Every business has to find a way to stand out from the competition while keeping costs in check. Today, many are looking to enterprise service management as a way to increase their competitive edge by boosting operational efficiency.
That’s because when it comes to internal service delivery, there’s a lot of room for improvement. Hamstrung by organizational silos and unstructured processes, inquiry management winds up being a complex, expensive operation that can frustrate employees and sour business relationships with suppliers, partners, and customers. From HR and IT to supply chain and procurement, service delivery suffers.
Businesses pay a high price for this kind of inefficiency. According to Gartner estimates, one hour of lost productivity can cost an organization with more than 10,000 employees nearly $69 million a year.
Enterprise service management (ESM) provides a way to standardize and centralize service delivery. When infused with AI, ESM helps break down silos and connect people, data, and processes to speed resolutions. This efficiency improves the service experience for happier employees, customers, and business partners while reducing operational costs and increasing profitability.
Reaching a breaking point
Many businesses are struggling to serve their customers, both internally and externally. Whether its an employee, supplier, partner or consumer, they expect fast answers and resolutions, but companies are mired down by inefficiency and fall short.
Organizational silos with too many internal unstructured, often manual processes make it impossible for a business to meet customer expectations. Here’s why:
- No data capture or repeatability
- No performance measurement
- Long resolution times
- High potential for erroneous responses
- Knowledge is buried in email conversations, forcing employees to hunt for the right expert
This leaves resolutions to institutional knowledge with the risk of different answers from different resources. Stressed service teams juggle heavy, unprioritized workloads, and overflowing inboxes. Everyone’s frustrated: Employees and the customers they’re serving.
Enter enterprise service management
Organizations today realize they can no longer overlook these inefficiencies, especially with modern, cloud-based technologies and artificial intelligence making it possible to gain agility and reduce costs. AI is transforming the way companies run and fueling new approaches that allow employees to be more productive and strategic in their day to day work.
ESM offers a way to leverage new technologies and AI to streamline and improve service. By capturing processes and linking data across departments in a unified, connected system, it reduces complexity to speed resolutions.
The most effective ESM solutions have these capabilities:
- Self service—Employees and business stakeholders can service themselves with easy access to knowledge and policies via their preferred channel. AI agents reduce burden on support resources.
- Case management
- Modeling ease for any inquiry type
- Seamless experience with supporting solutions and tooling
- Flexible UX
- Contextual knowledge access—Flexible knowledge models with in-context results from all relevant sources
- Collaboration support (within and between departments)
- Embedded AI-driven process automation and workflows
- Analytics & insights, including real-time service delivery performance insights & dashboards
Streamlined service gets real results
Organizations implementing modern AI-enabled enterprise service management are seeing benefits on a number of fronts: Reduced time to resolution across lines of business, improved experiences for employees and those they serve, and tremendous cost savings.
Simplifying and automating employees’ daily tasks boosts productivity, giving them more time to work on strategic improvements and growth opportunities. With quick access to the right data, support teams don’t get frustrated hunting down information. They’re more satisfied in their jobs and less likely to leave. Faster, accurate response makes stakeholders happier and decreases operational costs.
A single, connected ESM platform:
- Ensures collaboration
- Minimizes IT infrastructure costs
- Unifies processes
- Simplifies expert skillsets
- Ensures consistent service delivery
- Reduces total cost of ownership
A global supplier of technology-driven natural ingredients, ingredient systems, and integrated solutions for the food and beverage industry implemented SAP Enterprise Service Management to streamline HR service processes. The results were dramatic:
- 60% of employee requests to HR went through self-service widget since go-live
- 33% reduction in resolution time (from three to 2 days)
- 4x increase in productivity
Now, the company is planning to expand the deployment enterprise wide for broader adoption across departments. With its unified ESM approach, they’re setting a standard for enterprise-wide efficiency.
Embarking on ESM
Organizations looking to ramp up operational efficiency with centralized AI-powered enterprise service management should start by mapping out departmental needs (HR, finance, procurement, IT, etc.) and identifying cross-departmental needs for service delivery.
Then, begin piloting ESM in one or a few departments. By starting small, then testing, monitoring results, and iterating you can manage IT resources and scale with confidence.
You won’t have to wait long for a return on investment. With lower costs, greater efficiency, and happier employees and stakeholders, your business can drive growth and outshine the competition.