It is surprising just how few companies realise that their employees are also their customers. These same employees are an organisation’s first customers, which means it is imperative to keep them happy and satisfied, as companies would normally do with their external clients.
As the saying goes, take care of your people, and they’ll take care of your business!
Failure to address this issue will often result in decreased productivity, high turnover, and poor customer service, which would surely affect the organisation’s bottom line and make it harder to succeed.
The question now is: How can businesses keep their employees happy and satisfied?
The obvious answer would be to improve employee engagement and workplace culture, which often involves showing employees they are cared about and appreciated. But did you know that you could also improve the employee experience tremendously through technology?
Infusing a Service Design Thinking with Technology
Among the specific things an organisation can do to show that it truly values its employees is giving them best-of-breed technologies to work with. Numerous studies, in fact, confirm that technology impacts employee engagement and satisfaction in a positive way, which is not at all surprising given the many benefits of leveraging various technologies, such as:
- Using technology affords employees flexibility.
- It fosters a belief that the company is willing to give employees their needs.
- It reduces job duplication.
- It increases the pace of work.
- It makes work simpler and easier.
- It opens up lines of communication.
Nevertheless, giving employees tech to work with is not as simple as, say, buying high-end laptops or the most expensive software on the market. Rather, it needs to be institutionalised or made part of the fabric of company culture. This is something you can easily do by incorporating technology into the organisation’s service design thinking, where the planning of the business’ resources—including people and processes—takes place with the aim of crafting services that will improve the employees’ experience and, consequentially, the external customers’ own experience.
Companies can start with areas of the business that are long overdue for service improvements—something that Symphony SummitAI’s Enterprise Service Management (ESM) solution can ensure. As SummitAI points out, the IT department is not the only one in an organisation that provides services to employees. There are other departments that do the same, so it stands to reason that they, too, must benefit from transformative tech-enabled service management practices that are usually staples of the IT department through IT Service Management (ITSM) solutions.
In turn, extending ITSM principles and solutions to other departments, whether in marketing, finance, or even HR, will result in enhanced service delivery for all these business teams, which are not typically recognised as service providers. And, just as important, deploying ITSM solutions across the board will increase employee satisfaction significantly, as such an approach will be construed as putting the focus on employees by giving them exactly what they need to perform their respective jobs.
That need, again, is the right technology, which in this case is ESM as it can accomplish the following:
- Automate business processes, like employee onboarding and service request tracking.
- Simplify self-service through Artificial Intelligence (AI)-knowledge intelligence.
- Help increase productivity with the use of digital agents, auto-resolution and operational intelligence.
- Create custom workflows to ensure everyone is kept in the loop about vital matters.
A Happy Workforce Translates to Better Business Results
Ultimately, happy, satisfied employees who feel valued by the company are good for business since they are motivated to give their best. In turn, productivity increases, customer service improves, and employee turnover decreases. The end result is a bigger bottom line and an improved reputation among external clients that are all driven by the company’s first customers: Its employees.
For real-world examples of how tech can transform a workforce and the business that employs them, please download SummitAI’s case studies on Hinduja, a global leader in business process management, and Maruti, a leading automobile manufacturer in India.
