Equinix use ServiceNow HR Service Delivery to free up 10,000 hours for HR and the business

Ollie and I attended Knowledge 2025 in Vegas, ServiceNow’s conference of the year and a showcase of their best deployments and customer transformations. Of all the talks I attended, Equinix told possibly the clearest and most useful story of their deployment of HR Service Delivery (HRSD). Here’s why I liked it…

EQUINIX KEY FACTS

• 14,500 people

• Delivering infrastructure and internet connectivity that all of us will use on a regular basis

• 6 month HRSD deployment covering 20 services in 9 languages

THEY STARTED BY LISTENING TO THEIR EMPLOYEES       

They asked a large and cross-representative group of colleagues about the current HR Intranet page and how they experienced accessing the HR service. Three key points of feedback were:

1. The Banner was stale, didn’t change often, yet took up a third of the home page

2. ‘Raise a Ticket’ was written sideways on a little panel that no one could find

3. Chat Button – people didn’t realise this connected them to a live person who was monitoring messages and ready to respond

SETTING THE FOUNDATIONS

Equinix established 4 foundational pillars on which to build their new HR service and ServiceNow solution. These are very much aligned to Veran’s Service-led Mindset (download our free paper) that we’ve been teaching clients as a discipline and way of working that unlocks significant value from the HR function.  

When discussing clear measures of success, speaker Nicholas Karoutsos (Director of HR Tech & Experiences Product Management) asked the audience if they had clear KPIs and SLAs for HR services. I looked at the 100 people in the room and didn’t see any hands go up. Next, he asked if anyone had a strong method for defining metrics and KPIs for HR to which everyone looked around hopefully. (Veran has a proven blueprint for HR Service Delivery including an optimal operating model, end to end processes and KPIs so ask me about that!). 

TRANSFORMING THE EXPERIENCE

Below are the key changes Equinix made which are leading practice in our view and again, very aligned to our Service-led pillars.

• Homepage – actioning the feedback from their employees, they removed the banner from the homepage and replaced it with a Google-like search bar as the main feature because this is what employees said they used most.

• Feedback – after case resolution, employees could give a 1-5 star feedback rating with one click to aid continuous improvement

• Catch and Hold – this is a discipline and mindset that means the colleague given the case to resolve owns it from start to finish and is responsible for solving the case and delivering value to the customer (employee)

• Quality Assurance – they have a team that reviews cases periodically to ensure they are being resolved in the most effective and efficient way

• GPT Implementation – has further accelerated the resolution of cases

• ServiceNow Agent Workspace – this new functionality helps Equinix agents to prioritise cases and see their KPIs compared to their peers, as individuals and as teams. This helps them benchmark their performance and see where improvements can be made.

• Service Catalog – Equinix have become more structured about what services the HR team take on, with governance processes to assess and add new services to their remit when requested from the business.

• Microsoft Teams gives access to ServiceNow rather than through the mobile app.

BUSINESS OUTCOMES

In the organisations we talk to, this time released generally means that HR Business Partners can spend more time on complex, value-add and strategic activities instead of answering the same basic questions in high volumes that should be resolved via self-service.

WHAT’S NEXT?

• Equinix are aiming for ‘one click resolution’ e.g. open case / talk to someone.

• Consolidate the 800 business applications across the business and use ServiceNow to remove the current pain of employees having to work out where to go.

• Offer choices to the Google-like search bar because although this was requested a lot by the business, not everyone will want to access services via that method so the team would like to offer different channels to ‘meet people where they are’ and offer people choices.

• Migrate content from SharePoint and the Intranet to ServiceNow.

• Update the HR Taxonomy to reflect employees’ journeys and work rather than traditional teams and departments.

• Pilot and deploy updates quickly using hackathon style Proofs of Concept to show leadership and get approval to move to production rather than building a business case for a concept they can’t see.

In summary Nicholas Karoutsos, Katherine Schoenthaler and the Equinix team have made great strides towards a modern and integrated employee experience supported by an efficient HR function. Their guiding principles are very close to Veran’s Service-led mindset and I’m looking forward to hearing about their next steps.

To talk about the tangible benefits you could deliver with ServiceNow HRSD and Service-led HR contact me via becky@veranperformance.com