Transforming a Fortune500 Healthcare Payer by Redefining the Employee Experience

With over 40,000 employees and counting, this American health insurer has been committed to serving their employees, patients, and local communities for over thirty years. 

With the COVID-19 global pandemic throwing the healthcare industry into the spotlight, players in the industry have a new duty not only to their shareholders, but also to their communities. Driven by a true care for their team, this company demonstrated that social responsibility is a true value for them, not simply a marketing ploy. They’ve remained active in their local communities, offering health and wellness programs, donating to causes they believe in, ensuring their customers have access to quality care, and even guaranteeing free coronavirus testing and treatments for patients as well as deploying an emergency solution to distribute relief funds to employees with the help of ServiceNow. 

A Changing Landscape Drives the Need for ServiceNow

Modern healthcare organizations are increasingly concerned with managing patient outcomes. Effectively managing IT operations is key to managing sensitive data, ensuring quality care, and providing a consumer-grade experience to patients and employees alike. According to Acorio’s second annual Insight & Vision report, 78% of healthcare organizations report already having strategic initiatives underway in IT Service Management.  

“For an industry with such high stakes in patient care and centralized data, they [Healthcare Organizations] are first focusing on Service Management – even above Digital Transformation.” – Acorio Insight & Vision Report, 2020 

Another trend was revealed in Acorio’s latest Insight & Vision report; 28% of over 400 respondents from enterprise companies across different industries replied that they currently have ServiceNow’s HRSD solution in use in their organization, compared to 21% the year before. Organizations across industries are realizing that employee satisfaction is intrinsically linked to overall business performance.  

A Core Value Guides HR (and Soon Enterprise-wide) Transformation

This organization embarked on a journey to revolutionize its HR processes with one goal in mind – improving the lives of its 40,000+ employees through meaningful digital transformation. They needed a solution that would be transformative, yet simple and sustainable; the employee experience was paramount.  

Prior to this organization’s HR revamp, employees had to navigate multiple systems just to close a single HR case.  These disparate systems provided minimal visibility into what types of cases came in, how long they took to resolve, and what follow-up was needed.  

With an existing HR environment that was not empowering its employees to do their best work, the organization knew it would be crucial to avoid zeroing in on single solutions or tools when mapping out its HR transformation.  

Seeking a system that would empower rather than hinder employees, this client viewed their HR project as an opportunity to redefine the standard for their Employee Experience.  They understood that making the navigation of their Employee Service Portal intuitive, easy, and effective would unlock productivity for their employees and help them to deliver the best care to customers.  

An Expanding Vision Increases Scope

With 40,000+ employees, this organization struggled to keep communication and information open between their vast departments; the sheer size of their organization meant siloes were the norm. The Fortune500 already had ServiceNow deployed in its IT organization but knew the platform could be used across the organization to centralize communications and knowledge articles. Building off the idea that simplifying the user journey was key to supporting its employees, the company had a vision to break down siloes and consolidate into a single version of ServiceNow that would support the entire enterprise.  

The organization had a history with Acorio, first coming together in 2016 to work on a series of small projects. Acorio and the healthcare payer reconnected because the company’s CHRO was curious about how ServiceNow’s HRSD module could be leveraged to improve the employee experience and help transform the organization. What started off with small conversations and demos became an enterprise-wide transformation success story.  

The excitement for the ServiceNow platform that started in HR soon expanded across the rest of the company. The organization’s IT department had been eyeing a ServiceNow upgrade for upwards of two years, but the final push came when they saw HR jump headfirst into its digital transformation. Both departments had distinctly different cultures which made the project all that much more of a smashing success – they successfully integrated both projects and transformed processes, reduced systems, and collaborated to provide a single location for employees to request HR or IT help and search for knowledge articles.  

Simplifying the User Journey Becomes Tantamount to Success

The Fortune500 focused on two questions: What are our employees doing today? and How can they do that within the platform? They realized that there was immense value in transforming not only the tools that their employees use, but the way in which they do their jobs, leading them to evaluate how they did their current work in order to adopt best practices and utilize the platform to reach that goal.  

The Acorio team spent time observing how employees operated day to day – how many windows they needed to open, and how many clicks it took to complete a single action. The Use Cases that came out of those observation sessions – some straightforward and others more complex – became crucial to building a successful ServiceNow solution.  

Ultimately, the company’s vision was to create: 

• A best-in-class employee & HR team experience to further the company’s mission in empowering members to live healthy, active and rewarding lives.  
• A best-in-class HR Technology Estate founded in Workday, ServiceNow and potentially Knowledge repositories. 
• An OOB solution that can be easily maintained and configured (vs. customized) to capture future innovations that ServiceNow releases. 
• A system that achieves continuous improvement through actionable analytics. 

Top of Mind: Maintainability of the Solution

• As close to Out of Box functionality as possible to capture future innovations of the ServiceNow Platform. 
• Complement and integrate with existing technology. 
• Provide an efficient, intuitive and valuable experience for the HR team and all other employees. 

Final Solutions

The healthcare payer avoided drilling down specific goals like reducing call volume by a certain percentage, and instead looked at the organization holistically, asking how they could improve the lives of their employees by making their jobs easier, trusting that providing better self-help options would noticeably reduce call volume. 

A six-week blueprint phase with Acorio identified 13 different workstreams and helped the project team set up HR services, Knowledge articles, OCM plans, and training plans. The organization and the Acorio team realized that they would essentially need to run two concurrent projects to deliver the desired ServiceNow transformation on time to the company’s HR and IT departments.  

As an added challenge, the healthcare organization needed the project finished by the end of the year, leaving little wiggle room for changes or any unexpected hiccups. Acorio and the company went through countless meetings and ran projects in two concurrent work streams in order to deliver successfully within the time constraints – translating to 165 services in seven months. 

This Fortune500 truly took ownership of the project. This wholehearted investment, along with buy-in from high-level decision makers and platform owners alike ensured the project was kept front-of-mind and off the back burner, finishing with multiple new workstreams, 165 services – all delivered on time and on budget. 

Ready for the Future

This project has totally transformed the way this healthcare payer’s employees work – they now enjoy a new unified HR and IT Portal, and an optimized system to log in and self-serve. Having transformed their user experience journey, this organization’s new service portal better serves employees with its easy navigation, empowering them to find solutions quicker. Employees are also able to track the progress of their cases via the portal.  

Agility is now standard in the Fortune500. When COVID-19 hit, their ServiceNow environment gave them the capability to deploy an emergency solution to provide relief for their employees as well as communicate changes brought on by COVID-19 using knowledge articles and campaigns. They easily pivoted to set up a program that allowed tracking metrics related to the pandemic early on. The visibility they now have has set them up for success as they navigate a changing industry subject to global public health threats and complex government regulations. The organization is actively exploring ways the platform can be used to help them with the Return to Work journey they’ll soon face. 

The takeaway? Define your own “North Star” before starting your first (or next) ServiceNow project and ensure the right people are always in the room to make decisions. Securing a strong buy-in and commitment from the right stakeholders early on is crucial, as is a well-defined ServiceNow roadmap with actionable goals.