Leveraging the ServiceNow Platform to Enhance Employee Experience

The Opportunity

As an investor-owned utility service for the natural gas and electricity needs of millions of consumers in the state of Michigan, the customer has been at the forefront of responsible energy production since its inception in 1886.

In its more than 135-year history, the customer has consistently embraced an innovative approach to meeting its mission of providing reliable, affordable, sustainable energy to its customers. In years past, this meant embracing technologies like hydroelectric or nuclear power. As the organization leads the way into the 21^st century, it has taken a prominent position through the adoption of renewable energy sources – being named one of the top 6 utility providers in the world in 2016 based on sustainability practices and committing in 2018 to retire all coal plants and have a 40% renewable footprint by 2040.

However, meeting the energy needs of its Michigan customers isn’t just about building power plants, windmills, or solar facilities – it’s about attracting and retaining the talent required to make it all work. The customer’s partnership with ServiceNow and INRY to enhance the employee experience leverages the same commitment to innovation that it delivers to customers.

The Approach

The customer has adopted multiple parts of the ServiceNow platform and understood the power of the solution to transform interactions across various domains like Customer and IT Services. With this experience in mind, applying ServiceNow’s Employee Experience workflows to improve the quality of HR services delivered to nearly 9,000 employees was a natural evolution.

Throughout a multi-phase delivery schedule that brought immediate benefits to the HR and employee communities while building strong momentum, The customer ultimately deployed ServiceNow HRSD solution that included:

Foundational HRSD capabilities:

• An Employee Center Portal to provide colleagues with a single place to submit requests, regardless of whether they are fulfilled by HR, IT, Finance, or other parts of the organization. An HR Portal to make it easy for HR associates to manage inbound requests, build out knowledge articles, and update the solution on behalf of employees.

• Knowledge Management to provide employees with 24x7 access to self-service articles addressing some of the most frequently asked questions related to HR, Finance, and IT topics.
• HR Case Management to allow the efficient capture of inbound HR services requests that cannot be addressed through self-service options.

Advanced HRSD capabilities:

• An HR Services Catalog to allow the most common request types to be defined in advance for quick capture and more seamless resolution.
• Virtual Agent functionality allows colleagues to submit questions to an AI-powered interactive agent capable of answering many common queries at any time of the day.
• Integration with the SuccessFactors HCM to allow the system of action provided by ServiceNow to efficiently exchange documents and data with the HCM “system of record."
• Predictive Intelligence to allow inbound requests to be prioritized and routed based on the significance assigned by keyword tokens used when case management forms are filled out.
  

Targeted Employee Experiences:

• Onboarding workflows to make the process of bringing new employees on board as efficient, scalable, and effective as possible.
• A New Hire Portal to provide new members of the organization with easy access to information that will make their first weeks with the organization less stressful and more productive.
• Offboarding workflows to ensure that as teammates leave the organization, the processes for exiting them are consistent, compliant, and secure.
• An Alumni Center to stay in touch with former employees to promote a strong organizational culture. In today’s tight labor market, it’s worth noting that engaged Alumni often become repeat hires.

The Rewards

INRY has developed a strategic partnership-that has extended across multiple ServiceNow HRSD and CSM adoption phases. With each new phase, the organization extends its maturity in managing complex colleague and customer requests.

In its work with INRY, the customer saw Employee Experience and HR productivity benefits that included:

• A drastic reduction in inbound cases thanks to self-service options that make it possible for thousands of staff to find the answers to their HR, IT, and administrative inquiries whenever and wherever that information is needed.
• Significant automation in assigning and resolving inbound cases thanks to the use of Service Catalogs, Predictive Intelligence, and HR Agent Workspace that make assigning, prioritizing, and fulfilling inbound requests a more efficient and accurate process.
• More efficient and consistent onboarding/offboarding of employees to reduce the burdens placed on HR, training, and operational staff imposed by ad hoc processes that place unexpected demands on the organization while creating a bad experience for the new or departing employee.