If you work in an IT department serving the employees of your organization, it’s your job to make sure your IT hardware assets are working — “maximizing uptime,” as they say — so that the staff can do their jobs, thus unleashing the full potential of your organization.
A comprehensive IT asset management (ITAM) program can help you achieve that, by giving you better visibility to track your assets, and data to inform smarter IT investment decisions.
And to truly deliver ITAM for the 21st century, you’ll want to make it self-serve, powered by automation. Thanks to Signifi’s Tech Express Desk and self-vending kiosks, organizations from large companies to government departments and educational institutions can transform many routine IT interactions (including dropping off old or broken equipment for a replacement) from a headache into a self-serve snap.
Why is it so important to automate? It delivers a few important benefits, including the fact that employees’ positive self-serve experiences translate into better KPIs for IT departments. End users and IT departments both get a win.
Here are three reasons why self-service ITAM powered by automation improves IT departments’ performance metrics — and how it makes your organization stronger overall.
1. Self-serve ITAM delivers cost efficiencies
When it comes to B2C customer-service interactions, person-to-person communication (in the form of phone calls, emails and web chats) tend to cost several dollars and lot of time per interaction — while the cost of self-service can be measured in pennies, as the Harvard Business Review noted.
The same thing intuitively holds true for internal communications: When IT professionals talk with employee end-users to go through routine procedures and questions, it’s a more expensive and resource-intensive solution than allowing employees to solve those straightforward issues via an automated kiosk. (No one really needs an appointment or a full conversation to swap out a pair of dead earbuds — they just want the fresh earbuds, fast.)
Not only that, automation absorbs the burden of routine IT requests and frees up your IT staff to dedicate their efforts to more difficult or complex issues. So, powered by automation, an IT department is able to redeploy its human resources in more strategic ways.
2. You can make employees happier with self-serve ITAM
Employee happiness is always important — for the sake of retention, not to mention effectiveness and productivity. (According to Forbes Insights, 89% of executives at successful companies say higher employee satisfaction correlates with delivering better customer service, for one thing.)
At Signifi, we often hear from customers that their employees truly enjoy the speed and ease of self-service for dealing with their IT assets. It seems no one actually likes making phone calls to a service desk (especially if it involves conversing with call-centre workers located far away) to take care of IT questions and issues. A self-serve kiosk is a more frictionless way for employees to get what they need — and that makes them happy.
Think of it this way: From an IT help desk’s perspective, employees are customers. As one CEO noted in Forbes, smart companies are starting to view internal needs for IT service the same way they cater to customers: through an omnichannel approach, where employees can decide when, where and how to be served — they choose the time, place and medium that’s most convenient for them. For example, Signifi’s TED unit enables live, face-to-face communication between an end-user employee and an IT professional through video conferencing. This facilitates the delivery of quick assistance for an employee who’s located in the office (at a tech café or hub in their location), while the IT worker can be located pretty much anywhere.
Moreover, that’s a positive experience that employees may recall later — when they’re filling out a questionnaire to give feedback about their company’s IT service desk. Employee and end-user satisfaction surveys are among the most popular performance benchmarks for IT departments. Creating more user-friendly processes and procedures around IT hardware can set up an IT department for success on these metrics.
3. Self-service ITAM means more uptime
Self-service ITAM saves and reclaims valuable time for both the end users and IT workers within your organization. All units also integrate easily with ITSM systems such as ServiceNow, Remedy and many more. When employees can help themselves to replacement equipment, they get back to work faster — there’s less downtime when they have an issue. It’s as simple as that.
And for in-house IT staff, the time gains of automation are just as obvious: As we’ve pointed out before, no one should have to take a walk — whether across campus or across town — just to hand someone a mouse.
Are you an ITAM professional? Join Signifi (Booth 31) at the IAITAM 2023 annual conference from May 9 to 11 in Nashville, Tennessee!
Since 2005, Signifi Solutions has been making access to what people need an easy and inspiring experience. We create self-serve solutions that are as intuitive, beautifully designed, and built to last.
Our promise? We simplify getting people what they need, when they need it. We give back time.