Drinks maker Lion has set up a self-service portal and mobile app for its staff to interact with its people and culture, IT, finance and risk functions.
Image credit: Lion
The portal is based on ServiceNow; the company had an existing ServiceNow-based portal for staff to interact with IT as well as for “some basic HR delivery”, according to head of people experience and operations Christopher Lois.
Lion wanted to make the portal more user-focused and increase uptake of employee self-service, which – through a transformation – it has now done.
“We saw a 350 percent uptake in employee self-service – keep in mind we did have ServiceNow before, so it’s a 350 percent increase on that [existing level of usage],” Lois said.
“We’ve seen a 240 percent increase in services usage, which has made things not only easier to manage but also the experience we’re giving people has been a lot better, with 86 percent employee satisfaction across all of those services.”
At a ServiceNow World Forum event late last year, Lion spoke specifically about transforming access to people and culture self-service.
“With the support of EY and ServiceNow, we had to redesign our service delivery model in people and culture, and we had to rationalise the technology that we had in this space,” people experience director Emma Martin said.
On the technology side, Lion “took a people experience which [had] over 50 channels by which an employee or team leader could get in touch with people and culture, completely scrapped it, [and] started afresh,” Lois said.
“By listening to our people we turned it into one clear way of engaging – a single-use portal across people and culture services, IT services, finance services and risk services, so one place to go for all that stuff.
“We made sure it was done in a way that was intuitive. We had self-service channels and we also put together a catalogue of knowledge that really supported how we automated some of the service delivery elements.”
While there were “a lot of hypotheses” going into the project about what people most wanted from people and culture interactions, many turned out to be incorrect.
“The most important thing across every cross section of the business was: can you let me know how do I find my leave balance and how do I apply for leave,” Lois said.
That, together with a focus on incorporating voice-of-customer, informed the design of the portal and mobile app.
“One of the common issues we had coming into this transformation was about leave,” Lois said.
“We were getting a lot of queries through on leave, on things that could be done by the employee a lot faster than somebody in a central team could do for them, so in designing the service we put in prompts for people around, ‘Is your query about leave? Do you just want to know your leave balance?’
“If they click a dropdown that says ‘yes’, it points them to a knowledge article [and advises that they don’t] need to submit a request for this.”
The people and culture team also spent time streamlining “all-boarding” services, which cover recruitment, onboarding, internal movements and departures from Lion.
“This was about getting transparency across each of these journeys: for leaders and team members, and making sure from a workflow point of view that everybody was very clear about what needed to happen,” Lois said.
“When we did speak to employees early on in the piece, they told us some things like they couldn’t get their laptop working on day one, or they didn’t know who to contact to get added to a particular security grouping or email list.”
There are now workflows built into ServiceNow that can handle these types of issues.
Lois said that 2025 will be spent examining ways for the portal and app to handle more types of queries or issues and to connect employees to answers faster.
Lion also wants to “surprise and delight people through these services”.
One way it has done this so far is by giving customer service training to the teams that respond to staff through the portal and app.
“We talked about what’s the right tone of voice, what’s the right response length, how do you deal with somebody who hasn’t had a great experience,” Lois said.
“That’s allowed us to surprise people.”
Ry Crozier travelled to ServiceNow World Forum Melbourne 2024 as a guest of ServiceNow.