“Winning doesn’t always mean being first. Winning means you’re doing better than you’ve ever done before” – Bonnie Blair, five-time Olympic gold medalist. By that definition, Freshworks is a clear winner. Recording a personal best, Freshworks has been positioned on the Challengers quadrant in the 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant for ITSM Tools.

Recently I was thinking about the topic “How do you improve the employee experience?” Many organisations drive this from an IT perspective with concepts like a Self-Service Portal, or Teams Channels, chatbots, even Social IT boards. These are all great ideas, but are they truly addressing employee experience? Let me elaborate on this concept.

Recently I got the chance to speak with Neil Keating, Co-Founder and Chief Experience Officer at Bright Horse, a full-service IT experience consulting and training company. Neil’s candor and deep knowledge about IT Operations and digital experience was obvious from the start. Find a brief clip of our conversation here and several helpful nuggets for IT leaders in the text below!

We all want fast access to the information we need, when we need it. With a few simple clicks, we expect our questions to be answered and our problems to be solved. We want to be empowered to solve problems on our own, intuitively, and without friction. We expect seamless, quick, and easy self-service. According to a Gartner® report, 85% of customer service interactions will start with self-service by 2022, up from 48% in 2019.1.

Now is truly the digital age. In a world where operations are increasingly powered by code, there’s enormous potential for changing the way people work. But you need to know how to code to create this change…right? Wrong. Using ServiceNow App Engine Studio, ServiceNow’s citizen developer program empowers anyone with little to no coding experience to innovate and create the apps they need, when they need them.

Change agents oversee implementation of changes in an organization. They are the ones who make sure that the new strategy is being followed by everyone as they have the power to bring about change in an organization. A successful change agent should have the following skills: knowledge, leadership skills, understanding of factors that are involved in bringing about change, and knowledge of different forms of change management.

Are you leveraging technical account management software to fast-track technical support requests and increase customer satisfaction? To retain customers, your team must focus on providing technical support and guidance to ensure customer success. Increasing customer retention rates by just 5% can increase profits by between 25% and 95%.

It all starts with asking yourself how you would rate the IT portal’s employee experience at your organization. Think about it. Do your employees love using your IT self-service portal? Or do they simply put up with it to get work done? In a recent webinar on IT self-service portals and their effect on employee engagement, 42% of organizations said their employees aren’t the biggest fans of their organization’s IT self-service portal but still use it.