Intranet portals have come a long way with the features they offer – they enable employees to work efficiently by interacting with each other to enhance productivity. However, due to the lack of personalization in intranets, they are often met with dismal visit and adoption rates. This is further exacerbated by the fact that employees feel that the content showcased in the intranet dashboards is outdated.
Personalization is key to making employees more receptive to using the intranet on a regular basis and utilizing the information hosted on it. As expectations from the intranet evolve rapidly, organizations are compelled to step up from using the traditional intranet platform architecture to leveraging AI, machine learning and contextual processing to address growing needs. These changes have introduced elements of personalization in today’s digital workplace platforms.
Personalization also helps in driving intranet adoption rates. There is a paramount shift in the way employees are interacting with the intranet platforms.
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Importance Of Intranet Personalization:
Gartner defines personalization as a process that creates a relevant, individualized interaction between two parties, designed to enhance the end user experience.
Intranet personalization allows organizations to improve the employee experience and lowers navigation time so users can find what they need quickly.
Personalization delivers a range of meaningful content to the intranet users and automatically customizes content that is to be displayed on the user’s profile.
An intranet personalization strategy not only delivers significant value to the intranet users but also aids the organization in boosting productivity and adoption rates.
Intranets with built-in personalization feature empower employees with quick information and insights on their personalized dashboards. They enable employees to customize the intranet based on their interests, preferences, and needs. Enabling users to add a personal touch to their intranet view can create a positive organizational culture.
Benefits Of Personalization:
- Improved organizational culture
- Increased levels of employee engagement
- Enhanced productivity
- Ease of navigation
- Custom platform for blogs and articles
- Featured stories focused on employees
- Brand awareness
- Find information faster
- Sharing organizational news and timely updates
Read More: Why Modern Intranets Are The Gateway For A Modern Workplace
The above-listed advantages are only a few that come along with intranet personalization. However, more and more technological advancements can amplify the desired results leading to a win-win for both employees and organizations.
Here are a few intranet best practices to make your intranet software platform more personalized:
Best Practices Of Intranet Personalization:
1. Personalize Employee Portals
The main purpose of an intranet is to convey information to employees in a hassle-free way. Automatically introduce greater personalization in your intranet by using an intelligent intranet platform.
Rather than investing in an expensive and time-consuming overhaul to tag content and profiles of employees manually, adopt a modern intranet with advanced features, such as learning from user’s profile and behaviour analysis automatically to provide personalized content, customize the employee portal themes, customize widgets on landing pages etc. Featuring relevant content to employees amplifies the intranet adoption rate and justifies the overall intranet investment.
For example, employees can view a tailored or personalized content aligned to their specific goals or departments using the widgets available in the modern intranets. Not all content in the portal landing page is relevant to everyone. So personalizing and positioning it according to the preferences will stand a better chance to boost the adoption rates.
Similarly, taking advantage of the portal based features, one can change the theme of the portal making it a more personalized space.
Using theme-based personalization employees can modify their portals theme (as per brand guidelines) which will imbibe more sense of ownership in employees. Consequently, personalization amplifies the usage of the intranet portal resulting in a higher intranet adoption rates.
Additionally, there are multiple features aiding the personalization aspects of the intranet apart from the above-listed use cases.
2. Offer Customizable Widgets
One of the best ways to drive intranet personalization is to provide employees with customizable widgets on their intranet portal. Employees can select prefered widgets of their interests and add to their portals for an easy picture of organizations updates.
For example, a few employees may want to have a news feed displayed on the page while others may want to view a feed featuring rewards and recognition, organization’s news, events, announcements, regional news etc.
In any case, the ability to customize widgets is bound to become a favourite feature for employees, improving employee engagement and enhancing employee experience with the intranet.
Read More: The Digital Essentials Of An Employee Experience Strategy
3. Personalized Notifications
Notifying about the prefered news, events, announcements and other updates based on employees subscription can help to bring more personalization to the users in an intranet.
Employees can opt for different categories like global news, regional news, department activities, project status, events, announcements etc., and get notified with the updates. These notifications will be user-specific and suggested automatically based on the user’s profile and preferences.
For example, if employees what to know the updates about the events in the organization or status of the ongoing project, they can opt for options like events or projects accordingly and get personalized notifications.
Employees can opt-in to many categories based on their interests to get updates and if they feel updates are no longer needed, they can opt-out at any time to stop receiving notifications.
4. Introduce Chatbots
Chatbots Provide Personalized Information Right At Fingertips
AI-powered chatbots will allow employees to access relevant information anywhere, anytime and in a more personalized way through a conversational interface.
Below is a classic persona of how an employee can access information on the go:
Chatbots also help in enabling the exchange of the latest updates as alerts to employees. They have the ability to decode the context based on what employees have subscribed for or the widgets chosen. Chatbots enable a tiny glitch of personalization from the decoded information and send personalized alerts to the employees with more relevant and user-specific updates.
They Enable Employee Self-Service
For most work issues, time is the main constraints even if it is a simple task. Let’s consider the case of applying for leave. An employee has to check the number of leaves available and send a mail to the corresponding team, which can be time-consuming and at times require logging into different systems.
Introducing AI-powered chatbots in an intranet will greatly simplify the process of applying for a leave. Employees can chat with the intranet bot in order to quickly raise a leave request on behalf of the employer.
The chatbot can then provide information about the number of leaves utilised and available. It can also take inputs regarding the leave type (emergency or casual) to raise a leave request and trigger a mail to the respective team within no time.
Read More: The Role Of Chatbots In The Intranet
They Simplify Information Discovery
Searching for relevant information amongst vast volumes of data can be a major issue in the intranet. Scaling up intranets to match new age work culture and finding required information with ease is the need for the hour.
An intranet chatbot can bring significant changes in searching for relevant information. Employees can interact with the bot and get personalized information like news feeds, documents, announcements etc. through a conversational interface.
Subsequently, employees use the intranet more often to get relevant information quickly, which eventually boosts productivity.
By 2018, The Ability To Rapidly Create And Retrieve Relevant Content (Knowledge) Will Be A Key Attribute Of Leading Enterprises.
Finding The Right Stakeholder
If an organization is using a template-based intranet software, scenarios like multiple group interactions may not be possible and searching for the right person to get the necessary information may take a lot of time.
AI-powered intranet chatbots can help employees identify the right person from any department in an organization and get connected to share information with ease, thereby enhancing efficiency.
Read More: World’s First Bots On Skype For Business!
Conclusion
Businesses using the intranet are always looking for ways to keep employees engaged and coming back, and making the intranet a more popular place for your organizational needs.
To ensure that the intranet a go-to source of important information and relevant updates, it is vital that it offers personalized content addressed to meet individual employee needs. Providing news, events, alerts and links helps get things done, but providing them in the context of the user is key to your digital workplace adoption.
Getting people to understand the end product of personalization can be challenging. However, organizations with personalized intranet experience can eventually see a rise in their intranet usages.
Measure your intranet usage and get detailed reports using Acuvate’s SharePoint analytics tool – Seek.
Read More: How To Leverage Intranet Analytics To Measure Intranet Effectiveness
Personalization allows you to tailor the user experience and cut down on the amount of navigation it takes for users to find what they need. Check out Mesh – a digital solution that leverages AI, machine-learning, social collaboration and other emerging technologies to deliver intranet personalization.
Read More: A Buyer’s Guide To Choosing The Best Intranet Software
A frequent question we get from customers is about how they can build and deploy a new chatbot on the corporate intranet and ensure that it will boost intranet adoption rates.
Check out Acuvate’s enterprise bot builder platform BotCore which enables businesses to create and train their own bot based on their organizational needs.
If you’d like to learn more about this topic, please feel free to get in
touch with one of our experts for a personalized consultation.
