Original Publication: Customer Management Insight - July 2007
View Online
Today, a growing number of large organizations — those with multiple sites and business unit contact center operations — are creating HR Shared Services/Call Center operations. For these users, the HR function is more effective in providing strategic value when it separates transactional/administrative operations from its higher value leadership role as a business partner.
While call center directors and managers recognize the benefits of HR Shared Services/Call Center organizations, they also know the challenges of making such a platform highly effective (see sidebar below).
To respond to these challenges, and create an effective, world-class HR Shared Services/Call Center organization, many employers are integrating an HR Knowledgebase into their call center platforms.
Leveraging an HR Knowledgebase
An HR Knowledgebase should contain comprehensive information on an organization’s policies, procedures, benefits, compensation, services — such as employee assistance programs, tuition reimbursements and training/development — work/life events, manager procedures and more. This allows information to be personalized by employee and searchable by a unique employee ID so that when a CSR accesses the knowledgebase to respond to a specific employee inquiry, only the information that is relevant to that employee is presented.
For example, let’s look at what happens when an employee calls the HR Shared Services/Call Center organization with an inquiry on his/her maternity health plan benefits. Normally, the CSR would have to research the employee’s particular health plan and relevant coverage before getting back with a response — often taking hours, or sometimes even days to close the inquiry. However, when using an HR Knowledgebase, the CSR has on-demand access to the employee’s personalized information immediately. By searching on “maternity” for that employee, the CSR is immediately presented with his/her plans and specific maternity coverage options — allowing the rep to respond to the employee within minutes during the first call.
In just this brief scenario, we see that when integrated into the HR Shared Services/Call Center organizations platform, an HR Knowledgebase can create the following capabilities:
- Provide CSRs with on-demand access to any member of the workforce’s personalized policies, benefits, onboarding forms and more. This can be based on job code, location, bargaining unit and/or other parameters defined by the employer
- Promote first-call resolution with fewer escalations to higher-level service reps
- Increase call volume productivity and speed time-to-answer
- Speed time-to-productivity for service reps — reps can handle a wider level of cases with less specialization
- Promote accuracy and consistency in responses across all employee populations
In other words, this model improves service to the workforce with fewer people and dollars.
Extending the Model to Include Self Service and a Workforce Portal
Integrating the HR Knowledgebase with its employee/manager self-service solutions and within the employee intranet/extranet/portal allows employees to get the information they need by accessing their own personalized, searchable information. After all, the best call to an HR Shared Services/Call Center is the one that’s never made.
By allowing employees to access the knowledgebase via a portal and/or self-service systems — such as an employee self-service or eBenefits application — they can not only get the information they need, but process transactions, such as applying for maternity leave or adding a new dependent — all in one session, without third- party intervention. The integration of an HR Knowledgebase with self-service/portal platforms offers other benefits, as well, such as:
- Helping employees help themselves by getting the information they need, when they need it
- Empowering managers to respond to employee inquiries in a timely, fair and consistent manner
- Reducing call center volume
- Providing better service with fewer reps and a higher rep-to-employee ratio. Additionally, reps can “teach employees to fish” – showing them how to find their answers via the portal to reduce calls over time.
Things to Consider When Evaluating an HR Knowledgebase
There are five key features to consider when evaluating an HR Knowledgebase for your HR Shared Services/Call Center organization:
1. Your resources to develop and maintain content: If you have a lot of personalizations to create and maintain — for example, many different state laws or bargaining units to comply with and keep up to date — you might consider a knowledgebase that is offered from a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) vendor. These vendors will create and maintain the data for you without straining limited HR and IT resources. Additionally, vendors can provide pre-built content — such as regulatory guides and benefit plans — to speed deployment.
2. Integration and SSO: The knowledgebase should have the ability to integrate, with a single sign-on (SSO), to any HRMS, employee/manager/benefits self-service application, ticketing/case management application and portal platform that you have in place or plan to deploy — regardless of whether you use all of these applications from a single vendor or if you have a best-of-breed HRMS environment.
3. Integrated decision support: Some knowledgebases also integrate with decision support tools, such as dynamic benefit plan comparisons or medical cost estimators. These tools are valuable a CSR, helping provide informed assistance to an employee trying to decide, for example, between two different health plan options; or to an employee operating in self-service mode, helping to make the most informed decisions when completing transactions, such as benefits enrollment during a new-hire tour or during open enrollment periods.
4. Reporting: An HR Knowledgebase should come with standard reporting and analytics — and also allow ad hoc reporting from data in the system — allowing call center managers to measure response time, call volume and more.
5. Integrated case management/call tracking: An HR Knowledgebase should have the ability to seamlessly integrate with any case management/call center application you deploy. If, however, your shared services/call center operation is specific to HR, you might consider a knowledgebase integrated with an HR-specific case management/call tracking solution.
Integrated HR-Specific Case Management/Call Tracking
When an HR Knowledgebase is integrated with an HR-specific case management/call tracking tool, it allows a CSR to:
- Search on employees with direct look-ups from integrated HRMS views.
- Pre-populate HR-specific call tickets with employee data from the knowledgebase and/or HRMS.
Additionally, such solutions will often provide value-added reporting and analytics that are specific to HR — allowing HR professionals and call center managers to analyze calls in order to spot trends and take action if necessary.
For example, if there is a sudden jump in the number of inquiries on employee assistance programs after serious storms or fires in a particular location, it might show that a large number of employees were impacted, helping the employer to determine if special programs — or increased communication on existing programs — might be necessary.
Another example might show a spike in calls after a new benefit plan is offered — such as a high deductible plan — prompting the employer to improve communications and decision support tools for the plan.
Last, if such an HR-specific case management/call tracking solution is made available via the employee portal, even more economies of scale can be achieved. These solutions will allow the employee to first go to the portal/ knowledgebase to find their own answer. If they do not find what they need, they can use the portal to open their own ticket and have the information automatically submitted to the call center — with the information that was found by the employee prepopulated.
An HR Shared Services/Call Center organization can be key to an organization’s goals of HR transformation and leadership and improving employee service while reducing costs. And an HR Knowledgebase — integrated with an HR-specific case management/ call tracking tool — can be key to maximizing the effectiveness of your organization.
Barbara Levin is the Senior Vice President of Marketing and Customer Community for Enwisen. blevin@enwisen.com
