If the pandemic has taught businesses anything, it’s that user experience is essential to business success.
Before 2020, siloed teams and disconnected workflows all too often left organisations with disengaged employees and dissatisfied customers.
Enter COVID-19. Catering better to employees and customers remotely during the pandemic was a question of business survival, and one that has permanently turned business on its head.
Now that we’ve all grown used to better experiences, going back to the ways and tools of yesterday simply won’t work. To keep customers and employees happy, you need tailor-made tools that precisely address their business challenges, not a one-size-fits-all approach.
Bespoke apps are one of the most effective ways of doing this right now. Here are three examples of ServiceNow customers in the UK and Ireland that are leveraging modern apps to create great user experiences:
1). Accenture created a streamlined, employee-friendly approval process
Consulting firm Accenture was rapidly expanding and pushing to become a fully digital business. Faced with time-consuming approval processes involving disparate systems and multiple teams, it needed a way to transform its IT services delivery – not least because of pressure from its workforce.
According to Accenture’s CIO Andrew Wilson, “We hire a large number of millennials, and we are very conscious of the notion of consumerisation in the enterprise. We wanted our employee experience to reflect this, making it imperative that we expand our digital-centric way of working across the business and delivering it to clients.”
Accenture’s internal IT team enlisted the help of ServiceNow to transform its approval process from a laborious function to a seamless, easy-to-use workflow that enabled rapid performance.
To keep customers and employees happy, you need tailor-made tools that precisely address their business challenges, not a one-size-fits-all approach.
In just two months, Accenture and ServiceNow created a proof of concept for a revolutionary mobile app that improved the employee experience and freed up teams to focus on what really matters.
The approach provided immediate business value to Accenture as it focused on how to better deliver multiple services to the end-user, which not only benefited their employees, but their clients as well.
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2). The Francis Crick Institute helped ensure employee safety during a time of crisis
The Francis Crick Institute is dedicated to better understanding why disease develops and to finding new ways to prevent, diagnose, and treat illnesses.
To help combat COVID-19 and keep facilities open during lockdown, the institute urgently needed to establish a stringent track-and-trace process to help keep all onsite employees safe throughout the pandemic.
As an existing ServiceNow® customer, the institute utilised ServiceNow App Engine to build the UK’s first viable COVID-19 track-and-trace app in just 22 days.
Through an automated workflow on the app, employees were able to manage their testing through the platform and receive automatic result updates that synced directly to the Crick building entry system.
And with all their results stored on one platform, data became immediately accessible with a clear audit trail, enabling employees to safely continue critical research without worry.
Within just five months of the app’s launch in June 2020, the Crick Institute conducted over 120,000 tests, hitting 16,000 tests a week in October alone.
By keeping their employees at the forefront of the app’s design, the institute created a safe workplace for their staff.
3). Qlik delights customers through custom-made apps
Qlik is a business intelligence tool that converts real-time raw data into actionable insights.
To stand out from a competitive market, Qlik strives for flawless customer service and aims to resolve issues quickly. But to create that singular experience for their customers, it needed a way to connect all departments – from sales to R&D – to keep everyone on the same page.
That’s why Qlik turned to ServiceNow App Engine to build their in-house applications.
Through the platform, Qlik can connect departments, streamline productivity, and connect a seamless digital workflow across processes to empower employees and improve the overall customer experience.
“Almost all of our backend support can be managed from the platform,” says Dan Le Masurier, director of IT service delivery at Qlik. “We can transfer tasks between different teams or departments, track progress, and apply consistent security rules. We can move issues along simply by reassigning them. In fact, the more we put into the Now Platform, the easier it becomes.”
Through the Now Platform, Qlik’s 20 custom-built apps host 280 users, averaging around 19,000 requests per month – with 115 IT users online on any given day.
The results speak for themselves: Qlik achieved a cost avoidance of $162,000 in licensing costs since moving operations to a custom-made app, and their accounts payable eliminated all email requests by switching to an online portal. Their HR team even estimates a time savings of 35% on issue resolution.
By enabling their employees to work better, Qlik was able to create a more satisfying experience for their customers and in turn, produce business success.
Looking forward
Businesses will need a new approach to succeed after the pandemic. From now on, experience is everything.
Catering better to employees and customers remotely during the pandemic was a question of business survival.
Every business wants to grow. But doing so in the experience economy means focusing primarily on the processes and tools that maximize benefits for employees and customers.
The examples above show just how bespoke apps can be a powerful part of the user experience arsenal – supporting sustainable growth, increased productivity, and satisfied customers. And with ServiceNow’s AppEngine, businesses can use workflow technology to harness their existing IT assets and applications, rather than start from scratch.
To see more examples of how our customers are using technology to optimise user experience, see the case study section of this guide.