In the HCM technology and HR services market, delivering a rich employee experience is often associated with having the most user-friendly UI, seamless digital processes (zero touch) with field validations and single-point-of-entry to ensure high quality data. As discussed in NelsonHall’s recently published Cloud HR Transformation report, the next frontier of employee experience developments, where most investments are being made, is delivering greater personalization and insights to help decision making.

Indeed, the HR technology and services market has seen a trend towards incorporating more conversation and customized engagements with employees. Conduent, a CX and HR transformation service provider, noted that between 2020 and 2022, chat grew from 14% to 30% of all interactions (here).

A number of HR service vendors offer CX best practices and are leveraging CX developments to define a rich employee experience that incorporates unstructured conversations. One of the trends outlined in NelsonHall’s CX market analysis is growth in conversational interactions by better integrating sales, support, and marketing.

Conduent takes a broad look at customer experience and incorporates both conversation and empathy as part of it. The company aligns to three key characteristics of a positive customer experience:

• Competent: correctness & completeness
• Convenient: simplicity/ease of use & responsiveness
• Caring: empathy & appreciation.

HR technology and service providers have primarily focused investments on the first two of these characteristics. Regarding the third, Conduent’s recently released study (2023 State of Experience in the New World of Work) cited only 34% of HR organizations are very effective at providing consistent, empathetic omnichannel workforce experiences.

HR service providers that bring CX capability look to design high-touch human experience alongside high-touch digital experience, with appropriate handovers incorporated. How do they do this? Conduent designs its HR services offerings starting from employee journey mapping exercises. The journey experience explores scenarios where issue resolution is not just about simple vs complex or high volume vs low volume, but it also incorporates an additional dimension of high emotion vs low emotion. As part of this concept, at the core of the employee experience is employee wellbeing. Conduent’s journey mapping methodology incorporates insights, experience, engagement and monitoring to enable dynamic, personalized and proactive experiences.

In a recent interview, Conduent specialists pointed out that cycle anxiety can be as much about employee experience as the cycle time. For example, if an employee is not told when they will likely get a response or how long things take, not knowing often causes more frustrations than if they had information about timescales. Any London train commuter will have experienced this feeling on the occasions when customer information is not updated with next train times.

A broad employee experience framework that incorporates employee journey mapping with human interventions offers the ability to deliver many benefits and considers overall communication, not just timely and accurate transactions.

Conduent recently delivered HR transformation and outsourcing services to a global pharmaceutical organization. It is not only on track to achieve the expected savings of up to 35%, but it is also increasing the company attraction, employee support, experiences, engagement, and retention across 110k employees distributed across ~80 countries. It is achieving cost efficiency improvements by decreasing the number of cases via Knowledge Management and additional automation. It reduces manual administrative work through RPA applied to compliance risk and minimizing error rates. And it is also improving quality, SLAs, and the cycle time.

With the advent of generative AI to support conversations, NelsonHall expects HR service and technology vendors to further develop conversational capability, exploring new ways of engaging with employees, managers and HR operational teams to ultimately drive greater attraction, engagement and retention (employer brand loyalty) whilst managing operational costs. Finally, the importance of a rich data set to support conversational solutions that aid decision-making should not be underestimated.