The current focus on Employee Experience within the enterprise is unprecedented. It has proven to be a true competitive advantage, improving talent acquisition and retention as well as employee satisfaction and productivity to ultimately deliver better business results.
So, what do the announcements made at VMworld this week mean to our customers exploring how to improve Employee Experience?
VMware Workspace ONE is continuing to deliver services to personalize and simplify Employee Experience. You saw this last year with the Workspace ONE Intelligent Hub release, creating the digital workspace launchpad for employees with value-add services that support customization, including app catalog, notifications, home and people.
This year, we are focused on self-service. With the shift to a more modern workforce (50% of the workforce will be millennials in 2020, which is just around the corner!), there is a need to provide the same technology and solutions that the average employee uses in their personal lives. This includes the ability to problem solve and troubleshoot in an intuitive way without having to pick up the phone or engage a person to get the answers you need. And with the proliferation of mobile and flexible work, the ability to be productive from anywhere becomes more critical.
The first announcement you’ve seen this week is the new Intelligent Hub Virtual Assistant. This new AI-powered assistant is powered by an integration with IBM Watson for NLP. Within Intelligent Hub, users can now engage their assistant at any time and use a chat interface or speech dictation to ask any HR, IT or other business-related questions. To get started, make sure you have already deployed Intelligent Hub and Hub Services. You can connect your IBM Watson environment with the UEM Console for Hub Services. VMware is building a pre-trained data set that you can upload to your Watson environment for out-of-the-box flows and intents, but customers can extend to any custom flows as well as upload corporate documents. This allows users to ask a question and be presented with the right answer, not a “Google search result” where they then have to triage multiple links to find what they are looking for.
But the options don’t stop there—many of our customers are taking advantage of the self-service portal to give their users the ability to install new profiles, sync their device or register new devices during the device upgrade process. We believe there shouldn’t be a need to go to a separate portal now. By rethinking these common flows that relate to a digital workspace platform, users can complete these tasks from within Intelligent Hub. We also wanted to provide more customization. If you think about the 80/20 rule, generally 80% of inbound service desk tickets cover about the same 20% of topics. By uploading custom FAQs, you can target these most expensive tickets and provide embedded answers within the digital workspace user hub. These new support services won’t require Watson integration and are a great way to get started.
Earlier this year, we announced the integration of Workspace ONE mobile flows and the Intelligent Hub notifications service to support actionable communications, such as manager or process approvals. Mobile flows can really be thought of as the extensibility service for all employee and end-user facing workflows and tasks within Intelligent Hub. The ability to customize the self-service workflows we’ve been discussing is key—you’ll see the best return on investment by taking the time to ensure what you’re providing is tied into the key processes and third-party systems your business is built on. This can be HRIS, ITSM or even custom, on-prem applications. The Virtual Assistant can take advantage of these connections to support common flows like “open a ticket” by guiding the user through the necessary inputs to open a ticket successfully. Workspace ONE has an integration marketplace for these business systems, and we are so excited to announce that Jira ServiceDesk will be the next addition to our out-of-the-box connector library—alongside other connectors for Salesforce, ServiceNow, Coupa and Concur. Joint Workspace ONE and Jira ServiceDesk customers can now, with a single click, deploy approval cards for Jira ServiceDesk in Intelligent Hub and allow new tickets to be opened. For those who require additional customization, you can also download the connector source code from VMware’s GitHub site and modify as necessary.
VMware Workspace ONE is leading the way by enabling IT and HR to reimagine the way their employees work and start delivering on these new experiences. For more information on Workspace ONE and Employee Experience, visit https://www.vmware.com/employee-experience.
