HR Service Delivery Model

ByAnita Lettink

When redesigning your business processes, you also need to rethink your Service Delivery Model. How are you going to bring your services to your customers, the employees? Most HR professionals serve over a hundred employees each, which makes it hard to establish personal relationships with every one of them. Solutions are needed to serve them without having to expand the HR department or relying too heavily on self-service.

There are many ways to deliver services to your customers:

  • Internet (Browser, Handheld, Kiosk)
  • Voice (IVR)
  • Phone (SMS, WAP)
  • Text (Teletext, Chat)
  • Call centers (Helpdesk, Generalists)
  • Face to Face (Specialists)

Preferred Service Channels

It is important to compare these service channels and see which ones can benefit your organisation, while keeping in mind the channels your employees have access to and the ones they are comfortable with. Once you have selected the preferred service channels, you need to look at the business processes and determine the best way to deliver these services. This includes the combination of service channels.

An employee portal is an excellent starting point for all questions and can serve as a one-stop shop. If an HR professional needs to answer questions about retirement benefits, chances are, 80% of the questions are repetitive, and so it would be wise to add a FAQ to the portal that answers the most common questions. In addition, at the bottom of the FAQ you can list a service number that leads to a call centre. Employees in the call centre can handle additional questions and, if necessary, forward difficult problems to a topic specialist, who can then sit down with an employee and answer very specific questions. By doing this, you can free up valuable specialist time, which can be devoted to developing HR policy as well as managing and rethinking processes instead of carrying them out.

For every business process that you want to bring to your employees, you need to determine the best method of service delivery. However, always keep in mind that self-service is key: if an employee or manager can carry out a transaction, he or she should be enabled to do so, unless there are very strong reasons to prevent this.