I bet one of the important goals for your organisation’s intranet is to ‘help employees’. However, as an intranet manager you may be struggling to come up with tangible, measurable ways for the intranet to do just this.
Well, how about taking that goal literally? Use the intranet to provide easy access to help and support.
The problem: Help is hidden, even on the intranet
In many organisations, employees are wasting time trying to figure out:
- What email address to use when they need help with Excel. With SAP. With AutoCAD. With SharePoint. And so on.
- Who to call when there’s a light bulb out. Or their security card doesn’t work. Or they need to fix their timesheet. And so on.
At Perkins Eastman, an architecture and design firm with nearly 600 employees in 13 geographically dispersed offices, they had the same problems. Employees had to remember 20-30 support addresses, contact lists were maintained in Excel, and there were zero phone lines dedicated exclusively to providing support. Something had to be done.
The solution: “There’s only one four letter word you need to remember”
So, in the summer of 2010 various departments came together to provide easier access to support and information resources. At the last meeting of J. Boye’s network group for New York City intranet managers, Kate Grimes, Knowledge Management Coordinator at Perkins Eastman, demoed the result:
An integrated solution that links employees quickly to frequently requested information, answers to common questions, how-to guides, and . . . helpful human beings!
Now employees only need to remember one word: HELP. They can:
- Visit the HELP section on the intranet
- Send an email to a dedicated HELP email address
- Call the HELP line by dialing extension HELP
The help section on the intranet is not just a “contact us” link however. It includes icons for the top 10 topics, FAQ, who to contact, and a sidebar that lists the three options for help: intranet, email or phone.
The process: Identifying a shortlist of help topics
The goal was to reduce the call-volume/email-volume by 80%. To achieve this, the team identified a shortlist of recurring questions through:
- Anecdotal experience: As a group, they collected their experience of the questions they answered day after day. They polled office managers and department heads to learn about their experience, as well.
- Email archives: They looked through archives of the most-used support email addresses.
- Intranet metrics: Search statistics and overall site usage statistics helped them identify the resources that users are looking for most frequently.
- Survey: An online survey allowed users to tell the team directly what they commonly need help with, what resources would be useful, and how they prefer to seek help (online, email, phone, in-person).
“We looked beyond administrative and operations support”, said Robert Polkowski, Senior Knowledge Manager ”employees often want to reach out to someone with more experience on a specific market sector, and here we had the opportunity to easily link all employees to our design experts.”
The launch: Reaching everyone
The goal of the launch was, in the words of Kate Grimes, “to get the word ‘HELP’ stuck in everyone’s head like a Beatles song.” And they needed to reach everyone, including the road warriors and other staff who are typically hard to reach.
To do that, the team created physical ‘leave-behinds’ in the form of posters, wallet cards and laptop stickers. On the intranet they linked extensively to the help page and sent out informative email blasts.
Is your intranet helping employees?
Perkins Eastman is a member of one of our intranet groups, and shared the HELP project at a recent group meeting, where they also received constructive criticism from other group members for moving their intranet forward.
If you’d like the chance to network more with experienced web or intranet professionals, I’d encourage you to:
- Join a trial meeting in one of our groups for intranet professionals in the UK, US or mainland Europe.
- Join the J. Boye Conference Philadelphia 12, the premier conference for web and intranet professionals on 8 – 10 May, where you can meet and learn from 40+ speakers including a dedicated intranet conference track
What about your intranet? Is it helping people the way it should?
