A Multitier Approach to Delivering HR Services

By Barbara Levin, with Eric Tamm, Enwisen

The Challenge of Transforming HR
Transforming HR to be a true strategic business partner is a goal for most employers. Unfortunately, most HR talent is typically too busy answering administrative questions and providing HR services to take on more strategic roles. In fact, according to an October 2008 Gartner Report, HR organizations spend as much as 70-80% of their time dealing with administrative activities and employee/manager questions and issues.”

In recent years, as organizations have undertaken HR transformation initiatives, we’ve seen an emphasis on new applications for talent, compensation and performance management. Indeed, studies have shown the value of such applications. But one piece of the big picture that’s often been neglected is the whole realm of HR Service Delivery.

To achieve HR transformation, it’s key that HR separate administrative and service delivery operations from strategic work. To accomplish this challenge, many organizations are leveraging on-demand technologies that improve the delivery of HR services while actually reducing costs. These technologies include solutions for HR-shared services/case management, HR portals/ knowledgebases, benefits-decision support and onboarding. These tools allow HR to truly “do more with less” – providing quality services to the workforce while playing a leadership role.

Harnessing the power of today’s HR Service Delivery applications can help ensure the success of HR transformation initiatives, create a more loyal, engaged workforce – and reduce costs.

The Multitier Approach to HR Service Delivery
What if your employees could get their own answers to HR questions 70%-80% of the time? What if the remaining inquiries could be managed with an in-house HR Shared Services Center handling the highest number of calls with the minimum number of customer service reps (CSRs)? That’s the idea behind a multitier HR Service Delivery model. (See Figure 1.)

Figure 1: A Multitier HR Service Delivery Model

As the diagram shows, Tier 0 service delivery is when an employee or manager uses an HR portal – integrated with a personalized, searchable HR knowledgebase and self-service solutions – to answer their own questions and complete their own transactions. With today’s highly evolved HR Service Delivery platforms, a key performance indicator of 66% resolution at the Tier 0 level is desirable – and high performing organizations can achieve even an 80-90% rate. If issues can’t be resolved at Tier 0, the issue is escalated to the service center reps in Tier 1. With access to the same knowledgebase and the employee’s personalized information, reps can resolve the issue quickly – typically in the first call. Best practices indicate that only 28% of issues should be escalated to this level. Therefore, only when an issue cannot be resolved at Tier 0 or Tier 1 is it escalated to HR subject matter experts and policy experts/process owners.

The same 2008 Gartner report concludes: “A properly implemented multitier model expands the use of self-service applications, leverages less-expensive service center agents (while still providing a high level of service) and reduces the amount of time HR subject matter experts spend answering routine questions, freeing up their time to spend on more value-added activities.” 2 This same report cites Enwisen, an HRM Report sponsor and author of this article, as a comprehensive provider of employee service management software solutions.

A More Effective Way of Delivering HR Services
In recent years HR Service Delivery has emerged as a software category in its own right – supported by the CedarCrestone Application Blueprint for HCM Excellence (figure 2).

Figure 2: CedarCrestone Application Blueprint

HR Service Delivery technologies help speed HR transformation – and increase employee satisfaction and productivity – by allowing employees to get the HR information they need, when they need it. And it helps reduce costs. Period.

What if Employees Were Only 2 Clicks Away From the HR Information They Need When They Need It? Creating a More Dynamic Employee Portal
Most of your employees are already using the Internet every day to do their own shopping, banking, investing, retirement planning and more. In a single site, they can get the information they need to make choices (airfare comparisons, for example), and the opportunity to complete the transactions (buy a ticket). And the most often-used sites, such as Amazon.com™, provide personalized information relevant to the user.

Your employees bring this expectation to work with them. Unfortunately, most employee portals do not provide the ease-of-use and personalization required to make them effective.
 
An easy-to-use employee portal is key to an advanced HR-service delivery platform. But to make them truly usable many organizations are turning to on-demand knowledgebases and decision-support applications.

HR Knowledgebases
A knowledgebase is an application that holds all of an employer’s policies, benefits information and more – personalized so that employees see only the information relevant to them based on position and/or location. Such applications are usually hosted, so even if a portal is available only at work, an employee can still access the knowledgebase at home via the Web. Most important, knowledgebases are designed to be easily searchable – making it easy for employees to find what they need when they need it. Some knowledgebases have work/life event checklists that can help walk employees through the things they need to do – such as apply for maternity leave – and link to all relevant forms and personalized company policies.

If the knowledgebase is offered in a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model, then the vendor will even maintain the information for the employer. While many smaller companies deploy knowledgebases as their portal, most mid- and larger-market companies integrate knowledgebases into their existing portal and self-service applications so that the information is presented to employees within the context of their self-service transactions. In this scenario, the knowledgebase vendor should be able to unify all of the related HR applications into a single front-end interface with all solutions accessed via a single sign-on. This makes it easy for employees to navigate through their work/life events.

What if You Could Reduce Healthcare Costs for your Employees? Decision Support Technologies
Not only can technology help employers better communicate with employees, but it also can provide tools to help employees make more informed decisions. Best-in-class organizations are, for example, providing employees with innovative decision-support tools to help the workforce become more informed benefits consumers. Health-care cost containment is a major concern for today’s employers, and most have had to increase employee premiums to help offset costs, creating a burden for both the employer and the employee. To contain costs further, many employers have turned to high deductible health plans. But employees have not widely embraced these plans – largely because they do not fully understand the advantages and potential impact. That’s why it is important to leverage technology to help employees make the right choices when it comes to such HR services as benefits. There are a variety of innovative decision-support tools on the market today – such as medical cost estimators, dynamic plan comparisons, and HSA/FSA-modeling tools – that can effectively drive the right employees to the right plans.

Deploying these tools in a web-based environment – via a portal, as a stand-alone, or within the context of a benefits self-service solution – is also important because it allows employees to make decisions at home with spouses or partners.

What if You Could Streamline Onboarding Costs While Engaging New-Hires? Web-Based Onboarding
With today’s focus on cost-cutting, innovative new onboarding technologies can streamline the process by automating forms, tasks and notifications. Solutions on best practices can also lead new-hires through tours and videos that will acclimate them to the culture and policies of your organization – making them more productive on their first day. Integration with related HR, Benefits and Payroll solutions promotes pre-population of information and can trigger the new employee set-up day one. But it is important to look beyond simply reducing costs. Studies show that the average worker coming in to the workforce today will have 20 jobs before retirement. It is therefore also important to engage new-hires with a robust onboarding experience that lasts well into the first six months – when most new employees decide whether or not they’ll stay with a new job. Web-based onboarding applications allow employers to give new-hires a link to an onboarding portal the day they accept their job offer. The new-hire can then review company policies, complete forms (such as their W-2 and I-9) online, model and elect benefits, read about company culture – even begin to network through linked-in social networking applications like blogs and mentor chat rooms. These activities not only increase new-hire productivity on day one, they build a bond with companies that can result in higher new-hire retention.

What does it look like? Sample of the AnswerSource Medical Cost Estimator™ - courtesy of Enwisen

This is Do-able and Affordable Now
Today’s HR-service delivery tools have proven successful in meeting the challenges of transforming HR and helping employers provide better HR services while lowering the costs. More important, the best-of-breed of these solutions are offered as a Software-as-a-Service – meaning that they can be deployed quickly, with minimal drain on limited IT and HR resources and for a low total cost of ownership. With organizations reaching Key Performance Indicators in just months, these solutions begin to pay for themselves in the first year – with the added value of redirecting HR talent and better serving employees.

It’s a win-win: Transform HR by redirecting HR talent … reduce the cost of service delivery … and be a better HR partner to the workforce.
 
Getting Started:
If you’d like to discuss this topic further and learn how to build a business case for HR Service Delivery solutions, the author is happy to hear from you. She can be reached at blevin@enwisen.com

Barbara Levin has more than 20 years experience in the HCM technology industry, and is a frequent author and speaker on leveraging technologies to meet business objectives. She currently serves as the Senior Vice President of Marketing & Customer Community for Enwisen, a leader in HR Service Delivery solutions. Eric Tamm, of Enwisen’s product marketing and a former writer for PeopleSoft, also collaborated on this article.