Questions to ask a employee relations and case management vendor

Break the rehearsed route

Employee relations has the largest middle band of any People occupation and nearly all of it is drafting and preparation. Judge the tool on that rather than on its dashboard. All of this runs on their invented cases.

1. Take a grievance from first report to outcome letter, with the letters it produces at each step.

   The letters and the process steps are the work. Look at whether the templates are yours to edit, whether they follow your policy rather than theirs, and how much retyping happens between steps.

2. Our procedure has different timescales from your default. Show me changing them.

   Every organisation has its own policy and most of these ship with one opinion baked in. If changing it needs professional services, that cost belongs in the quote.

3. Show me a case three people have worked on over four months, and how somebody picks it up cold.

   Cases outlast the people handling them. Ask what tells the new person what has already been tried.

4. Restrict one case to three named people, in front of me.

   Standard role permissions are not enough when the case involves someone senior, and this is the moment you find out whether it is possible at all.

5. Export one of your demo cases as it would be disclosed. All of it, including edit history.

   Everything in here is a document that might be read out at a tribunal. If the export is tidier than the record, that gap is the problem.

6. Does anything written by AI go into the case record, and is it labelled?

   A model-written summary sitting unlabelled in a grievance file becomes a serious problem the first time somebody asks who wrote it.

   Worry ifGenerated summaries stored the same way as human notes.

7. A deadline in the process is about to be missed. What happens, and who hears about it?

   Missing your own procedural timescales is one of the easiest ways to lose a case you should have won. Ask whether the system warns before the date or reports after it.

The two questions that get honest answers

Ask these at the end, when the demo is over and the room has relaxed. They are worth more than the previous hour.

1. Which of the things you showed me today are live for every customer, and which are on the roadmap?

   The most common complaint from buyers in this market is feeling misled afterwards, with promised features never arriving. Ask in the room, write the answer down, and put anything you are depending on into the contract with a date against it.

   Worry ifAnything demonstrated in an environment no customer is on yet.

2. What are the three things your customers complain about most?

   A good salesperson answers honestly, because they know you will find out in month two. "Nothing really" means either they do not talk to their customers or they will not tell you.

   Worry ifA strength dressed up as a weakness.

Drive it yourself

1. Build one case type from our own policy, ourselves, with our stages and our timescales.

   You will do this for every policy you have. Whether it takes an afternoon or a services engagement is the difference between a tool you own and one you rent an implementation for.

2. Load one of our own letter templates and produce a document from it.

   Your letters have been through legal. Getting them in unchanged, with the right merge fields, is more important than anything in their template library.

Getting a sandbox at all

1. Can we have a sandbox for two weeks with our own test data, without a sales process attached?

   Everything you learn in a demo is about their product being used the way they use it. A fortnight with your own made-up data tells you whether your team can use it. A vendor confident in the product hands one over.

   Worry ifA trial only available after a commercial conversation, or a guided tour rather than an account.

2. Set up one thing we would need on day one, ourselves, while you watch.

   Pick something ordinary: a workflow step, an approval, a template. If it needs the vendor, then every change for the next three years needs the vendor, and nobody put that in the quote.

   Worry ifConfiguration that turns out to be a professional services ticket.

Ask a customer

1. What does it tell you about patterns across cases, and do you act on it?

   The reason to keep all this in one system rather than a folder is spotting that four grievances came from the same department. Whether the report exists and whether anybody uses it are different questions, and a customer answers both.

2. Has a case from this system ever gone to tribunal, and how did the record hold up?

   If the answer is yes, everything after it is the most valuable thing you will hear. If nobody can answer it, that is worth knowing too.

3. Do your managers log cases themselves, or does it all still come to HR?

   Most of these are sold on managers handling more of the early stages. Whether that actually happened is the single best measure of whether it worked.

Worth asking any customer, in any category

Ask the vendor for two customers your size, then ask each for a screen share. These four are for that call, with the vendor not on the line.

1. How long did implementation actually take, against what you were told?

   The most useful number in the whole process, and the vendor will quote you their fastest. A customer will tell you what it cost in their own team's time, which never appears in any quote.

2. What did you assume it did that it turned out not to do?

   Everybody has one. It is usually a reporting gap or an integration that needed building, and it is the thing you would otherwise find in month three.

3. What happened the last time you raised something serious with support?

   Support quality tends to drop once a contract is signed, and a reference customer is a year past that point. Ask for a specific incident rather than an opinion.

Cost, retention and leaving

1. How do we put a case on legal hold, and what does that stop?

   Retention rules that delete on schedule are good until a claim is live. The system needs a way to stop the clock and evidence that it did.

2. Is this priced per case, per user or per employee?

   Per case sounds cheap and punishes a bad year, which is the year you need it. Model a year with three times the cases you had last year.

3. Who at your end can see a live case, and under what circumstances?

   Support access to a grievance involving a named senior person is a real problem. Ask how it is controlled, logged, and whether you can switch it off.

4. If we leave, what does the case history look like on the way out?

   This is the record you will need if an old case becomes a claim after you have switched systems. A PDF per case is not the same as the file.

What it costs, all in

Implementation, migration, integrations and support tiers are where the quoted price stops being the price. Ask for the total before the demo ends.

1. What does year one cost in total, in writing, including implementation, migration and integration fees?

   The licence figure is rarely the bill. Implementation, data migration, API charges, premium support and mid-term true-ups are all common and all appear after signature. A vendor who will put the year-one total in an email can be held to it.

   Worry ifA licence price now and implementation "scoped later".

2. Is implementation a fixed fee or time and materials?

   Fixed fee puts the risk of a slow implementation on the people running it. Time and materials puts it on you, and HR data is always messier than anyone expects.

   Worry ifDay rates with no cap.

3. What is the renewal price, and is the increase capped in the contract?

   Year-one discounts often disappear at renewal, which turns a good deal into an expensive one two years in. A cap written into the contract is a normal thing to ask for.

   Worry ifUplift "in line with the market".

4. What notice do we give to leave, and does it renew automatically?

   Thirty to sixty days is reasonable. Ninety or more with auto-renewal means one missed diary entry costs another full year. Ask for the clause and read it in the room.

   Worry ifNinety days or more, auto-renewing, multi-year.

5. On the day we leave, what do we get, in what format, and at what cost? Is that in the contract?

   You want every record you put in, plus anything the system generated about your people, in CSV or JSON, at no charge. A feature can change in a release note. A clause cannot, and this one costs nothing to ask for at the point of buying.

   Worry ifA PDF export, a fee, or access cut off before the export arrives.

Data protection and security

1. For each thing this system does, are you controller or processor, and is the data processing agreement attached to the contract?

   The roles have to be settled activity by activity rather than once for the whole product, and the ICO expects a contract that says so. If they are a processor you have to give explicit written instructions, so ask what those will say.

   Worry ifHesitation, or "we are the processor" as a blanket answer.

   ICO, six questions to ask when procuring AI recruitment tools, November 2024

2. Where is the data hosted, which sub-processors touch it, and how do we hear when that list changes?

   Employee data includes salaries, health information and grievances. You need to know who holds it and to have a route to object when a new sub-processor appears.

3. Do you train any model on our data? Is it off by default, and is that in the contract?

   Ask plainly and get it in writing. "We do not sell your data" is a different sentence and is often the one that comes back.

   Worry ifAn answer about anonymisation that never says no.

4. Send us your most recent penetration test summary and your ISO 27001 certificate or SOC 2 report.

   A certificate number is easy to claim and easy to check. The pen test summary tells you whether anything serious was found and how fast it closed.

   Worry if"Available under NDA once we have progressed further."

5. When an employee makes a subject access request touching your system, what do we get from you and how quickly?

   You have a statutory deadline and the vendor does not. Ask for their internal service level in days and check it leaves you time to review before you answer.