Products look different depending on which side of the customer experience you’re standing on – provider or user. Providers may set the goals. But it’s the quality of the user experience that determines whether you reach them.
It’s why HR people should always step onto the employee side of a company’s HR platform. It’s the only way to see how it works; to understand the end-user experience; to answer important questions – how easy is it to use? Is it frustrating? Does it follow a logical path? – that will determine whether or not it succeeds.
That’s especially important this year. Twenty-twenty, as we know, is a year like no other. Following suit with pretty much everything else, open enrollment promises to break the mold, with many (arguably most) employers moving their benefit fairs online. The high-tech platforms may be state-of-the-art. But they’ll require some low-tech check-ups to do the job.
What should be on your list?
Log on: Don’t just look at it – use it. Have a task in mind and then try to accomplish it. Things can look a lot different when you move from the theoretical view to the “how is this working for me” perspective.
Click through: Take an objective look at content to assess the big picture. Is it comprehensive? Is it easy to see everything that’s available?
Surf: Put yourself in the space of someone needing a particular piece of information. Where are your solutions? How easy are they to locate, or perhaps more concerning – to miss?
Contact: Hit a snag? Is usable contact information in plain sight? Does it take a scavenger hunt to find?
Call: If you’ve got a phone contact, dial it. How helpful is the opening message? Where does it route you? Is it a fully-active source of information? Or is it a holdover from the days before electronic communication became the norm?
Leave a message: What happens when an employee leaves a message, either by phone or digitally? The best way to find out is to leave one yourself. And then wait.
In this age of high-tech innovation, it’s easy to lose focus on the employee experience. And that’s a shame since it means those right-now benefits you’re working so hard to create may end up helping your workforce – and so your organization – less than you think.
For all the algorithms and analytics, sometimes it’s plain, old human interaction that delivers the real insights.
