ADP has enhanced its platform to automate HR services to reduce HR staff time answering questions employees may have about benefits, pay, vacation and other related issues in work.
It uses AI technologies, including machine learning, to predict what employees might need and then send them a “proactive nudge” or notification that can pop up on their smartphone to make it easier action.
For example, if an employee welcomes a new child into the family, the platform can advise the employee to review their tax withholdings. This nudge or “action card” helps guide the employee through the steps needed to complete the process.
The upgrade, widely called ADP’s Intelligent Self-Service, has demonstrated the ability to “immediately address approximately 16% of a [HR] number of practitioners, and we fully expect that to grow in the coming months,” said Joe Kleinwaechter, vice president of UX at ADP.
The goal is to ensure that HR service requests are for “more difficult and meaningful tasks [HR] to resolve,” Kleinwaechter said.
HR service enhancements, which use AI technologies such as machine learning, are rolled out to customers. These include improvements to ADP’s chat system as well as streamlining the processes employees use to address HR service requests.
ADP, which posted $16.5 billion in revenue for its 2022 fiscal year that ended June 30, a 10% gain over 2021, is competing with other prominent HR vendors to automate as much as possible.
“This kind of thing definitely works,” Josh Bersin, an industry analyst, said of HR service automation. “When an employee submits a ticket, for example, and asks for a time card or vacation balance, the AI reads the request and automatically fulfills it.”
The AI is trained by service center reps “who look at incoming requests and categorize them,” Bersin said. “It’s a very powerful solution, and this kind of tech is also available in ServiceNow, Workday and Oracle.”
The Hackett Group, a management consulting firm, said in April that it expected HR budgets and headcount to decline this year but workloads to increase. HR departments have increased spending on technology in response, it said.
However, although HR self-service can lead to significant time savings, “it only works when there is strong adoption,” said Trevor White, an analyst at Nucleus Research.
HR service automation can face obstacles for employees who don’t have a computer at work and have little experience using the software, White said. The lack of adoption of HR self-service tools “is the biggest problem we see.”
Patrick Thibodeau covers HCM and ERP technologies for TechTarget. He has worked for more than two decades as an enterprise IT reporter.