Improving employee service delivery with a high-quality internal support team has become as strategic as the quality of customer service. Taking care of employees as we take care of our customers not only has an impact on the corporate culture and motivation of individuals, but also on the image of the company, its ability to attract new customers, and retain new talents.
But before you could focus on the customer and employee experience, your organization probably had to start building its support team from the ground up, including:
- Establishing a help desk—a real single point of contact for all services and support to employees
- Adopting best practices by training and implementing ITIL within your organization
- Formalizing and industrialized your IT and business processes
- Integrating your service desk with an ITSM solution
- Setting up a self-service portal for your employees to search for information and make requests
In fact, your employee’s first experiences with your company start with your help desk, from recruitment and training to integration and provision of equipment and library resources, most of which are carried out digitally. The quality of the services, tools and support perceived by employees can have a major impact on their productivity and effectiveness, especially in a rapidly-changing digital world. For this reason, technologies adapted in the workplace should be on-par with employee’s expectations.
Today, you have to take on the challenge of improving the efficiency of your internal support in a world focused on the user experience. In the next section we will highlight 4 help desk software capabilities to consider that can provide a smarter, personalized employee experience.
1. Contextualized User Interface
In the age of digital and big data, the main challenge for users is no longer to have a myriad of information available, but to have the right information at the right time.
Customer service organizations have always understood this, which is why they started offering a fully personalized user experience through technology. For example, if a customer calls support, the agent would already know who’s calling by using the customer’s information, such as their phone number. This would automatically pull their profile as well as any products they’ve purchased or any services they have access to.
Applying these methods to your help desk software will allow you to prioritize information and make it more accessible by offering fully-customized pages and smart notifications. Although this is a feature that can only be accessible by the service desk technician, it allows them to access contextual information about an employee to provide a prompt resolution without the need to ask a laundry list of questions. It can also provide information related to their work habits, the equipment and applications used, rights granted, their function and position in the organization, etc.
2. Smart Knowledge Base
Even though creating a knowledge base is the first step for employee self-help, being able to enrich knowledge articles and manage content on an ongoing basis is a challenge without the right knowledge management tools. In this context you could ask yourself, is your organization agile and your tools intelligent enough to support this?
Enhancing your knowledge search with natural language processing (NLP) helps your customers find relevant answers. In addition, tools that interact with your help desk software in order to pull information that is already known for the user can deliver the most relevant answer. Finally, the knowledge base should be capable of taking action for the user, i.e. automatically creating a ticket for the user if the answer is not found.
With all the above, it’s important to set up tools and metrics to identify which knowledge articles are not being used or could be outdated. For example, measuring which knowledge articles are actually being used can help you determine what type of content needs to be updated or even removed from the knowledge base.
3. Omnichannel Support
This one is pretty straightforward, but you will be surprised by how often this capability is not available. To start, the help desk needs to deliver relevant content and services to employees whenever and wherever they need them—including from any device! You need responsiveness already built in to employee-facing portals and knowledge bases, so employees can access them on any device, desktop, tablet, or smartphone.
Now that support can be accessed from any device, it needs to be available through a variety of channels, as the preference to get support can range from a phone call, social media post, or a chatbot within the company messaging platform. This is why companies should have various channels to deliver support information, content, and knowledge articles to users. An omni-channel approach ensures that support can be reached or provided wherever the employee works, even in collaboration tools like Microsoft Teams.
4. Strong SLA Management
Many of you have probably heard that users don’t like calling the help desk because it is like sending something into a black hole. That’s because they don’t feel like they are a priority.
Providing a great employee experience includes assuring them that you understand the urgency of the problem and that the help desk has a commitment to resolving it within an agreed upon timeframe. Having a robust SLA management capability is essential for managing priorities and making sure help desk customers don’t fall through the cracks.
The ability to identify VIP customers and having well-defined SLAs for the overall organization drives improved visibility and reporting, putting you in the best position for success in the employees’ eyes. With strong SLA management, the help desk gains complete control over service level agreements to ensure that the help desk is delivering on their commitments. No help desk can survive without this key capability!
Going Beyond Expectations
With the constant evolution of technologies and the experiences that are delivered as a consumer, employees expect to get the same level of quality at work. To offer a stable and effective employee relationship, you will have to offer support and services the way employees want them, and if you already have a tool that delivers a contextualized interface, a smart knowledge base, omnichannel support, and SLA management, then you are on the road to employee support success.
