ESM: Delight employees with personalized, accessible digital experiences

When organizations think about deploying enterprise service management (ESM), they often focus on gaining efficiencies and increasing productivity. But ESM doesn’t just benefit lines-of-business organizations through process automation — it also improves the quality of digital employee experiences so teams can find the information they need faster (even on their own through self-service), anytime and anywhere, to help improve employee satisfaction and collaboration.

Improving the digital employee experience is especially important now, as companies continue to struggle to attract and retain top talent during an ongoing tight labor market. It goes without saying that employees who are constantly frustrated by out-of-date information, cumbersome processes, and unresponsive or slow support are more likely to look for job opportunities elsewhere.

Specifically, ESM can provide employees with:

• An intuitive, easy-to-follow onboarding experience that helps new employees get up to speed and ready to work quickly
• Automated workflows that eliminate the drudgery of routine manual tasks so employees can focus on the work that adds the most value
• A unified service catalog that enables employees with self-service capabilities so that they can find exactly the information they need on their own rapidly or search for additional resources on-demand, such as knowledge articles
• Digital assistants and chatbots that understand requests made in natural language, personalize interactions according to the individual user and provide truly helpful information
• Real-time, AI-powered insights that assist and guide employees as they resolve inquiries from both customers and internal teams – anytime, anywhere, on any device

The result is a more intuitive and efficient experience, which reduces stress and enables employees to focus on their work instead of wrestling with complex internal processes.

George Washington University’s (GW) experience illustrates how this works in the real world.

GW’s IT group serves a student body of more than 25,000 and more than 11,000 faculty and staff. The student body, in particular, is a diverse group from a wide range of age groups and nationalities. Students, faculty, and staff use high-quality self-service with their apps and digital services in their daily lives. They didn’t want to work with an agent to solve their problems in their digital interactions with GW; they wanted to resolve them themselves quickly.  

GW’s IT team needed a consumer-grade, omnichannel self-service experience to meet those expectations. After evaluating several cloud-based platforms, GW chose:

• BMC Helix ITSM: a cloud-native IT service management platform
• BMC Helix Digital Workspace: a single solution for user self-service and multichannel experiences.

GW began by identifying their 14 most common support requests and setting them up in their chatbot, which they named “Martha.” UW community members can now interact with Martha via multiple channels, such as email, the website, text messaging, and even Slack. “Martha” addresses questions, walks users through the steps they need to take to resolve their issues, and automates all the processes required to fulfill requests.

The results exceeded GW’s expectations. They now manage more than 70,000 service tickets annually, assisted by cognitive automation, and reduced the number of cases by 25% thanks to student self-service. Just over one in 10 (11%) of all cases are resolved exclusively through chatbots powered by BMC Helix Virtual Agent.

“ESM does create significant efficiencies and improves a team’s productivity,” said Juergen Hauser, Senior Director of Product Management at BMC Software. “But its ability to elevate the digital experience for employees and improve their daily lives is just as important. People expect better, faster experiences from their employers — BMC Helix delivers on that and more.

Learn more about BMD Helix’s transformational potential.