Hewitt has a lovely article in their Hewitt Magazine Online entitled “The Science of Customer Experience.” ((Volume 9 Issue 2. Retrieved from www.hewitt.com on December 18, 2006.)) While I’m really going to stick by my guns in the proclamation that they are an outsourcing company and no longer a pure consulting company, their outsourcing experience does reveal some excellent consultative ideas.
Operational metrics, such as response time and speed to answer, are not enough, according to Christi Rager Wise, the Global Service Leader for Customer Experience at Hewitt Associates. “We can measure how well we’ve adhered to operational standards, but the ultimate litmus test is how customers feel about their experience,” she says. “If HR service delivery isn’t meeting customers’ needs, you won’t be able to influence them to adopt behaviors that achieve business goals.” ((Hewitt, 2006. “The Science of Customer Experience.” Hewitt Magazine Online Volume 9 Issue 2. Retrieved from www.hewitt.com on December 18, 2006.))
Measuring customer satisfaction and behavior provides directional input. But to help employees make the best possible decisions during benefits enrollment requires digging deeper… The [Hewitt] team is also helping customers make good decisions in other areas of employee and manager self-service. ((Ibid))
Be wary if you go read this article. Primarily it is probably used as a sales tool for HRO, but there are some nuggets of insight if you read between the lines.
The first tier of tactic is to ensure your service delivery communications are responsive to the immediate needs of your customers. However, as a long term goal your broad package of HR service delivery methods from web self service, to call center and print communications should be able to provide you with detailed metrics on what employees and managers are concerned about, as well as diagnosing where the key actionable areas are to address the concerns. Of greater interest is predictive modeling where you should be able to drill through the data and understand where your employee satisfaction scores will be going based on current business environments. The ultimate goal is to model your planned service delivery activities to cater to what you know is coming in terms of dissatisfaction or concerns.
