More and more of our customers have been coming to us asking to manage the implementation of their ServiceNow Employee Center. The conversation often starts the same, “We’ve got so many different employee portals, it’s a mess, where do we start?”.
Having successfully implemented it for several customers recently I thought I’d share some of the things we learned along the way.
1. Get the right people onboard at the start
Engage with stakeholders from each function or department who want a piece of the Employee Center pie. Get all of your core stakeholders in a room at the outset and ask them to talk you through their processes and requirements before you get started. This will save you time and money in the long run as you’ll avoid any unexpected requests further down the line.
2. Employee Center is very flexible – how far do you want to go?
One of the beauties of Employee Center is that it doesn’t replace other applications (so you won’t be starting inter-departmental war by trying to close things down). What this does is pull everything into one place, improving efficiencies and offering employees a much better experience.
You can integrate custom apps and bring them into Employee Center, rather than having these as separate portals. You can also give it the user-friendly look and feel of a good website (so the brand team is definitely one for your stakeholder list for point 1!).
And if you’re integrating Virtual Agent as part of your implementation, there’s a lot of flexibility there too. As an example, our team built custom conversations to answer the need of one of our customers who wanted responses not only to be as human sounding as possible but to quickly direct employees to the right person to solve their query.
3. Know what good looks like
Taking time to benchmark expectations will be time well spent. Ask your partner to share examples of Employee Centers they’ve implemented previously and engage your marketing team early to ensure you’re delivering not only an optimised experience but one that is on-brand.
4. Build and design with people in mind
Ultimately, success or failure will come down to how the end users react and engage with your new Employee Center. Lean on the stakeholders who helped you bottom-out the requirement list for a user perspective. And think about creating an employee panel for the user testing phase so they can experience it and feedback on what’s working well and where there’s room for improvement.
5. Start with a Minimal Viable Product (MVP)
As soon as your Employee Center is out there and people are engaging with it, feedback is going to bubble to the surface. Build your project plan around test and iteration by starting with an MVP.
This was our top five, but there is plenty more learning where that came from. If you’re thinking about implementing ServiceNow Employee Center, as always we’re happy to chat and share more about our experience with our customers and how we can help you and your organisation.
