by Paul Rose, Rizing HCM & Eduardo Lima Leite, ARAGO Consulting

Human resources (HR) service delivery managers face many challenges that place constraints on their time, resources, and budgets. At the same time, they need to demonstrate continual improvements in team performance and service quality.

One significant area that global companies struggle with from an HR system standpoint is a multitude of ticketing applications in disparate, overlapping locations. We can acknowledge in this backdrop that employees struggle to identify the HR policy information relevant to his/her personal circumstance and become frustrated when HR queries are being administered in a standard fashion.

Employees Seen as Internal Customers

HR service delivery is changing at a rapid pace and putting the employee experience (EX) at the forefront remains critical. SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central Service Center, a synergetic support solution, helps HR managers provide information to employees when they need it. This approach helps frustration and dramatically improves the EX.

In fact, how do companies stay competitive and not only retain employees but inspire candidates to commit to their mission and work of the company? The answer is simple: They treat their employees like customers. Happy and engaged employees create better experiences, which leads to more satisfied and loyal customers and, ultimately, brand and company growth.

Thinking of employees in the same way as customers may similarly improve both key business outcomes and employees’ experience. For many employees, the experience they have as consumers or technology users ends when they come to work. But the organization may change this perception. What employees need to simplify or enhance their work may differ depending on what kind of work they do, their life outside of work, or what motivates them.

Demand for EX

SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central Service Center offers organizations the opportunity to centralize HR/HRIS related queries for employees and managers. This means a more unified experience that will resonate with the latest drive in the industry to offer a more consumer level-experience to employees.

Your workforce provides you with the most significant opportunity to promote your company to the outside world. EX is the result of emotionally laden events (so-called “moments that matter”) and commonplace exchanges between employees and the organization.

One of the main driving forces behind the move to the cloud is a need for improved HR service delivery. Everything needs to be self-service. That’s why organizations are now exploring new ways to improve their employee engagement.  Why? Because employees expect HR experiences to be in-line with what they’re used to in their personal lives, meaning that information must be personalized, contextual, and easily accessible – where and when they need it – through their preferred communication channel.

In the last decade, we’ve seen a considerable effort in creating HR service centers, centers of excellence, and business partner roles that stitch this together for employees. In the future, as more employee journeys are automated and instrumented in cloud platforms such as SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central Service Center, the HR service center has to become a multi-functional solution.

There are several reasons driving interest in EX, including the complexity of the workplace and low productivity levels. The HR service delivery function is one area that has grown more complex. It manages thousands of interactions with employees every day, and, as a result, has a significant impact on an employee’s experience of his/her organization. By adopting HR service delivery such as SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central Service Center that improves the quality of HR services by offering technology with consumer-like functionality, HR can improve the way employees feel about their work and workplace. 

Old World vs. New World

A global insurance company with an HR shared service set up decided to deploy SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central Service Center.  Previously the organization had a disjointed approach to managing tickets. The company struggled with:

• Poor EX with multiple HR points of contact for employees and multiple HR mailboxes to manage
• Non-standardized way of working, less efficient and increased risk of errors
• Lack of comprehensive reporting capabilities which resulted in:
  • Lack of transparency in the most common queries from employees
  • No means to measure monitor service quality
  • Lack of quality data to determine how HRSS is being utilized
  • Difficult for service managers to understand workload, issues, training needs, etc.

With the successful deployment of SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central Service Center, the reality has shifted for managers & HR but, most pivotally, for employees. The company now enjoys:

• Seamless employee experience
  • Easy access to HRSS for employees via Employee Central ASK HR button or e-mail directly to single point of contact
  • Employees able to track and trace own tickets
  • Easier for HR agents to follow the thread – all against one ticket
  • Templated responses make it easier to respond quickly to tickets (can build on this for different scenarios)
  • Much easier to manage large volumes of queries
• More efficient way of working, standardised so reduced risk of errors
• Reporting tools
  • Dashboards showing snapshots of volumes, etc.
  • Able to run various reports using filters
  • SLA reporting
  • Service managers able to monitor team’s performance
  • HR able to demonstrate how HRSS resources are being utilized
  • Able to use quality data to make decisions – e.g. training, process changes, etc.
  • Better data to help identify process improvements

Figure 1 — SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central Service Center Analytics

Overseas – New Paradigm

A global shipping company, another fascinating example, decided to implement SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central Service Center alongside Employee Central and SAP Jam.  This company was able to reach immediate tangible results, including:

• Faster time-to-resolution for internal support issues enabled faster expansion of the business. Using SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central Service Center for internal case management, employees can easily locate the best experts and info from across the company to find the answers they need. As a result, the platform reduced internal support call center costs.
• Increased access to information and people. The most significant benefit experienced by the organization was the reduced time and effort to find information. With SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central Service Center, employees did not need to spend time finding the right answer. Instead, they were all using the same tools and understood the appropriate uses for them.
• Improved communication and transparency, both horizontal and vertical. The organization was able to more quickly and accurately provide information and get it into the hands of employees faster. The HR managers using SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central Service Center felt they could communicate more easily and transparently.
• A centralized repository for expertise and corporate knowledge. As a global organization, the company recognized that, although geographically separated, their workforce could gain more applicable knowledge from internal expertise than from reinventing the wheel or paying for outside consultants
• A means for a globally distributed organization to unify their content and work. For a global organization with several locations, content and collaboration management were daunting tasks for IT. With the legacy intranets, the IT staff had to duplicate important announcements for each location several times a week.

Elevate the HR Experience for Employees by Deploying SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central Service Center

HR processes play a decisive role in employee satisfaction and motivation at every company. Human resources departments are frequently confronted with the considerable challenge of bundling employee requests from the widest variety of channels while simultaneously offering employees a modern, efficient self-service support portal.

Shared-service managers can use embedded reporting and analytics in SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central Service Center to analyze SLAs, gain insight into potential bottlenecks, and assess the quality of ticket resolution. You can easily monitor your HR service delivery and introduce improvements to align your HR services with your employees’ expectations.

Communication between the employee, the HR expert, and any other involved stakeholders takes place within the ticket. This provides a full history of the issue, from initial contact to resolution, which serves as a record and can also be referenced to help resolve similar queries more quickly in the future.

Figure 2 — All relevant information in one single place

HR experts can easily find similar tickets and use the embedded “solution finder” tool to look into policy information and previous communications that could potentially help with the current query and avoid duplicate effort.

Figure 3 — Ask HR – Sharing experiences through a Knowledge database

Seamless Mobile Experience

All of us acknowledge employees demand user applications that are mobile enabled and intuitive.  EC Service Center provides the platform for users to be able to easily interact with HR service delivery. They can create, edit and view tickets with ease and can also filter the list of tickets by the respective category. The functionality also empowers users to be able to call or email the service center team from a smartphone or tablet device.  The technology can support live chat option too for users so the flexibility in terms of experience is clear.

Social Collaboration: Integration with SAP Jam

SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central Service Center is a comprehensive HR service delivery solution that provides employees with an integrated knowledge base. This allows for personalized HR policy information and the ability to reach out to the HR help desk directly through the system by phone or by e-mail.

The knowledge base can be accessed through SAP Jam Collaboration, the SAP Hybris Knowledge Central solution by MindTouch, or other OpenSearch-enabled products.

Figure 4 — Integration options for the Knowledge base (Source: SAP)

For example, SAP JAM can be used to generate a feed to automatically present service staff with recommendations from knowledge base content. Aside from SAP JAM integration, it is also possible to have integration with another knowledge base (e.g. Mind Touch). The solution with the highest value addition will strongly depend on a company’s individual requirements.

What Does This Mean for the SAPinsider Community?

Based on the information and guidance in this article, the following considerations can help SAPinsiders use SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central Service Center to improve EX. An overriding reason EX is so important is the positive impact it has on talent retention and recruitment so organizations need to view a focus on EX through this lens.

• Transform your HR Service Delivery with SAP SuccessFactors EC Service Center. As with all SAP SuccessFactors solutions, SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central Service Center has a simple and intuitive user experience that is easy for employees and HR experts to navigate, transforming HR service delivery into a clever combination of form and function. Align capabilities to help employees access knowledge, tools, and support at critical moments in the journey, become digital and co-design solutions with employees.
• Reduce the overall cost of support. Layers of integration and cross-functional bureaucracy can be eliminated. The HR shared service delivery team should deal directly with employees, and the backgrounds of issues are visible to all parties.  Organizations must strive to give employees  a transparent, consumer-grade experience to increase employee engagement in the medium to long term.
• SAP SuccessFactors EC Service Center as a central engagement hub for employees. HR leadership can connect the power of the SAP SuccessFactors employee data with EC Service Centre and SAP JAM to make life events a richer experience from an employee perspective. Think of a global assignment for example, the policy information available at employee’s fingertips, a JAM related group on practical considerations for the person which will smooth the journey for him/her and family. One common JAM group we see for global organizations is focused on the best schools in the area which can be a common challenge for people moving countries with children. Insightful learnings can be shared from previous expats which reassures the person making the move. How many global organizations can attest to a smooth, streamlined process in this type of area?