Published www.workflowotg.com – June 2021

Enterprise Service Management (ESM) vastly improves communication and collaboration across organizations, which benefits employee engagement and experience, say 72% of businesses in a recent survey. However, these same companies are failing to implement this way of working, with 68% admitting they still work in silos despite knowing it’s detrimental to their organization.

This displays a difficulty in gaining buy-in for ESM, perhaps down to the fact that we’ve failed to establish a hook for this way of working. What do we mean by a hook? A reason, a pain being felt throughout an organization that displays an immediate need for ESM.

Learning from experience

The idea of a hook has not been plucked from thin air. Rather, it’s something that has been proven to deliver a clear avenue for success.

A prime example comes in the mass adoption of collaboration tools in 2020. With organizations forced to work remotely in the early days of the worldwide pandemic, the demand for the likes of Microsoft Teams, Slack, and Zoom soared – Microsoft reported a 74% increase in the number of daily active users in April 2020.

The reason for such need? A hook. These collaboration tools immediately solved a common pain: the lack of ability to communicate and collaborate remotely.

Is it necessary?

The above example of a hook is somewhat extreme, so you might be thinking: is this necessary? The statistics paint a gloomy picture, one of organizations knowing the overarching benefits of ESM but failing to do anything about it.

The reasons behind this lack of motivation for ESM are plentiful. It’s not a short-term solution but rather one that will shape the future of our organizations – beginning such a journey can be daunting to businesses. They know it will help but will also cause friction. In particular, we will likely face resistance to change and silos that prove to be difficult to dispel.

But ESM can provide so much value, so, yes, finding and exploiting a hook is necessary. We need to give our organizations the kick-start they need when it comes to ESM.

Silos? Time wasting? Nope.

There are various benefits to ESM that can provide us with our hook; for example, finally busting those silos and creating a unified organization. But this isn’t strong enough. There is only one hook that can truly provide the real impact that we need: cost savings.

What organization doesn’t want to save money? And with ESM businesses, could incur savings as large as 30% of their annual costs. In fact, when asked, 95% of businesses using ESM said it saved them money.

Just a simple search on Google results in articles promising 22, 30, or even 50 ways to cut business costs. But what if you could just provide one way that could be the key to significant savings? And that is why this is our ESM hook.

Saving you money

The statistics say ESM saves us money – but how? There are various ways, let’s dive into three: a single source of truth, automation, and employee and customer satisfaction.

When we implement ESM, we’re providing our organization with a single area to work. The entire business is using and collaborating in the same system, sharing knowledge and resources. The alternative when we work in silos is each department procuring their own system that does the same job as something we’re already investing in. So, with ESM, we’re saving the costs of those duplicated systems and resources.

ESM allows us to automate simple tasks and processes. This means our staff can achieve more for less. Instead of wasting time on mundane jobs, like granting a security pass to the office, your employees can spend time on tasks that really provide value — maybe even monetary value.

Organizations recognize that collaboration, like that we see with ESM, improves the happiness and engagement of their employees. And when our employees are happy, the mood filters into our customer base. Thanks to unified, easy to use and access services, our customers are more likely to be satisfied. So, with ESM, we can retain and entice new business – more customers = more money.

Playing on the hook even further

If collaboration, efficiency, happiness, and overall success aren’t enough, we can play on the cost-savings with ESM even further. Just imagine what you could invest in with 11-30% more of your annual budget.

We asked businesses what they were hoping to invest in. Sixty-three percent said technology and infrastructure – perhaps ESM’s cost savings could be your company’s avenue into futuristic tech like artificial intelligence. Forty-four percent said company culture and employee experience and 43% said customer engagement. ESM can improve both aspects, so investing could help you reach your goals in one fell swoop.

Ultimately, the cost savings from ESM will have an indirect impact on other aspects of our businesses.

Let’s flip the statistics

The disappointment of finding that 68% of businesses work in silos mustn’t dishearten us. We can flip this statistic. All it takes is finding the hook that will shock organizations and use this to our advantage.

In the world of ESM, our hook is clearly cost savings. And there’s no reason why we can’t see similar results to those of collaboration tools by revealing this huge benefit. ESM deserves the same level of mass adoption, the added value speaks for itself: collaboration, efficiency, happiness, and success.