Delivering digital innovation with award winning EX technology.

Background to the project

Healthcare provider • UK • 15,000 employees

In 2021, a UK-based not-for-profit healthcare provider entered into discussions with a London-based international business process outsourcing company to implement improvements to its HR systems. The healthcare provider sought to advance its digital innovation strategy and improve the user experience for its workforce in a scalable way. With the help of the outsourcing company, they hoped to be able to expand their digital services for their users.

The business enlisted Applaud to deliver a digitally secure, all-in-one platform, enabling managers to access different HR services quickly and easily and freeing up time for administrative and hospital employees to focus on patient care.

The Applaud team partnered with the process outsourcing company to facilitate the refresh program, breaking it down into multiple phases. This enabled the team and HR to collaborate and deliver an enhanced employee experience (EX) to those utilizing the platform, while simultaneously providing HR with the necessary support.

Want the big picture on Digital Employee Experience?

Download the full version of the 2023 DEX Trends Report, with insights from over 200 HR leaders.

The Problem

Across all UK not-for-profit healthcare providers, leaders are wrestling with a range of pressing issues: workforce shortages, ineffective processes costing efficiency, accumulating care backlogs, and overburdening workloads. To address these challenges, they are working with partners to simplify processes, support managers, and improve the working lives of their front-line workers, all while facing constraints on funding. Digital transformation can go a long way towards helping them manage these problems, by developing scalable systems that can help save large amounts of money and prevent the strain from becoming unmanageable.

Moreover, it can create new opportunities and help to create a more enjoyable working environment. This hospital was determined to take a new approach and be a part of a system that would make their lives easier and run more smoothly.

To ensure that the issues that were being faced from an HR perspective were addressed, the team took stock of their current situation and reviewed the roles and responsibilities of their staff. Through this process, they discovered:

Scheduling meetings with HR through outdated call booking systems resulted in prolonged wait times for queries to be answered, as each team's availability had to be taken into account.
The current offboarding process for past employees carried a heightened risk of human error, leading to confusion over who was aware of the resignation.
There was no system for gathering insights from patients and students on the staff they interacted with.

Want the big picture on Digital Employee Experience?

Download the full version of the 2023 DEX Trends Report, with insights from over 200 HR leaders.

The Solution

Applaud is built on the belief that employees should have the same exceptional technology experiences inside the world of work, as they do outside the world of work, as consumers. That's why, when a process outsourcing company was looking for a platform to upgrade the digital HR systems of this hospital, it only made sense to choose Applaud to support them. Not only was Applaud able to provide a new level of personalization for front and back-end staff, but the hospital also gained access to new functionality that its software offers. After a full year using Applaud, the hospital was able to:

Book in time with HR when it suited them

Employee's and front-line staff were able to easily access HR and payroll services through a new call-back booking service. This platform allowed employees to view their queries, their status, and any other updates from HR.

In addition, the knowledge library and chatbot functionality enabled staff to receive the help they needed without speaking with HR, consequently saving time for both parties. Over the last year, the hospital has uploaded 203 knowledge articles and 68 FAQs to the platform for employees to access.

Offer one place for all employee and manager needs

The hospital has accomplished its goal of creating one central platform for employees to access their HR and payroll systems with Applaud. Not only that, the platform also serves as a portal for employees to easily access other critical systems. This has enabled employees to focus more on their core roles, instead of spending time and effort on administrative tasks.

Provide smoother offboarding for past employees

The Applaud platform now simplifies the offboarding process for everyone involved. Employees and their managers can submit leavers forms directly through the platform, which will then generate tasks and notifications for completing the offboarding process. Oracle Service Cloud is also integrated, creating incidents with structured data for automated processing. This way, all relevant departments such as payroll are alerted of the leaver on the same day the resignation is submitted. This eliminates the risk of human error, as well as saves managers the time it takes to contact all team leaders.

The Results

The results for users have been incredible, and take-up has been outstanding. As a result, the platform has now been rolled out to 15,000 employees, up from its initial pilot of 1,200.

Initially, this product was handled by the London-based outsourcing company, allowing the hospital to try and see if it fit their needs. Now, the relationship has been so successful the hospital has taken over complete control of the platform. This project has already been a huge success with Applaud reducing unnecessary offboarding spend by 33% and as the use of the platform continues to expand, more benefits are on the way. The hospital plan on digitizing critical paper-based forms, potentially saving their employees over 500 hours of wasted time a year and HR over 400 hours a year in processing these forms.