Employee Center: Define and measure success by identifying clear business outcomes & KPIs

Pooja Gupta1 · ‎03-22-2024

Every organization wants to reduce cost, drive operational efficiencies, and increase revenue. A great way to do this is by building a unified employee portal using Employee Center, thereby increasing self-service, and creating experiences that lead to greater employee productivity.

However, to justify the investment in modernizing your employee portal, you need to clearly articulate the value i.e. the Return on the Investment (ROI) and build a business case that ties with your organization’s business goals.

Every organization is unique, with its own culture, goals, and challenges, so there is no “one size fits all” vision that you can take off the shelf. However, you can learn from other organizations that have already embarked on a similar transformation journey. In this document, we draw on ServiceNow's experience working with thousands of organizations like yours to highlight the most widely targeted business outcomes and the key performance indicators (KPIs).

Key Employee Center business objectives, outcomes, and KPIs

The table below summarizes the most frequent business objectives for implementing Employee Center (Pro).

Key Business Objective (realized by deploying Employee Center)	Why it matters? (example organizational challenges)
1. Simplify access to information, updates, and services across all departments and through any device	Employees find it difficult to find information when they need it or get help quickly. They often need to rely on costly channels such as voice calls to get some of their basic needs like password reset or employee verification letter.
2. Integrate information from back-office systems and automate common processes	Teams are stuck manually managing content and information across different tools and systems. Managers need to move from one system to another just to do their Approvals.
3. Engage employees with personalized, dynamic, and actionable communications	Uninformed or unengaged employees miss out on important events and announcements, leading to delayed actions or business disruptions.

The return on investment (ROI) or business value associated with the above objectives can measured using the below outcomes and success metrics or KPIs.

	Employee Center Outcomes	Explanation (How Employee Center helps to achieve them)	Success Metric (KPIs)
Impacts Cost	Reduce the number of tickets (fulfiller)	Improved employee self-service via a unified portal to access services results in fewer tickets to fulfillers	Ticket Volume (#)
	Reduce ticket resolution effort (fulfiller)	Accelerate ticket resolution by providing fulfillers with contextual information, knowledge articles, etc. in a consolidated view, collected at the time of submission	Time to resolve Tickets (hours)
	Increase portal administrator efficiency	Reduce portal management effort for admins through easily configurable multi-department experiences, external data source integrations, analytics, etc.	Portal administrator FTE efficiency
	Increase communication content creator efficiency	Streamline content creation effort by providing authors with integrated workflows, editors, etc. to create and analyze multi-channel targeted communications	Avg. cumulative effort for content creation and publishing (hours)
	Decommission enterprise portal spend	Retire existing enterprise portals, legacy intranets, etc.	Enterprise portal annual run rate ($)
Reduces Risk	Reduce disruptions from poor/missed communications	Reduce the probability of disruptions to employees by serving up proactive announcements, personalized recommendations, assigned tasks, etc.	Employee Productivity lost due to poor/missed communications (%)
Increases revenue	Reduce the number of tickets (employee)	Self-service via a unified portal enables employees to resolve requests quickly, resulting in reduced time spent on requests	Ticket Volume (#)
Increases revenue	Reduce employee time spent on search	Consolidate employee interaction channels (portals) across the enterprise to reduce time spent on search	Employee time spent on search (%)
Non-monetized	Increase employee satisfaction (non-monetized)	Increase employee satisfaction via consolidated interaction channels, better user experiences, easier access to information, etc.	NPS or CES- Success metric will vary depending on how satisfaction is measured (e.g. employee satisfaction specific to company portals)

Think about how each of the above outcomes supports your organization’s business goals and create a ranked list.  A typical process might follow these steps:

Choose your top outcomes and share these with your stakeholders to align on priorities.
Evaluate how many of these agreed outcomes you can reasonably address in your initial rollout, and which ones need to be delivered in future phases.
Use this evaluation to create a roadmap that aligns with your strategic goals.
Share this roadmap with your stakeholders to get their agreement and support.

NOTE: You can achieve all the business outcomes above over time. However, by prioritizing which ones to target first, you accelerate time to value and avoid doing too much, too soon.

Learn more on how you can take a multi-phased approach to deploying Employee Center.

Example Success Stories

Here are some examples of results peer organizations have achieved by deploying Employee Center along with their other ServiceNow investments. Please note these results are only intended as a real-life example of what other organizations have achieved. You can leverage these guidelines and examples to help build a business case for your organization.

Organization name:

To see more success stories and hear directly from peer organizations who have deployed Employee Center, attend our Employee Center Show & Tell webinars hosted by Live on ServiceNow.

Note: Employee Center reference in this article is for the product as a whole, i.e. it includes capabilities available for both Employee Center and Employee Center Pro licenses.