The Urgency Around Digital Employee Experience And Enterprise Resilience

The employee experience in an organization is directly connected to the overall productivity of the company. If your employees are not getting the right support in the right manner, their work and your outcome will face dire implications. 

In 2021, you cannot continue with the traditional employee support if you want to leverage your functionality. Gone are the days when fragmented employee support worked well for an organization. Owing to a steady increase in digitization, employees need support that is automated, quick, personalized, and highly efficient in solving problems. 

The world is going digital after the pandemic in 2020. According to a report by IDG, 70% of the companies functioning in 2021 either have a digital transformation strategy in place or are working towards implementing one soon. 

This makes it clear that the urgency around a digitized employee experience is real. With businesses forced to operate virtually and professionals made to switch to online collaborative platforms, almost every business process in every industry has found a digital alternative. 

Platforms like Slack, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams have found more user adoption than ever. According to a report by Forbes, Zoom's Q4 2019 (the fiscal year 2020) revenue grew by 78% to $188.3 million. This is because employees are finding it easier, more convenient, and more efficient to work via online collaborative platforms. 

What Do Employees Need In 2021? 

Employees' needs have significantly changed over time and a lot of them revolve around having a digital experience. 

Ease Of Operation 

As more and more professionals are getting hooked on digital platforms in their daily lives, they demand ease of operation while working. When they can create documents, organize them, and share them anywhere across the world with a few simple clicks, they would never want to resort to a more traditional alternative again. 

An "Artificial Brain" To Work With 

The increasing prominence of automation in workplaces has resulted in the need to have a virtual assistant to assist the employees whenever they encounter challenges. Artificial intelligence has improved the employee experience by providing them with continuous support by understanding exactly what they need. 

Work Flexibility 

In 2021, employees no longer want to adhere to the traditional 9-to-5 of going to work 5 days a week. As business processes are getting more digitized and the use of cloud platforms is on the rise, employees now have an option to work from anywhere and at any time, provided the given task is completed on time. All they need to do is log into a software platform and get to work. 

The Need To Collaborate While Working Remotely 

Although employees find working remotely convenient and refreshing, the need to interact with the team remains. It is never healthy (or advisable) for an employee to keep working out of a locked room without interacting with anyone. Along with a digital employee experience, employees need to collaborate with their team members to fill the void left by the lack of water cooler conversations! 

The Texas Winter Disaster – A Warning Bell 

On February 12, 2021, Austin (Texas) witnessed a massive winter storm leading to more than a week of freezing temperatures and a state-wide disaster. The disaster resulted in millions of Texas residents losing power, or water, or both. 

This troubled several tech companies of the state as they started facing issues in continuing with smooth business operations. News about founders relocating their headquarters has been doing rounds in the wake of the disaster. 

Just like the COVID situation in 2020, the winter storm in Texas exposed the mismanagement of several small and large companies, leading to disgruntled employees. With the lack of sufficient resources and infrastructure for employee support, companies are not able to deal with employee issues in an effective way. 

This situation makes it clear how important it is for an organization to implement a digital employee experience. Sooner or later, businesses that are not ready for the digital shift will find it extremely difficult to survive in the market and cop with disasters – both natural and man-made. 

The Problem With Traditional Employee Experience 

The traditional employee experience left employees dissatisfied, confused, and helpless as their issues were not resolved in a satisfactory way. 

A Fragmented Support 

The biggest problem with traditional employee experience is that of fragmented support. With different service desks for different departments and different issues, employees often found themselves confused as to where to go and whom to approach. 

Further, fragmented support increases the complexity and time taken for an issue to get resolved. This often led to employees avoiding the use of help desks altogether. 

Generic Solutions 

Traditional employee support lacked the much-needed personalization in providing solutions to the problems. This is because the enterprise knowledge base is not utilized in an optimum manner. For the questions asked by the employees, all they received was generic texts in the form of solutions, making them look for specific answers manually. 

Priority-based Approach 

When an organization employs support agents right from the first level of support, it is difficult for every employee to get the same help simultaneously. The issues raised by the employees often outnumber the agents providing solutions. This results in agents taking up more pressing issues as a priority, leaving employees with basic issues waiting. 

Manual Ticketing System 

The manual ticketing system often complicated things for employees when it came to resolving their issues. The system puts all the burden on the employees to create and track the support and request tickets until their issues are resolved. 

Further, the time is taken by a ticket to reach the agent and for the problem to get resolved was often too long. This resulted in employees having to wait for too long despite having basic issues. 

Support Restricted To ITSM 

The traditional employee experience in terms of support was often restricted to ITSM. With all the departments of an organization diversifying and adopting a digital approach, it is necessary to have digital employee support for the entire organization. 

Why Is Enterprise Resilience Important? 

With an increase in the complexities of various business processes, specific customer demands, support needs of the employees, and customization of services, enterprise resilience has become really important for organizations. 

Enterprise resilience allows your organization to handle a range of systemic discontinuities and adapt to new and dynamic risk environments. A resilient enterprise makes use of the most suitable technology to align a number of strategies, business processes, management systems, governance structures, and support services for dealing with an array of risks. 

Through enterprise resilience, you can establish complete transparency across the board, clearly defining the controls for the CEO and senior management for addressing risks throughout the organization. The practice is important to safeguard the interests of your company and to empower your team to deal with a number of risks threatening the well-being of your company. 

Similar to digital employee experience, digital enterprise resilience allows you and your team to make use of process automation to mitigate crises and solving all major technical and non-technical issues faced by your organization. 

The Importance Of Digital Employee Experience And Enterprise Resilience 

When you digitize the employee experience and the resilience of your organization, you are no longer bound by a physical infrastructure for carrying out support services. Not only do modern software platforms provide much-needed flexibility to your employees, but they also increase the efficiency of their work. 

Today, all the support needs of your employees can be taken care of by implementing a single and unified service desk powered by AI technology. The use of AI allows the platform to understand the questions asked and issues raised by your employees, providing them with solutions that are tailor-made for them. 

The modern service desks provide a digital employee experience across all departments of an organization. From collaborative platforms to retail businesses, AI-based help desks make matters simpler and more organized for the users. 

Rezolve.ai, the AI-service desk integrated within Microsoft Teams, provides the employees with a completely digital experience for obtaining support, giving specific commands, and automating specific processes. For every question asked, the platform scans the enterprise knowledge base and provides a personalized solution to the problem in a matter of a few seconds. 

Use Of Conversational AI 

As opposed to the employees having to wait for hours to get their issues resolved, the use of conversational AI improves the overall employee experience and provides them with wholesome solutions. 

Conversational AI allows you to employ AI chatbots to solve answer every question of your employees almost immediately. They will be accompanied by a virtual assistant from the moment they log into the service desk and engage with them throughout. 

When you use such a technology for providing constant support to your employees, they avail the benefits of agent interaction and advanced technology on the same platform. The interactive nature of the chatbots allows them to obtain assistance every step of the way. This helps your employees obtain answers to all their problems without having to waste their precious time wondering whom to approach. 

An Integrated Help Desk 

An integrated help desk helps you in leveraging the employee experience within all your departments. As mentioned earlier, having a separate help desk for each department often results in chaos and mismanagement of cases. Here, all your employees can have common L1 support where the virtual assistant will answer all the basic questions, irrespective of the department in question. 

Mobile Customization 

Employees need more flexibility at work. Gone are the days when they would sit at their desks for 8 hours a day and get up only when the daily workload was completed. Moreover, not every employee may have access to a desktop/laptop at the workplace. 

In such cases, the use of relevant business apps can significantly improve the work experience of your employees through digitization. Once they have the app installed on their cell phones or tablets, they can work from anywhere and at any time by logging in. Also, mobile apps are convenient for field employees who are always on the go. They help the back-end departments coordinate with the employees in real-time, ensuring utmost work efficiency. 

Seamless Employee Training 

If your organization requires your employees to learn specific skills to perform or improve their job, it is advisable to train them through your employee service desk. As opposed to spending money every time you need to train an employee, having the microlearning feature within your service desk helps you train your employees in an economical way. 

Moreover, this allows your employees to learn new and important skills by themselves. As they are guided by the digital training resources provided right at their fingertips, they feel more self-reliant after learning the concerned skills. Ultimately, increased motivation and self-reliance will lead to increased productivity. 

Engaging Content 

For the longest time, employees have been provided with long texts in the form of manuals, rule-books, and guides for support. However, if you want to improve employee support through digitization, it is advisable to make use of engaging support content provided to them via your help desk. 

Use images, animations, videos, infographics, and charts to indulge your employees better and help them retain the information effectively. 

Invisible Ticketing System 

Arguably the best employee support can be provided by removing the traditional ticketing system, which required the employees to manage their support and request tickets. 

Modern AI service desks make use of AI chatbots to create, track, and close tickets on behalf of your employees. All they need to do is ask a question and the system will automatically raise a ticket, route the case to a dedicated agent, bring the answer back to the employee, and close the ticket when the employee is satisfied with the solution. 

The Final Word 

The issue of unorganized employee support and poor employee experience is common across the world. You can take the first step towards providing a better work environment to your employees by digitizing the support provided to them. 

If you have any other suggestions for improving the employee experience, you can share your thoughts in the comments below.