It is taken for granted when one says that poor employee management skills can lead to disastrous results for a company. It is also taken for granted when a company says its human resource team has the best pro-employee policy. At HCL Comnet, however, we have moved beyond those benchmarks and created a unique employee experience engine - ‘Smart Service Desk.’ The tool is a radical new way of addressing employee issues through a swift, fast, and efficient manner. It also ensured high employee satisfaction levels and an empowered workforce in our company.

This is how it works. Any employee, irrespective of his or her position in the company has access to this automatic ‘Trouble Ticketing Tool’ on their desktops. All they have to do is just open a ticket in the ‘Smart Service Desk’ and send in their transaction/problem requests to any manager/ employee service department like HR, Finance electronically. It could be as small as a program to be loaded onto the computer or as critical as a discomfort with his manager.

What the employees writes is recorded and the service departments are mandated with deadlines to solve the problems or address transaction requests. Through this process employees can open up tickets bypassing the ubiquitous hierarchy making the process transparent. This ensures that the issues are taken care of within a stipulated time. A few months ago we came across one such case. One of our employees raised a ticket to the HR Manager saying that he didn’t find his job interesting and wants to switch. So the HR Manager contacted his Line manager and the recruitment manager to solve his problem. Everything was done in such a transparent manner that at any point of time he could check the status of his ticket. This way it also helped the organization to understand the root cause of the problem.

Employees can also use the ticketing tool to raise tickets on the senior management. For instance, if an employee raises a ticket to the head of the HR, then the HR head will send the feedback about the ticket to the line manager. Now, it is the line manager’s duty to find out the reason behind the ticket and acknowledge to the HR head within the next 72 hours, that's the time commitment the SSD ticket necessitates to reply to the employee. The Smart Service Desk tracker analyses even the CEO's performance regarding his ability to respond to employees queries.

The objectives of such a system is to tell the senior management that it's their job to attend to employee issues fast, keeping in mind the corporate philosophy of ‘Employee First’. The success story of the system is visible, as the number of tickets has gone up since it was launched.

The system was deployed three years ago when HCL Comnet's headcount was 750 people. During that time we got 700 tickets. Today as we are close to touching the 3,000 mark the tickets have also gone up to 1500 tickets. The system works so effectively that it helps the company to manage employee transaction/action tickets without virtually him leaving his seat. The employee is thus empowered and focused more on creating value for the clients.

The larger objective behind launching the Smart Service Desk is to place employees and their needs FIRST. It has been communicated in the organization that what is most important for them is to resolve the employee issues. This helps them to empower their employees with new values not only for the company's growth but also for his individual growth.


J Kalyanaraman Senior VP, Human Capital Management, HCL Comnet.