#GoToGetsIT: This article is part of an ongoing series from GoTo’s thought leaders on the frontlines: Our Solutions Consultants deeply understand our customers’ unique challenges and connect the right solutions to meet their goals using GoTo technology. Here, they share their industry knowledge on what it takes to help businesses everywhere thrive in a remote or hybrid world.
The workplace is changing rapidly in the post-pandemic world. Organizations are moving towards creating a more inclusive and digital workplace to support their employees’ ability to work from the office, home, or in a hybrid model. Employees today are utilizing multiple vendors, accessing a large number of applications and touching various infrastructure components from company-provided and personal devices.
Thus, the focus for IT teams today is on developing consumer-like automated and self-service experiences across devices for the user. To accommodate rapidly changing work, there’s a need to transform a traditional IT support approach in the workplace into tomorrow’s digital-first environment.
Key digital workplace transformation goals for IT support
How will IT organizations approach their digital workplace transformation? Bit by bit. Here are some of the smaller scale challenges that organizations are trying to solve in traditional workplaces and some of the solutions that can help move companies to a more modern and efficient workplace:
In a traditional workplace, we often see:
- Fragmented and decentralized operations
- Overburdened service desk
- Limited knowledge management
- People-resource intensive support delivery
- Service Level Agreements (SLA)
- Reactive support
- Focus on customer satisfaction scores (CSAT)
- Focus on issue resolution
- Inadequate remote support tools
- Complex tools for simple problems
- Bloated IT stack
- Insufficient endpoint security
- Expensive in-person support
But to transform into a modern workplace, the goal is to achieve:
- Simplified, standardized, and unified operations
- Reduced call volume with self-healing tech
- Improved knowledge management for support and resources
- Self-service and automation-led delivery
- Experience level agreements (XLAs)
- Proactive & predictive support process
- Focus on customer and employee experience (CX, EX)
- Focus on improved KPIs: average handle time (AHT), mean time to recovery (MTTR), and first call resolution (FCR)
- Technology-driven remote support
- Consolidated tech stack
- Robust endpoint security with remote monitoring and management (RMM) and mobile device management (MDM)
- Visual engagement enabled field support
Shifting each of these areas should help drive several key outcomes:
- Equipping users with the means to be productive whether working from home, office, or hybrid
- Improving the security posture of devices
- Improving the end user experience with a focus on providing a consumer-like experience to deliver IT support
- Shifting from reactive support to a proactive support model to reduce the burden on IT teams
- Consolidating the tech stack and reducing IT costs
How do you go about creating a digital and inclusive workplace?
So that’s where organizations are trying to go, but how do they get there? The short answer is, with the help of IT support technologies. Organizations can look at the following areas to lead their digital workplace transformation journey:
Employee experiences powered by automation
Developing a self-healing, automation-led IT environment has become a top priority for organizations. Automation-led IT support reduces dependencies on the service desk teams to resolve the most trivial, mundane, and predictable IT issues.
Self-healing alerts, for example, use the power of data-driven insights and actions collected from various endpoints to predict and solve user issues before they occur. With these tools, organizations can lower their service desk ticket volume and minimize downtime.
Automation enables the shift from reactive to proactive IT operations, and as a result, employees’ productivity is not compromised, and IT staff can focus on more strategic tasks.
Remote access and support
With the emergence of IT outsourcing, Remote Infrastructure Management became one of the most widely used methods of managing an organization’s IT infrastructure and providing support to end user devices from offshore locations. By leveraging highly skilled resources instead of expensive field support, a fraction of the cost is spent.
Managed service providers (MSPs) contracted by companies choose to leverage remote support tools so that they can securely access devices and networks in the company’s ecosystem, perform routine maintenance on IT infrastructure, manage applications, and support user issues as part of their managed service operations.
Cloud-based remote support tools are becoming highly popular in such scenarios which provide security, ease of use, and simplicity in terms of setup for organizations and improved productivity and experience for end users.
Device monitoring & management
It’s clear the post-pandemic workplace is no longer the same as it used to be. Many organizations have their employees working in a hybrid or fully remote model, which means IT teams are relied upon to enable employees with the tools and devices they need to be productive. Not only do organizations need to ensure that IT support sets up their employees with what they need to do their work, but they also need to ensure that the devices are secure.
This includes secure access to network, data, applications, keeping devices secure with latest OS version, patch management, antivirus management, and support for a range of devices (i.e., desktops, laptops, cell phones, wearables, or IoT devices). Organizations can ensure this is done by deploying a cloud-based unified endpoint management (UEM) solution, a modern approach to device management. One of the key benefits is that it provides simpler device provisioning by providing better security posture with automated patching and access to applications from any device.
Traditionally, device management has been a function managed by different teams based on device type and delivered with on-premises solutions. A cloud-based unified management solution offers the opportunity to consolidate the tech stack, reduce management costs, and offer a consumer-like experience to end users with the ability to self-enroll devices and install approved apps themselves, thus reducing the burden on IT staff.
Transforming field services with visual engagement
Field services is one of the oldest forms of providing technical support to the end users in the workplace. Before the advent of remote infrastructure support and outsourcing, organizations leveraged their in-house IT support teams to provide on-site support to their end users. Despite field support being an expensive function for the IT organizations, even with advent of outsourcing and remote support, it still is a vital support function. Hence, organizations and service providers are constantly seeking opportunities to transform the field services organization to not only improve the end user experience by making field services more efficient but also reduce costs. Visual engagement or augmented reality offers immense help in enhancing user experience in areas that require field services.
Visual engagement platforms (i.e., camera-sharing) can help end-users self-resolve their issues by connecting with the expert via a simple camera share.
With these tools, agents can guide end user step by step to resolve the issue; no field visit by an expert is needed. In case a visit is essential, such technologies enable technicians who may not have skills or experience to resolve the issue on location to be connected with an experienced agent to guide them in fixing the issue.
Using visual engagement technologies to provide remote support is especially relevant in supporting disconnected devices within IT organizations (such as home Wi-Fi routers, printers, and monitors) as well as in key industries such as large manufacturing plants in remote locations, healthcare equipment, offshore oil refineries, and automotive.
To drive transformation, shift left
In the modern era today, users spend most of their time at the workplace, whether it be in office or now in their home offices. It is essential they are equipped with the right tools to be productive and when any issue comes and provided with seamless support that does not impact their ability to do their work.
How IT management and support are offered to the employees in the workplace becomes especially important, because today support goes beyond just enabling teams to fix issues. It’s now about providing a superior end user experience, offering consumer-like services, keeping endpoints secure, and empowering technicians with ability to remotely execute tasks in the click of button.
IT teams need the right tools in place to support the complexities of the digital workplace.
With the right tools and technologies in place to enable IT support teams, organizations can achieve their goal to create a digital workplace that operates like the above depicted operating model. Such a digital workplace transformation will enable remote teams to be more productive, proactive, cost efficient, and at the same time, be able to focus on more strategic initiatives.