Lenovo handles 13,000 HR cases a month and fixes 96% at first contact

Lenovo built globally consistent HR service centers across four geographic regions in 2014, alongside a global HR system integration. The case management system in place at that time did not support the operating model the new centers needed.

Sheryl Li, Global HR Services Director, oversees those centers and a team of 60 HR services support staff. Five problems drove the decision to move:

• No usable SLA function. Inquiries vary in complexity and urgency. Without SLA levels there was no way to hold different resolution timeframes for different kinds of case, or to monitor whether agents were meeting them.
• No management reporting. Managers needed to review report matrices monthly, track cases daily and analyze case complexity to measure agent productivity. The previous system did not give them the data to make those decisions.
• No child cases. If an inquiry could not be resolved at tier 1 and needed to go to tier 2, the team had to raise an entirely new case. Continuity was lost and the work was duplicated.
• Employee case history was hard to reach. The volume of historical case data was beyond what the system handled well, and getting to it was slow.
• Daily operational productivity. Routine tasks took longer than they should. As one example, the previous system could not forward attachments on email.

Lenovo had merged with Motorola Mobility, and the Motorola team were already running Dovetail HR Case Management. They demonstrated their own configuration to the Lenovo team and gave direct feedback on the software.

Lenovo compared Dovetail's functionality and price against other case management providers. Child case functionality and SLA capability decided it. Dovetail went live in 2015.

Tier 0, employee self service. Lenovo runs an internally developed knowledge base built on SharePoint alongside an AI chatbot named Robbie. If an employee cannot find an answer there, they raise an inquiry by email, Microsoft Teams or telephone.

Tier 1, HR services support. Sixty support staff, made up of four service center managers with their teams of specialists and coordinators, work in Dovetail across the four centers. They handle an average of 13,000 employee cases every month. Their first contact fix target is 92%. They currently run at 96%.

Tier 2, second level support. The remaining 4%, around 520 cases a month, go to roughly 50 people across centers of excellence, payroll, HRIS and other HR functions. Almost all are resolved here.

Tier 3, third level support. Centers of excellence and HR business partners receive fewer than 10 cases a month.

Cases created by email are routed automatically to the correct service center based on the employee's location, so team leads can assign, track status and follow up against SLA without manual triage.

Four SLA priority levels are configured in Dovetail. Not every inquiry can be resolved inside the two day priority 1 window, so the team needed a way to manage longer running cases without an automatic breach and without leaving the employee waiting without recourse. Team leads monitor SLA adherence across tier 1 and tier 2 and intervene on cases approaching violation.

Reporting runs on a monthly cycle for the management team and a daily cycle for service center team leads. Reports are scheduled automatically rather than run by hand, and simple case queries are self service. CSAT is tracked as a service quality measure, with team leads following up directly where a score comes in below target.

Case complexity is tracked using a label, because case volume alone is a poor measure of agent productivity when some cases take many times longer to close than others.

Historical case data going back several years remains accessible to the team, so agents can check what an employee was previously told before answering.