Recently, NetEase Qiyu held an online live broadcast themed “How Should Enterprises Build HRSSC in the Digital Wave?”Mr. Wang Zhenchen, the person in charge of NetEase HRSSCwas invited to the NetEase Qiyu live broadcast room to share the development history of NetEase SSC and the transformation journey of SOC, hoping to provide some reference and inspiration for everyone.

The Evolution Journey of NetEase SOC: Achieving Excellence in SSC Operations

The following content is organized and refined based on the speech transcript, welcome to read~

Hello everyone, I am glad to have the opportunity to communicate with you today. I will mainly introduce the situation of NetEase SSC in three aspects: first, the concept and development history of NetEase SSC; second, an overview of the application of the NetEase SSC intelligent service platform; and finally, the transformation of NetEase SOC.

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The Construction Journey of NetEase SSC

NetEase’s mission and vision is to gather the power of people and create a better life through technological innovation. Our values are threefold: fully invested in what we love, being with users, and innovation from 0 to 1, as well as continuous improvement from 1 to 1.1.

What does “being with users” represent? It represents user orientation, which is the most common or basic concept of SSC. What does “innovation from 0 to 1, and from 1 to 1.1” represent? It represents continuous improvement of processes.In fact, NetEase’s SSC has gradually grown based on the values that complement NetEase.

The entire NetEase HR team currently adopts a relatively classic three-pillar structure. Our goal is to become the most trusted entrepreneurial partner for the business. Our COE will focus on policy design, SSC will focus on service delivery operations, and BP will focus on areas related to organization and talent.

Around 2015, the entire group began to build the three-pillar model of HR. On this basis, we established the SSC team in Hangzhou, and after about two years, completed the establishment of the SSC teams in Beijing, Guangzhou, and Shanghai, achieving coverage of shared services across all BU of the group.Between 2017 and 2019, we focused on process sorting, internal information construction, and building the operational system, ultimately achieving nationwide unified operations. Starting in 2020, we gradually began to expand and support some overseas SSCs, while also continuously exploring the expansion of SSC service product scope. In 2022, we officially began the transformation of SOC, that is, the transformation of the Shared Operations Center.

Our goal is to achieve “ONE SSC, SIMPLE SSC, SMART SSC“, focusing on standardizing process products and normalizing service delivery, while also utilizing process optimization and technology to improve efficiency, ultimately achieving interactive connections, insights into changes, and enhancing experiences.

NetEase HRSSC currently covers more than 30,000 formal employees across the group and also covers over 500 HR personnel. The service scope mainly includes four parts: personnel services, payroll calculation, data systems, and welfare care. The organizational structure also adopts a relatively traditional front, middle, and back office structure for SSC: the front office focuses on service delivery, the middle office focuses on service management, and the back office focuses on design and operations.

There are four core concepts: ① Self-optimization, continuous improvement ② Enhancing user experience ③ Good refined management ④ Driven by technology.

Driven by technology can be divided into several aspects, such as data empowerment, process efficiency improvement, and intelligent consulting platform. Next, we will focus on the application of the intelligent consulting platform, using NetEase Qiyu’s digital service platform as a starting point to introduce the progress in system aspects.

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NetEase SSC x NetEase Qiyu

Intelligent Empowerment, Creating a High-Quality Employee Consulting Experience

Integrated Platform Construction of HR Shared Service Center

First of all, the intelligent customer service platform is not only used in HRSSC, our vision is to use it to create the same platform across different regions to unify all employee experience service entrances. Therefore, in fact, the real users of this platform, in addition to our HR team, also include IT, finance, and other departments such as procurement. As long as it is an internal employee-facing department, it can use this platform as a unified entrance to connect all teams internally.So what it carries behind is actually standards, knowledge base, scientific cultural management, and connects all our systems to achieve a large shared service center.

Specifically for HRSSC, our customer service and ticket platform is basically built using Qiyu. You may have heard that SSC has an industry jargon called “line-net platform integration” or “line-net platform unification”, which actually means that we have a service desk, hotline, and so-called service network or online system. So how do we organically combine them to achieve the unification of the entire SSC service?

Currently, we are using the Qiyu platform to help us complete internal ticket circulation, service collection, service assessment, and some functions related to sharing and self-service.We want to turn the SSC service from the original black box into a white box with the help of Qiyu, so that the operation process and data can be clearly settled, helping the business to continuously optimize.

Every SSC will have an inquiry center, or HR help. In fact, our HR help went live in 2017. As of now, it has achieved one-stop inquiry functions for all employees regarding HR policies, service inquiries, process inquiries, etc., gathering all employee experience entrances and employee consultation entrances.

To C & To B

Our overall HR help service process is actually divided into to C and to B lines.

For C, it is more for employees. Employees can find us through various channels, first through the Qiyu robot process to automatically reply and match some inquiries. When the inquiry is not matched, we will transfer to local customer service; if the inquiry is about local issues, such as local residence permits or household registration policies, the conversation will be transferred to local partners; if it requires some time to follow up, such as payroll appeals, we will create a ticket for follow-up; if it can be solved immediately, we will respond immediately and invite everyone to evaluate their satisfaction, and finally close the loop.

To B is aimed at BP and COE users, who may also have some HR process or policy inquiries or encounter issues that require SSC support, such as needing us to provide solutions. We hope to connect and implement this through ticketing.

Not just keyword matching, but solving problems

There are actually some differences from traditional CC; for example, traditional CC is about knowledge base keyword matching, or what we call metadata matching, which is a relatively standardized answer. However, we also pursue personalized responses, meaning for different users, we hope to analyze their past inquiries and behaviors, or recent high-frequency terms, to push personalized questions and guidance, including providing better experiences through personalized greetings.

Additionally, we spent a long time discussing the “one-touch access” feature, which can be understood as a task-oriented multi-turn dialogue robot. In fact, various SSCs are solving problems by matching knowledge bases, where employees ask a question, and the robot answers a question,but in reality, employees come to you or your help desk to solve problems.

So we thought, when an employee asks for annual leave, we can not only tell them the annual leave policy but also assist them in applying for the leave? Finally, through the internal system connection,when an employee asks for annual leave, I can directly tell them how many days of annual leave they can take and can submit their leave request directly on our Qiyu platform, and can directly connect with our system to create an approval ticket, allowing the entire business process to run smoothly.

Of course, we want to continue to advance, for example, can we make Qiyu a tool like Siri, allowing direct conversation, saying “I want to take annual leave, I want to take three days off from this date to that date”, using this method to complete all inquiries, rather than just a so-called inquiry process.

Secondly, by leveraging the Qiyu ticket and customer service platform, we have built an integrated online service workstation for HR, which can help us listen to various employee questions and record various communication processes to help us build a knowledge base and case accumulation. At the same time, we have also been monitoring and quality checking services to help us close the loop on customer service P-D-C-A cycles.

In 2021, the overall user satisfaction of the NetEase SSC consulting platform reached 99%, with robots independently answering 82% of employee inquiries, and the platform coverage for all consulting users reached 69%. As you can see, the volume of robot conversations, human conversations, and hotline conversations (1818 is our hotline) has solved the vast majority of problems through self-service, which is also the direction we have always pursued.

Let the data “speak”

We have always wanted to understand what employees care about more or what employees want more. With the help of Qiyu, we have achieved a rich data dashboard function, allowing us to regularly check the top 3 issues that employees focus on each month. Based on these issues, the SSC platform can operate targeted solutions, such as article push or offline Q&A activities to address employee pain points. Some BPs even propose to focus on issues that BU employees are more interested in, which is also something we have been striving to achieve through data accumulation.

Therefore, regarding “how to achieve excellent data on the platform through Qiyu”, I think the key lies in the reconstruction of the knowledge base, quality inspection of human customer service, and insights into employee needs through backend data.

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The Transformation Journey of NetEase SOC

Development = Return to Essence

Sometimes development equals returning to essence. As we all know, with the slowdown of China’s macroeconomic growth and the quiet arrival of the second half of the internet, reducing excess and fine-tuning operations have gradually become the hottest vocabulary in internet society. Against this backdrop, the previous main work of domestic SSCs was to support the rapid growth of the business and liberate the productivity of the business and HR teams. However, it is now gradually leaning towards the concept of efficiency management that foreign companies have emphasized, with more and more SSCs starting to focus on cost, quality, and efficiency. This is actually a common rule; what do foreign companies start with when doing SSC? Generally, they start with Global Payroll. So what do domestic companies start with when doing SCC? It starts with regional lifecycle.

This reflects two types of enterprises, fundamentally differing in their understanding of SSC or problem-solving. However, we now find that it is not a difference in enterprise types, but a difference in the stages of enterprise development. The current internet has become what foreign companies were ten years ago, and it is beginning to engage in information-based operations, so the concept of excellent operations has become a super popular concept in SSCs.

Excellence originates from lean, which is a classic IE theory. Essentially, foreign companies used to have dedicated lean departments responsible for SSCs. Therefore, in my view, excellent operations are often more of a process of returning to essence rather than a trend of SSC development.

What is the core of IE? It is to reduce costs, quality, and labor productivity, pursuing the best efficiency of the production system. SSC generally has four users: employees, HR, business, and the company.

Initially, IE mainly focused on its significance to the company (which is to reduce costs, improve quality, and efficiency), while the other three may have received more attention after its establishment. The tools or methods we have been using in SSC, such as reducing regional HR ratios, reducing redundant system investments, unifying quality levels and experience standards, and improving information technology levels, are all essentially aimed at reducing costs and improving quality efficiency. Therefore, you will find that the underlying logic of SSC, or the scientific process, is consistent; the concept of excellent operations, rather than being newly introduced into SSC, is actually part of what SSC considered from the beginning, which is also our understanding.

What exactly is NetEase’s HRSOC doing or why are we doing this? We will conduct our work in what way? What is the concept of lean operations?

First, we believe that lean philosophy, data-driven insights, and user insights constitute our concept of excellent operations. Secondly, based on this concept, we will design our operational system and operational model, ultimately achieving support for HR’s efficient operation and continuously refined goals, leading to the transformation of the entire HRSOC.

NetEase SOC Operational Philosophy

Lean Philosophy

As mentioned, lean originated from the Toyota production system, and its classic example is TPS. What are the characteristics of this production method? It is based on two pillars above the foundation: JIT (just in time) and automation (automation is the pursuit of problems automatically surfacing), which is essentially a concept of optimal quality, cost, and delivery time.

I have included a commonly used diagram for SSC, where you will find our standard operations corresponding to our SOP; leveling corresponds to SOP and quality inspection, reducing quality fluctuations; improvement corresponds to CIP; JIT corresponds to our Tier placement; Tier 0123 corresponds to our line network integration, our service ratio, and our continuous exploration of ROI for outsourcing/self-operated. Automation corresponds to our process systematization, ticket-driven, data governance, and operational metric systems. Therefore, rather than saying that lean philosophy has been introduced into SSC in the past two years, it is more accurate to say that the SSC tools themselves have been built on lean philosophy. What we can truly learn are the methodologies of lean.

Data-Driven

All SSCs face a painful point: “If I do well, it’s expected; if I make a small mistake, it’s unforgivable”, leading to various complaints. Why does this happen? I feel it is because the original SSC was too single-pointed.

As an operational department, what we should pursue is the drive of operational metrics. At NetEase, we divide the entire SSC operational metrics into four major modules: cost, quality, efficiency, and experience. Based on these four modules, we have various subdivided metrics, and based on these metrics, we continuously monitor, such as monitoring unit costs; SLA for assessment; satisfaction for flow trend monitoring. Ultimately, we hope to reach a fixed evaluation: this year, the SSC services have reduced costs, improved quality, increased efficiency, and enhanced experiences, rather than getting bogged down in traditional metrics that focus on how many quality accidents were discovered and what issues they caused.This reflects a change in our philosophy, hoping to apply operational metrics to evaluate SSC.

Changes in Operational Philosophy

It involves understanding the needs of multiple users and constructing some anticipatory services. The users mentioned earlier are not just employees, but also many managers and HR. Constructive services are actually a requirement from our boss, who once gave us an example, saying that one of his best experiences at NetEase was when he arrived at the dormitory on the first day of employment and found that the administration had already turned on the air conditioning.This is a constructive service, anticipating the unspoken needs of users. Therefore, we also have dedicated user research partners who identify user pain points, recognize user itch points, and create user delight points to construct some anticipatory services. This is also a change in our operational philosophy.

After discussing the philosophy, we need to implement it into a specific operational system.

The operational system is roughly divided into several parts: what is visible above the iceberg are user-perceived products, services, and solutions; below the iceberg are our three-layer operational systems: process operation, service operation, and user operation. The process operation side serves as our foundation, the service operation side is our core strength, and the user operation side is our outward-facing hands and face, forming a relationship.

Process Operation

On the process side, the first thing we do is to “close the loop of business-process-system, promoting service productization.” As we know, SSCs often abstract the business status from various business forms into a unified process, solidify the process into the system, and use the data left by the system to operate the business. This is essentially our first task, called “promoting the flywheel of shared service productization”, because being able to make all BU processes operate more efficiently is a continuous task for our process operation.Once the business process system loop is established, the data left can find new opportunities and improvement points in the business, and this loop can continue to run.

The operational processes of SSC also require continuous optimization and operation. As mentioned earlier, SSC has lines, networks, and platforms; is it enough to just create one entrance, or should we connect the line, network, and platform together to create a mechanism that allows employees to solve all problems within all connected entrances? This is also a direction we will continue to explore in the internal organizational operation processes of SSC, which is also a focus of our process operation.

Service Operation

Service operation is the most basic model; I believe that those doing SSC should know thatfirst there is SOP, then SLA, then quality inspection, and then continuous improvement. This is the most classic cycle in terms of quality, so we will definitely adhere to this improvement process to ensure the enhancement of our service quality. Secondly, as we just mentioned, data-driven operations will analyze operational metrics through various dashboards and data to promote continuous improvement. This is also one of our important tasks in service operation.

User Operation

In terms of user operation, we have borrowed from a commercial brand operation model, which is commonly heard asattract-convert-process chain. On the attracting end, it is about establishing a service brand, letting employees know what SSC does and what issues can be addressed by SSC. We will do a lot of VI exposure, such as logos, slogans, and surrounding materials. We will also engage in extensive content operations and event operations.

In the conversion stage, when employees start to use it, we will design more touchpoints with employees through the employee journey and increase engagement through lifecycle care, allowing employees to perceive the existence of SSC. We will also help design scene-based experiences so that when employees use the service, they can become key users or brand users of SSC. Finally, retention will be divided into several parts, one of which is to provide timely feedback after all business processes are completed.

While operating, we will also conduct user research, replacing our original service with users as the main operational object. In the To C end, we hope to conduct in-depth engagement and experience tracking during various stages of employee onboarding, employment, and offboarding. In the To B end, we hope to design different service products and solutions targeting different roles such as BP, COE, and LM to address different user needs.

Our current operational model is quite different from the traditional SSC operational model. If you were to hire a consulting firm to help you build SSC, it would typically involve: process design, quality assurance, and experience design. This is because we are operating under a traditional 0-1 SSC system, where personnel are delivered individually by branch offices, abstracting business to processes, solidifying processes into systems, and once SSC is established, we then work on SOP-SLA-quality inspection, satisfaction tracking, experience design, continuous improvement, and finally move towards shared services.

In fact, our current approach is more parallel. The three operations of process, service, and user are like a gear relationship, mutually driving and promoting improvement. To some extent, this is also because we are not building from 0-1, but from 1-1.1, making this a relatively atypical path of operational system construction.

Welcome to join our HR intelligent exchange group,

More materials and activities await unlocking~~~

Kuaishou HRSSC Practice: How to Be a Connector in the Shared Services Industry | Live Notes

2022-06-10

The Evolution Journey of NetEase SOC: Achieving Excellence in SSC Operations

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The Construction Journey of NetEase SSC

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