For business decades past, IT has been the team responsible for providing access to technology. Once considered the gate keepers, and even ‘gods of admin rights’ at times, IT is often viewed negatively by most employees.
In fact, according to a 2016 study run by PwC, “90% of C-suite executives believe their company pays attention to people’s needs when introducing new technology, but only about half (53%) of staff say the same.” How can we ensure our employees feel differently? By putting the employee experience first.
What does that mean? Hasn’t IT always cared about employees? Absolutely! IT was created to care for the technological needs of every employee; however, providing a technical solution and a desirable solution can be two entirely different things. What’s the most complicated digital service you’ve ever had to interact with at work? Chances are, even if it was ‘functional’, a frustrating experience can change the entire workday. Let’s look at Dr. Novant as an example:
Dr. Novant is a primary care physician, working for a large healthcare organization. There are 150+ locations affiliated with the healthcare network, and many doctors travel between sites as part of their scheduled shifts. Anytime Dr. Novant needs to access patient records, he fights with the technical systems in place. Most doctors and nursing staff have struggled, and IT receives on average 4,000 calls a month because of it. Can you imagine waiting an average of 4 hours on IT to do your job? IT is aware they have an infrastructure problem and need $3M in approved budget to correct it permanently. What do the doctors and nurses do in the interim? Continue to bleed $.5M in work waste a month?
There aren’t many organizations thriving with that type of productivity being lost each month. Think about the salary for nurses and doctors, as well as the support staff that engages when issues arise. Those costs cannot be ignored. Now, insert the idea of putting the employee experience first. In this case, we did so. We met with the customer and simply asked the employees for their desired experience. Their response was “Although you cannot stop our virtual sessions from freezing, if doctors and nurses could at least reset their own sessions, that would change the game for us.”. Three weeks later, Dr. Novant’s experience at work changed drastically, thanks to an employee first focus.
How did we do it? By automating technology services. Luckily, this healthcare company already processed employee issues on the ServiceNow platform. Because of the integration capabilities available via the platform, we were able to deliver a self-service solution for ‘trouble accessing patient records’ via chat. How was it architected?
- First, we had to create a conversation in Virtual Agent that would be available to the appropriate staff, with the correct tracking on the back end, for audit purposes.
- Next, we created a ServiceNow spoke that connected to the Citrix server farm and checked for ‘active sessions’ for the given employee via Citrix PowerShell command (‘run as’ wrapper required). If ‘sessions’ were found, the spoke invoked clearing them.
- Lastly, we enabled the conversation to be available on the mobile device. If employees were still unsuccessful, the conversation would create a ticket for the Citrix team. IT could see the previous steps taken by the spoke and quickly continue troubleshooting.
This solution saved each employee an average of four hours per issue, resulting in 16,000 hours per year saved from work waste. How can you quickly identify solutions that could change your work world? We start by using analytics. If you can compile a list of the highest number of employee issues, by category, you can begin to look at the experiences where impact is possible. Remember, you won’t be able to fix everything, that’s not the point. Instead spend time on solutions that provide the most employees value.
If you’re struggling to create innovative solutions or you’re unaware how much power your ServiceNow platform has, feel free to reach out to your Premier Partner, Veracity! Our team of experts have been in the ServiceNow ecosystem for 10+ years and designing experiences is our specialty! Need the solution we created in the example? It’s since been certified and published on the ServiceNow store. You can search Citrix to see the Virtual Agent and Spoke solution, along with many others.
