ITSM: From managing IT to enhancing the employee experience

Building a great employee experience is key to building a great company, and businesses are embracing ITSM as a key factor in the process.

TRY IT FOR FREE

What is ITSM?

ITSM (or IT Service Management) refers to creating, managing and supporting the lifecycle of all the IT services in an organization. This includes employee laptops, the apps installed on their machines, the printers used by your support staff, etc.

Age of employee experience

Today’s workforce predominantly comprises millennials who have greater exposure to technology. They expect the same flexibility and accessibility to be built into the tools and services they use at work.

They expect their business apps to have mobile apps, customizable user interfaces, automation capabilities, personalized suggestions, AI/ML, etc.

These requirements are the primary factors for employees to continue in an organization apart from factors such as salary hikes, promotions, perks, etc. Employees across organizations place their experience with the company over other benefits they receive.

Organizations have also started understanding the importance of employee experience. According to Salesforce’s research on State of the Connected Customer, 78% of IT leaders are giving digital employee experience projects higher priority than they were just two years ago.

Role of IT in employee experience

The IT team plays a pivotal role in unifying business teams and ensuring a hassle-free employee experience.

IT teams are tasked with the responsibility of ensuring business continuity by helping employees and providing them with the necessary resources to complete their tasks and projects. In order to achieve this, the IT team uses technology to streamline several internal processes that usually involve collaborating with several internal teams.

Streamlining these processes to deliver a positive employee experience requires a deeper understanding of the employee lifecycle from onboarding, through every interaction between the employee and the organization thereon.

The IT service desk used acts as a catalyst for an IT team to deliver positive employee experience in an organization. Here are a few simple ways for IT teams to maximize an organization’s employee experience using their IT service desk.

Tips to Maximize your Employee Experience

Improved accessibility

The IT team should be accessible by the employees through multiple channels. Rather than asking employees to visit a portal or send an email, IT teams integrate their existing IT service desk with widely used communication platforms such as Slack and Microsoft Teams.

Freshservice carries powerful integrations with Slack and Microsoft Teams and provides a dedicated mobile app that allows IT agents to get real-time updates on tickets raised by their employees. IT teams can also use these apps and integrations to collaborate among themselves and solve employee issues faster than before.

A multi-channel service delivery approach makes IT more accessible to employees, which in turn delivers a positive employee experience.

User-friendly service catalog

Employees often request for new hardware, software, and other services to aid with their projects, enhance their productivity, or while facing a technical issue. Providing a seamless channel for them to request the required service items is a great way to deliver a positive employee experience. IT teams can use the service catalog to make it easy for employees to request products and services.

A service catalog gives employees full visibility into the status of their requests, eliminating the need for constant back-and-forth email. This can also be expanded beyond requesting IT hardware and software. Non-IT teams like the HR, admin, and facilities can also be linked to a service catalog in order to provide a unified employee experience.

Automation of internal processes

Employees spend a lot of time on manual, repetitive tasks that take a huge chunk of their productive time. This involves tasks like requesting to speed up the resolution of an issue , requesting approval for the purchase of equipment, assigning tickets to the respective departments, etc. Automating these tasks using technologies like chatbots and workflow automator frees up a great deal of time for your employees. This improves employee productivity, ROI, and also creates a better employee experience.

automate internal processes using workflow automator 2x

Futuristic self-service experience

Self-service is one of the key focus areas for IT teams today. IT teams are constantly looking for new and exciting ways to drive self-service adoption. Features like the Freshservice Conversational Portal provides a new and a more natural way for your employees to interact with their self-service portal. Your employees can simply chat with their self-service portal to find solutions for all their needs, right from browsing the knowledge base, raising a ticket, to requesting a service item. This way, employees can interact with the portal in the most natural way possible.

A better Knowledge Base

The knowledge base is the most direct way to point employees towards the solution. A knowledge base empowers employees with the right information at the right time. The key is to give employees easily searchable access to all of this knowledge. The knowledge base should be written in a simple, understandable language. A well-maintained knowledge base helps agents by deflecting tickets for standard support issues and freeing up agent time for more valuable tasks. It ensures a consistently positive employee experience by allowing agents to attach solution articles to tickets. An ideal knowledge base serves as a database of resources based on the organization’s history of internal incidents, and issues that have slowed employees down in the past.

Employee Experience = Customer Experience

Keeping your employees happy is a great way to improve productivity, ROI and business continuity. Leveraging a modern and agile service desk to cater to these needs is a good place to start delivering exceptional employee experience. Organizations should always remember that a great employee experience leads to great customer experience.