Delta Air Lines launches services portal with ServiceNow

A leading, global airline
Headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, Delta Air Lines is the U.S. global airline leader in safety, innovation, reliability, and customer experience. Powered by employees around the world, Delta has for a decade led the airline industry in operational excellence while maintaining a reputation for award-winning customer service.

Fast and easy access
Like all airlines and other industries around the world, when COVID-19 struck and lockdowns began, Delta witnessed an unprecedented decline in customer demand, impacting schedules, operations and, most of all, its employees.

While many teams within its many complex and highly dispersed global operations experienced greatly reduced workloads, others leading the company’s response to the pandemic needed additional support.

Delta was determined to respond as quickly as possible to support its 75,000 people, providing fast and easy access to information, advice, and services. “Throughout the pandemic, Delta has been hyper-focused on putting people first and minimizing the impact on our employees,” explains HR Service Delivery Manager, Beverly Hill.

“Across the board, employees had questions about COVID-19 and looked to HR for resources and information. Within HR, the team needed a single source of prompt and accurate answers.”

One-stop-shop employee portal
In 2019, Delta had begun deploying ServiceNow HR Service Delivery (HRSD) Pro to initially capture employees’ time and attendance questions and ultimately streamline and automate the majority of its HR services.

Armed with this existing knowledge and experience with the intuitive and easy-to-use Now Platform, Delta was able to launch a one-stop-shop COVID-19 employee portal in just 48 hours.

“We very quickly met as an HR team, gathering the individuals tasked with navigating our COVID-19 response,” explains Beverly. “We got high level requirements and iterated from these to have the first portal up and running within a couple of days.

“Delta has always had a very strong culture of mutual support. My team has done an incredible job, and I include HR Communications, ServiceNow, and our fantastic implementation partner, Accenture. They are dedicated, highly intelligent and innovative, they really care about delivering the best for our Delta employees.

“We went with a minimal viable product for the COVID-19 portal launch and leveraged links to existing content on Deltanet, with the knowledge that the ServiceNow technology would allow us to rapidly expand the portal as the full extent of the requirements created by the pandemic became clear.”

Data helps reduce spread of COVID-19
Within a month, the team processed more than 4,500 cases through the COVID-19 portal, more than 110,000 in total by 2021. Employees were able to connect with a nurse to share concerns and get basic medical advice, while Delta’s prevention team used ServiceNow data to identify specific, localized opportunities to help reduce the spread of COVID-19.

Once vaccines became available, employees could express advance interest via the COVID-19 portal, resulting in more than 40,000 entries which helped accelerate Delta’s internal COVID-19 vaccination program, while leaders were able to assess and report the results of Delta’s contact tracing efforts.

ServiceNow’s functionality-rich, easy-to-use technology has also replaced spreadsheets, speeding up grant application processes by 50% for a non-profit, employee-sponsored program that supports colleagues in need of financial support during different life situations.

“ServiceNow HRSD provided us with a means to give employees one place to submit their COVID-19 questions and concerns and have them addressed quickly, as well as a very flexible and nimble case management tool that could meet the ever-changing needs of the COVID-19 response ,” says Beverly.

“I believe that the way we were able to leverage ServiceNow for our pandemic response accomplished in a matter of weeks what would previously have taken me months to achieve.”

Self-service center meets evolving needs
As 2020 progressed, the HR team was able to broaden the scope of its activities and restart the HR service delivery transformation program that had begun before the pandemic. As a result, the COVID-19 portal evolved into an employee self-service center that will ultimately handle 85% of HR questions such as health and welfare, payroll, and retirement, which were previously raised by phone or email, creating a unified employee portal for HR.

“We had begun our journey with ServiceNow HR Service Delivery in the fall of 2019,” explains Beverly. “Our first launch was a case management solution for time and attendance, and we were underway to add two more HR areas into ServiceNow when we had to shift to the COVID-19 response and put other HR deployments aside. But just having one group under our belt, along with a small team of strong implementation partners, meant that we were fully prepared and able to provide solutions for the ever-changing COVID-19 landscape.”

Performance analytics for better statistics
Delta remains fully committed to maintaining its COVID-19 response portal and has begun to shift back to business as usual, expanding the scope and scale and rebranding the portal as ‘Ask HR’. Delta’s HR team has added case management for its employees’ financial assistance program, managers’ self-service forms, employee relations, and knowledge base articles with deep links into the employee self-service application for frequent processes such as name change, adding dependents’ details. And there’s still several more HR groups to bring into the platform.

“Our roadmap also includes enhancing the current virtual agent experience, leveraging artificial intelligence, machine learning, and our knowledge base to deliver a personalized employee experience, and implementing performance analytics for better statistics,” says Beverly.

By mid-2021, the HR time and attendance feature originally launched in October 2019 had seen more than 94,000 cases submitted.

HR services anytime, anywhere
Beverly concludes, “‘Ask HR’, powered by ServiceNow, is a great example of us simplifying and modernizing the employee experience at Delta. ServiceNow HR Service Delivery is one of the easiest solutions I have used.

"We’re using it extensively and there’s a real appetite for it now because colleagues can see how the application can make things so much more efficient, avoid duplication of work, help speed up responses, and deliver great services. There’s so much out-of-the-box functionality, minimizing the need for customization and enabling us to engage the business earlier for review of the process design, and encouraging rapid adoption by our colleagues because it’s so easy to use."

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