How to Improve Human Resources Call Centre Management

The Challenges that HR Practitioners  Face in Large Organizations

There are many challenges that HR Practitioners face in large organisations but some of the more common ones involve...

1) How to give consistent advise - with employees that will shop around to get the answer they want to hear.  But even when they employees don't do that with so many access points to a typical HR Department and so many people in that department it is near impossible to ensure that exactly the same advice is given in the exact same circumstance by two different people on your team.

2) How to be Proactive - HR Practitioners are often left reacting to issues that go on in the business and scrambling to catch-up.  Issues around discrimination, employee dissatisfaction with their line management team, and lack of understanding around policies and procedures are often dealt with reactively as opposed to proactively. 

3) How to be more Efficient - It's a tough economy out there.  Everyone is cutting back and HR departments are expected to do their part in terms of cutting costs.  This often means handling more issues with fewer people.  How will you cope with this?

How a Dynamics CRM System can help...

Speaking from practical experience there are a number of ways that a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system can help an HR department and specifically how Dynamics CRM can help.  Most HR departments when they invest in technology think of HR Payroll tools and HR Management Systems but not much else.   They rarely think of their employees as their customers and therefore don't think that CRM systems can help them.  But the reality is that CRM systems specialize in managing "People Interaction" and if you are an HR Department Good People Interaction Management is key to your success. 

Specifically here's some ways how a Dynamics CRM based system can help...

1) Full Communications Management - Dynamics CRM allows you to manage all your communications such as email, phone, meetings and letters.  Everything can be tracked and the entire history of communication with an employee since they started with and organization can be seen.

2) Integration with Outlook - Because Dynamics CRM is fully integration with Outlook and most organisations still use Outlook at their email tool this means that everything can be tracked with a single click.  There is no double handling copying emails over to your HR tool or recording appointments and the outcomes thereof in both your calendar and your HR tool.  Double handling is eliminated.

3) Integrated Knowledge Base - There is a fully integrated knowledge base that is easy to search and allows your HR Business Partners with a few clicks to insert the knowledge base article into an email.  This means it is easy to process common employee questions quickly and effortlessly.

4) Complete Activity History through Audit Logging - One of the most important things with employee communication is to keep detailed records.  These can be admissible in the court of law or in labour disputes.  Dynamics CRM keeps a full audit trail of interactions with an employee and keeps track of all changes in the system.  So you can see when a change to an employees record was made and by whom?

5) Advice Self Service  -   The Knowledge Base in Dynamics can be integrated easily to a self service portal.  This means that policies loaded into CRM for your HR Advisors to use can also be made available for employees to easily look for themselves.  Dynamics CRM becomes your one source for all your HR Policies.

6) Proactive Reporting to Identify Trends and Problems - One of the challenges for HR Departments is to see a problem is coming and proactively deal with it before it becomes more serious.   For example identifying a supervisor who gets a lot of complaints or realising that a particular piece of HR policy is generating a lot of questions and needs to be better communicated.  With a full dash boarding and reporting capability, HR business partners can build reports themselves easily to identify trends and emerging problem areas.

7) Proactive Outbound Communication - Once you've identified a particular issue you can use Dynamics CRM to communicate out to your employees in a proactive and consistent way.  You can also track who has read your communications and who hasn't.

8) Standardize Responses - Email templates to standardise responses can be built in Dynamics CRM and used either through Outlook on an Ad Hoc basis or automatically through system generated emails. 

9) Case Management, Queues and Workflows - Depending on the type of question or issues raised by the employee or determined by the department they come from the question or complaint can automatically be routed to the group or person within your HR team best suited to answer the question.  The issues is tracked as a Case and the history of the case is management.  This means that employees are not being bounced around from person to person looking for the relevant expert in your group, communications is more efficient and the employee is responded to more quickly than before. 

10) Business Processes Built right into your System - with the new Business Process Based User Interface the CRM system can be designed specifically around your HR Departments specific business processes. 

In the end then a Dynamics CRM System can help you give consistent advice, be more proactive and do more with less by becoming more efficient in your people management. 

 

Less Cost than a cup of coffee per day, really?

So the Professional version of Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online is priced at relatively cost effectively at ~$65 per user per month.  However Microsoft provides for various license levels and for most HR users of a Dynamics CRM Online system the lower cost "Basic" License applies.  Priced at ~ $30 per user per month this is extremely cost effective for most HR departments and can often be handled as a OpEx expense rather than a CapEx expense requiring more formal approvals.  Work this out and this amounts to less than $1.50 per day per user or less than the cup of coffee you buy down at your local coffee shop.  If you want more details around Dynamics CRM Online software pricing just click on  Dynamics CRM Online Quick Reference Guide .

Now there will likely be some services costs associated with the deployment and those costs may vary with the level of backend integration you want with other systems in your business.  But based on practical experience a simple system as a first step can be up and running typically within 6 to 8 weeks.  So for most HR Departments to get a basic system in place the services costs will be relatively low.

A Practical Example:  How the NSW Gov't does it...

One of eSavvy's oldest customers is NSW Health, specifically the Hunter New England Region.  They came up on one of the earlier versions of Dynamics CRM and have since upgraded.  But their HR Department are using Dynamics CRM as described in this article with some significant business benefits being realised.  For more information click here:  NSW Health Customer Case Study  or alternatively you can send me an email at dgoad@esavvy.com.au


David Goad is the Managing Director for eSavvy – Microsoft Dynamics CRM Gold Certified Partner. eSavvy is an award winning Microsoft Dynamics CRM Partner staffed by some of the most experienced solution and technical architects in the Microsoft partner channel. We build and deliver relationship management solutions based on the Microsoft Dynamics CRM platform for large enterprises as well small and midsize businesses in Australia