Self-Service Causes Call Volume to Drop 75 Percent

Feature: Three Stories of Self-Service Success

Self-Service Causes Call Volume to Drop 75 Percent
Tally Defense has reduced the size of the HR department without falling behind on HR obligations.
By Sarah Fister Gale

Name:	Tally Defense Systems
Location:	Mesa, Arizona
Business:	Developer of propellant systems
Employees:	300

s director of human resources for Tally Defense Systems, Marcie Franklin had many reasons to transition the company to a self-service HR management system. Reducing the amount of handholding that employees required for every decision or information change was a primary motivator, she says. Employees would often call to ask about such mundane issues as when they could get new safety goggles, or to check how many vacation days they had left. "Even though we sent all this information out, people would lose it and then call us when they had a need." That meant her small team spent hours on the phone dealing with non-critical administrative issues. Franklin also wanted to eliminate unnecessary printing and labor costs, which would allow her to reduce the number of employees in the HR department over time. And she wanted to create a more open environment in which information was readily accessible to employees.

With these goals in mind, the company chose Best Software’s self-service HRMS in late 2000, putting much of the company’s relevant employee information online. "Now if employees want to know if it’s time to replace their safety goggles or to check if their training certification is up-to-date, they can find that information online," Franklin says. They can also access salary and vacation history, review benefits information, and get copies of their W2 forms or verification of employment records--all requests that were previously filtered through the HR department.

She estimates that since the self-service system was implemented, call volume has dropped by 75 percent, now taking up less than 5 percent of her staff’s time and energy. The self-service tool also made it possible to stop printing and mailing pay stubs unless employees requested them--a job that occupied two full-time employees for several days a month. That is enabling her to reduce the size of her department through attrition without falling behind on HR obligations.

Franklin and her team are thrilled with the self-service tool, although it was a bit of a hard sell for some employees. "A few people were intimidated by the new system," she says. "They wanted to know why they couldn’t just call us instead of having to find the information on their own."

But, she says, winning them over was mostly a matter of education. Now when employees call with questions, instead of supplying them with the answers, HR staffers direct them to the Web site and walk them through the process of finding the information themselves. Franklin estimates that her team has coached half of the employees one-on-one on using the system, and the rest have figured it out on their own. "Now they all feel empowered because they don’t have to wait for us to provide them with the information they need. They just get it themselves."

Workforce, January 2003, pp. 61-62 -- Subscribe Now!

Sara Fister Gale is a freelance writer based in Minneapolis. To comment, e-mail editors@workforce.com.