Digital Employee Experience Evolution
Over the past two years, ServiceNow witnessed an evolution in the Digital Employee Experience mindset. Our customers recognized that they must simplify and personalize the digital experience for their employees to keep them productive and happy. This stems from Design Thinking methodology and reimagining the way employees access information and services to do their jobs. Every week, I talk to more customers who want to replace their legacy intranets with ServiceNow as a way to achieve their objectives. It’s all about consolidation of portals and providing an engagement layer to help employees navigate the digital landscape.
In terms of timing, the train has left the station. Check out this video from our customer Channel 9 (formerly Fairfax Media) and our partner NewRocket. This is just one customer who is doing this already.
History
Why are customers doing this? They recognize that their legacy Intranets have become ineffective link farms. Due to a lack of controls, one customer told me at Knowledge 2019 that their company’s Intranet feels like a “flea market.” “We don’t know what is relevant, what’s old, what’s broken, or what’s valuable,” she explained. Additionally, many of the legacy Intranets are not mobile responsive, are not personalized, and do not provide the metrics and analytics necessary for Internal Corporate Communications to improve the experience. Another customer referred to his company’s Intranet as a “dumping ground.” Another major complaint is search results. (More on that later.) ServiceNow's introduction of Targeted Content and Campaigns with the London release is what opened the eyes of Corporate Communications leaders, who began to see the possibilities.
Why ServiceNow?
"Employees don’t have to go to our Intranet and they rarely do unless we drive them there. Employees have to go to ServiceNow to get things done. We want to meet them where they are,” a customer told me. “The Intranet is passive.. ServiceNow is actionable,” another customer explained.
The truth is...
Employee Experience = Intelligent Workflows + Modern Engagement
Content Management Systems only provide ½ the formula at best. ServiceNow fulfills both sides of the equation and also produces a “connected experience” by guiding employees in their journey across the digital enterprise landscape to the applications and information they need. The Employee Experience Packs that ServiceNow publishes are excellent examples of this convergence.
Advantages
ServiceNow provides advantages over the legacy Intranets.
- Targeted Content and Information Campaigns are personalized.
- Catalogs and Workflows make ServiceNow actionable, not merely passive
- It’s easy to get help. Employees are never stuck at a dead end when they cannot find what they need.
- Knowledge content has governance and controls that make it easy to manage; so it’s always relevant and up to date.
- Analytics allow content managers to see exactly how employees are interacting with the digital experience, so they know how to continuous improve it.
- Content Managers can assign tasks to employees to take actions; such as acknowledging an announcement, signing a policy, or watching a video. Therefore, they know exactly which employees are interacting with their content and campaigns.
- ServiceNow’s interface is mobile responsive and includes native mobile apps and a virtual assistant with natural language understanding, so employees may engage via the channel of their choice.
- ServiceNow’s Integration Hub provides a “Connected Experience” across the digital landscape. This is useful for universal approvals and to-do’s. It also allows ServiceNow to guide the employee to the correct application contextually from a knowledge article or campaign.
- ServiceNow’s AppEngine makes the platform extensible. Customers build applications to fill the voids in their application portfolio that are native to the ServiceNow experience. (See consolidation above.)
- ServiceNow is able to search across many different sources of content and return results that are prioritized by relevance for the employee who is searching. Search is so important that we discuss it in greater detail below.
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What are Customers Really Doing?
The term “Intranet” means different things to different people and includes various components. Let’s be clear. ServiceNow is not going to replace productivity and collaboration products, such as Microsoft’s suite of OneDrive, SharePoint, Teams, and Yammer. But customers are using ServiceNow as the engagement layer where employees start their digital journey. Some customers will refer to ServiceNow as the “One Stop Shop”. I think it is more appropriate to refer to it as the “One Start Shop” because it’s unrealistic to expect an employee to stop and stay within ServiceNow 100% of the time. They will start in ServiceNow, but ServiceNow will guild them to Microsoft applications, Human Capital Management systems, Learning Management Systems, or Financial ERP systems when it’s appropriate. And ServiceNow can search all those applications to help employees find what they need from one place.
Unified Search
Search is critically important to employee productivity and satisfaction because it is the main way people find information and answers. Today, many companies force employees to access each system separately to search for information within it. This would be akin to forcing people to go to Google when they want to search for movies, Yahoo when they want to search for cars, and Bing when they want to search of a good restaurant. But what happens in the enterprise when you need an answer and you don’t even know in which system it’s stored? It's not pretty.
Several partners enhance ServiceNow’s search capabilities to crawl and index content from multiple sources and present it back to the employee in a unified view with relevancy that is continuously improved via machine learning. Relevancy is important because you don’t want the information they are seeking to be buried on page 3 of the intermixed results. And reconciling user accounts across the different systems to honor permissions is also important. You don’t want to present a result that give the employee a “you don’t have permission…” message when she clicks on it.
Some Customers have expertise with in-house search platforms such as Google, Elastic, Solr, or Azure and can use these to index content from ServiceNow and other systems. But two partners have specific ServiceNow offerings: Coveo and Attivio. (Note: ServiceNow acquired Attivio in the fall of 2019 and is replatforming the technology so that it will be native to the ServiceNow platform. Therefore, the former Attivio offering is no longer available until ServiceNow releases it.)
Coveo has an impressive offering that includes prebuilt connectors to common enterprise systems and works within ServiceNow for both employees and service agents. Coveo can track employee behaviors and recommend content to them as well. I always encourage customers to evaluate Coveo or leverage their in-house enterprise search solution to make search work better for their employees.
Stakeholders
Many customers have evolved to provide a unified services portal experience to their employees; therefore HR, IT, Finance, Legal, Workplace Services are all stakeholders. But when customers leverage ServiceNow as the Employee Experience & Engagement Platform to replace their legacy Intranet, Corporate Communications becomes intimately invested.
Corporate Communications is accustomed to using classic content management systems (CMS) to power their Intranets. For larger organizations, publishing microsites (i.e. subpages, topic pages, or team pages) is important. Therefore, delegated content authoring becomes important. Corporate Communications wants to ensure that various leaders have the ability to author and publish content for their teams and that subject matter experts can control the content on their topic pages (e.g. Career Development, Wellness, Open Enrollment, etc…) It is expected that many of these content managers will be restricted to publishing content to specific pages or audiences they have access to.
They key is providing an intuitive content authoring interface and to accommodate various workflows for collaborating, reviewing, and approving content as it is developed. Less formal content for smaller audiences may be instantly published and formal content (e.g. “we just acquired a new company…”) should be reviewed and approved at multiple levels.
ServiceNow is not known as a classic content management system; but it has terrific governance and controls for content such as knowledge articles. Partners have been adept at configuring capabilities for building microsites with delegated content management and governance and controls to match customers’ desired processes. Here is an example that
Corporate Communications leaders are often also keen to provide a social collaboration application to employees, such as Yammer or Workplace. That’s great. ServiceNow can interface and integrate with those applications. And if investing in a world-class social collaboration tool is not on their roadmap or budget, then I encourage them to evaluate ServiceNow’s Employee Forums (a.k.a. Communities).
Conclusion
These are exciting times. The digital evolution feels like a digital revolution! ServiceNow customers are reimagining the experience from the employees’ perspective and realizing that employees need a connected experience that guides them in their journey across the digital landscape. It must be actionable; not merely passive, and it should be personalized and modern. Customers who take advantage of this trend this will reap the benefits in terms of employee productivity and delight.
