The last three years and the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the way we work. Despite the vaccinations, the World Health Organization has said that Europe will experience a challenging autumn and winter of 2022/23 with the new infection wave. How can your company be prepared for another potential work-from-home season? What are the best practices to improve self-service?
Hybrid is the new normal
The digitization of the workplace has been one of the most impactful trends of the last decade. In 2021 Okta pointed out in their report that the average amount of apps at organizations has increased by 22% in the past four years. Many of these solutions were introduced to provide easy self-service to employees. More apps mean more problems and increased work for service desks. But the higher number of tickets hasn’t been the only challenge during the pandemic.
Most companies addressed arising issues with data security, time tracking, and workplace safety by creating work-from-home policies. ServiceNow platform did everything to ensure employees’ flexibility and safety, having a home office or hybrid work environment. For example, a ServiceNow plug return-to-work product has been widely used by companies like Uber or Bank United, allowing them to shift from 100% remote working to hybrid mode safely.
More than that, ServiceNow offers automation systems, workflow handling, and new ways to digitize processes usually done in person before. From an IT perspective, the most important elements to address are IT support and service desk team agility, making work from home much easier for the employees. Ensuring a business continuity plan for remote work scenarios is a safe way of facing the possible new COVID-19 waves.
Service management at its best with an office-in-a-box solution
Different pandemic restrictions forced the business world to introduce change and remote work quickly. Facing this challenge, one of our clients reached out to create a tailored home office solution for the company employees. This leading supply chain solution company utilizes high-quality infrastructure, modern facilities, and proven IT systems like ServiceNow to meet and exceed the expectations of its customers.
During several lockdowns, the company employees had to perform their duties from home. The managers saw how important it was to provide employees with a working environment and to keep efficiency levels high. That’s when the idea of creating a dedicated platform to order home office supplies was born.
The collaboration with our client on this project has been very enjoyable. Responsiveness and knowledge from customer side part allowed us to create a novel solution fit for our times.
Magdalena Kurzymska, Project Manager at SPOC
We approached this idea with an MVP solution, choosing CSM customization to ensure high speed to market. CSM is a great choice to support several external users and company clients. The solution allowed people to order all the equipment needed for their remote work environment and resulted in quick service delivery. It made the process smooth and effortless without losing any additional time, improving both service desk staff work and employee experience.
Automation, artificial intelligence & self-service
As mentioned before, remote or hybrid work setup results in many IT tickets from the users. Usage of new software, VPN, and connection poor quality create an accumulation of cases that service desks need to cope with. How to handle the ticket pile-ups in the most effective way? Technology can help overworked service desks by automatically resolving common service desk questions and 24/7 availability for all users.
With ServiceNow Virtual Agent, these numbers can significantly go down. Self-service solutions like chatbots responding to users’ questions and assigning tickets automatically save time on both service desks and users’ sides. A faster, easier, and more pleasant way to provide FAQs, give status on cases or incidents and resolve multi-step problems. All of it is in one channel of the user’s choice – without logging into the service desk portal.
Read more about the Virtual Agent portal
With predictive intelligence as an additional tool, you can do even more. It helps you foresee what problems might arise, allowing your service management a better and quicker response. Machine learning is a great solution, ensuring a great work experience and more satisfied agents and users.
Discover the most common myths around ServiceNow Predictive Intelligence
Go hybrid with ServiceNow
Whether there is another COVID-19 wave or you plan to switch from remote work to hybrid, you need to improve the user experience on your ServiceNow platform constantly. The reason is simple – with well-working service desks, automation, self-service, artificial intelligence, and other solutions improving the ways of working, your employees will be more pleased. And it will have an impact on their work, meaning improved efficiency. Let’s talk about how we can help you to adjust the platform to your users’ needs.
