Today’s businesses are full of digital-savvy employees who aren’t just used to using digital services but demand them. As a result, retailers are realising they need to digitally transform how they operate and serve their internal customers to make sure their internal world keeps pace with the rapidly transforming external world.
Employees are no longer satisfied with time-consuming manual processes that have been the norm for so long. They are seeing rapid digital change in the services provided to them as consumers in their personal lives and want that replicated in how they fulfil their jobs.
However, the current status-quo within IT for many businesses in the retail sector is quite a bleak sight. Services are being delivered using manual tools like email and spreadsheets which is forcing your IT team to track the services they deliver across multiple locations. This is incredibly time and resource heavy and distracting IT from the strategic business goals that matter like driving innovation and growth.
So, in the face of this, what’s the solution?
The solution is simple – remove complexity. You need a technology solution that stores all of your data in one place so that you can build services that are simple, consistent, predictable and repeatable on top of that. This is where ServiceNow comes in.
The ServiceNow cloud platform is most well-known for innovating service delivery through its advanced automation and workflow capabilities. But the only reason these capabilities are accessible is because the platform becomes your single system of record on which you deliver your business services. This is achieved by consolidating the data currently stored in your various manual tools like email and spreadsheets into a single data model but also by integrating all of your other core systems of action with ServiceNow as well. Essentially, you are centralising all of your data by plugging everything into one single source.
By consolidating your IT infrastructure and services onto a single platform, IT have a centralised, real-time view across the organisation. This makes it possible to digitise your legacy business processes using digital workflows. Now you have full visibility end-to-end which allows you to automate the routine manual work. As a result, your IT team have more time and energy to focus on the higher-value, strategic activities that drive the business forward.
So, this covers how you can boost IT productivity but what about your employees?
Again, centralising all of your data allows you to surface essential information in real-time to your internal customers, your employees, with confidence. Why? Coming from a single source that updates in real-time, you can be confident it is correct. But above and beyond that, it gives your employees access to a wealth of information at their fingertips that they never had access to before. Giving them all of this information allows you to structure your services in such a way that they can choose to help themselves before coming to IT to do the work for them. This eliminates a large proportion of the time-consuming back and forth communications that bogs down your IT team and distracts your employees from their day-to-day work.
The presentation layer for this wealth of information is an intuitive self-service portal that can be configured to dynamically change based on the employee’s role, preferences and the services they are looking to consume; be that raising an incident, a request, or managing approvals. This frictionless approach saves your employees a huge amount of time, boosting their productivity, but also tightly manages the services your team provides by offering unprecedented visibility and control.
If you would be interested in learning more about how ServiceNow can support you with your IT objectives, please feel free to reach out to us. You can either reach us at letstalk@crossfuze.com or you can reach me personally at oliver.nowak@crossfuze.com.