When IT and HR Work Together to Deliver Service at Schneider Electric

[Sunita Khatri]

"When I think about IT and HR in a shared space, I'm reminded of the famous Reese's peanut butter cup slogan 'Two great tastes that taste great together,'" said Melissa Golden, Director of Global HR Customer Service at Schneider Electric during her sessions' opening remarks at the Knowledge18 conference last month. In other words, when two great forces like HR and IT unite, businesses are at a competitive advantage, just like peanut butter cups, there's so much more goodness to be had.

Schneider Electric experienced this epiphany after both departments realized they had planned separate initiatives to transform internal enterprise customer service delivery. At the time, HR was running a separate user experience from IT for their employees, utilizing several customer support phone numbers, and facilitating ticketing in an outdated platform with limited upgradable functionality. Simultaneously, IT was on a quest to modernize IT service management. The end game in each initiative was delivering a rich, consumer-grade experience to their 133,000 employees and having rich functionality in place for IT and HR staff - this prompted HR and IT to join forces on their initiatives with a business outcome to deliver a single unified employee service experience.

Why ServiceNow

Whether submitting an IT request to fix a broken laptop or completing an onboarding task as a new hire, Schneider Electric's business objective was to deliver an end-to-end easy, intuitive experience. "The reason we chose ServiceNow is because of the platform, the platform would allow us to build one employee portal to create that single, unified experience for all employees," said Melissa. With an HR plus IT implementation, both departments would have the flexibility to independently redesign their areas with unique assignment groups, workflows processes and security measures. And lastly with a demanding global workforce to support, Schneider Electric desired a technology vendor that was committed to delivering progressive innovation in the area of service delivery for years to come.

Customer First Approach

Schneider Electric kicked off their HRSD project in September 2017, shortly after visiting the Knowledge17 conference. Several factors were considered as they planned for implementation such as timelines, workflows, knowledge base and the user-experience with a focus on creating one destination for the user regardless of whether it would be an HR or IT request. "The end game for employees would be to have one consistent experience removing the ambiguity of whether IT or HR would fulfill their request" said Melissa. To accomplish this, the teams engaged several internal teams in "planning for the customer experience" leveraging design thinking - this included user research in efforts to capture the voice of the customer, benchmarking, design principles mapping back to the research, prototyping and usability testing for feedback. They designed "empathy experience maps" by personas for both IT and HR related experiences often overlooked in traditional UI/UX service designs such as:

• Findability: optimal search experience to reduce memory strain
• Reducing mental load with visual elements: non-distracting visual catalogue for better picture of service items
• Efficiency in consuming user's attention and time: consuming users only with necessary information and notifications
• Promotion of self-help: starting a chat or easy ticket creation
• Encouraging trust: inducing trust and voice of customer through feedback channel

Schneider Electric is scheduled to go live HRSD for phase one with subsequent phase to launch IT in efforts to deliver one unified employee portal experience that will combine HR/IT knowledge and case execution.