How HR tech enabled Northern Trust to respond to clients 30% faster

Fortune 500 financial services giant Northern Trust is focused on always putting its clients first.

“That is our competitive advantage” in the overcrowded financial sector, according to Shaelyn Otikor-Miller, SVP and Global Head of Digital Workplace Strategy at Northern Trust Asset Servicing.

But it is only possible for Northern Trust’s 23,000 employees across 26 countries to deliver that great customer experience if “we make sure to take care of ourselves first”.

Ultimately, if employees are happy, “they’re going to make sure our clients are happy”.

While Northern Trust employees were working hard at ensuring the customer experience was top notch for all clients, whether they are organizations or high-net-worth individuals (and their families), emails were getting in the way.

Every month the entire company was receiving 17 million emails, and had 12,000 shared mailboxes to serve 3,000 clients.

Otikor-Miller notes: “Once upon a time, we didn’t have email, then we got email and it was great. Now we’ve got too much email.”

All these emails were hindering productivity for the business; it was making employees reactive (rather than proactive) in dealing with clients and their needs.

So, in 2018, Otikor-Miller and her team got to work figuring out how new, innovation collaboration tools could help Northern Trust “get better at manual processes, time consuming tasks”, and ultimately “move faster [and] more accurately and with less risk”.

Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit and accelerated the need for new ways of working (powered by modern tech tools) – whether it was new laptops, webcams or conferencing technologies.

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“Before the pandemic, you could call it change management”, but during COVID-19, it was “total digital transformation and disruption” – these modern HR tools were no longer a nice to have, they were necessary to get work done.

UNLEASH was thrilled to sit down with Otikor-Miller to hear the $6.8 billion company’s digital transformation success story. What does the future hold for HR tech at the financial services giant?

RIP email, hello modern HR tech

The two aims of Otikor-Miller’s original transformation project in 2018 were first, to reduce email traffic, and second “servicing our clients better.”

Thus customizing the customer experience to every individual, and specifically “giving clients the flexibility to choose how they want to communicate with us”.

“We’re no longer living in a world where it’s just email – some clients want chat, some want to use SharePoint sites”, other use other tools – so Northern Trust needed to find a way to cater to those needs in a personalized manner.

So, Northern Trust started to pilot Microsoft Teams, Webex and Zoom in 2018; these roll outs continued through the pandemic.

Even in Northern Trust’s current hybrid model “video conferencing still dominates”; this is “because it makes the experience equal for every single person, no matter where you are”.

During COVID-19, the employer also handed new laptops and Jabber softphones to help everyone work from home effectively.

But “there was a point where our employees were so frustrated, there were so many different tools” for different, which was creating tech overwhelm.

This pushed Otikor-Miller and her team to think about consolidation tools and finding a way for employees to be able to deal with all of their clients in one platform with one user interface; “if they have 20 clients, we don’t want them to have to use 20 different technologies”, says Otikor-Miller.

The solution for Northern Trust was to implement the entire Microsoft 365 cloud base suite, and in 2023 specifically chose Microsoft Dynamics as its client relationship management and workflow platform.

Because Microsoft Dynamics is integrated with Outlook email, Teams chat, it is an “omnichannel” for employees – no matter which tool customers are using to contact them, workers are responding through one single platform.

She is clear that in making the decisions about which tool to choose client risk and compliance were top of mind.

“We have to make sure it is an improvement, we have to make sure it isn’t going to frustrate or cause any sort of disruption to the process”.

This explains why in her role as head of digital workplace strategy Otikor-Miller sits separately to HR.

“I’m on the business side. I work hand in hand with our clients, our servicing leaders and our operational leaders”, and every time she implements technology she talks to every country’s compliance team (and the regulators by proxy).

But that doesn’t mean HR has no role to play.

I do not think people…respect how quintessential HR [is]” – the digital workplace is not all about the tech itself, it is also about culture changes needed to make this tech transformation work for all.

Secrets to HR tech success at Northern Trust

Otikor-Miller is a big fan of Microsoft Dynamics; she describes the tool as “fantastic” and “wonderful”.

Not only does it solve the customer needs, but it also fixes that email overload challenge.

Going back to those 17 million monthly emails, and 12,000 shared mailboxes, Otikor-Miller states “you can imagine what emails are like – it is like ‘whack a mole’ for leaders overseeing them, they were drowning trying to…stay on top of emails”.

But through Microsoft Dynamics, “we connected shared mailboxes” and now info and actions from those emails are organized into a workflow queue.

“When I come in the morning, and I wonder where to pick up from last night, I can clearly see in the timeline and tracking what [my team has done overnight] and where it is”, she explains.

As a result of Microsoft Dynamics, Northern Trust has seen a 50% reduction in email traffic; the tool has been in use for less than six months (Northern Trust went live on October 1 2023).

“It’s a staggering drop”, and for Otikor-Miller this email traffic “was largely just noise, it wasn’t quintessential client queries or information; it was just your inbox on steroids”.

As a result of the roll out of Microsoft Dynamics, some teams have been able to respond to client queries in a third of the time.

Plus, leaders can now get reporting and metrics from sales and relationship management teams up to five times a day (rather than five times a week). All of this drives much more proactive client experiences.

These impressive results come as just 1,400 of Northern Trust’s 23,000 headcount are onboarded onto Dynamics – the employer is planning to onboard up to another 4,000 this year, and then achieve 60% of all staff (15,000) over the next few years.

The remaining 40% are under review to see if Dynamics is the right tech for them and how they work.

The financial services giant is still calculating the financial benefits of Microsoft’s tool.

Otikor-Miller tells UNLEASH that while she is proud of the results that can be shared, “we’ve just scratched the surface”.

Northern Trust, AI and future of HR tech

Even as Northern Trust is still implementing Microsoft Dynamics across its global workforce, Otikor-Miller and her team are continuing to look at new technologies on the horizon, and whether they are right for Northern Trust’s employee base.

Alongside the cyber, legal and risk teams, Otikor-Miller is exploring how to roll out Microsoft’s AI copilot capabilities.

“We definitely want to roll that out” – Northern Trust sees real promise from AI in driving efficiency and reducing “the grunt work and administrative work by 30% to 40%”, which is “absolutely amazing”.

But, of course, all the teams had to work together to look at risk, compliance and ethics.

She adds that Northern Trust is starting with some pilots and minimum viable products to start testing Microsoft copilots on fake data – “we’ll test it, then we’ll come back together and discuss what happens before we allow it to read real data”, client data.

Beyond AI, a unique part of Northern Trust’s approach to HR tech is its citizen developer community – this puts the financial behemoth “on the cusp of fintech”.

These 600 employees globally who are tech savvy, love new tech and want to learn new skills – “they’re embedded in every function, every group and team”.

They not only enable Northern Trust to provide the best tech solutions to their customers, but they are on hand to help Otikor-Miller’s team with the change management piece around new tech implementation – “we roll out a lot of information to them, and then they go out and educate the masses”.

They also inform Otikor-Miller’s team about the feedback from employees – where they are struggling, where they are thriving – and that helps leadership to adapt quickly and ensure the technology tools are still working for employees.

The benefits for the developers are not just up-to-date tech skills, but, as primarily junior level employees, they are connected to “senior leaders to get more recognition, more visibility for their skill set”, which also drives retention.

UNLEASH’s Northern Trust interview concludes with Otikor-Miller reflecting and sharing her top tips for HR and business leaders unsure further behind (or struggling) on their workplace transformation journey.

My advice is start small – don’t try to boil the ocean. Find some valid uses, find a proof of concept and make sure you get all your risk reviews and stuff tight.”

Then, once you’ve got your ducks in row, “you can scale up at speed” and drive true people and business success.