Your employee is as important as your customer

Employees are consumers too—they fly JetBlue, ride Uber, shop on Amazon, stay at high end hotel chains and spend money with Apple Pay. On a regular basis, they interact with companies that deliver a great customer experience. But when they come to work, they don’t find this same great experience from their company’s service desk, which hurts their productivity and overall work satisfaction. Poor productivity leads to frustration, which is often projected onto customers. To overcome these challenges and more importantly, provide a better employee experience, businesses are starting to look to smarter technology and enhancing service processes to attract and retain talent.

To date, IT has refined the art of employee services. The term IT service management has a connotation of value to the technology group. In a world that is often looked at as organized chaos, service management strategies introduced structure and created seamless, smart and meaningful service interactions with employees. This is the inspiration for employee service management. Driven by the explosion of digital consumer experiences, employee service management addresses the general lack of a unified view across departments and increased level of employee expectations.

Consumerization is driving demand

A primary function of employee service management is to tailor the user experience and the methods by which employees are serviced based on their individual preferences and needs. Many of these preferences are driven by their specific generation and these attitudes and choices are extending from their personal lives to the workplace. A manager versus a director versus a line worker is not as relevant now as a millennial versus Gen X or Baby Boomer. By better accounting for and addressing generational differences, organizations can better tailor internal services to meet different employee needs through service management solutions that provide a more personalized and intuitive experience. For instance, the first generation to grow up with computers, Gen X employees, will have a different set of expectations on communicating with a department like HR or IT via email, compared to a Baby Boomer who might be as comfortable just picking up the phone to make a request, or a millennial who may want to submit their request through a mobile app or online chat. 

One platform to unite employee service experiences

Today’s employees are not only looking for a more tailored experience, but a smarter one that provides a unified experience that lets them get their job done more effectively, regardless where they work in the organization and for whatever service they need. Employee service management extends beyond IT to HR, marketing, facilities, procurement and finance to break down legacy information silos across departments and thereby increase visibility and productivity. Today, every employee requests, participates and delivers services as part of their work – no matter their department. Providing a one-stop shop for serving all employee requirements, employee service management provides the platform necessary to unify and improve internal services. Imagine if you could eliminate the silos and increase collaboration across the organization from one service provider to the next, creating effortless support and services, while centralizing the service management experience.

Retain. Grow. Innovate.

An employee is able to do their best work when they have the tools necessary to be able to work efficiently and efficiently from the time they walk in the door. Successful companies of the future will attract, retain and grow the best employees. However, if these employees are not receiving great support and feeling valued as they make requests, they are subject to churn. As remote workforces are skyrocketing and users aren’t strapped to a local VPN, they are in the cloud, working from home, beaches and airplanes – employees have a growing set of unique needs and these needs have to be addressed in a faster, more personalized manner.

Predicting solutions before the demand occurs

At an increasingly faster rate, new machine learning capabilities are providing breakthrough features in employee service management that will result in unprecedented service efficiencies. These new AI features include self-help options that identify, track and categorize common employee challenges and requests, as well as predictive resolutions based on the analysis of patterns and commonalities in historical ticket data.

Looking ahead, technology innovation such as these new AI capabilities will continue to drive the expansion of employee service management to help meet the demands of digital transformation and exceptional service experiences. For organizations that are rushing full speed ahead in their journey to deploy new technology solutions that increase efficiencies and usability, paying closer attention to internal employee services is an ideal weapon in the fierce battle for talent. By driving innovation to employee services, organizations that treat their employees as customers have learned the critical lesson that improving the employee experience directly results in driving bottom line – and customer satisfaction.