Australia Post has created a single front door for HR support, underpinned by a platform that’s being enhanced and expanded over a three-year period.

Head of people services Laura Cheail told the ServiceNow World Forum Melbourne 2024 the postal service decided to transform its entire HR operating model about 18 months ago.

“We had a decentralised support model for people and culture, and HR, which was not very efficient and in some parts [was] ineffective with what the business needed,” Cheail said.

Cheail said the postal service also needed to free capacity in its strategic HR teams to support Australia Post’s modernisation agenda.

Additionally, it wanted to run its support centres more cost effectively and to improve the way staff interacted with HR services.

“We spent far too much time with our employees and leaders trying to navigate working with HR, which takes time away from them serving our customers,” Cheail said.

Australia Post set up a new consolidated HR ‘front door’ under the banner of people services, which is supported by a “completely rebuilt” ServiceNow HR Service Delivery or HRSD platform.

“We’ve really focused for the last year on building foundations around service delivery, so getting that support when you have a HR related problem,” Cheail said.

“We’re on probably a three-year journey. We now have that one key front door for HR support, that one brand which is people services, we’ve got our HRSD portal and one phone line [to contact us].”

Channel consolidation was a significant exercise in the first year.

Cheail said that 18 months ago, there were “over 107 email addresses and five phone lines for HR support.” 

“We’ve consolidated 65 of those inboxes and built out services in ServiceNow, and we’ve gone down to one phone line,” she said.

Aside from making interacting with HR much simpler, the channel consolidation also helped the people services organisation “better quantify and understand what [HR services our] business was engaging” with.

Australia Post has also managed to shift 20 percent of query volumes off phone and onto the people services portal underpinned by ServiceNow.

“We’ve [also] seen a 20 percent reduction in pay related queries, 20 percent reduction in leave queries, and looking at time and attendance, over a period of six months, we saw a 45 percent reduction in volumes,” Cheail said.

Cheail noted, however, that the complexity and volume of contacts relating to employee relations had “trended up 20 percent” year-on-year, although Australia Post was able to shift some existing resourcing to cover this.

She said that the second year of transformation work around people services would focus on service and customer experience uplift.

She saw the potential for generative AI capabilities in ServiceNow to help “find capacity so we can improve the customer experience.”

The ability to use AI for case summarisation, for example, promised to reduce time spent “searching through knowledge or managing case notes”.

“We want to add more value to every interaction [with staff] that we have,” Cheail added.

Ry Crozier travelled to ServiceNow World Forum Melbourne 2024 as a guest of ServiceNow.