Epson Europe's Ethaniel Kelly-Wilson on the value of user experience
The UK benefits technology landscape is undergoing substantial change, with mergers and acquisitions between platform providers, new digital offerings and the growing use of artificial intelligence.
During REBA’s recent webinar, How disruption in the digital platform market is changing benefits delivery with strategic partners Isio, Ethaniel Kelly-Wilson, head of HR operations & HR technology at Epson Europe, detailed the importance of understanding your organisation’s needs when considering new benefits technology.
A poll carried out during the webinar showed that 44% of attendees are exploring new benefits tech options, demonstrating the volume of change within the industry.
Understanding your technology needs
Epson is embedded across 28 countries in Europe and its benefits platform operates as an extension of its core people information system. All employees can access the system from a single portal.
“What we want is a system that people don't just go into once a year at selection time,” said Kelly-Wilson. “We want to constantly drive that traffic to our benefits system and have people engage in our benefits.”
Put simply, he said, “the greater the user experience, the more that your people will use it”.
When selecting a benefits technology provider, he explained that they must consider their employee population in multiple countries. These sites can have as few as three people or several hundred.
“Often the providers that are really in our sweet spot tend to be smaller and are not geared up to deal with a massive workforce,” said Kelly-Wilson.
“In smaller organisations, you might have people that are more HR generalists who are covering multiple roles and don't have that time to spend with employees.”
What is needed, he said, is for the technology to perform most of the function of explaining benefits to employees with great content so that you can focus on negotiating with different providers, doing the broking. As a result, self-service and thus the user experience, is important to them.
Tech security is essential
Tied to the need for a good user experience is data security.
The move towards single sign-on systems not only makes for a better user experience, with fewer people forgetting passwords, but also increases the security of the system.
“We use single sign-on technology so people log in to our Epson platform and they're using their credentials that they would use every day to log into that system, which makes it more secure and puts it within our total security ecosystem,” said Kelly-Wilson.
In future, he hopes that the data these systems hold will become even more important as they will be able to pull from that entire ecosystem, be it benefits information, employee engagement survey findings or reporting.
“It's really important that we get that data security right up front so that we can do that without any security issues,” he said.
A roadmap to the future
Not only do organisations need to understand what’s important to them – such as good user experience – but they also need to understand what they want from their benefits technology in future.
“Understand where your business is going over the next five years and any growth opportunities that you have, and have a strategy in place around how your benefits roadmap and your benefits tech should work with that,” said Kelly-Wilson.
“When speaking to potential providers it’s important to ask how both the benefits strategy and the benefits tech will align over a period of time,” he said.
“You don't want to end up with a system that you think you're going to outgrow in the future.”
