Over the last few years, there has been a natural shift towards digital transformation and adopting new technologies which have helped organizations embrace the modern world and new ways of working. However, we could never have expected the technological changes we would go through on a global scale at the start of 2020.

The Covid-19 pandemic signalled a sudden shift to remote working, and while many businesses may have been prepared or testing remote working on a small scale, the speed at which it needed to be rolled out when stay-at-home orders were issued, was unprecedented.

Fortunately, many organizations have been successful in this pivot and are now in the position to shift from surviving to thriving. For GBS organizations, this means prioritising the journey towards digital service delivery and the end-to-end goal. But what does this involve?

The disparate application and support experience

According to research from Pegasystems, the average knowledge worker is using 35 business applications, and switching between these over 1,000 times a day. As well as this, research from Okta has found that worker applications deployed by organizations has increased by 68% over the past four years.

While this proliferation of technologies has enabled huge business and economic success pre-pandemic and survival in a Covid-19 world, the experiences that these applications offer to employees is often disjointed.

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The siloed nature of knowledge bases, bots, helpdesks and support experiences within each application has a huge impact on an employee’s ability to stay in the flow of work. In fact, research from McKinsey has found that knowledge workers spend up to 20% of their working week searching for information or support on tasks. This issue has only been compounded further with employees working from home, and not knowing where to go for timely support.

The impact this has on an organization’s overall ability to create a unified employee experience and strive towards the end-to-end goal is huge. Therefore, as businesses look to rebuild and strengthen their foundations for the future, it is critical that GBS leaders take a holistic approach to the employee experience and process completion.

In an ideal world, business leaders wouldn’t have to worry about support and disparate applications – where advanced analytics capabilities identify and resolve support issues before they become a problem, and before an organisation even notices. However, there is some way to go for many businesses to achieve this panacea.

Prioritising the end goal

When facing unprecedented challenges, organizations can be forgiven for addressing issues in a “point solution” manner, where problems are solved in isolation. But this approach doesn’t lead to success for GBS leaders, resulting in processes being loosely connected and disparate application experiences.

The end result of this approach is obvious – a poor employee experience. Often, we see organizations trying to resolve these issues through using legacy support systems, knowledge bases, classroom training, and support desks. This doesn’t work and results in frustrated users, inefficient ways of working and a noticeable lack of visibility for business leaders.

Instead, businesses should assess the support channels they use, their effectiveness, and have a clear idea of the metrics that matter and if they help them towards the goal of end-to-end process completion.

Addressing the employee experience gap

The problem is clear – the employee experience is disjointed, and businesses are finding it hard to support and enable their users to do what they do best. And we know that this challenge will continue to loom over businesses heads until they take action.

According to a recent employee experience report from analyst firm Constellation Research, organizations have a historic opportunity to transform the employee experience gap. The solution? Adopting an ‘employee experience platform’ (EXP) model. Put simply, this model is made up of disruptive technologies that bring together disparate applications and software.

These technologies include digital adoption platforms (DAPs), which are highlighted as a critical component to the EXP, alongside on-demand talent sourcing, robotic process automation and others.

The report explores how DAPs help to bring together disparate IT estates together by integrating on top of software applications and providing contextual, consistent support for users – wherever they are and whatever language they speak, to ensure they can stay in the flow of work.

Using a data-driven approach DAPs also provide insight the everyday tasks and processes that employees are completing. They shed light on any tasks that might be taking longer for users to complete, proactively flag issues and deliver support to the user as and when they need it.

Looking beyond the pandemic

Remote working is here to stay and it’s a good thing – GBS organizations now have the foundations to build a resilient workforce that can work productively from anywhere at any time.

However, GBS leaders shouldn’t take this for granted – ensuring that the employee experience is at the heart of everything they do will be crucial as we move beyond the pandemic. Ultimately, this focus will mean that businesses will emerge from the pandemic stronger, more resilient and be in a better position to achieve end-to-end service delivery.