Reimagining the employee experience through a new self-service portal

While the current economic climate is being keenly felt by many companies, according to Forrester Planning Guides 2023 investment is continuing to flow into technologies that improve customer experience and reduce costs. 

The shift to automation is an essential investment to ensure our workforce can focus on strategic and value-adding work, while we can program machines to do the rest. Full automation — in its strictest terminology, where the machine executes — is not rarely possible at the start. In fact, sometimes we don’t have the right capabilities or enough data to automate with accuracy.

Because of this, we think it’s useful to think beyond automation to a broader spectrum of possibilities that can improve employee experience, while also allowing enabling our operations to scale in a cost-effective way.

(Note: Self-service simply means that customers can complete an action, solve their queries on their own without assistance from a customer support rep.)

Reimagining the employee experience: the opportunity 

Thoughtworks currently has 12,000 employees in 16 countries. Our organization is growing rapidly, and we are exploring ways to scale employee services without linearly increasing operational costs. 

Thoughtworks employees make approximately 900 requests per month to obtain licensed software for their work. The licensing team (known as SLAM: Software Licensing And More) is the team with the highest number of helpdesk tickets. In 2021, they solved more than 10,000 tickets; that's almost 25% of the entire number of tickets raised. The full ticket resolution time is approximately 4 hours, this would take one person three years to respond to all these tickets. The current size of the team is five people full-time, based in Europe and Brazil, who support global requirements. Providing a fast and friendly service to all Thoughtworkers while simultaneously supporting the business’ needs for compliance and cost optimization is one of SLAM’s missions.

The business ask was clear:

• A scalable, sustainable function: smooth operations that enable licensing to scale at pace

• Excellent service: retain or improve the Thoughtworker experience

• Compliance & risks: reduce the risks of errors and make time for compliance activities

• Data-enabled: capture and use data for decision-making to continuously improve

• Reduce spend: identify opportunities to reduce spend and optimize current software investment

• Scale first and raise standards: become an exemplar of how to empower Thoughtworks to scale while retaining a world-class experience

What did we do?

Scaling SLAM was always going to be a challenge. They have more ticket requests than any other team and  provide an ever-growing and changing catalog of software. They have always kept exceptional records. That wealth of data was an opportunity to shape the work to ensure that we could have a big impact with little effort.

In 2021, the licensing team resolved 10,445 tickets. The confidence about proceeding with the automation came from the number of pre-approved licensing requests: approximately 70%. Pre-approved requests are the simplest tickets; they can be resolved with one answer from the operator because they don’t require approval. 

By analyzing the volume of tickets per title, we hypothesized that automating the most requested title would have reduced overall volume by 30%. We knew where to start.

By observing how the licensing team was getting work done, we noticed that they had to jump from one digital product to another in order to confirm the pre-approval of the request, verify no existing license assignment already in place, assign the license in the vendor portal, assign the license in the inventory records and, finally, send the licensing instructions to the requestor. By automating the movement of information from one product to another and pre-populating messages to employees, a task that used to take 5 minutes to be completed could now be done in 1 minute or less.

Results

The project was a huge success:

• 98% employee satisfaction
• 34% faster service to employees (time from request to fulfillment)
• 75% decrease in ops  time  (time spent by the licensing team per ticket)

Looking to the Future

Our internal IT team continues to improve the licensing experience. The next big milestone is to dramatically reduce the number of tickets raised. We are piloting a custom-built self-service platform to allow employees to autonomously request and return software. The self-service platform is capturing data that, in the near future, will enable every employee to access the software they need without having to request it from the licensing team.