As expectations of what is possible in the digital world have grown exponentially, Capgemini is aiming to close the widening gap between consumer experience and employee experience.  It is looking to digitalize workplace interactions while keeping the warmth, emotion, and uniqueness underpinning company culture.

It has built a Digital Employee Operations (DEO) practice over the last four and a half years, which brings customer service to a new level in the field of HR. DEO aims to bring everything into one place: knowledge, help, and information through a "one pane of glass" digital window.

This is only possible through tighter technology partnerships which support more robust integrations with more industrialized processes and more standard services.

What's New?

In 2020, Capgemini selected ServiceNow as a strategic partner for its digital employee operations. Importantly, this is not positioned as a call center. Its Digital Employee Operations clients use a digital-first strategy.

ServiceNow brings a case management platform designed for HR with a prebuilt data structure that is HR-centric, combined with prebuilt security. One of the differentiating features is that this product enables not only service agent interactions, but employees can interact and collaborate across the organization; for instance, product enabling managers and employees are able to engage on a case.

Before reaching this partnership, Capgemini supported operational customers in its DEO practice with the ServiceNow platform for a number of years. Its first ServiceNow customer was AECOM, which went live in Q4 2018, and it has built a significant practice over the years. Today, Capgemini's DEO supports more than 20 languages for more than 250K lives in 90 Countries on ServiceNow. The formal partnership now takes this model and approach to a new level.

Applying chatbots in HR and adoption levels

In Capgemini, chatbots have a high adoption rate, with ~20% of its clients leveraging or launching virtual agents/chatbots. Chatbots offer iterative functionality, and Capgemini sees varying deployment approaches across clients.

Some add a virtual agent/chatbot alongside live human chat support. This expedites the learning process for a bot by having a log of live interactions to drive and map intents and responses accurately to employee queries. An alternative approach is where there is no history of live chat. As an input, the bot simply requires more effort and assumption in intents and interactions. This approach involves more humans validating questions and answering questions the bot could not address.

Why a strategic partner?

Having selected a dedicated human resources “hire to retire” services solution, Capgemini can now drive larger benchmarking data sets to evaluate process improvements through comparative trend analysis. Benchmarking is critical for a mature operation that looks for a competitive advantage. Capgemini offers benchmarking in two ways:

• Sharing of knowledge and experiences learned across clients to benchmark what is leading practice, and applying and sharing lessons learned and continuous improvements across clients
• External benchmarking against non-DEO clients less than 15% of its current client base have engaged with that additional offer.

NelsonHall Viewpoint

Its first truly joined-up DEO contract on ServiceNow was 12 months ago. Over the next three years, NelsonHall expects a service approach to HR transformations will be increasingly important as organizations look for more than just an HCM technology deployment and/or support partners.  Organizations will likely look for more robust and holistic service-based HR business cases to ensure savings and ROI are achieved through end-to-end digital transformations. They will likely increasingly assess their own operational capability to drive the change to achieve a digital-first approach to help drive more consumer-like HR services.

Although many organizations have leaped to mobile-first employee experiences through HCM platform deployment, few have addressed the experience of inquiry support and how HR operating models and interactions need to uplift. Rather than treating this as an afterthought, proactive HR directors with ambitions to reshape companies in 2021 are expected to evaluate service delivery models on a more holistic level, looking more at people and digital and how they come together through technology.

Capgemini's offering maturity is evidenced by the fact it now has 30-40 pre-packaged HR services and a deep service partnership with ServiceNow. This puts it is in a strong position to take this maturity to the next level of sophistication.