Norton Healthcare, a Louisville-based health system providing care at more than 400 locations and nine hospitals across Kentucky and southern Indiana, welcomes thousands of new employees and care givers each year across clinical and non-clinical roles. With that scale comes a critical question: How do you deliver consistent, high-touch onboarding and communication to employees at critical milestones who may not sit at desks, who start asking questions before day one, and who need support well beyond orientation week?

In this session, we will share how we designed and deployed an SMS-based chatbot to extend onboarding from pre-hire through the first year of employment. The bot proactively texts new hires after offer acceptance, guiding them through early questions, strategically connecting at critical milestones, connecting them to well-being resources, reinforcing professional growth, and gathering real-time feedback. Rather than waiting for employees to seek help, Norton Healthcare meets them where they are - on their phones and in the flow of work.

We’ll walk through the design decisions behind the text cadence, content strategy, and measurement framework that made this initiative successful. You’ll see how conversational nudges, stress and burnout support, and intentional feedback loops helped Norton Healthcare exceed the 75th percentile nationally for employee turnover benchmarks, while driving elevated outcomes for “likelihood to recommend” and “intent to stay” for their newest employees

We’ll also address how we use AI sparingly and responsibly as much of the user experience is deterministic in its approach.

In this session you will learn:

• How to identify key friction points in large-scale onboarding and how automated outgoing messages can address them.
• How to design a messaging strategy that supports employees from pre-hire through year one.
• How to measure the impact of chatbot-driven onboarding on engagement, stress, and retention.
• How to apply a simple framework for scaling personalized employee experiences across distributed workforces.