Streamlining the HR process

Challenge

Mercury Systems is a leading commercial provider of secure sensor and safety-critical processing subsystems that power a wide variety of critical defense and intelligence programs. Supporting employees is a hallmark of the company as evidenced by the appointment of its CEO, Mark Aslett, to the Glassdoor 25 Highest Rated CEOs During the COVID-19 Crisis in the US. Yet, with 2,000 employees and growing quickly, their HR department was overloaded with a wide variety of support questions, especially during open enrollment. The team was stymied from struggling to answer these questions — preventing the team from focusing on larger initiatives in the company.

“We were in the process of rethinking what a business partner could do for us to help free up our team’s capacity to allow us to take on more complex tasks related to our rapid business growth and recent acquisitions,” said Tim Aleck, Vice President, Head of Talent at Mercury Systems. “Our company had grown to a size where we could justify the investment in a technology platform that could grow with us. We have a population that is fairly sophisticated in using technology so we knew there would be an inherent comfort level in using it.”

Following research on other competitors and speaking with other HR professionals for advice, Mercury Systems selected the Genesys DX Helpdesk solution.

Solution

To improve the employee experience, Mercury Systems implemented the Genesys DX Helpdesk solution to add an AI-based virtual assistant to the HR team. With intelligent self-service capabilities, Genesys DX Helpdesk gives employees immediate answers to their questions, thereby reducing the number of routine inquiries that are diverted to HR.

“We didn’t have a chatbot feature prior. When there was an HR question, employees could email us through an Outlook address, walk over to our department or call us. The issue was this left us with no way to properly track or manage cases. We had a lot of random one-off queries that answered the same question over and over,” said Aleck.

With the Genesys DX Helpdesk solution, Mercury Systems built a knowledge base that consolidated all of the HR data from an outdated site and other documents into one, allowing the HR team to easily keep it current and relevant. The team built out its HR model around centers of excellence (COE) for talent, recruitment, benefits, and learning and development; and pointed employees to its bot, MAE (Mercury Assistant for Everyone). Basic information resides in these areas where employees can get the answers they need, and if the bot cannot answer a question, it is elevated to the HR operations team or up to the COE lead.

“We went live with MAE in October and timed it with open enrollment. The Geofluent tool is now particularly helpful for our international team as we expand MAE’s footprint – providing rapid translation. Our hub is in Switzerland so this ability allowed us to easily incorporate natural language processing so MAE can engage conversationally with our employees in Spanish, Vietnamese and just about any other language. It has increased our team’s efficiency as we no longer need to rely on supervisors to translate,” said Aleck.

Results

Since Mercury Systems launched MAE, the bot has handled a large amount of volume with high accuracy rates. “The October open reenrollment period was fairly quiet. Typically, there is a lot of noise. It took a bit of getting used to, but it was definitely well received,” said Aleck.

The Genesys DX Helpdesk implementation with the HR Service Center helped position the team as a leading force within the company and allows them to tackle more strategic and additional operational improvement opportunities. It has also permitted the team to bring in new talent for HR where these entry-level roles oversee the bot before moving onto other roles.

Since the launch of MAE, Mercury has seen the following results:

• During open enrollment, MAE handled 1,890 queries within 14 days from 2,000 employees that would have normally been routed to the HR team members.

• Since the launch of MAE in November 2019, the information accuracy rate has been at 92.6% with MAE answering 20,960 questions out of the 22,511 asked.

• Overall, the Geofluent translation option was utilized in 2.74% of all questions asked to MAE.

• An ability to keep costs down as the headcount in HR doesn’t need to grow as quickly

• Increase in productivity as employees get the right answers to their questions quickly