Hearst is a landmark media company that operates more than 360 businesses, including Cosmopolitan and Esquire.
Hearst’s long history of acquisitions created a complex IT environment, filled with dozens of disconnected systems that frustrated employees.
Speeding up the support process — enabling employees to keep pace with an increasingly rapid news cycle.
The Problem
135 years ago, William Randolph Hearst launched what’s now one of the biggest global, diversified information, services, and media companies in the world. Today, Hearst is a behemoth of a company, and yet it has remained at the top of the diversified companies food chain decade after decade. How? Put simply: speed.
For David Kaczerski, director of Hearst’s Global ServiceDesk, the top priority is ensuring that everyone has what they need to do their job the moment they need it. To withstand the test of time, Hearst has had to act like a startup and move faster than all of its competitors. That said, Hearst’s support environment is complex due to a long history of acquisitions.
Each new organization added to the company’s portfolio brought dozens of disconnected systems that sometimes confused colleagues and frustrated the support agents who dealt with the same core issues over and over again.
The Solution
In June 2020, Hearst launched its Moveworks Copilot, Herbie. Moveworks is an AI platform that can quickly resolve employee problems, no matter what the issue or where it’s submitted. When an employee spills water on their keyboard or doesn’t know how to properly submit an expense report, they can reach out to Herbie on either Microsoft Teams or Slack and get the help they need 24/7.
Today, Herbie resolves 57% of all employee support requests in minutes. The result is that over 1,200 employee questions per month are answered instantly, saving the company tens of thousands of hours of productivity.
As Hearst implements more Moveworks skills, such as routing issues to the correct assignment group with AI-powered triage, employees are more empowered to use self-service to solve their everyday issues, from IT to finance. In other words, as Herbie delivers more solutions, support teams can allocate more time to meaningful work — not busy work.
The ROI of Moveworks is clear. We’ve saved hours and hours of time, decreased resolution times, improved productivity, and received considerable positive feedback from employees. With Herbie, we have a solution that removes bottlenecks
The Result
For Hearst, success is all about adaptation. Hearst continues to thrive because it has adapted to the ever-changing landscape of the media industry. One of the company’s greatest strengths is that it still has a startup mentality. Innovative approaches to old problems are welcomed, not spurned.
Embracing this mindset Kaczerski and his team were inspired to look out of the box when it came to reinventing the company’s support experience. Investing in tools like Moveworks has allowed Hearst to not only meet the needs of its core audience, but also transform its internal processes to meet the needs of the 2020s.
“Whatever the world throws at us next,” Kaczerski said, “we’ll be able to take it on.”