IT Teams sometimes envision modernization projects by starting with the technology in mind. But in today’s world, where employees and partners are more mobile, remote, and independent, it’s essential to roll out modernization programs by prioritizing the end-user experience.
Often, businesses focus only on innovating new products and digital services for their customers. However, no organization can create valuable customer experiences if their employees still work with legacy systems and outdated technology. Legacy systems lead to a poor end-user experience, longer time-to-market, and higher operations costs. Moreover, an organization has minimal scope to become resilient when burdened with inflexible systems that cannot scale up.
Employees demand digital experiences that replicate how they, as customers, interact with their preferred brands – customized, self-led, and available on-demand. Here, you may think of IT as the “product” and the employee as the “customer.” Consequently, employee experience should be at the heart of any IT modernization strategy.
While efficiently scaling your IT operations creates a simplified, agile, and resilient IT infrastructure, workforce experience may suffer if leaders fail to recognize that technology is only an “enabler.” True success will come from focusing transformative initiatives on the end-users. Therefore, IT innovation must take a “worker-centric” approach that designs the digital platform after gaining rich employee insights.
Moreover, effective change management must form an integral part of the process to enable a smooth transition to new working ways and ensure employee experience isn’t compromised. Failure to prioritize the end-user experience may hamper productivity and lead to suboptimal experiences and decreased adoption of new tools.
Meet the modern IT technologies that ensure a seamless Digital Employee Experience (DEX)
1. Employee experience (EX) chatbots
Siloed systems and legacy business apps force employees to spend considerable time on unproductive tasks that add little value to the organization. From raising a ticket for a password reset to checking leave balance to the continuous search for documents and information, such tasks occupy a significant portion of their time, leaving no room for productive/value-adding work.
Employee experience chatbots for IT, HR, and business intelligence (BI) leverage technologies, such as machine learning (ML), artificial intelligence (AI), and natural language processing (NLP), to answer employee FAQs, simplify repetitive tasks, and retrieve the required information for the employee.
Take, for instance –
- IT bots manage service disruptions, initiate software upgrades, conduct password resets, send outage alerts to affected employees, issue asset request notifications, and wipe off stolen devices.
- HR bots help employees book business travel and apply for leaves easily. Moreover, they automate everyday onboarding tasks, such as screening candidates, scheduling interviews, and collecting employee documents.
- Managers don’t have the time to navigate complex BI dashboards and filter unnecessary information to get the required data. A BI bot answers questions, such as “What were the sales in 2019?” or “What were the operating expenses in Q3-20?”, using either text or rich multimedia formats, such as graphs and images, saving time and expediting the decision-making process.
At Acuvate, we help clients build AI-enabled employee experience chatbots with our enterprise, low-code bot-building platform called BotCore.
2. Modern intranet
In the current scenario, given employees function independently from remote locations, organizations must ensure robust digital workplace tools are in place to facilitate seamless collaboration and communication.
And what’s better than a modern intranet – a unified digital platform that brings employees together under a single roof. Unlike its traditional counterpart, a modern intranet is based on a powerful technical foundation with an employee-first strategy at its core.
Modern intranets centralize company-wide information and tools, boost productivity, and empower employees to do all their work through a single hub.
The platform sends AI-driven personalized content recommendations and targets messaging based on role, geography, responsibilities, interests, etc. It fosters corporate culture by delivering consistent company communications in one location. Moreover, a mobile intranet app allows all employees – whether in-office, remote, or desk-less – to access the platform anytime and from anywhere.
One of the most distinguishing features that set apart a modern intranet from a traditional one is a cognitive search engine.
According to Mckinsey, On average, employees spend 1.8 hours every day and approximately 9.3 hours per week searching and gathering information.
With a cognitive search engine, organizations can integrate all their internal and external apps and enable employees to find all the relevant files and documents from within the intranet itself.
The search is not limited to keywords; instead, technologies like AI and ML help perform a robust search to pull out the most personalized and contextual information from enterprise-wide tools and apps. Moreover, an AI-enabled chatbot embedded within the intranet retrieves information seamlessly via text or voice.
We at Acuvate Software help clients transform how their employees communicate, collaborate, and work through Mesh 3.0, our Autonomous SharePoint Intranet that leverages the best Microsoft AI technologies (Office Graph, Azure, LUIS).
3. Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
Many organizations are now using Robotic Process Automation (RPA) technology to automate repetitive, rules-based employee tasks, such as data entry, calculations, compliance checks, etc., and develop a leaner and more relaxed workforce.
When combined with the cognitive intelligence and self-service capabilities of chatbots, the technology helps automate tasks end-to-end, increase productivity, reduce costs, and solve many workflow-related problems for enterprises. Here’s how it works.
An RPA chatbot integrates with several legacy back-end enterprise systems and retrieves information from the same. It can then handle complex requests at scale and perform tasks without any human intervention.
RPA bots streamline activities and ensure standard procedures are followed at each step. This reduces the risk of error and minimizes the associated stress of the employees.
As end-users needn’t spend time on mundane activities like gathering data, copying information, etc., they can focus on more strategic and value-adding activities.
At Acuvate, we help elevate end-user experience through RPA chatbots by integrating Microsoft Power Virtual Agents and Power Automate.
Learn More: Power Virtual Agents & Power Automate
Developing an IT Modernization plan with the end-user experience in mind
In today’s rapidly evolving business environment, outdated, stagnant, and standardized digital employee experiences won’t suffice.
Indeed, technologies like AI, machine learning, predictive analytics, and robotic process automation (RPA) are the keys to IT modernization. However, organizations now realize that to succeed, their focus should not only be on their customers but their end-users as well.
Visualizing their employees as their internal customers and IT as the product and developing digital employee experiences that are more personal and less transactional is the need of the hour for all IT leaders.
In his book “The Employee Experience Advantage,” Jacob Morgan has said, “Organizations that invest in employee experience are four times more likely to be profitable than those that don’t.” In other words, if they get the people part right, the technology can, and will, look after itself.
A prudent IT modernization strategy, therefore, consists of the following steps –
- Assess the current state of the workplace, including existing technologies and workforce skills.
- Set measurable, actionable, and achievable goals.
- Address the challenges, including resistance to change and lack of executive buy-in.
- Roll out the technologies and support the end-users to adapt to the new ways of working
- Monitor, collect end-user feedback, and make improvements as needed.
Acuvate Software enables clients to modernize their IT infrastructure and enhance end-user experience with technologies, such as AI-enabled chatbots, a modern intranet solution, and RPA bots.
To know more about our IT modernization services, please feel free to schedule a personalized consultation with our experts.
