Northside handles 300 HR cases a day, and clears 500 a day through open enrollment without a backlog

Northside's HR services team came to Dovetail through WTW, whose Embark employee experience platform they already used and which integrates with Dovetail case management. The problems they brought were concrete.

Duplicate cases. When a case was closed and then reopened, the old system created a new case with a new number. Referring back to the original was awkward and case history fragmented across numbers.

A team at maximum capacity. Case volume meant constant pressure with no mechanism to park, reassign or queue work.

No way to separate urgent from routine. Specialists had no way to mark which cases needed attention first.

Employees could not manage their own cases. A better employee experience was a stated requirement, not a nice to have.

Reporting locked to the administrator. Only the HR administrator could run reports, so everyone else worked without data.

One case at a time. Specialists needed to look at several employee records or cases at once to work efficiently, and could not.

• Cases can be merged, and reopened as many times as needed, with everything held against one record rather than a chain of numbers.
• Cases can be placed on hold, assigned to someone else or moved into a queue, so specialists control their own workload.
• Labels categorize cases by urgency.
• Employees create, view, note and attach to their own cases through the Embark interface, with existing case history migrated across.
• Reporting can be switched on for specific groups, so non administrators run their own.
• A preview pane lets specialists scan multiple cases without opening each one, and independent case URLs let them work several in separate tabs.
• Specialists customize their own screen layout and sort case lists by any of 26 columns, including case type, SLA remaining and last modified date.

Tier 0. Employees start in WTW's Embark platform, where they find information, view their cases, add notes, upload files and create new cases through the Dovetail integration built into it.

Tier 1. New cases arrive in Dovetail and are handled by HR shared service specialists reporting to the HR operations manager. Workflow routes cases automatically to the right team based on events or conditions.

Tier 2. Subject matter experts in benefits, compensation and payroll take what tier 1 cannot resolve.

Tier 3. Senior and benefits leaders handle cases needing higher level intervention, for example where several people hit the same issue and it needs establishing whether there is a vendor or file problem behind it.

Workflow automation carries most of the load. Cases involving doctors, executives, managers and directors flag automatically. Cases move into a resolved waiting for close queue with rules that stop them being missed. If an employee comes back with a question on a resolved case, that case returns to the service center queue by itself. Building a rule means picking a triggering event, the conditions to be met and the actions to take.

Through open enrollment the team took 400 to 500 cases a day and cleared them, eliminating the backlog of open cases that had built up in previous years.

Reporting is now run by the people who need it. The HR operations manager runs weekly metrics on service center volume and can pull reports on specific keywords or phrases.

The capacity released is being put back into service. The team is developing a model offering employees one to one appointments, in fifteen minute slots for a few hours a week.