Reimagining the Help Desk through Workday’s Power to Adapt

Challenge

Oakland County, MI, had already transitioned to Workday Human Capital Management (HCM) and Payroll, and to streamline its processes, the county was looking to implement Workday Financials as part of its technology modernization plan. With approximately 5,000 active employees, the current process of utilizing a centralized email inbox to manage employee support was unsustainable and proved to be a poor user experience. Without a mechanism to track requests to completion or the ability to report on and analyze incoming data, it was difficult for Oakland County to make meaningful changes to better its user experience and facilitate improvements to its operations.

Solution

With a focus on bettering the user experience, increasing employee self-service, and unlocking the power to adapt, Guidehouse led the implementation of Workday Help. Guidehouse set up and configured Workday Help, which is comprised of both Knowledge Management and Case Management. Knowledge Management allowed the creation of help articles and facilitated employee self-service discovery. Case Management enabled the creation, tracking, and resolution of cases. To further aid employees in finding answers during case creation, Case Suggestions were configured to automatically recommend Help Articles, Workday Learning Content, Workday Tasks, Workday Reports, and external resources. To enhance the user experience and streamline the flow of requests, our experts also configured routing rules that directed cases to the correct service team member and subject matter expert. Additionally, to facilitate greater data analysis, we created custom dashboards and reports within Workday to help Oakland County track key metrics over time.

Impact

By utilizing Workday’s Power to Adapt approach to implement Workday Help, Oakland County created a seamless user experience within the same application. While Workday already allowed employees and managers self-service capabilities across the entire platform of HCM, Payroll, and Financials, now it also offered self-service capabilities around user outreach and support. The enablement of case suggestions increased employee self-service capabilities by proactively providing suggestions through curated Workday Learning content or custom Workday help articles which limited the amount of actual case creation. Empowered with real-time data and insights through Workday’s dashboard and reporting capabilities, Oakland County is now able to analyze and quantify where employees needed additional support. This data has allowed Oakland County to identify departments that would benefit from additional training, institute, and conduct open office hours for various functional areas, and send across targeted communications.

By embracing continuous innovation, Oakland County has continued to develop and refine Case Management. Recently introduced functionality includes Case Questionnaires which allowed support staff to receive relevant and complete information upfront, resulting in reduced case resolution time.