Customer Service, Technology and Empowerment
By Howard Freedman, CPP - President Financial Aid Consulting
Change can be perceived by the fearful as a threat that things may get worse and by the self-assured as an inspiration to make things better. Whatever your perception, change is inevitable. In particular, new technologies provide employees with tools to access and update their own information rather than let others to do it for them.
Do It Yourself
Employee self-service uses technology to create a direct path for employees to maintain their personal data and gain access to company and benefits information on a 24-hours-a-day, 7-days-a-week basis. This is merely an extension of the use of already common communications tools like voice mail, interactive voice response (IVR) systems, the Internet, and intranets. From the employee's point of view, employee self-service is not unlike pumping your own gas without an attendant or withdrawing money from an ATM without a teller — something else that was once done for you and which you're now allowed to do yourself when and where you choose to do it. When necessary, employees unable to find the answers on their own can fall back on an in-house or outsourced call center to provide assistance when needed. In general, however, with greater employee empowerment, employees can do their own 'data entry" and common tasks that require no special skills.
Aiming Higher
There is a learning experience in this process for payroll and HR professionals as well. Empowering all employees to perform more clerical tasks frees up the HR/payroll professional to focus on more value-added activities. Enhancing basic HR and payroll processes, designing benefits packages more suited to employee lifestyles, and developing more sophisticated data-management capabilities are all examples of how payroll and HR can become more strategic. There is also a positive financial aspect to instituting employee self-service systems. In his book Business at the Speed of Thought, Bill Gates relates how employee self-service programs at Microsoft resulted in significant cost savings by eliminating duplicate data input, i.e. data input became a one-step process in which the employee keys in his or her own information, rather than a multi-step process in which the employee gives the information verbally or in writing to Payroll/HR, which then keys it in. Thus, at least half the time traditionally required to input this data is saved and perhaps even more, since employees can access the system at all hours and often will do so from their personal computer or telephone at home on their personal time .
Technologies Impacting Employee Self-Service
Today's new technologies have now become a way of life and not so new as they were yesterday. Cell phones have eliminated the need to be tied down to an office and available 24/7. Speech-recognition technology allows workers to make benefits selections over the phone without having to type it. Video conferencing has saved travel costs while accomplishing the same objectives throughout the world. The bottom line is that physical presence or human intervention is not necessary because of the way that we are all technologically connected.
For those, fearful of losing their jobs, technology is not a take away but a way of providing better tools to process and information without the rework. What are left are departments who have become greater experts, listeners and knowledge providers than mere processors.
Technology should be perceived as one of our greatest opportunities for professional growth as we continually seek ways in which we can apply it to daily operations. This is an ongoing exercise that requires us to look at all processes and to ask all the right questions of those responsible for doing the work.
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Does this process actually add value?
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Can a system edit what we do manually?
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What recurring questions that can be answered on line?
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Is there a more cost-effective, more user-friendly way of doing this?
We must define employee needs and preferences, seek and implement solutions, and whenever possible empower employees to push the right buttons for making their own changes. We must continually seek more sophisticated technology-based alternatives to our procedures. Finally, we must continue to listen to what our internal and external customers need, learn from them and determine the best path, and leverage our resources to make changes that will foster service excellence.
Service support is always subject to feedback, fine tuning and most of all continuous improvements towards which we must all contribute.
