Bespoke communications drive meaningful messages at Travis Perkins

Sending a Spark

Esparx was developed a few years ago when the builders’ merchant was looking at better ways to communicate about its benefits.

“We were looking at the volume of emails and the communications that go out to people and trying to think how we make our communications a lot less like spam and a lot more meaningful,” says Nelson. “We wanted to explore how we could be a lot more targeted with communications so that people would know that a certain branded communication was always going to be relevant to them.”

Travis Perkins worked in conjunction with its long standing partner HRUX to develop Esparx. The premise of it is simple, says Nelson: you have a database, you add to that database any information that you want to be a factor in your communications and then you send off a Spark – an email – which is based upon the data in that database, and we apply some rules to it.  

How it’s being used

The team at Travis Perkins first began sending Sparks to confirm employees’ expression of wish. Previously the company had used a paper-based system to keep these records, which was fraught with issues such as duplicates, records from staff who had left the business etc. When these records were moved online they went from thousands of paper documents to only a couple of thousand people who had completed the online form.

“We tried a few campaigns to get more people to complete them and we did manage to move the dial by a few hundred each time,” says Nelson.

However, the big change came when they started to send Sparks. The call to action was only sent to those who had not completed their expression of wish form.  

“We had an uptake of about 5,000-6,000 on the first email. A couple of weeks later we sent another one, but because the Spark had been written to look at ‘has this person completed an expression of wish form?’ it obviously didn’t send it anybody who responded to the first one,” says Nelson. “We ran it three or four times and each time it was all automated. It looked at the same equations – do they have life insurance? Have they completed an expression of wish form? What’s the email address? Send it out.

“We now have 20,000+ people who have completed their expression of wish form and that worked over two to three months. The impact was really significant and the amount of life insurance cases we would have had to look at without an expression of wish is drastically reduced.”

Since the launch of Esparx it has predominately been used in the benefits space, particularly where processes are administration heavy. For example, when someone joins the company they receive a benefits pack, this used to be a manual task but now it is an automated process. Esparx runs a report to find out who is a new starter and then automatically sends them the relevant benefits information. The same is applicable to those who change jobs and there is a benefit change.

“We have started using it for pensions as well,” adds Nelson. “We have pre-retirement workshops and information; so the Spark would run to look at who’s in the pension scheme, look at their age and it will send them the relevant information.”

Drawing together the data

Of course, what really drives the success of the tool is the quality of the data.

“At the back-end of Esparx is a HR data lake, where for every employee we’ve got every known record for them. That’s how we can create these Sparks very quickly because we’ve just got a whole host of information, all under GDPR,” explains Walden.

The advantage of the data lake is that they can pull data off of multiple systems as Esparx overlays the other systems they have. Often benefits systems have communication tools built-in, but these can be limited to the database they are built on.

The freedom and flexibility this brings “enables us to think – do we want to do something quickly to get messages out to targeted employees to help drive change, performance or whatever it might be,” adds Walden.

“My key objective is to ensure we can make decisions through use of data – Esparx is a really great example of doing that. You might get a notification on your phone or your car might tell you that you need petrol – I want to do the same thing within analytics so that people don’t have to look at a raft of information,” explains Walden. “What we do is take away the confusion of giving people lots of information and just tell them the things that they need to do through data.”

How is it helping with the Coronavirus pandemic?

Like most businesses, Travis Perkins is still in the process of finalising its strategy going forward, and as such has been using more traditional methods to communicate with employees. However, it does plan to use Esparx for things that require bespoke messaging as a result of the changes brought about by coronavirus.

As Walden explains: “For example, where people are nearing retirement we’re thinking that we could go out to them and say, ‘your pension fund has been affected – so here’s some advice on what we propose you could do or here’s some links to financial advisers, so you can get a bit of help around what your options are’.

“There’s lots of ideas [about how to utilise Esparx], but with the former part of getting everyone furloughed, that’s taking precedence over everything else. Once that’s done we’ve got this bigger reward strategy around COVID-19 and we’ll be ready to deploy around that,” he adds.

Improving the employee experience

The introduction of Esparx has not only led to massive time savings for the HR team, but has “beyond a doubt” improved the employee experience of staff.

“It’s not entirely down to Sparks as we’ve done a number of others things as well, but our level of engagement with our benefits brand over the last three years has grown significantly,” says Nelson.

A good example of this relates to their private medical insurance (PMI) benefit. When someone becomes entitled to PMI they are not automatically enrolled into the scheme because there is a Benefit in Kind charge, which they may not want to incur, and as such, they have to enrol. Occasionally people would say they didn’t realise they needed to enrol and they now want to.

“Now [with Esparx], if they’re eligible for it, they’ve had the pack through a Spark which says this is what you need to do, you have to go online and register. And so now the process is a lot more efficient,” says Nelson.

Although this may seem like a minor thing, the smooth running of benefits all helps with employees’ perception of an organisation and, ultimately, helps to improve the employee experience.

Walden adds: "By sending targeted, actionable messages it removes the 'catch-all' cascade and enables colleagues and managers to focus on activity that they need to do, thus giving them more time back.

"As an example, our targeted open sickness communications, send notifications to managers to close down open sickness records for their colleagues. This ensures managers are following processes; it can result in the colleague being paid correctly (ie they don't fall onto occupational sick pay). This reduces the demand on our managers having to face queries about pay from the colleague, which can be compounded by managers then needing to ring payroll for advice/advances etc. So the NET impact can be very proactive and result in a significant time reduction," he explains.

Engaging communications

By segmenting their communications, targeting specific groups of employees and creating bespoke, useful messages – many of which include a call to action – employees soon understand that engaging with these communications is worthwhile, which in turn helps to improve the employee experience.

“We’re keen to reinforce the message that if you get a Spark it’s worth reading because it’s helpful,” concludes Nelson.

The author is Dawn Lewis, content editor at REBA.