Nasreen (Nash) Shaikh, HRIS Project Manager at Blue Cross Blue Shield (BCBS) of Minnesota, a health plan provider employing 3,500 people, recently joined a panel of customers at ServiceNow’s HR Summit in Cincinnati. As part of a multi-city event series, these free one day events bring together HR practitioners and thought leaders to discuss and share best practices around HR service delivery.

Nash is a double post graduate with a Master’s degree in Commerce and in Human Resources Development Management. She has more than 14 years of experience with Human Resources Information Systems and has executed global rollouts and managed international teams.

I was fortunate enough to grab a few minutes with her to learn more about how BCBS transformed HR service delivery.

Mike: Thank you for taking the time to chat Nash. What were the driving factors behind transforming HR delivery service at BCBS?

Nash: The healthcare industry is changing and our business needed to change as well. Our senior leadership challenged us – how can HR become more focused on the strategic aspects of the business while also supporting our employees in a better way? We knew we needed to become more consumer-focused in how we provided services to our employees.

Mike: Prior to this transformation, how did employees get the HR services they needed?

Nash: Employee questions and requests, via email, were passing through up to three people before getting to the person who could resolve the issue or take action. This had to change. We wanted to provide a more consumer-like experience for our employees and knew moving to a shared service environment supported by ServiceNow would help us do that.

Mike: Why did you choose ServiceNow?

Nash: We did a needs analysis. One of our main drivers was around metrics. We needed to know how well we were servicing our customers (Nash refers to employees as customers). We also wanted everything that our HR managers were seeing on a screen, to be able to be put into a report. Our HRIS function was too often being relied upon as the report-generation function. We wanted our managers to create their own reports. ServiceNow was the strongest in this area compared to other competitors. The project team also quickly identified that ServiceNow was better able to support their use cases and requirements.

Mike: What were some of the other “must haves” in an ideal solution?

Nash: We also wanted to provide a one-stop-shop for our customers to find information they needed on their own. It needed to be a simple Google-style landing page where users could start typing what they were looking for, and before they even finished, the system would start suggesting content. And if they couldn’t find what they needed, they could easily open a case to get help, all from one place.

But we didn’t want this improved customer experience to come at the cost of the experience of our HR administrators. We needed to make their lives better and make it easier from them to do their jobs as well.

ServiceNow delivered on all of this, and we were live in just 6 weeks, thanks to our implementation partner, Integrhythm for all the help and making it swift for us.

Mike: What have the benefits been so far?

Nash: By far the biggest benefit was the access to data and metrics that we never had before. We now understand very clearly what questions our employees are asking and what their biggest concerns are, allowing us to more proactively address them.

Employees are also now getting support much faster. They can see the status of their requests at any time, creating a more consumerized employee service experience.

Mike: Thanks for sharing your story Nash. Congratulations on your success!

Nash: My pleasure.

Want to hear more HR service delivery success stories? Join us at Knowledge17 where we will have 20 customers sharing their success using ServiceNow for HR.