Creating a Unified Shared Services Experience

To provide more value to customers and increase the competitiveness of the organizations, managers are looking to explore beyond the traditional business models such as – centralized, decentralized, outsourced and insourced models, and recent prominence to shared services model. Bergeron defines shared services as: "Shared-services is a collaborative strategy in which a subset of existing business functions are concentrated into a new, semi-autonomous business unit that has a management structure designed to promote efficiency, value generation, cost savings and imposed service for the internal customers of the parent corporation, like a business competing in the open market." Portfolio of shared services centres (SSCs) in organizations is increasing because functions are willing to share more complex and knowledge-oriented services such as R&D, product planning, data analytics, investment, transportation management, etc. The different types of SSCs that can exist in an organization are: Administration (Inventory, Mailroom, Printing, Records management, Supply Training); Customer Service (Computer customer support, Field service, Telephone customer support); Finance (General accounting, Payroll processing, Purchasing Taxes, Transaction processing); Human Resources (Recruiting, Staffing Training, Workers’ compensation, Relocation); Sales and Marketing (Advertising, Direct mail, Field sales, Telemarketing) etc. The basic premise for shared services seems to be that services provided by one local department can be provided to others with a better efficiency. But, as organizations are becoming more and more global the need for sharing services are also increasing, making shared service units more complex. An efficient and streamlined business unit is a necessary but insufficient condition for a successful shared services implementation. While individual SSCs offer great advantages to the parent organization in terms of cost reduction, greater efficiency and economies of scale, the service delivery design must attempt to create an experience-centric service that can integrate the individual, differentiated and specialized SSCs on to a single platform. Experience-centric service organizations deliver services in which the customer experience is at the core of the service offering. A key characteristic of experience-centric services is that they are designed to engage customers, that is, to enable the customer to connect with the service. As the number of points where the customer can connect with the service increases, the number of experiences also increases. Designing experience-centric services thus involve the management of a chain of service encounters that surround the service delivery experience. The ability of organizations to create great customer experiences during service delivery has been realized to create customer satisfaction and loyalty. While extant literature has focused on external customers of organizations research on experiences of the internal customers of the organizations has remained scant. Customer orientation literature has focused predominantly on the importance of external customers and pays little attention explicitly to the role of internal customers or employees of a firm who work within the boundaries of the organization. In the current study, we focus on the design of an experience-centric service platform for the internal customers of an organization. While current research on organization design has focused on creating shared services, hardly any evidence is available regarding the ability of organizations to link these services on a single platform to enable better employee experiences. Therefore, extant literature is reviewed to understand the elements of experience centric services and propositions are developed and tested. These propositions are tested on internal customers of an organization who are the final beneficiaries of the internal services of the organization. These employees are the final users of the service platform that integrates the services offered by each SSC and provides a holistic Service Experience.