Co-authored by Srishti Sawant, 23 November 2018

“The customer is king” is often the slogan that organizations tend to propagate among their employee masses, however, there is a definite shift in this mindset that is seen to reverberate among most new-age companies. “The employees behind the success of the customer – is the new king”!

Engaged employees are found to have some serious power over the success of the business. Engaged employees are often empowered employees – but organizations often tend to render its employees helpless when it comes to handling their queries. Based on Neeyamo’s initial assessment of HR query volumes handled by its customers, it was found that approximately 60% of the total employee queries received from client employees revolved around questions regarding “leaves” and “payslips”. HR executives lose productive hours in responding to such transactional queries. On an average, an employee tends to seek for resolutions at least 5 times in a month. Now consider the case of a multinational organization with over 50,000 employees, with its presence in over 50 countries spread across the world – What should an organization do to ensure they empower their employees to help themselves?

Would it be possible to put your employees in the driver’s seat to handle their own queries rather than placing the onus on HR? After all, the best HR ticket would be a ticket that was never raised!

So how would you go about it?

Query Analysis: Analysing the types of queries on a consistent basis will help organizations identify “Frequently Asked Questions” and having them listed in an FAQ section. Depending on the severity of the query, this could provide the HR department with an opportunity to either conduct road-shows or campaigns to train employees to resolve the specific type of query.

This knowledge base further acts as a repository for employees to refer and gain resolution to most Level-1 queries. This also equips HR to create AI enabled training programs that will increase employee experience.

Chatbots: Chatbot is another tool prevalently explored by organizations over the past few years to address most Level-1 queries. The bots are equipped to identify certain key-words or strings of words that would help employees with basic queries such as the availability of a specific HR policy etc. The system would further assess and identify if the query is of a higher category and route the request to HR personnel as required.

User Experience is key: At times, despite taking the right steps to equip employees with information, there would definitely be instances where an employee has to turn to the helpdesk to raise a ticket. While an employee helpdesk can be a simple repository of tickets and statuses, a provision of an individual dashboard with resolutions earlier received, could become a personal point-of-reference for the individual. Remember – the intent here, is to ensure you do everything possible to equip your employee!

Multi-channel calling assistance: Nothing can beat the possibility of getting an immediate resolution – something that would take away that nagging feeling of your query remaining unresolved. Helpdesk tools have now come up with multi-channel call assistance options through Voice and Video on VOIP for rapid and immediate resolution. Employees can also reach out to their HR teams via Chat bots which can help translate the query and facilitates a faster turnaround in query resolution.

Multi-lingual capability: While dealing with a global workforce – especially in the case of an organization with a Long-tail presence, the HR team should be equipped to handle queries of its employees, irrespective of the language. Traditional HR ideology would have required HR personnel to be made available in the requisite country (with knowledge of the local language) to fulfil this need. However, having the right set of tools can now equip an HR team from the US to handle the queries of its employees in Japan “over a phone call” – Yes, this is possible. Click here to learn more.

Several organizations tend to use a “Helpdesk Tool” as a simple alternative to handling employee queries on email, telephone, walk-ins etc. However, an integrated helpdesk to a HR & payroll platform will further equip employees with dashboards and modules that make it easy for employees to mark their skill sets, apply for leave, check records that need approval, and perform a whole host of other actions.

A single point solution to all HR needs with an integrated helpdesk would help employees see the larger picture and consider all alternatives prior to raising a ticket with HR.

A robust helpdesk tool is a mandate for fast-growing businesses as it brings together cutting-edge technology, superior customer experience and aims to maximize ROI. At Neeyamo, we ensure solutions are developed to custom fit the client requirements as we believe in designing tools based on our customer’s individual requirement. Click here to read a case study on how Neeyamo’s HR & Payroll helpdesk solution helped to drastically reduce its client’s HR query volumes and increased employee satisfaction over query resolution to 85%.