Employee Center vs Service Portal: 6 eye-opening reasons you should consider an upgrade

Employee Center Upgrade

In today’s digital age, businesses need to keep up with technology to stay ahead of the competition. In other words, digitalization is a must.

As customer service and employee satisfaction are critical aspects of any successful business, modernizing service management can make all the difference. Two common tools used in service management are Service Portal and Employee Center, designed by ServiceNow to improve employee experience. While they have certain similarities, there are notable differences that can impact the user experience.

In this article, we’ll explore the dissimilarities between the two while uncovering the top 6 reasons why upgrading to Employee Center might be the best solution for you business.

Contents

Before we begin, let’s refresh our memory by quickly going through the essentials of Service Portal and Employee Center.

Service Portal is a user interface framework for ServiceNow, which allows customers to access IT services and support. The portal’s features include request forms, knowledge articles, and chat support, making it easier for customers to find solutions to their problems. Service Portal is generally intended for customers to interact with IT support teams.

Employee Center is a single, unified and modern portal where employees can find information and get the help they need from HR, IT and other company departments. It provides an intuitive and user-friendly interface that enables employees to access HR services, such as requesting time off, viewing pay stubs, and updating their personal information. In short, it simplifies the entire employee experience and boosts employee satisfaction.

Now that we solved the issue of terminology, let’s delve into the benefits of Employee Center and the characteristics that differentiate it from Service Portal.

1. Improved Employee Experience

One of the primary reasons to upgrade to Employee Center is the improved employee experience. Employee Center provides a unified, employee-centric experience that solves many challenges and limitations that Service Portal makes hard to address. It offers a clean and intuitive interface that makes it easy for employees to access HR services. This improved experience can lead to higher levels of employee engagement, job satisfaction, and productivity.

In contrast, Service Portal is more focused on providing access to IT-related services. It lacks the same level of customization and flexibility as Employee Center and can be more challenging for employees to use.

2. Unified Employee Service Center

Employee Center is a great way to keep every employee engaged, productive, and informed. It is an out-of-the-box ServiceNow solution created for employees’ information, communication, and engagement to ensure exceptional HR service delivery and customer experience. With Employee Center, you can gather all necessary data in one place. This makes it much easier to use because it is no longer scattered among catalogs and knowledge bases. All users can quickly find what they are searching for and get HR service delivery in one place.

Having all information available in one place not only saves users time and energy but also improves cost efficiency. Let’s make it simple: a multitude of portals means high maintenance costs. A lot of information scattered across various places is also associated with a high risk of data leakage. High costs and security risks are definitely not the outcomes you would expect from your service management tool. This is where Employee Center comes to the rescue. Upgrading to Employee Center solves these problems by lowering maintenance costs and ensuring greater information security.

3. Enhanced Return On Investment with Topic Personalization

Employee Center can be customized to fit the unique needs of your organization. This is another feature that employees will be happy to use. You can tailor the portal to include only the services and information that are relevant to your employees. Each team can have its own personalized topic page that can be adapted and designed to their specific needs, including banners, icons, and colors. This makes teams use the portal more willingly, leading to greater independence, improved collaboration, and a better service experience tailored to their needs.

Consequently, by improving employee satisfaction and productivity, you can increase revenue and reduce costs associated with turnover and low productivity. Additionally, with the ability to customize and automate HR processes, Employee Center can help your HR department become more efficient, further improving your ROI.

In comparison, Service Portal doesn’t offer access to easy topic personalization. If a team wants its own brand, a separate portal has to be created. 

Here’s two examples to better understand the differences between Service Portal and Employee Center when it comes to topic personalization.

Organization A uses Service Portal. Teams do not have the possibility of having their own personalized topic page. Team X requests access to a page adapted to its needs but in order to provide the solution, a whole new portal has to be created. This process implies costs, time and resources. In order to implement personalization, each team requires an individual portal. 

Organization B has upgraded to Employee Center. Now, each team can quickly have access to personalized topic pages that fit their needs and identities. Having this feature, teams are more willing to use the portal, consequently showing enhanced productivity and contributing to the organization’s ROI. 

4. Facilitated Information Flow with Targeted Audiences

Employee Center allows organizations to segment their employee population into targeted audiences, such as managers or new hires, and provide them with personalized content and services based on their needs. This targeted approach makes it easier for employees to find relevant information and services, reducing the amount of time they spend searching for information. Thanks to targeted content, employees only see banners, messages and changes they are interested in. This way, the amount of overwhelming information is reduced, thus making the platform more user-friendly. By providing customized content and services to each audience, the Employee Center can also improve the accuracy and relevance of the information that is shared with employees.

In comparison, Service Portal provides a more general approach to information sharing, where all employees have access to the same information and services, regardless of their specific needs.

The feature of targeted audiences not only improves communication, collaboration, and decision-making processes, but it also contributes to enhancing the overall experience of the users, having a powerful impact on the organization.

5. Business Growth through Innovation Management

Employee Center provides a powerful tool for innovation management through the Idea Portal. This allows organizations to harness the creativity and expertise of their employees in order to drive business success and stay competitive in their markets.

Through the Idea Portal, employees can submit ideas and suggestions with potential for implementation. The idea manager or demand manager  will then evaluate the submitted ideas and will further promote the accepted ones to demands, epics, features, or stories.

This fosters a culture of innovation, empowering employees to contribute to the success of the organization and providing a channel for employee engagement.

Meanwhile, Service Portal doesn’t offer any specific innovation management capabilities, nor does it provide a platform for employees to submit ideas and feedback in a centralized way.

6. Robust Knowledge Management Capabilities

Employee Center leverages a unified taxonomy and AI-powered search to structure and organize knowledge, making it easy for employees to find the information they need quickly. This allows organizations to create a centralized knowledge base of articles, FAQs, and other resources that employees can easily access to find answers to their questions.

With unified taxonomy, organizations can ensure that knowledge is consistent and accurate across all departments and teams, while the AI-powered search functionality allows employees to quickly locate relevant articles and resources based on their search queries.

Contrarily, Service Portal provides a more basic approach to knowledge management, lacking the same level of customization and search capabilities as Employee Center. It doesn’t provide a centralized knowledge base, making it more challenging for employees to find information.

Through its knowledge management capabilities, Employee Center provides a powerful tool for organizations to improve employee productivity and engagement.

To sum everything up, Employee Center is similar to Service Portal, but it is designed specifically for employees to interact with HR and other company departments. 

In time, Employee Center might slowly take the place of Service Portal as ServiceNow is pushing towards the migration to Employee Center. 

Our advice: take into account the benefits of Employee Center, its added business value and your organization’s needs, then make the choice that suits your goals best. 

Whether you’re considering an upgrade to Employee Center or you need more information on the topic, please don’t hesitate to contact us. Click the button below or write us an email at [email protected].

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