"Talk to someone about themselves and they’ll listen for hours."
Dale Carnegie wrote that in 1936 in his iconic book, “How to Win Friends and Influence People.” He was telling us that if we want to keep a person’s attention, make the conversation all about that person.
77 years later, Leena Rao wrote a blog post “When it comes to personalization, Amazon has been one of the pioneers in mining and using data to create a more curated e-commerce experience for consumers.” We all have a pretty good idea of the kind of success that these personalized experiences have generated for Amazon.
The 21st century technology of Amazon validates the 20th century theory of Carnegie: if you want to win someone’s attention, give them an experience that’s personalized toward that person.
During my nearly decade-long tenure in working with HR Service Centers, it’s become clear that the Self-service Portal is the lynchpin to success and efficiency in HR service delivery. If an organization can stock a portal with useful tools and content, the employees will be more empowered to help themselves, and place less demand on HR resources. In the business, this is called Tier Zero Resolution – resolving issues without involving an HR representative. The higher your rates of Tier Zero Resolution, the greater your efficiency, the lower your costs, and quit often, the happier your employees.
According to Dale Carnegie’s teachings and Amazon’s experience, “personalizing” the portal will keep the employee’s attention longer once they’re in the portal (that’s called “stickiness” in web-speak), and induce them to return to the portal more often. And if they go there more often they return, the more frequently they’ll use the tools in the portal. These tools may include Knowledge Base Content, corporate announcements or Smart Forms. And when employees do this, they become more informed, and more self-sufficient. And what all this adds up to is more Tier Zero Resolution.
So, how does Amazon “personalize” its portal, and how can this apply to your employee portal? How does Amazon dynamically generate a portal view that’s filled with content that will interest the individual shopper? It starts with data – data about the customer. And in defining the customer through data, it’s able to display products that align with that data description. I’ve admittedly simplified Amazon’s science here, but the point is this: in a digital environment, data is what defines the individuality of a person, and that same data can help you to personalize a user experience in your HR Self Service portal.
You likely have dozens of different data points in every employee record. That data is your key to driving a more personalized employee experience in the portal.
How personalized is your portal? Does every employee see the same content on the same landing page, regardless of their business unit, region, and length of service or union membership? Does an HR Business Partner experience the same portal view as a New Hire? Or is the content personalized by using the data that defines employee? Our personalized Neocase HR Self Service Portal resolves all of these questions.
To paraphrase Dale Carnegie, “Show employees content that’s about themselves, and they’ll use the self-service portal more often.” And you’ll achieve Tier Zero Resolution more often.