Experience matters on both sides of the business at Smartbox. For almost 20 years, the company has enabled customers to gift memorable experiences to friends and loved ones. Within the organisation, it wanted to give its users a positive experience when interacting with its HR software, and its existing platform didn’t deliver this.
As an organisation, Smartbox was growing to a point where it employed 700 people across 10 countries. With the previous system, carrying out the simplest task needed a dedicated resource. The company was also locked into an engagement with an external consultancy for support, which added an extra layer of complexity. “It took hours to make small requests, which was frustrating and time consuming. We wanted something simpler,” say the Smartbox People Team.
When the original vendor increased its prices, that was the trigger for Smartbox to go to the market to look for an alternative that was closer aligned to its requirements.
Smartbox was put in contact with Grouper, which proposed a HR service that was less complex and more user-friendly than the previous enterprise product. Grouper formulated a project plan to manage the migration from the former HR system, and guided Smartbox’s team step by step.
The extensive project covered relatively simple work such as transferring basic employee data, through to complex tasks such as calculating staff absences. The work was finished on schedule, in just three months. “It was record time,” say the People Team. “We started conversations with Grouper around mid August, we took the decision to switch around mid-September and the project started in October and we were able to launch in December. Of course, the project required hours of dedication but it was straightforward.”
They also pay tribute to the support from the account manager at Grouper which was especially valuable in guiding Smartbox’s team. “He was always available for a call, to give a demo or to run us through how the system worked. That level of involvement was great, to be honest. It’s unusual that an external provider takes so much time and effort into your project, so at one point, it felt like we had one of our colleagues. We would have regular catchups and meetings, uploading the data and checking the data we sent, sometimes correcting errors, sometimes we had to do an additional meeting. In my personal experience, I have never had such close contact and support from an external vendor.”
Full deployment of the Grouper HR service is a work in progress. The people team at Smartbox hasn’t currently rolled out certain features in all countries and its main goal is to see usage of the system at 100%.
Looking ahead, Smartbox plans to explore and implement additional features from the Grouper HR system across all countries, including e-signature, file uploading, asset management, and the expenses module. The company plans to continue working with Grouper to get the most from the system’s capabilities. The ultimate goal for Smartbox is to replace having information about some of the team spread across different spreadsheets. The People Team agree: “The ideal is what we have now with Grouper.”
