Self-service for Shared Service Centres

Charles Drayson

May 5 · 2 min read

I spent some (great) years in an organisation that served HR professionals. Shared service centres of large organisations were important customers. They demanded self-service tools so employees could book their own holidays, change their payroll details, submit expenses, that sort of thing.

I worry that ‘self-service’ sounds like something negative – probably because we have suffered from self-service checkouts in retail outlets where it feels like a way for the retailer to save money and have us do a task that is better done by the retail staff. The last point is critical: the person best equipped to process your shopping basket at the checkout is a shop assistant.

Self-service for shared service centres

Self-service for shared service centres offers something more empowering. If I want to change my bank details for my salary or book a holiday, I know what I want to do. And, I’d like it done now. Self-service offers me on-demand, customised, confidential support. If I work in a sales team and I’ve worked hard to get a prospect to the stage of being ready to sign a deal, I’d rather not hand the task to the legal team and wait for my turn in the queue, especially if they don’t look after my hard-won customer.

If I just made a job offer for a vacancy I need to fill now, and I’ve found the best person for the role, I want to get the paperwork done now, and I want the candidate to feel they are joining a high-performing team. I might be embarrassed if I wait for the HR team to send out forms to collect information the applicant already provided in their resume.

Get it done right

I like self-service, but it has to be done right. Recently, I was involved in a residential property sale in the UK. The law firm offered a computerised system that promised to keep things moving and keep me up to date. The first batch of documents from that system included a pile of forms to be completed. Most of the forms contained the same set of fields: my name, my email address, the law firm’s reference number, the address of the property, and similar details of the transaction. They already had those details, and yet I had to enter them multiple times in different forms. Moreover, they sent PDFs which I could not edit – so most people would complete have to print them and fill them in manuscript. Doubtless, when the forms arrive back at the law firm, a secretary or paralegal would re-key the data (perhaps with errors).

WHY

They already had all that data: they emailed their forms to me! Why didn’t they use document automation to pre-populate the forms? Better still, why didn’t they pre-populate a questionnaire and leave me to provide missing information, and have the software generate all their forms? As far I can see, their computer system does nothing more than automate the dispatch of the same analogue documents that they were probably using years ago.

Self-service done right looks like this:

Collect data from the person (or system) best equipped to provide it – and use a medium that is designed for the task
Build a system that flows the data to wherever it is needed (keeping it as structured data in digital form)
Add intelligence to compute extra data, validate the data, predict what the user might want
Don’t add unnecessary analogue steps to a digital system: for example, don’t add human approval steps if the system is capable of calculating whether requisite criteria are satisfied – humans are not good at rubber-stamping computed results
Provide feedback: tell the user what has been achieved and what comes next
Monitor the manual interventions to learn where the system is failing to meet user needs (telephone calls and emails to helpdesks, escalations to managers, submissions from channels other than self-service)

This manner of intelligent automation is easier if one solution can handle all the component features. In case you’re wondering, Legito can do that.