The Internet has long established itself as an important sales channel. Correspondingly, marketing and sales managers invest heavily in professional online appearances. At the same time, departments such as internal company communications, product management or corporate knowledge management have invested a lot of money in the development of intranets and so-called employee self-service portals in many companies.
The Intranet's contribution to value creation
However, while the continuous monitoring and controlling of their Internet presence is a matter of course for most companies, even in the face of high competitive pressure, the analysis and optimization of the intranet is often neglected. Particularly with regard to the high value-added potential of internal employee portals, it is surprising that many companies have so far refrained from monitoring the success of their intranet investment.
Continuous success control
Of course, for a company, the interests of the customer and the provision of services for the target group are always the first priority. Only by selling products or services can sales finally be achieved. The challenge is at the same time to exploit the optimization potential of internal processes.
Code of Conformity and Works Council
When employees are able to quickly access the required information via internal knowledge databases or process standardized processes such as travel bookings or material procurement via the Intranet, an employee portal helps to save time and money. By providing up-to-the-minute knowledge and required documents centrally, organizations can help their employees work more efficiently.
All-round analysis shows optimization potential
However, the basic prerequisite for increasing the efficiency of the intranet is that the employees actually use the intranet - and they only do so in the long run if they actually find the required information quickly and easily there.
If you have to search for a product data sheet or a template for travel expenses billing on the intranet for too long and have to click through numerous pages, you will be asked to consult colleagues again or use an outdated template copy. In terms of usability, the same requirements apply to the intranet as for the public Internet presence.
Particularly in economically turbulent times the consistent success control and the associated strategic success control are just as important for many companies as a comprehensible return on investment (ROI). Investments, such as the establishment, operation and maintenance of employee portals, now also have to be tested for added value.
Only by analyzing and optimizing their Intranet as well as their public website, they learn whether and how the employee portal is used. Only through a continuous success check will it become apparent how satisfied the employees are with the intranet, what they actually perceive, and whether they can find the information, documents and applications stored there at all.
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For this, a procedure is recommended according to the classical control circuit: Firstly, the goals for the use of the intranet are defined: for example, that every document submitted can be reached with a maximum of three clicks, or at least 80 percent of all business trips should be booked via Intranet.
Then the company measures the actual values and optimizes the relevant areas. On the basis of a continuous evaluation of the set and actual values, the optimization is continued until the targets are reached. These findings are essential to the strategic expansion and optimization of an employee portal, which is the only way to increase the value of an intranet.
The fact that companies have often neglected the analysis of their employees' portals against their public online appearances is due not only to the already mentioned focus on the customer's sales force. In many cases, the strict data protection requirements - especially when analyzing the usage behavior of one's own employees - have also frightened companies from optimizing their intranet professionally.
Data protection and works council compliance should therefore have top priority when selecting an analysis software for the intranet. We recommend a solution that does not use IP addresses, but still allows segmentation according to specific criteria, such as location, department, or language.
Automatic recommendations for action
Meanwhile, there are suitable analytical solutions that enable session-based recordings. A session identifier is assigned by the web server and transmitted to the analysis software, on the basis of which the click path is analyzed. Since this identifier is deleted immediately after the session has ended, a single employee can not be identified. IP addresses that allow single-user conclusions are never processed or stored.
If a company chooses a continuous success control and control of its employee portal with a solution for intranet analysis, it benefits from comprehensive insights: How to use a classic web analysis software, among other things, key figures for number of visitors, dwell time, click paths and search behavior And enter / exit pages.
Statement: Integration is trump
Click heat and link clickmaps show which page contents are often clicked and which are hardly noticed. Using these key figures, companies will learn how and to what extent the intranet is used and whether this usage meets the targets.
A more detailed analysis via mouse tracking also shows how the employees interact with individual pages, what content they perceive and what is overlooked. The mouse tracking software records individual visitor sessions, which can be played like a movie or can be condensed into meaningful overlay maps.
This way the attention focus, the scroll behavior as well as the dwell time of the portal visitors can be made visible on individual page sections. This shows clearly whether the user guide is working on a page or whether visitors are searching the mouse in zigzag lines across the page. Particularly valuable are the findings obtained by mouse tracking, which are documented in scientific studies due to the high mouse-eye correlation in mouse movements (more than 70%).
Statement: Beyond the e-mail - The next logical step
Statement: Increased user acceptance
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A professional mouse-tracking solution also offers detailed form analyzes down to the individual level. If employees are required to complete forms for their travel expense accounting or holiday applications directly on the Intranet, a mouse tracking software can be used to determine precisely whether there are critical fields in which the form processing takes a long time or is often canceled Code>
As with the analysis of the public Internet presence, intranet managers get a comprehensive picture of the user experience of the intranet visitors and find out where optimization potential exists.
A comprehensive Intranet controlling solution also offers the option to carry out active on-site surveys and to obtain feedback via special buttons. The company learns how satisfied employees are with the intranet, what they like, and where they need improvement.
Intelligent interrogation software also provides automatic recommendations for action, through which optimization measures the satisfaction
Of users. Again, of course, the data protection and works council conformity of the software used is a basic prerequisite for the use.
When software is able to segment by location or department, despite an anonymous session log, the company gets particularly powerful insights into the acceptance and use of the intranet and the optimization needs.
For example, if product management at the head office has extensively populated the internal knowledge database with data sheets and product information, but hardly any access is recorded from the sales offices, the reasons should be examined more closely. It is equally useful to examine whether certain search terms are used frequently, but not to results, and whether intranet training for employees results in increased use.
Of course, not only should an employee portal be user-friendly, but also the software used for a comprehensive analysis. It is not only about data protection compliance, but also a quick and easy implementation. The software should be seamlessly integrated into the existing IT landscape, and not only in the software-as-a-service model, but also as an in-house solution because of the sensitive internal data.
Many companies run their employee portal based on Microsoft SharePoint or SAP NetWeaver, so it makes sense to choose a solution that is specifically optimized for these platforms. If all these aspects are taken into account when selecting intranet analysis software, there is nothing more to prevent a continuous and comprehensive success check of the employee portal. On the basis of the acquired insights, companies can then strategically set up and expand their intranets, increase added value and maximize the return on investment.
A recent BITKOM study shows that almost 50 percent of American companies now use social media - but so far mostly only for external communication, such as brand awareness, customer and employee development or image management.
When it comes to internal communication, social media has hardly played a role. They provide enormous added value within the company! Currently, companies often only provide their employees with the e-mail as an electronic means of communication for exchange. Undoubtedly, the e-mail has many advantages. In internal communication with colleagues and superiors, however, it is increasingly becoming the real time-consuming and producing unnecessary data and information.
Because it is often used where it is not suitable as an instrument: An example is the 'Rundmail' to several colleagues, for example, with the trivial question of who is going to lunch together when and where. This results in various e-mail strings with different local and time proposals, which must be coordinated at the same time. For example, the instant message would be more suitable. Another example is that many employees copy their supervisors with each e-mail, either to position themselves internally as an important employee or as a justification to signal their colleagues that the manager always knows in detail about their actions. This approach is counterproductive because colleagues and supervisors are no longer master of the flood and can neither read nor process such e-mails for capacity reasons. Therefore, the motto is to use e-mails only sparingly. This leaves more time for a personal conversation, where you can exchange content directly.
The volume of incoming and outgoing e-mails has now become no longer acceptable for the business world. Of the over 100 emails that employees receive daily, only ten percent are useful. It is estimated that executives spend up to 20 hours a week using e-mail alone. In addition, they are already working increasingly with social networks and spend about 25 percent of their time searching for information. In addition, e-mails are antiquated for the next-generation generation of employees: young employees do not want to miss the social media opportunities that are used everywhere in their everyday lives.
The e-mail as a primary means of communication will soon become less important for companies. At Atos, we decided to ban the e-mail from communication among the employees in 2013, and instead to put it internally entirely on collaboration and social media applications. The aim is to relieve employees of the process, to make processes more efficient and to optimize the flow of information within the company.
While the continuous optimization of their Internet presence is self-evident for companies, this is often neglected in the Intranet. As a result, employees are not taking the portal seriously. For an intranet to fulfill its tasks as a company-wide communication, work and application platform, however, a high acceptance among the users is required.
This is achieved through intuitive user guidance and an appealing design, providing the right applications and personalized content in the right place, mixed with up-to-date editorial information, but especially through the possibility of easy sharing and interaction. Most port solutions have deficits.
The integration of a content management system into the enterprise portal can help. The CMS should provide an intuitive editorial interface that enables casual users to easily create and maintain editorial content without the need for portal knowledge.
The intranet can also be more attractive if the CMS acts as a content integration platform and can, for example, also integrate cloud applications such as video platforms, translation programs for foreign-language content, geolocation services or databases, for instance for contact partner search. Except for content users, companies benefit from accelerated processes, time and cost savings in content creation, as well as the increased use of self-services.
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