Article: Reliance - Driving business agility through HR Technology

HR Technology

Reliance - Driving business agility through HR Technology

Reliance Group is bringing in organizational agility through Cloud-based technology to reduce customer response time
Reliance - Driving business agility through HR Technology
 

Cloud-based technology helps to cascade the ever-changing real time goals to the customer-facing associates

 

If we view business, customers and HR as concentric circles, then ideally HR should revolve around the business and business should revolve around the customers. The outermost circle that encompasses all the three would be the technology that enables each of them to function in their respective areas. In a number of organizations, technology takes the center stage with an expectation that business and HR align with technology, leaving the customers in the periphery. This happens where IT teams take the lead in implementation of technology rather than business teams and technology starts becoming an impediment rather than an enabler. Reliance Group has always believed in the “Customer First” principle. If organizations have to serve the customers better and be agile, technology needs to be flexible and cater to HR, business and customer needs. That is where Reliance Group is different and uses technology only as an enabler.

Business drivers for establishing agile organization

The financial sector operates in a highly competitive environment. While management theorists are of the opinion that four to six players are needed to create healthy competition, there are more than six players in every sub-sector of BFSI and the situation has been complicated by subdued growth in the market. The primary levers for business growth are market share and share of the wallet. Therefore, listening to customers, recognizingtheir needs and addressing them becomes paramount.

For Reliance Group, the key to creating a customer-focused agile organization is the customer-facing associate. The role of the associate is to be the face of the Reliance Group, have the ability to understand customer needs, act as a source of knowledge about the products along with understanding queries, demands, complaints and issues that customers face and relay the information back to relevant stakeholders.

In order to constantly educate and train customer-facing associates, Reliance Group provides them with updates and information on a real-time basis and aligns all the rewards and recognition programs with changing market and business needs. Hence, Reliance Group uses Mobile and Cloud-based HR technology as a critical enabler to achieve such outcomes.

The Role of HR Technology

As a people (Employees and Customer) centric company, process and technology are only enablers; it is really the people who play a pivotal role, in this case it is the customer-facing associate who represents the promise of the brand. Technology is only enabling all the different levers to support the right behaviors of customer-facing associates:

Managing performance: Performance goals of the customer-facing associates are modified in real time, taking into consideration the changing market conditions and dynamic product innovation. While Cloud-based technology helps in cascading such goals in real time, the company insists that the managers have an in-person dialogue with the associates to ensure buy-in.

Real-time capability building: The customer-facing associate needs to be constantly trained and informed about the new products and their features. This is effectively delivered through a combination of electronic training material, Cloud-based HR technology and tablets/smartphones.

Connecting with manager for feedback and support: In the wake of frequently changing products and goals, it is important that the support and feedback provided by the manager to customer-facing associates is also in real time. The Cloud-based HR technology used by Reliance Group enables the upload of the manager feedback that can be tracked by skip level managers, functional/business unit heads and the HR. This helps in ensuring that the whole organization is aligned to deliver the strategic goals.

Rewards &recognition: As a business organization, Reliance Group has been adept in recognizing and rewarding its employees, especially its customer-facing workforce. At Reliance Group, customer-facing associates enjoy a dynamic incentive program, which is frequently re-aligned to the dynamic market. The administration and timely payout of incentives is made possible because of agile HR technology.  

As told by Prashant Srivastava, President-Group HR People Excellence, Reliance Group

 

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Topics: HR Technology, #HRTechnologyStudy2015, #TechHR2015

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