How future-ready ITSM tools propel employee experience

Insights

• It is crucial for organizations to have a modern IT service management (ITSM) tool.
• It empowers employees to resolve IT issues swiftly, often through self-service, minimizing downtime.
• Lacking the right tools can lead to frustration and increase attrition risk.
• Organizations must prioritize strong ITSM solutions to retain talent and sustain productivity.

A global airline that serves over 80 destinations across Europe, Asia, and North America was in a fix. Its employees — the backbone of the airline’s successful operations and customer satisfaction — were unhappy. The organization relied on a legacy on-premises service management system for employee use. That system allowed them to raise IT service requests, such as software access and issue reporting, but it was outdated and held up their work, hindering their productivity.

The system was not user-friendly. It was hard to navigate for tasks such as onboarding new crew, reporting in-flight entertainment issues, or creating project requests. The system was also prone to glitches. All of this delayed workflows and annoyed users.

Several factors contribute to a positive employee experience, and having a modern IT service management (ITSM) tool in place is key. It enables employees to resolve IT issues quickly and efficiently, often through self-service or minimal human assistance, helping them get back to work without delays. Without the right tools and technology to do jobs effectively, frustration builds, leading to attrition. This makes it essential for organizations to prioritize robust ITSM solutions to retain talent and maintain productivity.

Outdated and outpaced legacy systems

Organizations often continue using legacy service management systems because they remain functional, but these outdated tools come with significant drawbacks. Their performance is typically slower, which leads to longer wait times and user frustration, negatively impacting employee satisfaction. The user interface is often slow, and the system can lack the flexibility to integrate with modern technologies or offer mobile access. Additionally, legacy systems are difficult to customize for evolving organizational needs, and infrequent updates further limit their effectiveness. A modern ITSM platform can address many of these legacy system issues.

State-of-the-art ITSM tools and employee experience

ITSM tools streamline workflows quickly and efficiently. For example, they can analyze the life cycle of employee requests to assess which aspects take longer to solve and can therefore be improved on. The AI capabilities in an ITSM tool can collect and survey data more efficiently than traditional systems. AI-powered virtual agents can tap into numerous topic flows — that can exist as knowledge articles fed into the system, related to resolving an issue — and quickly summarize a response for the employee or even provide the steps they need to follow to solve the problem, enabling rapid issue resolution. The same action would take a human agent much longer.

That said, organizations will encounter challenges when implementing ITSM tools. Even for this airline, migrating large volumes of data from long-standing legacy systems was complex, necessitating strategies for smooth user adoption of the new system.

Best practices for aligning ITSM with employee experience goals

Companies deploying ITSM tools must set clear service level agreements (SLAs) and experience level agreements (XLAs) when planning their use. They should also gather user feedback on their experiences with new ITSM tools to facilitate necessary adjustments and improvements. The aim is to deliver better IT support and enhance overall user experience. Additionally, defining key performance indicators (KPIs) and regularly evaluating the tool’s performance will help uncover opportunities for improvement. A key part of a successful rollout is creating and providing self-directed training for users and support teams.

How Infosys enhanced service management for the airline

The airline was looking to migrate its in-house applications from on-premises servers to the cloud owing to the ease of maintenance and upgrades, and cost effectiveness associated with the latter. In line with this strategy, it wanted to move from its legacy on-premises ITSM tool to a modern, cloud-based tool. It sought a user-friendly, responsive system with simple workflows, and one that would address the prime challenges in its IT operations and automation aspects, ensuring stability and availability. “For instance, when the airline was facing an incident in its legacy service management platform, it needed to log into another tool that was responsible for analyzing the issue and the impact it was causing, to assess the next steps, as the legacy system wasn’t capable of having this feature built into it. This process was time consuming. The airline was seeking a new platform that would have this operation built into it,” says Ramjanam Raghunath, principal consultant at Infosys, who was actively involved in the implementation. As the airline operates in a dynamic environment with evolving risks, it was also seeking an integrated risk management framework to develop a comprehensive approach to identify, assess, and mediate security risks.

Infosys implemented ServiceNow for the airline with Infosys Cobalt, addressing issues related to poor user experience and the lack of self-service capabilities in the earlier system. The aim was to choose a platform that would allow relevant and disparate application management teams within the organization to have a 360-degree view of the performance of an application including all its outages, incidents, and related issues in one place. It also aimed to provide a platform that would have the ability to perform automation and provide flexibility and scalability to accommodate the growing business needs of the organization. For example, to be able to easily integrate the airline’s new requirements like hotdesking or visitor management for its employees into the system easily, and have the capability to seamlessly integrate with the wider range of enterprise applications, and meet the organization’s security and compliance requirements, while maintaining cost-effectiveness.

What the implementation involved

Catering to the most important requirements of the airline, Infosys integrated the ServiceNow platform into the organization’s monitoring tools so that the application owners and incident management team can have a clear view of applications that are down, and gauge the impact to services from it, to make informed decisions. Now, the airline’s application management teams can detect incidents related to ServiceNow or be alerted of maintenance checks required well in advance.

An integrated risk management framework was implemented for relevant teams within the airline to gain better visibility of security risks which can be managed through ServiceNow, and minimize operational impacts. Employees can now flag vulnerabilities in any application identified within the organization through vulnerability requests on ServiceNow, and the requests which the respective application teams will manage.

Infosys ServiceNow Enterprise Service Management (ESM) Café solution with generative AI capabilities helped to reduce the implementation time significantly. The solution pulls together best practices from Infosys’s past implementations with similar clients to prebuild and predetermine the configuration for the current client. This helps the Infosys team implement the platform in one month instead of three months, saving on the time spent on trial and error related to configuring a new platform.

A “Tech Lounge” set up for the organization helps flight crew members get issues related to their organization-provided devices addressed. The interactions for this are managed through ServiceNow. It sets up virtual agents to allow the employees to perform self-service related to simple tasks such as setting up an email account without the involvement of human agents.

Challenges to navigate

As the Infosys team embarked on the digital transformation journey for the client — of migration from the legacy tool to ServiceNow — there were challenges to be met at different layers. The team needed to map the process differences between the legacy tool and ServiceNow accurately, as both had distinct workflows. The convoluted workflows increased the complexity of implementation. The wide scope of implementation meant various processes and automations. The Infosys team also needed to trade off between configuration and custom development to meet business requirements across modules.

“Effective change management played a huge role in helping overcome the challenges. One of the steps involves identifying and involving the right stakeholders during the various stages of the implementation. This becomes helpful in collecting valuable inputs related to the process mapping,” says Raghunath. “We performed process standardization exercises, which is carefully studying the existing processes and workflows, and streamlining them by reducing the number of steps while reusing steps that fit well into the new workflows.”

The airline’s legacy service management system was gradually phased out, being kept active for a month before transitioning to ServiceNow to ensure that existing tickets on it were closed. Infosys built training materials, including manuals and videos, to equip both support agents and employees with the skills needed to transition to the new platform.

Impact to the client

As part of the ServiceNow implementation, the client adopted automation technologies such as virtual agents. Employees could solve their issues by chatting with virtual agents, reducing manual efforts for human agents. The implementation improved accuracy and speed across business, and consistency across processes. The generative AI capabilities of ESM Café reduced implementation effort and timeline by 40% to 50%.

“Employees benefited from the self-service option with personalized interactions. It led to a boost in employee experience and employee engagement, and gradually increased employee satisfaction which was measured through feedback surveys. The successful implementation helped in streamlining processes and improving response times to employees,” says Sivakumar Ayyasamy, industry principal at Infosys.

Looking ahead, Infosys will assist the client in implementing IT asset management focused on enterprise software, to ensure compliance and optimize software costs organization-wide.

Choosing a modern service management tool can revolutionize an organization's processes and operations, making the transition from a legacy system more than worthwhile. Medium to large organizations should implement efficient ITSM tools, as they can integrate with existing platforms and reduce the need for a big IT support team by enabling users to resolve their problems via self-service options. This not only enhances process efficiency but also improves user experience and boosts employee satisfaction.