The customer, a global leader in polytechnic education, has seen healthy growth in employees and today stands at approximately 3,500 faculty and staff. With this many employees, efficiently understanding, tracking and managing HR-related requests for issues like payroll, employee records, time and attendance, benefits administration and compensation proved to be a daunting task. The customer needed technology and smart systems to help them create and run standardized and efficient processes to remain relevant and attractive to a demanding workforce and provide a seamless experience for all employees.
Initially, the customer’s system was a manual process for these types of inquiries where employees directed all questions and requests to an email address and phone number that was monitored by HR. With the success and growth of the institution, this quickly proved to be an inefficient strategy, as it could overwhelm staff and impact response times. Additionally, the HR team just didn’t have the tools and technologies to track the volume of inquiries and who was issuing responses.
The customer needed supplemental tools to support the HR staff and technology that would effectively support the team with automation of the employee lifecycle, knowledge of high-volume requests, and processes that would maintain compliance and privacy. Ultimately, their goal was to provide better service for their employees.
In response to the urgent need for additional support, the customer implemented a new HR system in summer of 2019. Knowing that a new system would not be without its own set of challenges, they engaged Buchanan Technologies, the school’s existing IT service partner, to facilitate technical support for employees and application support for the HR system.
Through the Buchanan partnership, the customer had access to more knowledge and insights than before. Once the HR support desk was well underway and ticket trends were evaluated, the IT team realized the support tickets were not necessarily technical issues, but instead much more generic inquiries related to payroll, records of employment, vacation and sick day balances, benefits, and time entry.
With this insight, the customer and Buchanan were able to make an informed decision to shift the responsibilities of the HR support desk from the
technical team to the business support team. To support this transition, Buchanan provides the customer with operational reporting that details the types of issues the HR support desk receives, which in turn helps the HR leadership team to continuously improve systems and processes.
The transition of the HR support desk to a business support model drove quicker resolution of inquiries, improved customer service levels, and an
enhanced contact experience through the utilization of 24x7x365 phone and chat support. Buchanan was able to provide a 9% reduction in the customer’s monthly spending in the first year as well as an overall cost savings of 38% compared to an in-house support desk. Because Buchanan’s team had the capability to scale up and down during peak and off-season, and the customer only paid for what they consumed, this model allowed the college to realize a 4% reduction in average ticket cost – while also experiencing an 11% increase in total ticket volume – from 2020 to 2021.
From an HR perspective, staff were able to focus on more impactful tasks to support the growth of the college instead of managing emails coming in daily to an inbox that was overflowing with inquiries with no way to track them. With the transition of the HR desk, the IT support team was also able to improve response times and meet or exceed SLAs due to staff being freed from managing HR inquiries.
Historically, HR and IT experienced similar peak times which could cause tickets to become bottlenecked, and this problem was eliminated with the restructuring of the HR support desk. Through ongoing knowledge and reporting, the customer and Buchanan are committed to continuously improving the HR support desk, integrating new technologies and innovations to better serve the business.
Learn more about the specific IT solutions deployed & their outcomes
