Amplifon leads digital transformation with great HR

Empowering people to rediscover all the emotions of sound
Loss of hearing can have a devastating impact on personal confidence and life quality, leading to social isolation and to a decline in health and wellbeing. Amplifon personalized hearing-care solutions have transformed the lives of millions of people by reconnecting them with family, friends, colleagues, and the world around them.

Launched in Milan in 1950, the company now operates around 9,200 specialized centers and other retail outlets, with 18,600 people helping improve the lives of millions of customers in 25 countries.

Amplifon is constantly striving to keep its team members connected, to ensure all have easy access to the HR support they need to focus on providing a caring and professional service to their customers.

Customer devotion is one of Amplifon’s key values; it applies not only to external customers but also to the internal ones. In this context, the HR department went through a major transformation with the following mission: to create a best-in-class HR function that accelerates business growth and transformation, and offers a unique HR customer experience.

A best-in-class HR function
The key aim of one particular workstream of the transformation was to deliver consistent, high-quality HR services and a great user experience to all colleagues, with all HR-related systems, topics, policies, and processes available in one place.

This enables the HR business and people partners to spend less time on repetitive administration tasks, emails, and calls—which, historically, take up almost half of each working day—and more time on strategic and added value projects to unlock further productivity and efficiency benefits across the organization.

Considering the pace of business growth and the constant expansion of the organization on a global scale, moving to a single common HR ecosystem required a greater focus on change management and continuous improvement.

Revolutionizing HR service delivery
With the support of consulting practice Deloitte, Amplifon launched an HR digital transformation program featuring a new HR operating model. Deloitte has played an important role in partnering with Amplifon on relevant transformation initiatives, most recently on the implementation of an Oracle ERP cloud solution and the related HCM solution.

Building on its widespread use, trust, and confidence in ServiceNow IT Service Management, Amplifon selected ServiceNow HR Service Delivery as the platform to automate many of the everyday HR processes and tasks which were time-consuming both for employees and the HR teams.

Hey HR!
A bespoke solution emerged following the close collaboration of the Amplifon Corporate HR Operations Team, Deloitte, and ServiceNow: ‘Hey HR!’. Comprehensive engagement and testing involved the HR teams in Italy, Spain, France, Germany, New Zealand, and several other countries to optimize processes, identify areas for improvement, and define best practices.

The inbuilt flexibility of the Now Platform was an important factor in the continuous improvement process, delivering an experience appropriate for all HR users’ requirements around the world, and one that would enable Amplifon to monitor the adoption of the new HR Operating Model from both a technical and an organizational perspective.

A single, intuitive self-service HR portal with a single point of access and landing page—called Hey HR!—is easily accessible from workstations and, crucially given the age profile of Amplifon’s workforce, from a mobile app. It brings all HR information and services together in one place.

Support in multiple languages
For further ease of use the portal features Virtual Agent; this feature is called ‘Support Chat’ and assists employees to find the information they need, in a range of languages, through an algorithm that responds to simple prompts by the user without the need to search through the service catalog.

The first two phases of the global rollout, beginning in Europe and New Zealand in 2021 and early 2022, have already transformed the way employees consume HR information and services. The gradual extension of the solution to all 25 countries will be implemented during 2022 and 2023.

With the portal available 24/7, staff are empowered to take control of their own HR requirements in their own time with the help of an extensive knowledgebase.

Everyday activities like password reset, inquiries about payroll, time, and attendance, holiday requests, sick leave, and booking desk space can now be automatically completed.

For HR business partners and people partners, the portal automation has progressively reduced the volume of repetitive, time-consuming manual tasks like sending and responding to emails, phone calls, and messages, processing requests, and sending alerts.

This means they can now focus more on business partnership, organization development, and innovation while analyzing the data generated by the platform, instigating service improvements or developing new services as well as addressing skills shortages and considering future resource requirements.

Furthermore, this new platform has been launched in parallel with the development of new capabilities within the HR team in the leadership, functional, and digital areas as well as with a progressive empowerment of managers and employees.

Dashboards deliver rich insights
he data from the Now Platform, presented in easy-to-understand dashboards and reports, is also providing insights into the impact of the HR Service Delivery, identifying the most popular services used by employees as well as areas for further improvement of the HR processes and services to be implemented during the global rollout.

Meanwhile, the integration with the Amplifon HCM system ensures that double data entry is avoided.

“More than 80 HR services have now been automated, producing a significant reduction in phone calls and emails,” says Francesca Morichini, CHRO at Amplifon. “When the rollout is complete, we expect that all Amplifon employees will be using the HR portal and Virtual Agent to take care of their HR requirements.”

The solution has proved to be intuitive and employees report high confidence levels within just two or three weeks of use; staff appreciate having a fast and streamlined way of managing their day-by-day needs.

Download PDF