Employee Query Automation Hub

The client’s employees did what most people do: send an email, ping someone on Teams, or tap their friendly HR contact. Over time, this created a shadow support system that no one owned.

• HR inboxes flooded with questions that belonged to IT, payroll or facilities.
• No single place to see “what employees are asking” across regions and functions.
• Leaders relied on anecdotes, not data, to decide which services to improve.
• Policy updates sat in PDFs; employees kept asking the same basic questions.

Leadership wanted one governed front door for employee questions — without forcing everyone to learn a new tool overnight.

Our remit was clear but demanding:

• Unify HR, IT, payroll and admin queries into a single, trackable hub.
• Meet employees where they already are — Outlook, Teams, and a simple web portal.
• Use knowledge articles to deflect repetitive “how do I…” questions.
• Give service owners visibility into demand, SLAs and bottlenecks.
• Deliver a pattern that could later be extended to finance, legal and vendor queries.

Before Sapnity, the “employee support model” was just an organic sprawl of inboxes, Teams chats and local workarounds. A single employee journey often looked like this:

• Employee emails HR, who forwards to IT, who copies in security.
• Same question appears in three channels: email, Teams, and a hallway conversation.
• Replies are inconsistent; some people get screenshots, others get old policy PDFs.
• There is no case ID — if someone is on leave, the thread simply stalls.

When we asked, “What is your SLA for employee queries?” leaders answered honestly: “We don’t know — we just try to be responsive.”

Sapnity re-framed the problem as an Employee Query Hub pattern: one front door, multi-channel intake, routed to the right team with knowledge-led deflection.

This pattern is now the blueprint for the client’s entire shared services strategy — new functions plug into the same hub instead of launching their own inbox.

Phase 1 — Discovery in the Wild

• Shadowed HR and IT support teams to see how queries really arrived and were solved.
• Sampled two weeks of inbox data to identify top topics and re-routing patterns.
• Agreed on a simple taxonomy: HR, IT, Payroll, Admin, “Other”.

Phase 2 — Dataverse Model & Case Design

• Designed a Query table linked to employees, topics, channel, and attached evidence.
• Added Assignment and Interaction tables to track handoffs and responses.
• Defined a clean lifecycle: New → In Progress → Waiting on User → Resolved → Closed.

Phase 3 — Intake Experiences (Teams, Email, Portal)

• Delivered a Teams app where employees could log a query in under 30 seconds.
• Added an Outlook add-in that turns an email into a tracked query with a single click.
• Created a simple portal for employees who prefer browser access over chat or email.

Phase 4 — Routing, SLAs & Knowledge

• Built Power Automate flows to route based on topic, region and employee type.
• Configured SLA clocks by function, with escalation rules to team leads.
• Linked SharePoint-based knowledge articles and response snippets inside the agent app.

Phase 5 — Pilot, Rollout & Continuous Tuning

• Started with one region and two functions (HR + IT) to refine categories and templates.
• Scaled to payroll and admin once we had clear evidence of value and adoption.
• Set up a monthly “service review” using Power BI to tune topics, queues and SLAs.

The result is a single pattern where new services can be added by configuring topics, queues and rules — not by building new apps from scratch.

More importantly, the client can now answer strategic questions: “What are employees actually struggling with?” and “Which policies or systems generate the most noise?”

• Pattern over Point Solution: We delivered an Employee Query Hub blueprint that can absorb new functions over time.
• Channel-native design: Leveraged Teams and Outlook first, instead of forcing yet another portal.
• Knowledge-first, not ticket-first: The hub is designed to eliminate avoidable queries, not just log them faster.
• Governed Dataverse model: Audit-ready, secure and aligned with the client’s broader Power Platform roadmap.
• Ready for AI: The pattern is built so that AI summarisation and suggested replies can be layered in safely later.

For this client, Sapnity did not just “add a ticketing system” — we created a shared services nervous system that finally made HR, IT, payroll and admin act like one coherent team for employees.