Personalized Experiences
Traditional intranets do not provide personalized experiences. A modern intranet build on an employee experience platform delivers hyper-personalized company news, departmental announcements, and other communications targeted via composite employee profiles that may include any combination of information; for example business unit, level, position, location, status, start date or work anniversary, birthday, and assigned assets (e.g. laptop). Content managers may personalize the experience by targeting curated content to audiences and allow the Platform to recommend content via Machine Learning based on an employee’s actions and interests. Employees may also individualize their own experiences by designating topics of interest, subscribing to particular Community Forums, and bookmarking their favorite articles, forms, and applications.
Omni-Channel Campaigns
Traditional intranets only support portal content. An employee experience platform supports omni-channel content that can be targeted to the portal, mobile app, email, SMS text, push notifications, and even external collaboration interfaces such as Microsoft Teams and Facebook Workplace to meet employees wherever they are. Furthermore, an EX Platform can combine multiple pieces of content and publish them in stages over time based on dynamic triggers and dates. Common examples of campaigns may include Open Enrollment, Earth Day, or even a Laptop Refresh.
Service Management
Traditional intranets may navigate employees to other portals where they can search for answers to their questions or submit support tickets, but they do not natively provide the support function which can lead to confusion and wasted time for employees. An Employee Experience Platform natively provides employee services for IT, HR, and other departments in the same portal or mobile experience that employees use every day. Therefore employees are never confused about where to go for help.
Employee Tasking
A common complaint we hear from content managers using traditional intranets is, “we can publish content all day long, but we can’t make anyone do anything.” With an EX Platform, you may assign tasks (a.k.a. To-Do’s) to employees to take actions, such as acknowledging they read content, watching a video, signing a policy with an eSignature, or clicking on a link. Content managers may track compliance and workflows can automatically remind employees or escalate attention to these tasks before they are overdue.
Single Sign-On Application Access
Traditional intranet portals may have a list of applications, but they do not integrate with the organization’s Identity Management and Provisioning system, such as Okta or Azure. ServiceNow’s AppLauncher integrates with these systems to provide employees SSO access to the applications they are entitled to access and it allows the employee to access their recent or favorite applications for convenience.
Aggregated Approvals & Tasks
Legacy intranets are disconnected and passive. An EX Platform is digitally connected and “actionable.” ServiceNow’s Approvals Hub aggregates approval requests from common enterprise functional systems (e.g. Concur, Workday, Ariba, Coupa) so managers may review and approve/reject requests directly in ServiceNow’s portal or mobile interfaces. ServiceNow also aggregates tasks originating from other systems, such as a human capital management or learning management system, so employees can be alerted to actions they need to take in a single view.
“Our Intranet was a Link Farm”
Traditional intranet portals have a propensity to devolve into link farms. Why? Search was so ineffective that employees could trust they would find what they were looking for and therefore the content managers had no recourse other than to place more and more links on the portal pages in hopes that employees would find what they need. An EX Platform powers search using Artificial Intelligence, so the relevancy of the search results are continuously improved over time and employees can trust their results. This means the portal pages can remain clean and uncluttered.
On top of AI-Powered Search, ServiceNow allows customers to index and search external systems with relevancy and permissions intact. This unified search experience intermingles results ranked by relevancy from multiple enterprise systems to provide the best answer or file to the employee regardless where it is managed. AI-Search Connectors are available on the ServiceNow store to 40+ enterprise systems including SharePoint, OneDrive, Confluence, Jive, Google Drive, and more.
“Our Intranet was a Flea Market”
Many customers using traditional intranet technology explain that they lost control of content management. A common lament we hear is, “we don’t know what’s relevant, what’s new, what’s old, what’s broken, or who owns it.” An employee experience platform leverages workflows and content lifecycle to ensure that all content has ownership and governance in place, so it’s always accurate and up to date or it retires as planned.
Mobility
Traditional intranet portals do not have a corresponding mobile app experience. ServiceNow’s EX Platform provides the same personalized news, services, application access, and unified approval experience whether the employee is using a browser or the ServiceNow Mobile App.
Intelligence
The legacy, traditional intranet does not employee AI to recommend content to employees or to improve search results. An EX Platform takes advantage of AI to improve the relevancy of search results and to make recommendations to employees based on searches and other actions.
A Unified, Integrated Experience
The traditional intranet portal is an isolated view of links and content. An employee experience platform is digitally connected to unify touch points for employees. Basic examples include unified searching across multiple systems, application access with single-sign on, and aggregated approval requests. ServiceNow customers who are entitled to Integration Hub or HR Service Delivery may also display Total Rewards, PTO Balance, Paycheck information, and learning opportunities so employees don’t have to navigate to a myriad of HR systems to check that information. ServiceNow also provides pre-built integrations to pull in common employee profiles attributes from external systems to build robust profiles for hyper-personalized experiences and we allow employees to update information in ServiceNow and push that back to the system of record.
* Some prebuilt integrations may requires specific entitlements from ServiceNow.
Employee Journeys
Whether it’s onboarding, a promotion, a transfer, or a leave of absence, traditional intranet portals do not support these common employee moments that matter*. An EX Platform guides employees through these complex events using the same interface they use every day to get their news and start their day.
* This requires HR Service Delivery Enterprise from ServiceNow.
Content Requests & Governance
Content managers on the Communications team often receive requests for content in the form of email, making it difficult to track and prioritize their work. An EX Platform leverages Service Management to structure content requests, allowing content managers to collaborate, review, and schedule content efficiently with the requestors. Structuring the fulfillment of content requests supports dashboards to provide insights into the distribution of work and ensures quality through review workflows and approvals, reducing the risk that anything will fall through the cracks.
Extensibility
The traditional intranet portal is just a website. An Employee Experience Platform allows customers to extend it by creating fully functional custom applications that are native to the experience. Often times organizations suffer from digital sprawl that stifles employee productivity because different departments and teams purchased or built hundreds of disparate, niche applications which contribute to this sprawl and which confound employees with disjointed experiences. Customers can reduce this sprawl and confusion by re-platforming many of these niche applications onto the EX Platform.
