What is the "Employee Interaction Center"?
- The Employee Interaction Center (EIC) is a centralized call center application that is a key part of SAP’s shared services offering. It delivers employee information to your contact center agents and empowers them to capture the details of an interaction.
- SAP supports multiple types of communication channels. Employees can contact the Employee Interaction Center by phone, email, chat or web request.
- SAP strategy is to use the ERP Employee Interaction Center solution for customers that are looking to only implement a Human Capital Management shared services center and don’t want to invest in CRM.
What’s new in Enhancement Package 4 (EHP4)?
Although this is not the complete list of all the new functionality for the Employee Interaction Center with Enhancement Package 4 (EHP4) these are some of my favorites:
- Authorization: With EHP4, it is possible to control access to EIC activities based on the type of case or activity and the location or function of the call center. SAP has delivered a new authorization object that allows restriction based on the EIC category/subcategories, activity status as well as the type of operation being performed (create, modify, read). The ability to use more robust security/authorizations around HR data is one of the key differentiators between the ERP and CRM versions of EIC.
- Flexible Activity Views: In EHP4 there is now the ability to create a flexible activity views in which customers can add new data fields. Outside of the authorization this was one of the most common requests by clients and SAP has addressed it.
- Personal Reminders: There is now the ability for an agent to set up personal reminders which can help remind them of any outstanding tasks or deadlines within a pre-defined time period. It is activity specific and was a common request by several of the early EIC customers.
- Activity Printing: There is now the ability to print an activity in a document that contains all the relevant activity information as well as the ability to format (ie Company Logo). This is one of those that SAP missed in the initial version of the software but better late than never.
- Off-Line Survey: The survey can now be sent via email using Adobe PDF which allows it to be filled out off-line. This is an additional option of the survey being sent out as a URL or hyperlink. There are also several other new features for the survey.
- Email Attachment: In earlier versions the email attachment was a tedious process as they had to be downloaded to an agent’s hard drive and attached to the activity. They can now be automatically transferred to a new activity and displayed via a hyperlink.
- Portal: The first portal content was delivered for EIC via business package HR EIC (SAP ERP) 1.40
- Employee Search: This was a pain point for early customers and with EHP4 they have added the ability to search via user ID and telephone number in addition to the already delivered employee name, personnel number and social security number (US Customers). There are also several other new features of employee search.
Those of us who started working with the Employee Interaction Center from the beginning have seen the product grow with all the major additions in Enhancement Package 1 (EHP1) (Survey, BW Integration, SLA etc), the integration with HCM Process and Forms in Enhancement package 2 (EHP2) and all the above changes and many more in Enhancement Package 4 (EHP4).
Many companies are still in the process of upgrading to ERP 6.0 therefore the adoption of EIC has been slow and there seems to be a lack of awareness regarding all the functionality that the ERP Employee Interaction Center offers. That said the ERP Employee Interaction Center is currently being used by multiple large clients worldwide. Given all the new enhancements and additions over the past few years the product is fully developed and a great fit for SAP HCM customers looking for a shared service solution.
