What HR can learn from Customer Service?

When you look inside most HR departments you would find that they are busy doing transactions or clarifying issues around transactions. This is true to varying degrees in organizations of all sizes. So when you decide to implement an HR Workforce management (WFM) solution in HR, you need to evaluate what all the system is supposed to record and what transactions will happen based on information stored in the system.
At the core the WFM will have to do a great job of recording various types of information about an employee and then displaying it back in an easy to understand manner. Such stored information will also give the ability for managers and HR alike to analyse the same to identify various trends and take informed decisions.
While one must also understand that HR typically has to handle multiple transactions and a good WFM should look to automate most such transactions. Most transactions however need a trigger and in most cases it’s a human who need to provide some trigger. This is where HR can learn from customer service in B2C and even B2B companies.
Most companies today adopt a self-service approach to customer service. Wherein the customer can login to the system look for what she is looking to do and do it themselves. We routinely see this in banking and insurance related transactions and these systems have now matured to a great extent over the last decade.
HR has been slow to adapt to this self service trend however now more and more companies are adopting this either as part of their WFM solution or as part of their HR shared service module which again will have a WFM working at the backend.
Following are typical transactions that can be moved into Employee & Manager self service mode via your WFM solution.

1. Employee Self Service:
   1. View & Edit personal information like Pan Card, Date of birth, Address etc.
   2. Check & Correct daily attendance
   3. Apply for leave
   4. Apply for travel
   5. Check leave balance
   6. Ask for experience or residence proof or other such letters
   7. Respond to surveys
   8. Ask for training programs
   9. Submit Resignation

1. Manager self service
   1. Approve leave or attendance correction requests
   2. Approve travel requests and advances
   3. Initiate transfer out of employee from own team
   4. Initiate promotion of an employee from own team
   5. Initiate Rewards & Recognition
   6. Review Salary of team members
   7. Approve Training requests
   8. Initiate disciplinary action/s
   9. Approve resignation

Such configurable workflows which suit the organization need for these processes free HR from the burden of managing these multiple transactions across different locations. This helps improve the accuracy and efficiency of these transactions as most information is directly taken from the system or from the manager.
When a manager has complete access and control over information about his or her team, this causes in change in behaviour of the manager and the employee. When the employee knows that his or her manager has access to all this information instead of this being in some black box with HR, the dialogue between employee and manager will mature.
HR then can move beyond the operational aspects and focus on activities of strategic importance to the business. HR will then ensure that the processes are adhered to while focusing on improving the overall quality of such HR processes.