---

With data-driven insights, companies can transform their HR or broader business services to increase talent engagement and productivity. Doing so makes good business sense.

It’s time that the CHRO and other C-suite leaders ask: How are we bringing more personalized experiences to the workplace? How can we engage with our workforce in a way that excites and encourages them to be more productive?

Customers want a ‘human touch’ in financial services experiences

Financial services (FS) customers in the UK reported in our 2018 survey that they value a human touch in their experience with banks and insurers.

The survey also highlights that FS customers know that their data is valuable and want banks and insurers to treat it with care. UK banks and insurance companies are responding by offering personalized, hyper-relevant offerings and interactions, and by engaging customers through natural conversation—rather than through impersonal transactions.

Turns out, it is machines and data that have the potential to put the human element back into the conversation with customers.

Accenture recommends the following actions:

1. Identify pockets of value

Consider the business outcomes you want to achieve, like improved workforce retention, productivity or satisfaction. Then prioritize the workforce based on the likelihood that an improved employee experience would drive more value to the business.

2. Define moments that matter

Don’t assume anything about your workers. Use analytics, internal and external survey data, and social listening to understand the professional and personal moments that will matter to them. Use this understanding to design hyper-personalized experiences and to offer physical, human and digital choices that will empower employees to achieve new productivity goals.

3. Co-create and design the experience

Apply customer-centricity techniques like design thinking to reinvent your employee experience. Use choice as a key design principle, and engage with employees to co-create the most relevant and valuable experiences.

How can organizations achieve these three steps? Let’s take a deeper look. In Accenture’s Improve the Employee Experience report, we recommend four actions to help FS firms put their people at the center of their operations:

4. Organize around the ‘moments that matter’

Organizing your HR function to focus on these critical moments will allow you to drive real value, not just deliver a service to your workforce.

• Develop advanced analytics capabilities to understand what the true ‘moments that matter’ are.
• Organize HR services around workforce needs.
• Use human-led design to change from existing process/standards-based approaches.
• Cultivate a customer-focused mindset and behaviors.

5. Transform HR to become responsive and focused

Encouraging a laser focus on simplicity and agility can release savings that can be reinvested to deliver what your workforce wants and expects.

• Simplify and standardize processes.
• Remove local customization where not absolutely critical.
• Automate and provide self-service to give employees access anytime, anywhere.

6. Proactively nurture employees

Balancing proactive technology, automation and artificial intelligence with delivery that comes from human contact builds a more efficient and nurturing organization.

• Use analytics-driven insights to determine how and where to interact and to provide personalization.
• Form a technology ecosystem that can anticipate what employees want—and may need—to pre-empt issues.
• Deliver end-to-end services providing integrated access, delivery and escalation tools (for example mobile, workflow, integrated case management, etc).

7. Measure, adjust and repeat

Understanding what makes your employees tick is not a one-time thing. It’s important to continually track behaviors, mindsets and problems that face your workforce every day, and to evolve how you address these.

• Use advanced analytics to both measure performance against ‘moments that matter’ and monitor changes in what those moments are.
• Focus on a few outcome-based measures for things that can actually be addressed.
• Adjust based on insights.
• Prepare to continually evolve and improve.

Are you ready to engage your employees at a higher level and in the process boost your company’s productivity? Have a look at the following resources for more insight:

• Improve the Employee Experience report
• Employee Experience Reimagined report
• UK Financial Services Customer Survey 2018

To find out more about digital HR in financial services or to join us at the Change Directors Forum and People Innovation Forum in London, please contact me here or on Twitter @knott_nic.

For more information on how to manage change with data-driven insights, contact Jasmine Zivari.