How ITSM Helps Drive Exceptional Digital Employee Experience

Orinal source post by Melissa Palmer

Throughout the pandemic, we heard quite a bit about digital transformation initiatives. Companies are often looking for ways to leverage technology as a competitive advantage to accelerate business outcomes.

However, if we’re looking for a true digital transformation, we need to take one step back and look at how the increasing use of technology affects our employees and the future of work. By shifting our focus to understanding digital employee experience (DEX), organizations can work to improve the digital experience for their employees.

The good news is you may already have a tool you can use to help improve DEX. One often overlooked way you can help prioritize the digital employee experience in your workplace is with an IT Service Management, or ITSM, solution. ITSM incorporates different processes and technologies to enable IT services to meet the needs of users.

In this post, I’ll dive deeper into what DEX is, the importance of creating a digital workplace, common challenges, and how you can better understand the digital employee experience by rethinking your ITSM solution.

What is digital employee experience?

Digital employee experience in the modern era is about ensuring employees are easily and successfully able to adopt workplace technology to improve their work experience. This makes employees happier—and, of course, can lead to increased productivity.

In the age of digital transformation and remote work, we want our employees to access any app, device, or location. The digital experience is also about ensuring workplace technology provides a productive work environment.

What are the benefits of a digital workplace for employee experience?

Creating the best workplace environment can be a crucial factor regarding issues like employee retention and attrition. A central benefit of a digital workplace is allowing team members to work the way they are happiest and most productive.

How they like to work, will, of course, vary depending on the employee. For instance, some employees prefer to work from home, while others prefer to come into the office, or have a hybrid schedule. Some users may prefer to submit a service ticket when they need help while others may prefer to self-serve more simple help desk tasks or message support through their preferred chat app for real-time assistance.

When employees are given the freedom to choose how they work best, employee satisfaction rises—as long as they have a good digital experience. Users can have the same day-to-day experience through a digital workspace, regardless of their location or work device. This is especially important with the rise of mobile devices and bring your own device (BYOD) in recent years.

What are challenges to implementing digital employee experience?

Some of the biggest challenges to implementing an effective DEX strategy stem from having ineffective systems needed to support the digital employee experience.

Prioritizing employees’ digital experience must include providing employees with the resources they need to understand how to use new technologies, software, and other digital systems required to perform their jobs. Without this support, organizations may see increased service tickets from frustrated users with digital issues. This frustration can also result in employees not using the software or implementing alternative solutions to solve their problems, which can affect the return on investment of the provided solution, lead to toolset sprawl, cause workplace silos, and present security risks.

Driving successful software adoption by employees is often overlooked or done with a substandard approach, which is a huge mistake. A great digital employee experience can be nearly impossible to achieve without taking the time to help employees understand the digital tools available and processes necessary to help them excel in their roles.

How to get a better understanding of digital employee experience with ITSM

As someone who has been on both sides of the fence, from providing internal customers IT services to consuming them, I know a focus on DEX through ITSM can go a long way in improving the overall experience for everyone involved. To better understand how to improve DEX, let’s dig into what makes ITSM a critical component to understanding how employees interact with and perceive their digital experience at work.

Since ITSM covers everything from service request management, lifecycle management, incident management, and problem solving to change management and asset tracking, organizations can often create a better digital employee experience by using ITSM tools to streamline these workflows, minimize disruption caused by technical issues, and improve operational efficiency across departments.

For example, with an ITSM solution, you can collect key metrics to better understand the digital experience, including performing service desk benchmarking of data for customer satisfaction, average response speed, agent satisfaction, alongside other performance dashboards. These benchmarks can help teams compare their performance against industry standards more easily and trend these metrics over time. Using this deeper level of understanding, teams can derive actionable insights to help ensure they’re providing a successful service desk experience and putting user experience and well-being front and center.

Using an ITSM solution can also help support your ability to provide better resources, support, and overall digital experience to employees with built-in functionality designed to help maximize employee productivity by solving common pain points, such as:

• A change management solution can help reduce disruptions and allow IT teams to better plan changes to minimize employee downtime
• A knowledge base can provide step-by-step articles and tutorials for employees to reference and find answers to common questions, which can also enable employees to resolve common issues on their own
• An employee self-service portal can serve as a one-stop shop for submitting and tracking service requests by providing full visibility into ticket progress
• An IT service catalog can eliminate unnecessary back and forth with dynamic request forms to help streamline workflows through automation

Another core component of DEX supported by ITSM tools is the ability to create a centralized way for remote or in-office employees to receive services through a digital workplace designed with end-user experience in mind. From something as simple as browsing the intranet for something they need to submitting service desk requests, an ITSM solution can help organizations provide a great digital employee experience for users, wherever they are located.

Improving employee experience with ITSM

While prioritizing the digital employee experience is often the first step towards elevating employee satisfaction and the customer experience, it’s equally as important to frequently examine the digital employee experience to ensure it’s a great one, which is another reason making the most out of your ITSM solution is so important. It’s easy for a user to become frustrated if their services aren’t working as expected, so having the best processes and workflows in place to quickly address and resolve issues becomes a crucial part of the digital employee experience.

If you’re on your journey to create the ultimate digital employee experience, be sure to take a look SolarWinds^® Service Desk to learn how it can help drive your ITSM processes. With more than 200 cloud application integrations, Service Desk can provide an all-encompassing solution to address the service management needs of IT teams and more, including human resources, finance departments, and other key business stakeholders.

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