A 2021 report by Forrester predicts that remote work will stay at 300% of pre-COVID levels, permanently changing operational practices and how organizations design their employee experiences. 

At the same time, employee expectations haven’t waivered — it’s actually the opposite. Employees expect more from their employers in the digital age: thoughtful, well-designed, and consumer-like personalized experiences that enable them to do their best work at any time, from anywhere. 

Employee frustrations with the current systems in place are well founded; the traditional approach to solving employee’s IT issues (creating a ticket and waiting for an email response that can take days to address and requires a lot of time on part of your human resources) doesn’t hold up against the new world of work. Without IT and HR teams that work around-the clock, time-to-resolution is too long, impeding employees from delivering on their work and forcing higher impact projects to stay on hold.

Remote employees are looking for better solutions. They’re setting up their own hardware and software, from different time zones and across borders. And without immediate assistance to onboarding, setting up their employee accounts and software, they’re likely to be blocked from starting and delivering on important work. When this is the case organization-wide, your employee experience (EX) worsens, productivity decreases and so does the overall business growth. 

What brands need now is transformational ITSM that puts employees in the driver’s seat — providing them with best-in-class technology experiences like instant access to software and tools and speedy resolutions to their most pressing questions and work-blockers. And, at the same time, freeing up IT and HR teams from tirelessly attending to repetitive and mundane tickets that are better suited for your employees to self-serve. 

So ask yourself: do you want to reduce operational costs? Improve employee productivity and satisfaction? Well, we’d be worried if you didn’t. 

What you need is automation that allows you to reserve employees for the projects and tasks that bring value, not only to your organization, but to them professionally. 

Transformational, automation-first ITSM better serves your employees, IT, and HR teams

So we know that traditional ITSM models are struggling to remain relevant in the digital age. Simply working to fix problems, like hardware setup and software support, takes away the ability for IT teams to focus on more impactful projects like anticipating tech market changes, implementing new IT software and tools, and handling mass incidents. But where does automation come in?

Automating repetitive inquiries that require little to no human intervention—password resets, login support, and system access for example — removes barriers and allows employees to auto-resolve inquiries from anywhere, at any moment they choose to do their work.  

According to Forrester, satisfaction with work devices and technical support drives employee engagement. Employees who scored in the top 20% of engagement are more likely to be satisfied with their technology environment, while those in the lowest 50% were most dissatisfied with their technology. 

In IT uses cases, automation allows employees to:

• Troubleshoot device issues
• Set up their needed technology, software, and tools
• Get immediate support on their inquiries, with instant access to updates on their request

This frees up IT teams from having to spend an exorbitant amount of time and effort on low-skill, repetitive, administrative tasks to focus on more impactful and rewarding projects.

In HR use cases, automation allows employees to:

• Quickly find information they need on vacation policies, employee benefits, recruitment and referral programs, and expensing
• Instantly access referral statuses, track reimbursements, and view compensation reviews
• Receive proactive reminders on HR required actions like updating payroll information
• Submit real-time employee feedback

This allows HR teams to focus on attracting top talent, drive productivity and employee satisfaction, and sustain relevance in a digital-first landscape. 

Brands who have extended the value of automation to their internal teams are already seeing great returns: 84% of IT and HR tickets resolved and 50% of help desk staff re-assigned to higher-value projects.

Key Takeaway for ITSM: Brands need to transform their ITSM to address the pains of remote work and keep up with employee expectations. An automation-first ITSM approach allows employees to self-serve and get to work faster and more efficiently, while giving time back to IT teams to focus on more impactful and satisfying work. 

Marry the quality of your EX with that of your CX

Transforming digital workflows through automation, with a new focus on people behavior and culture, is a top focus for ITSM this year—and in the years ahead. But currently only 25% of organizations are prioritizing the use of automation in the IT infrastructure and IT operations over the next 12 months. And with automation having the potential to contain 80%+ of interactions, this appears to be a significant oversight. 

An Automated Employee Experience (AEX) directs employees to where they can find policies, technology how-tos, and detailed product information. In turn, it frees up your IT, HR, and other internal leaders to focus on optimizing their teams’ output and put leading business objectives at the forefront of their daily work. 

Still, many brands prioritize the customer experience above all else, but it’s becoming clearer that the ability to attract and retain top talent is an equally important revenue driver for brands. To break down the silos between your brand’s interest in CX with EX means ITSM that thinks from the outside-in, offering the same proactive interactions model to internal stakeholders. 

Transformational ITSM that prioritizes AEX:

• Allows employees instant and painless access to resolving support issues themselves, reducing cost-per-ticket and allowing IT teams to move quickly on tasks and projects that have more impact on organizational infrastructure and growth.
• Empowers employees to self-serve their technology onboarding, and increases the ROI of service desk teams without rising IT headcount.
• Provides proactive, automated interactions to employees on updates, where to find resources, and feedback on current ITSM and employee structures. Gathering insights and real-time employee feedback into the technology experience enables brands to optimize EX that can boost productivity and satisfaction. 

Key Takeaway for ITSM: Brands should be transforming their ITSM to marry EX with that of their CX, offering automation as the first layer of interaction support with employees.

Look for a no-code automation platform that integrates seamlessly with the employee-facing tech stack and enables internal teams to build efficiencies through automation. ITSM teams can use this conversational, self-service approach to pull in knowledge from distributed resources and quickly share them with team members.

Implementing an Automated Employee Experience (AEX) is good for employees and for business

Just because employees are working from home, doesn’t mean brands need to abandon their approach to employee engagement. Hyper personalized automated interactions with employees can be infused with empathy, emotion, and even humor — and they should be — while at the same time, providing answers to employee’s most common, most pressing, and most important questions. 

Your approach to AEX should intelligently comprehend employee inquiries through the same Natural Language Understanding (NLU) you use for automation-first CX, pulling in knowledge to provide quick answers and direct employees to resources, creating autonomy among employees, and allow IT teams to focus on more meaningful and interesting work. 

But AEX extends benefits past employee satisfaction, well-being and retention — it manages the costs associated with serving a growing remote workforce and allows brands to ladder up their ITSM performance into broader business goals.

Automating employee interactions with the right platform allows brands to make stronger data and insight-driven decisions. When ITSM is focused on connecting data, insights, and action in one place, brands can track communication patterns and pinpoint gaps and bottlenecks in collaboration and productivity. 

At the same time, brands can leverage this transformational approach to ITSM for software and hardware provisioning to stay on top of licensing approvals, transactions, and delivery.

Key Takeaway for ITSM: AEX reduces average handle time for IT teams by pulling in information from knowledge bases on how to troubleshoot or set up systems. Set up your AEX to capture and store employee inquiries, summaries, and transcripts, and use them to inform future automation.