The typical on-boarding process may not always make a good first impression, according to Christi Rager Wise, the Global Service Leader for Customer Experience at Hewitt Associates. "I think most HR managers would agree that the process often seems disjointed from the employee's perspective," she says. "Employees eager to get to work must focus instead on filling out forms and navigating a number of systems to get the information they need to get started."

Inefficient on-boarding hurts employers, too. "There's a lot of synchronization of HR data required to process a new hire," says Wise. "The more steps and paper involved, the more costly the process."

To make on-boarding as smooth as possible, Hewitt's employee Web site, myHR®, pulls data from a variety of back-end systems and guides the new hire through the process via an integrated checklist. "Having an integrated checklist on our site gives new hires a single place to go for all the HR-related information and tools they need in their first days on the job," says Wise.

From the checklist, new hires can access data about pay and benefits, complete an orientation session, and perform routine tasks such as documenting beneficiaries. They can also set up retirement savings accounts and authorize direct deposit of their paycheck. The service center is always available for those who need further assistance.

By making the on-boarding process easy and accessible, Hewitt is helping employers to harness the enthusiasm of new hires and free them to be productive from the start. It's one example of Hewitt's focus on creating customer experiences that lead to better business results.

Creating the Customer Experience
Today's employees have great expectations, based on their experiences as consumers, especially on the Web. "Employees can go to the Web for instant insurance quotes, create a customized Yahoo page, get personalized recommendations from Amazon.com, and have any number of other easy, intuitive experiences online," says Wise. "They expect their employers to deliver the same level of access and convenience when it comes to HR."

In addition to the Web, delivering a great experience requires a service center where employees can go for assistance, and print and email communications that can educate employees about the services and options available to them. "The customer will access your services and brand through a variety of touch points," says Wise. "How well those channels work together will determine the quality of the overall experience."

To enable channels to work together smoothly, systems integration is essential, and a key reason why Hewitt invests as much as 20% of revenues each year on HR technology. The right technology platform can provide consistent data across channels and the ability to move easily between channels—two more attributes of a good customer experience. That might mean, for instance, that an employee reviewing retirement plan options online can phone the service center with a question, and a customer service representative can provide assistance while viewing the same screen.

Where to Focus
Hewitt incorporates these fundamentals in designing solutions for clients, and builds on lessons learned from more than 60 years of HR experience, as well as current service delivery to more than 18 million employees and retirees worldwide. Based on the knowledge gained through delivery and experimentation, Hewitt has identified four areas of focus that are essential to creating customer experiences that satisfy employees while achieving business objectives.

1. Focus on the customer. That means understanding customers' needs and designing solutions to meet them. To do that, Hewitt's solutions team worked with the Seybold Group to implement a rigorous process of segmenting employees and mapping the needs of each segment.

The first lesson the team learned from this process is that the most frequent activity of "savers" in the United States is checking their 401(k) balances, which requires three clicks from the benefits home page. So the team made the 401(k) page the first page you see.

Then, the team focused on promoting better decisions by employees who visit the site to check their balances. To help employees achieve their retirement goals, the team added personalized action tips for different employee segments. Wise explains, "If you're not participating up to the company match, you get a personalized message encouraging you to increase your contribution. If you're not contributing at all, you get a different message prompting you to get started. You're able to see an account projection of what your balance could be by the time you're 65. You can click on the Start Saving button to immediately begin saving."

The team also developed a targeted print and email strategy to reach the "non-savers," who are less likely to visit the Web site since they don't have a balance to check.

This multichannel approach helped to raise the retirement savings rate of "non-savers" at one company by 13%. "What customers experience is precisely relevant to them and easy for them to act on," Wise points out.

2. Focus on critical moments in the customer interaction. These typically are defined by an important event, such as
on-boarding; a frequent activity, such as balance checking; a milestone event, such as going on leave; or a decision that can't be modified for a defined period of time, such as annual enrollment in the United States. Delivering a great experience during critical moments is crucial, since that's when employees make decisions or take actions that make an impact, on themselves and their employers.

For a client that had a 25% Spanish-speaking population, in addition to the already-in-place bilingual service center, the solutions team translated the Web site in an attempt to provide an enrollment alternative for this important and growing segment. Despite predictions that a good portion of the Spanish-speaking employees in the pilot would use the Web, only 4% went online, and those who did hardly strayed from the enrollment path. The majority of Spanish speakers chose to use the service center. "These results will help us to create the right customer experience for this segment. When it comes to choosing channels, it's the customers who decide what's right for them," says Wise.

3. Focus on mutual objectives to achieve business results. The best HR solutions achieve outcomes that matter to employers and employees alike. "A solution has to benefit employees, or you won't get the desired behavior needed to achieve your business goals," says Wise.

For example, an early version of Hewitt's health care Web site made it easy for employees to find doctors near home or work. Then, the solutions team learned that 30% of all health care outlays result from poor-quality care, which translates to $420 billion a year in the United States alone.¹

Armed with the research data, the team began testing a new design for the provider search tool. The new tool encourages employees to use quality rather than proximity to home or office as the key criterion when seeking care.

Both sides benefit from the redesign. Employees spend less time in the hospital, return to work sooner, and stay healthier. This reduces health care expenses for employers and for employees, who are being asked to share more of the cost burden.

4. Focus on the system as a whole. Focusing on one channel in isolation can be misleading, as Hewitt learned from a pilot to boost Web enrollment. The solutions team was pleased that 77% of employees enrolled online—until they learned of the high volume of calls to the service center from employees wanting to verify that their Web enrollment was complete. A simple solution—emailing confirmation statements—reduced the call volume by 56%.

Ongoing Experimentation
"In many organizations, development ends when a product is rolled out," says Wise. "We're committed to seeking out the customers' point of view and responding to their feedback, before and after deployment."

The team meets with customers throughout the year, to observe firsthand how deployed solutions work. "Sometimes we're testing new concepts or prototypes. Other times we're refining solutions that have already been deployed. Our lab is in the field, where the customers are," says Wise. "We visit at least 15 different employers in a year, and we sit down with 10 to 12 employees during each visit. We watch how employees respond to print communication, navigate the Web site, and use the automated voice response system. We listen to what they say about their experience—What's easy? Where do they get stuck? Then we go back and make changes. The insights gained from working directly with customers help us to develop solutions that work in the real world."

One recent insight emerged from a pilot to test a new retirement savings Web page. "Our initial approach focused on making people aware that they may not be prepared to retire," says Wise. When that generated negative feedback, the team tried a more positive approach that showed the impact of small increases in monthly contributions. A button that had read "Are you saving enough?" was changed to "See how your savings can grow." When employees click on the new link, a graph shows how small savings can add up to substantial retirement income. "We got a much better response with messages that focused on what they could accomplish, rather than on the gap between their current savings and their retirement needs," says Wise.

Once a solution has been deployed and refined, Hewitt measures customer satisfaction on a regular basis. (Measuring the success of HR service delivery is a broad topic that will be the focus of a feature in the next issue of Hewitt magazine.) Eventually, by mining data from 13 million calls to Hewitt's service center annually and more than a billion Web interactions each year, it may be possible to predict the outcomes of alternative approaches to service delivery, and provide for even better customer experiences.

In the meantime, Hewitt continues to combine experience and experimentation to create great customer experiences that lead to better business results. "In addition to solutions that we're developing for broad deployment, and others that are being piloted, we have some solutions in the concept-testing phase," says Wise. That includes a total benefits decision-making model that's designed to encourage employees to consider all of their benefits in the context of their present and their future. "We'll always have a portfolio of solutions strategies in various stages of development," says Wise. "We'll always be experimenting."

¹Midwest Business Group on Health, 2004

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