Ensuring your business has a frictionless digital experience for employees leads to engaged, productive staff – and, ultimately, happier customers.
Businesses spend a lot of time thinking about the customer experience – whether that’s delivering an excellent service in person, or creating fulfilling interactions with the business online. But what about the digital experience for employees?
If the day-to-day experience for your workforce is inconsistent with the quality of service they’re expected to deliver to customers, you’re creating a breeding ground for problems. By not providing a great digital experience for your staff, you create issues that bubble just below the surface, harming retention rates for good employees and eating away at your bottom line.
Employee experience
At a fundamental level, employees who feel there’s a discrepancy between their experience of your business and its outward message simply won’t be engaged with their work. At best, that view leads to a cheapening of the experience they deliver to your customers; at worst, it will lead to staff leaving for pastures new.
Most staff just want to get on with their jobs. Systems that hinder that desire for work create the spectre of ‘shadow IT’: third-party services, downloaded apps and personal hardware used to get round the roadblock. Shadow IT weakens the security of your business information. If you don’t control the tools being used, you can’t know for sure that your data is secure.
With its vast range of powerful tools that are becoming more intuitive by the day, investing in Office 365 is a big step towards dealing with the problem of shadow IT and employee engagement. Microsoft themselves say they’re “on a mission to empower every person and organisation to achieve more in the modern workplace” with “modern Microsoft products and services that help make employees more productive, creative and secure.”
However, simply licensing Office won’t suddenly result in employee satisfaction; the best companies understand the importance of implementing it correctly. Rather than just buying Office 365 and expecting their staff to get on with it, they take steps to ensure their investment in Office 365 isn’t squandered.
Augmenting Office 365
One step smart businesses are taking is to improve their staff’s experience of Office 365 with a digital workplace solution, such as Kira WorkPlace. Kira WorkPlace not only brings key productivity tools to the fore, but it uses Microsoft’s Graph technology to identify the most relevant people, documents and conversations for each user. This is revealed via an intuitive, personalised homepage which offers direct access to Office documents, cross-business conversations and news about the organisation.
Implementing a digital workplace has been shown to dramatically improve the experience for staff, leading to much higher user adoption rates, satisfied people and increased productivity. There’s also the positive implication for security – Office 365 puts you back in control of your business’s data, with the full weight of Microsoft’s security expertise behind you.
In addition, more and more businesses are looking for help in implementing Office 365 in a way that makes sense for their staff. As a leading Microsoft Partner, we have been working with the platform since its inception, and now offer what we call Office 365 augmentation services. This lets us sit down with you to help tailor Office 365 to the specific needs of your business, creating a clear path to productivity through the tangle of options available.
Reducing friction
From an employee’s perspective, a frictionless digital experience at work makes their job seem easier, increasing satisfaction and letting them get on with the task in hand, rather than worrying about the tools. Employees take more pride in creating great customer experiences when they know their own experience is being considered. And that’s simply good business.
Find out more about our Office 365 cloud augmentation services or about our Kira WorkPlace platform.