The average intranet consists of a maze of links and pages with confusing navigation. Many employees spend more time navigating the site than they do getting their work done. However, the problem isn’t just about lost productivity. An intranet that creates frustration for users harms the overall employee experience. In this article, we’ll discuss how to replace your intranet with something that’s more frictionless for your team.
What are the challenges with intranets?
An intranet is a private network used by an organization to help employees communicate, store and find information, and collaborate.
Many intranets aren’t optimally organized, have dead ends, and information can be hard to find. It can be frustrating for employees when they can’t find the company holidays, the dress code policy, or their remaining PTO days, for example.
Many companies also have different internal systems for different bodies of information. For example, there could be separate programs for tracking work hours, accessing company training, researching human resources (HR) policies, and claiming expenses. Having separate programs means that employees need to maintain numerous passwords, learn how to use each system, and spend time logging into each.
Why should companies replace their intranet?
In today’s digital world, employees bring valuable insights to organizations. Engagement is key to creating a landscape where employees have the bandwidth and motivation to contribute in a meaningful way.
Businesses today know that they need to think beyond compensation to attract and retain key talent. It’s important to focus on the employee experience (EX) because happier employees perform better and stay at their jobs longer. It’s also important for profitability because happy employees make their customers happy.
One way that an organization can make a big improvement to its EX is through technological improvements. A more frictionless intranet is one application.
Frictionless intranets also:
- improve communication and collaboration between employees
- save valuable time
- facilitate remote work
- enable employees to seamlessly access support without relying on other team members or management
- encourage employees to spend time on work that makes the company more successful and profitable
What should companies replace their intranet with?
To replace an intranet with something more frictionless, companies should look for AI-powered automation solutions like Capacity. Capacity is an AI-powered support automation platform that connects your entire tech stack to answer questions, automate repetitive support tasks, and build solutions to any business challenge.
Solutions like Capacity include the following features.
Chatbots that use Natural Language Processing (NLP).
Chatbots enable employees to find information by asking questions instead of scanning through pages and links. Chatbots can even be tailored to an individual’s needs, language skills, or work style.
Escalation procedures.
Escalation procedures ensure a question doesn’t go unanswered when an employee can’t find the right information. Rather than reaching a dead-end, automation systems help team members crowdsource content, find an expert within the company, or reach the appropriate manager.
Centralized system.
Automation platforms like Capacity can integrate with apps like Microsoft Teams or Slack. So no matter what employees have a question about, they only have to access one program to find the answer.
A comprehensive and ever-expanding knowledge base.
AI-powered tools like Capacity can connect organizations’ knowledge base with other tools, so chatbots, helpdesks, and automated workflows can all pull consistent information from one place.
Plus, these tools are continually learning and adding new content. The more employees that use the chatbot, the smarter it gets. As people ask questions and input data, the AI learns from that information to answer future questions.
Appropriate permissions.
It’s also important that employees can only see the information they have been granted access to. For example, this ensures that no one stumbles upon classified salary information for their peers.
Collection of employee feedback.
Employees don’t work well when they have no say in how the company runs. Automated systems can help companies collect data about anything affecting team members, including workflows, HR policies, or working conditions.
Effective onboarding.
An automation platform can make onboarding more efficient by taking over key aspects of the process from managers and HR team members. Companies will never miss a beat when an employee gets hired and needs to fill out paperwork and documentation because the platform can automate those processes.
What is the best way to replace a company intranet with an automated system?
When making the change to a support automation system like Capacity, companies need to create a robust knowledge base. This is so that the automation system can answer most of the questions it will get, giving employees a frictionless experience.
Companies should also appoint back-end users who can answer difficult questions and continue feeding new information to the system.
How can Capacity help companies replace their intranets?
Capacity is an automation platform that can completely replace a company’s intranet, even when knowledge is spread across various databases. It integrates with many third-party tools, so employees don’t have to switch over to a new system.