How to meet demands for a great employee user experience

The workplace is changing. Companies must now support a growing number of mobile and remote workers, BYOD policies and enterprise software convergence to maximize operations. To accommodate these complex IT issues, organizational leaders should focus on delivering a user experience that aligns with the tools employees require to get their work done, on the devices and applications they prefer. One tool that can spur a seamless rollout and adoption of these shifts in enterprise technology is through modern employee engagement technologies. Effective employees do more than just fix things that break: they empower an organization to be more productive. To that end, CIOs should consider these three approaches for leveraging service desk technology to enable smarter services and build a comprehensive and quality employee user experience.

Ensure a consistent, single-platform experience

Traditionally, IT leaders had to choose between different service tools for specific capabilities such as incident or ticket management, a customizable service catalog, or workflow engine. These are all great for helping connect employees to resources that they need, but new single-platform employee engagement technologies allow CIOs to merge multiple departments to operate out of one system. These new employee-friendly engagement technologies — think BYOD, chatbots and built-in service engagement capabilities — provide employees across any department with a one-stop shop to submit a ticket, request a service, or search the knowledge base. Regardless of how many departments your organization has, the single-platform employee engagement solution means employees experience a streamlined process for submitting requests, no matter what their job role or need is.

Furthermore, new AI-powered technology is enabling an even more consistent employee experience by making it easier for employees to submit requests. For instance, predictive capabilities based on machine learning algorithms can automatically recommend what category a ticket belongs to across departments, ensuring a faster resolution process for the employee.

Empower employees with self-service access to real-time information

The beauty of the modern work environment is that employees can work wherever they desire and are not beholden to the traditional 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. work hours. Remote workforces are skyrocketing in number and employees are no longer strapped to a local VPN. Instead they are in the cloud, working from home, the beach or airplane. Because of this new paradigm, successful companies will ensure that internal services keep pace by powering a service desk that can handle requests 24/7. But, asking technicians to be available in all time zones and on all channels is expensive and excessive.

Instead, new self-service solutions empower employees to resolve their own issues. Leveraging the power of the cloud, modern employee management technologies enable increasingly advanced and sophisticated knowledge libraries that allow employees to identify and solve their own service requests – without having to wait hours and hours for technician input. With the expansion of machine learning functionality, self-service solutions will become even more predictive in nature, helping guide employees toward a resolution even earlier in the ticketing process. By the same token, employee self-service functionality frees up technicians to focus on more strategic and pressing problems.

Cater to individual needs with a service catalog

Employees represent a diverse set of individuals with different needs and different skill sets. Only by addressing each by their own specific roles can you develop an impactful employee experience. To home in on individual needs, organizations should make sure employees can access the information they need quickly. Once the information is available, it can be shared across multiple departments to teams in each department to seamlessly work together to resolve the issue. Placing information at the forefront of incident resolution removes friction from the resolution process and gives your organization a way to provide individualized attention to employees.

Information access is important because most employee frustrations come from having to spend time answering a litany of questions after they’ve submitted a request or issue. In service management, the service catalog sits on the backend to provide a curated menu of employee services. Today’s service catalogs leverage the cloud and new automation technologies to deliver more comprehensive and personalized results.

For example, workflow automation can help ensure repetitive job activities are the purview of the software rather than humans, making it easier for teams to focus on priority projects. By building rules that drive ticket routing, approvals, alerts and other associated tasks, workflow automation makes it easier to get tickets to the right teams, quickly, so that subject matter experts can get them resolved.

Successful leaders abide by the golden rule

The employee experience helps define success for an organization. Today’s employees require the answers, solutions, and resources they need to get their work done from wherever they are on whatever channel they prefer. To attract and retain talent, organizations are advancing internal employee services to ensure a consistent and seamless experience: When employees are confident that they have the tools, information and flexibility they require, they are more productive and efficient and ultimately improve the bottom line of the organization. Simply put, to achieve success, treat your employees the way you treat your customers.