It all starts with a simple question: how would you assess your company's IT portal's employee experience?
Consider that for a moment. Is your IT self-service portal well-liked by your employees? Or do they just put up with it in order to get the job done?
In a recent webinar on IT self-service portals and their impact on employee engagement, 42 percent of companies claimed their staff aren't huge lovers of their IT self-service portal, but they still use it.
Furthermore, 23% of employers indicated their employees avoid using it due to a bad user experience.
What if my staff don't like utilizing the IT self-service portal, you might wonder as an IT executive. Isn't it true that regardless of the quality of the IT self-service portal, work gets done?
This is where you're mistaken.
According to a poll conducted in collaboration with Harvard Business Review, 77% of employees stated they would consider searching for a new job if their present one did not offer them with the tools, technology, or knowledge they require to accomplish their jobs properly.
Workers, particularly those of a younger generation, are increasingly expecting technology to be straightforward. According to the same poll, 91 percent of employees now anticipate technology to be easier to use than they did ten years ago.
With so much relying on technology's make-or-break role in employee experience and engagement, companies that use traditional IT self-service portals are under a
lot of pressure to find a quick answer.
So, what's the answer?
Service and support capabilities that are frictionless to use
There are several existing access methods that can be regarded direct alternatives to a standard gateway, such as:
🟣 Employees have access to IT help "in their palm" thanks to mobile applications that, although still portal-like in appearance, are more user-friendly.
🟣 Slack and Microsoft Teams (internal work collaboration applications) provide access.
🟣 Amazon's Alexa, Google's Home, and the speech interface on Android and iOS smartphones are all examples of voice access points.
There are also a variety of smart capabilities that may be used to offer service and support through these alternative access channels (in addition to traditional channels), such as:
🟣Chatbots and virtual assistants with conversational artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities — either text or voice-based. These can either use knowledge or automation to support an employee, or they can capture demand for human-based aid or service supply.
🟣Smart automation (which includes both machine learning and robotic process automation (RPA)6 skills) - the automatic delivery of what an employee need, such as issue resolution or updated software.
🟣Smart email autoresponders — this is intelligent automation applied to a typical access route. An email from an employee to IT support is automatically responded to with a machine-learning-generated response that explains the expected repair step and/or links to smart automation to provide what's needed.
In brief, your business can deliver rapid and frictionless service and support by integrating different access routes with smart capabilities.
