Benefits of Employee Center Pro (ECP)
Are you considering your internal intranet and/or portal strategy for your organization? There is a large shift towards consolidating and having one unified place to provide communications, news, and other helpful content.
Did you know that ServiceNow’s Employee Center Pro (ECP) can provide that single place to go for your employees and contractors to go?
Besides the obvious reason of “we already own it”, below are some other benefits to using ECP for your unified portal and possible intranet replacement.
Increases Employee Satisfaction:
- One place to go – less bookmarks, favorites, searching and wondering where to go.
Decreases Interdepartmental Back and Forth:
- Do you have the common issue of employees not knowing what department handles what, so they go to the wrong portal or email the wrong team? This leads to slower resolutions and even confusion on who should handle the request. Employees do not and should not have to know if a question, request or issue is for IT, Facilities vs HR or legal.
Increases Self-Reliance:
- Provides the ability to search in one place (i.e., Tier 0, self-service). This provides case deflection and gives your agents more time to focus on bigger initiatives.
Seamless Experience:
- Can find knowledge (e.g., FAQ, policies, How-to), communications, campaigns, upcoming events, and services all in the same place.
Eliminates Missed Communications:
- Do you have deskless users that don’t have corporate email to get emails? How about employees saying they didn’t get the email, manager didn’t tell them or missed the poster in the breakroom about some big announcement? ECP puts the power in the employees’ hands.
Improves Efficiency of Employees:
- This unified portal can have all relevant, targeted information for the employee. They see the right information at the right time! (more on that below)
Improves Collaboration:
- Ability to use Forums, Campaigns, Pulse Surveys to promote engagement and sense of belonging.
- This is becoming more important with remote, hybrid and in the field employees.
- The engagement also provides feedback to aid in your continual improvements to self-service, service delivery and more.
Frequent Releases:
- ServiceNow ECP is a store app with multiple releases per year (i.e., no need to wait for a ServiceNow major release to get new functionality).
- ServiceNow is fully committed to continually improving and rolling out new features for the unified employee experience.
Opportunity for Shared, Centralized Governance of Communications:
- Targeted and scheduled (i.e., correct audience sees it at the correct time)
- Version control
- Delegated content administration and/or approval flows
Unified:
- Can become your platform for communications, engagement, content experiences and service delivery – removes the silos
Extensible:
- Scalable across all departments with intranet possibilities, without rework
Available:
- Available to employees (contractors, pre-hires, alumni), omni-channel; meets them where they are at
Employee Center Pro Functionality
Below are ECP, ServiceNow platform and HRSD functionality that support the powerful case for moving to ECP.
- Built on ServiceNow’s service portal technology, so if unifying with teams that already use a ServiceNow portal – everything still works. No need to rebuild any widgets, CSS, etc.
- All existing ServiceNow applications and configuration can be surfaced / used (e.g., Knowledge, Services, Live Agent Chat, Virtual Agent; ITSM, SPM, WSD).
- Campaigns can be configured to push content (e.g., notifications, actionable tasks, banners, videos) to users in targeted, scheduled manner (e.g., Open Enrollment, Performance Review, Compliance Training) – even goes to mobile apps.
- Integrations to have all action items/to-dos from other systems appear in their list in ECP (e.g., Workday to-dos, Concur approvals, Cornerstone learning assignment).
- App Launcher integrates to the SSO provider (e.g., Okta, Azure AD) to display all assigned SSO apps to quickly access from ECP.
- Company News application provides ability to create targeted news and featured content.
- Microsites / Topic page allows for delegated management of content, as well as governance (i.e., Benefits team can maintain the Benefit microsite to add remove announcements, links, knowledge; approval flows can be set in place to ensure consistency and compliance).
- Communities / Forums allow for collaboration and engagement. Each forum can have its own security and content types (e.g., New hires community adds and removes users automatically and will only allow non-moderators to ask questions and add comments, only moderator can post events, blogs & videos; New dads community is public and only allows for Q&A).
- Knowledge Articles provide a way to store your policies, SOPs, FAQ and more in a centralized place. Like everything else in ECP, it can be targeted and secured to make sure employees only see what they should (e.g., a US part-time employee should not see the Leave policy for UK management).
- All open and closed requests and tasks from all departments can be viewed.
- Provides consumer grade search capabilities.
- AI features to continually improve (e.g., most popular topics, recommended for you, genius search results)..
- Reports and Dashboards can be surfaced for executives and other leadership that may not want or have need to navigate to the ServiceNow backend.
Other ECP widgets and applications:
- Manager Hub is a landing page(s) specifically for managers to see their direct reports, suggested training and other information relevant to them.
- Org Chart is configurable visual representation of organizational details brought in from system of truth (e.g., Workday) to show manager, peers, direct reports, etc.
- Carousel banner announcements (e.g., see latest travel expense policy, welcome back from maternity leave).
- Videos (e.g., New Hire’s Welcome to the company message from CHRO, training video for OCM).
- Upcoming Events (e.g., start of open enrollment, company picnic).
- Schedules/Calendars (e.g., Holiday calendar, payroll dates).
Corporate Communications
With the trend of consolidating tools, Corporate Communications is usually a big part of this. Their typical goals that we’ve seen are:
- Easy to use
- Streamline communications
- Engaging user experience
- Ability to drive adoption and use
- Push different types of communications to different user audiences at different times
- Foster collaboration
- Meet users where they are at
ServiceNow’s ECP can deliver all of these with the use of ECP and HRSD features (e.g., News, Campaigns, Communities).
The focus of ECP is all about the employee experience – giving them one place to go for all their needs, whether it’s communications from Corporate Communications and Marketing, HR, PMO, IT, Legal, or any other department within your organization.
Employees expect the simplicity of going to one place and not trying to remember where to go for an IT question, saving favorites and shortcuts, and even having to know what department handles what.
To meet your employees where they are at, ECP is responsive, meaning employees can log in through their favorite browser on a desktop, laptop, tablet or cell phone and it responds and looks clean for them without all the needless scrolling to read the sentence. It also integrates with and can surface in MS Teams. There is also a mobile app where employees can see targeted communications and receive push notifications.
Unlock the full potential of ServiceNow
By investing time in comprehensive preparation and teaming up with a leading ServiceNow Partner like Infocenter, you can enable your organization to make informed decisions, streamline processes, and unlock the full potential of ServiceNow, ultimately contributing to your business’ improved service delivery and overall business success.