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Catering to your employees is as important as catering to your customers. An organization needs to make sure that the needs of its employees are taken care of and their issues are resolved in a satisfactory manner.  

Employee support is a planned and structured activity that requires an organized approach. We live in an age where digitization is at its peak and every possible business process can be automated for ease of operation. Looking at the current trends, digitization and automation need to reflect on employee service management as well.  

It is never advisable for an organization to go ahead with traditional employee desk management in 2021. The employee needs and preferences have gone through a major shift in the last few years. If organizations fail to fulfill these requirements and are unable to provide well-structured support, employee engagement is bound to go down.  

Employee Needs In 2021

The needs of employees have changed significantly over time. Gone are the days when an employee’s satisfaction was limited to a stable job and the desired remuneration. As businesses diversified and people’s lifestyles changed with new trends in the field of technology, employees saw a gradual shift in their needs.  

Here are some of the contemporary needs of employees working in 2021:  

The Need For Flexibility  

Employees are no longer happy with a stringent 9-to-5 job where they are required to work from a single desk for eight hours a day. Employees in many industries require flexibility in work for them to feel comfortable and pace themselves according to the work to be done.  

The Need To Work Remotely  

Although this became a compulsion for many professionals after the pandemic in 2020, the new-age employees have often found comfort in working remotely. Thanks to the digitization of businesses, there is hardly any work that cannot be done without sitting at the office desk. Statistics show that remote employees are more likely to report being satisfied with their jobs as opposed to office-based workers. Now that employees have an option of working remotely and businesses are benefitting from the trend, it is a win-win situation for everyone.  

The Need For Collaboration While Working Remotely  

Although employees like working remotely, they do not want to be cut off from their team without interacting with their colleagues. Employees need to find an ideal balance between working remotely and recreating the office-like atmosphere by interacting with their colleagues.  

This is the reason why online collaborative platforms like Slack, Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams have gained immense adoption during the previous year. These platforms provide the ease of working from home and allow employees to be in touch with their team through a virtual workplace.  

The Need For A Seamless Employee Support  

Today, employees need an organized support system within an organization to get their issues resolved. Business processes have become increasingly complicated and customers’ demands are getting more specific. This has resulted in employees having to work harder on newer platforms. In such cases, streamlined employee support becomes essential.  

The need for integrated and seamless employee support has resulted in the need for improved employee service management. Although organizations across the world have been providing support to their employees, the techniques and approaches have not always been the best.  

In 2021, businesses need to re-think employee service management to counter the ills of the traditional approach.  

Why Is Traditional Employee Service Management No Longer Effective?

Excessive Focus On ITSM

Even today, a lot of businesses equate employee support to ITSM. Although ITSM is an important approach to providing support to the employees, one cannot limit employee service support to ITSM in 2021.  

Several other departments within an organization require support that is as effective and structures as ITSM, especially the HR department. When an organization is restricting its employee support to ITSM, employees working in other departments often find themselves deprived of organized support.  

Multiple Service Desks  

Traditional employee service management often made use of different service desks for different issues faced by the employees. This confuses an employee as to where to go and whom to approach to get their issues resolved. Moreover, if an employee needs to deal with multiple issues, keeping track of different service desks will get tedious and chaotic.  

Over-burdened Agents  

If an organization employs dedicated support agents right from the first level of employee support (L1), it is very likely for the agents to be outnumbered by the number of requests pouring in from the employees.  

When the agents are over-burdened with the cases to be handled, there are two tentative outcomes – either the agents will rush through the cases, or the organization will have to hire agents who are not too equipped just for the sake of handling the cases.  

In either of the alternatives, the quality of employee support will go down.  

Delayed Solutions  

When you have a few dedicated agents looking after a plethora of employee issues, employee support is bound to be delayed. This results in agents attending to the more pressing issues first, making the employees with basic hassles wait for a longer time.  

Confusing Ticketing System  

A manual ticketing system often makes matters confusing for the employees. Not every employee in an organization is an IT expert and well-versed with the ticketing system. When employees are not able to work their way around the system, they resort to sending emails and making calls to anyone who can help them get their problems solved.  

Lack Of Personalization  

Traditional employee service management fails to make optimum utilization of enterprise knowledge in an organization. The service desks often fail to provide precise and personalized answers to the questions asked by the employees. The answers provided by these desks are generic, where the concerned employee is required to look for the precise solution themselves.  

Also, almost every answer and solution provided by the traditional service desks are in a long-format text or guide. This is likely to put the users off in 2021 where people have become extensively used to microblogging platforms.  

The Importance Of Modern Employee Service Management

Looking at the shortcomings of traditional employee service management, the need for a modern alternative seems evident. Modern employee service management makes use of technologies like process automation and artificial intelligence for providing structured support to the employees.  

Modern employee service management makes sure that the employees do not need to wait for their issues to get resolved by providing quick and personalized solutions. Also, these platforms allow organizations to automate a number of processes to help employees carry out specific tasks with ease.  

Here are some of the major reasons why modern employee service management is important:  

Reduced Costs And Improved ROI  

IT spending by companies in the wake of the COVID situation has reduced significantly. This implies that organizations are willing to cut down their costs and make more work done by lesser employees.  

In such a situation, modern employee service management helps companies to get work done faster with little to no human interruption. As the employee problems are solved faster with lesser downtime, the operational costs come down to a good extent. In simple words, with a modern employee service desk, companies are just required to make a one-time investment instead of repeatedly spending money on decent employee support.  

The Self-service Approach  

Implementing a modern employee service desk within an organization along with self-service technology allows the employees to perform a variety of tasks by themselves. Whether employees need to search and make HR requests, facilities requests, marketing requests, or carry out other relevant processes, a single platform can help them do the same without seeking help from anyone.  

Ideal For Working Remotely  

As discussed earlier, employees in 2021 need to work remotely along with a healthy collaboration with their team. Owing to the digital nature of the modern service desks, remote employees can log into the platform and obtain solutions to their problems from wherever they are. Similarly, the agents can manage tickets and revert with suitable answers remotely, making the entire employee support system virtual.  

Improved Governance  

The use of an automated platform for employee service management allows the management to keep track of the issues raises, issues resolved, and the tickets created by the employees with a few simple clicks. This provides managers and agents with valuable insights into the issues faced commonly and the areas where the employees may need additional help. The use of such platforms leads to improved governance without the management wasting time in micromanagement.  

Improved Employee Engagement  

It is important for an organization to have employees who are genuinely driven and motivated to increase its overall productivity. The use of a modern employee service desk allows employees to resolve all their problems easily and on a unified platform, leading to an increased employee engagement.  

The traditional service desks often left employees confused and dissatisfied. Now that they have a platform where they can get issues resolved and work done by themselves, their work experience improves, leading to higher engagement.  

Improved Customer Experience  

When your employees are able to get the internal issues resolved in a faster and more systematic way, the customers can be served better. Whenever an employee encounters a customer and the employee needs internal help to serve the customer, modern service desks can provide solutions in a matter of seconds. This way, neither your employees nor your customers need to wait for availing of the services tailored for them.  

Employee Service Management In 2021 – Best Practices

2021 calls for some major changes in the realm of employee service management, most of which revolve around the latest technological advancements. Your employees need to be provided with a digital and automated platform for handling their issues and automating their processes for higher productivity.  

Here are some of the best processes for employee service management that should be considered by organizations in 2021:  

Use Of AI Chatbots  

Conversational AI always makes it easier for your employees to navigate through a service desk and obtain personalized help. Using AI chatbots allows you to have a virtual assistant from the moment your employees log in to the platform.  

These chatbots form the common first level of support for your employees, where all the employees of your organization can obtain quick answers to their questions. The use of chatbots provides a human-like approach to your employee without getting the agents involved directly.  

Invisible Ticketing System  

The use of conversational AI allows you to make the tedious ticketing system invisible. If your employees are not happy with the first line of support and want an agent’s help, an AI service desk will automatically create a ticket and route the case to the right agent. The respective agent can then communicate the solutions to the concerned employee via virtual assistants.  

Microlearning Features  

Modern employee management service can be used for getting your employees trained in specific skills, all by themselves. If you are willing to train your employees, you can add all relevant training resources within your knowledge base and have the employees access them on their own. This will not only help them get trained better but also save you training cost.  

Effective Content Management  

Instead of handing our promise notes and other longer texts to your employees as solutions, you can customize the way in which you manage the support content. Through improved knowledge management, you can provide solutions to your employees in the form of charts, videos, images, and animations, making the consumption of information more engaging.  

Automated Onboarding And Asset Management  

Also, processes like asset management and user onboarding can be automated using modern employee service management. This allows an organization to send automated emails and/or all relevant material important for joining the organization. Automated asset management saves time and effort of the dedicated personnel by keeping track of all company assets in real-time.  

The Final Word  

Looking at the drawbacks of the traditional approach and the importance of the new digital ways of implementing employee service management, it becomes clear why businesses need to upgrade their support services and re-think employee service management in 2021.  

If you have more suggestions regarding the practices and features to be added to a modern service desk, please mention them in the comments below.