Kelly uses Power Pages to revamp the customer experience

A staffing labyrinth

Finding the right talent for open roles can be a challenging aspect of maintaining a business. An entire industry has grown around sourcing candidates for companies. Kelly is one of the agencies credited with pioneering the modern temporary help industry. 

Kelly—initially called Kelly Services—was established in 1946 in Detroit, Michigan and offered administrative, typewriting, and accounting services that employees typically performed from the Kelly office. But when a steel company in need of payroll assistance was reluctant to send its records offsite, Kelly hired 13 employees and sent them to the factory to help—creating the staffing services model. Now more than 75 years old, Kelly is a world-class organization that provides workforce solutions around the globe. 

But the logistics of sourcing talent for over 7,700 companies worldwide means contending with a lot of moving parts across multiple teams and divisions. When KellyOCG President, Tammy Browning, and her team reviewed feedback from over 3,000 clients of all sizes, she found that “the path to sourcing staff was circuitous and time consuming.”

Kelly learned that many clients were not receiving support in the manner or in the timeframe they expected, with support requiring workarounds and potentially unclear processes for requesting temporary help. The agency realized it needed to provide its clients with a better, more customized service experience.

A solution customized to meet client needs

To streamline the staffing process, Kelly created Helix UX, a new client portal built with Microsoft Power Platform. Rather than the one-size-fits-all portal Kelly created with its previous software, the company used the low-code benefits of Microsoft Power Pages to build individual branded portals for each customer. Most of these customers have personalized sites, and Helix UX allows each client to make the portal with the services purchased from Kelly feel like their own internal branded intranet site rather than a portal off the Kelly site. Customers can request candidate placements, chat with customer service, see performance reporting, and access business insights in one portal.

The Kelly solution exists in two components: the Helix UX client portals and the Inquiry Management model-driven app. With Helix UX, Kelly guides its clients through creating a personalized portal that can be embedded into their intranet. This acts as the customer-facing frontend to attract and process candidates. Inquiry Management is the backbone where Kelly customers can interface with Kelly directly, ask questions, and get answers while managing their portals. The app consists of a variety of Microsoft Dataverse tables to store important information while automatically correlating support requests to these common solutions.

Power Pages provides the front end for Helix UX to create the portals, while Dataverse handles the required data storage. Kelly also uses Power Automate to automate various processes that help deliver a seamless experience to both customers and internal teams. “The way Power Pages interacts with data and content from Microsoft to host Helix UX removes the need for managing infrastructure, while still providing enterprise trust that both Kelly and our customers expect,” says Hope Bradford, Senior Director of IT at Kelly.

Using the low-code efficiency of Power Pages, Kelly can provide its one-stop-shop experience with just a small team, who can manage the creation, maintenance, and updates of client portals. “When we first began,” says Bradford, “it took us nearly a month to go through the entire process of getting a portal provisioned, getting access, configuring all the components, and building the actual site. Today, using Power Pages, we’ve cut that process down to a week or less in some cases.”

Kelly clients can even integrate their portals into their own systems. “We’ve gone to great efforts to strike a balance between standardization on our end and flexibility for the client,” Bradford continues. “The result is a seamless experience for the end user that allows them to feel as if they never left their organization.” 

Sourcing unexpected benefits

Since working with Power Platform, the benefits for Kelly have been tremendous. In addition to an increase in sales, “the fact that we spend less time in damage control is huge,” says Bradford. In addition to the new ability to serve over 38,500 customer inquiries every day, a feedback-gathering campaign shows client satisfaction has increased due to the transparency of transactions that Kelly can now offer.

The Helix UX solution serves as an entry point for clients to increase the services they initially sought with Kelly—often expanding their use beyond the original scope. The benefits of Helix UX can extend to managing internal employee operations. For example, customers may go from using Kelly for simply their contingent workforce, to routing their full-time employee and other talent needs through their portal. 

With Power Platform, Kelly gets the value of one back-end system without the sync delay of integrating the data across many websites. By hosting and managing the portals of 7,700 clients, Kelly can gain additional insights into its customers and provide more value to them. Microsoft Power Pages is helping Kelly innovate to continue to meet the changing needs of modern businesses and raise the overall standard of service within the industry it helped create over 75 years ago.

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