A New HR Channel?

I was going to buy a Kindle Fire just to meet Amy, the device’s cute pop-up help desk agent, until I found out she was a professional actress employed just for the commercials. Aaawe. Kindle isn’t the only place these virtual Vannas are popping up. Major banks are pilot testing the video teller, a cross between online banking and live tellers, intended for those customers who aren’t yet up for online banking yet willing to do business with a video image. But wait! This can’t be more efficient than online banking. Why don’t banks just wean customers away from live tellers and hold fast to the online channel, which clearly is the most efficient? And what about existing ATMs? These prototypical self-service machines can already handle just about every type of banking transaction short of a mortgage loan closing. What’s going on here? Are we going forward or backward? And, by the way, what does this have to do with HR technology? It has everything to do with HR technology because it has to do with change, in specific changing delivery channels. So what insight can we glean from this newest trend in banking transactions, user support and who knows what else? Most banks currently support three delivery channels – Internet, call center, and branches. The vast majority of services performed by each of these channels also can be performed by the others; they are largely redundant. It goes without saying that managing redundant delivery channels comes at a cost. The rule of thumb is that paying for a new channel requires taking sufficient cost out of the ones that remain. This is the ever-raging battle for shared services organizations. Will the video teller save money or just another redundant channel? The banks are betting they can save money by moving work from the more expensive branch channel to the less expensive (due to centralized scalability) video teller channel. My bet is that it will cost more in the short term, as branch ranks are not shrunk enough to cover the investment. In the longer term, however, video tellers may serve to wean customers off face-to-face transactions to the point where human-centered branches will become a thing of the past. Of course, by that time the vast majority of customers will have adopted online banking. Thus, the video teller’s useful life will have reached its useful conclusion as a temporary bridge to full self-sufficiency. Whether the video teller survives or disappears depends upon whether it can prove useful as a tool for higher-level transactions. Mortgage closings, maybe? Let’s get back to Kindle Amy and HR. The new generation of cloud-based HR system allows managers to be almost entirely self-sufficient in day-to-day HR transactions. But many, if not most, organizations still resist turning over the controls (literally) to managers, claiming they just aren’t ready or cannot be trusted with so much power when it comes to HR data integrity, compliance and compensation decisions. Frankly, I have no reason to think they’re wrong, at least in enough individual cases to have systemic impact. So here’s the question: Would an Amy-like video interface to a virtual HR manager make it work? Is this the next new feature of cloud HRMS platforms? What do you think? [inlinead]

A New HR Channel?

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