Employee experiences are inextricably linked to customer experiences. So it’s easy to understand why you’d want your employees to have a good one. (Spoiler: so your customers do, too). As such, improving the employee experience has been a pivotal trend throughout this year and will continue to be top-of-mind for businesses as we head into 2024.
One of the biggest frustrations workers face is not a lack of information; quite the opposite. Instead, they’re inundated with data. What they lack is the ability to access organizational information easily, quickly, and intuitively — which directly impacts their proficiency and productivity.
In the long term, this influences employee retention, as workers actively seek out employers who invest in technology that fosters development and growth.
Forty-four percent of respondents in Coveo’s 2023 Workplace Relevance Report said that information stored across multiple applications slows them down or prevents them from finding the answers they need to do their job. Thirty-one percent said the company intranet contains irrelevant or outdated information.
What trends in the new year will further complicate — or potentially ease — this need for finding information? Let’s dive in.
Trend #1: The Decentralized Workplace
Shifts between in-person and remote work are still occurring, which makes maintaining a consistently good workplace experience challenging — and a top trend for 2024. As organizations navigate a landscape increasingly defined by digital interfaces and remote work, the quality of the digital workplace experience is impacted by being able to find the right information quickly. This requires connections that can work between multiple employee setups.
Creating and supporting a decentralized workplace underscores the need for intuitive, seamless, and personalized digital environments. You should have technology in place to enable things like asynchronous communication and foster a sense of connection among employees.
Our newest platform innovations address this with the following capability improvements:
- Generative Answering – A significant leap in how information is retrieved and presented, generative answering uses AI and ML to understand the context of employee queries. Coveo Relevance Generative Answering pulls information from your own various internal knowledge repositories to provide tailored, conversational responses that create a more intuitive and user-friendly search experience. Ultimately, this reduces the time, applications, or articles that need to be parsed through to find the right answer.
- AI Model Suite – Our suite of 11 AI models which include behavioral, deep learning, LLM, and more, are built to enhance and improve workplace experiences. These models are adept at understanding and predicting employee needs, which makes them capable of personalizing and optimizing interactions across digital platforms and tools.
- Facet Generator – Coveo’s facet generator is a new dynamic navigation feature that automatically creates relevant search facets based on user queries and content. This innovation, which can be easily integrated into your existing search solution, streamlines the search process by allowing employees to filter and find information more efficiently.
“The fact of the matter is everyone learns a little bit differently. Having options on reformulating or different styling is very important. AI tools like smart snippets and generative answering make suggestions or recommendations to users to take them to the next step that you want them to execute. So, we’re exploring ways of providing low pressure recommendations or suggestions to help your business and your employees get better outcomes.” Juanita Olguin, Senior Director Product Marketing, Coveo.
Connecting the different components of your organizational knowledge base (intranets, cloud-based storage systems, and collaboration tools like Slack) versus replacing them keeps employees productive and happy no matter where they happen to be working. That’s why intelligent information retrieval with the help of generative AI was a central focus for Coveo throughout 2023.
Trend #2: Workforce Demographics Are Changing
Demographic shifts in the workforce are shifting what it means to have a good workplace experience. As Gen X takes over for Baby Boomers in management and senior roles, Millennials and Gen Z are filling in experience gaps and coming to the table with different expectations. Finding information quickly is important, but so is finding the right information and minimizing time spent searching across multiple data repositories and applications.
Our 2023 Workplace Relevance Report revealed that older employees don’t spend as much time searching for information as their younger counterparts, with Gen Z respondents saying they spend an average of 183 minutes per day searching for information versus Baby Boomers who spend about 130 minutes per day.
Digital maturity – and where you stand as an organization – directly impacts employee engagement, productivity, and organizational efficiency. Coveo’s latest innovations focus on improving the workplace experience by addressing four different levels of digital maturity as follows:
Level 1 – Company-wide Intranet
Your intranet is your digital gateway, the starting point your employees use to navigate an increasingly digital workplace. Creating a company-wide intranet is a foundational step that allows you to engage and inform employees about company news and general information.
It fosters a sense of belonging that’s particularly important for large, globally distributed enterprises while remaining relevant for employees at all levels and stages of their careers. Coveo’s workplace innovations support an effective intranet with unified, enterprise-wide search, expertise locators, and AI-powered recommendations.
Level 2 – Personalized Workspace
Building personalized workspaces is the next level of digital maturity. Again, a Gen X employee who’s been with the company for fifteen years is going to have different informational needs and behaviors than a Gen Z employee fresh out of college.
Personalizing digital experiences based on employees’ departments, activities, and experience keeps information relevant and employees engaged. For example, the integration of ML-driven recommendations that incorporate relevancy help guide employees to the most contextually meaningful information — whether that is a document, person, or an answer.
Level 3 – Follow Me Search
Coveo’s “Follow Me” search feature is an in-product experience that can be incorporated into your internal workplace ecosystem via a widget. It’s meant to help employees as they toggle between websites and applications, providing personalized recommendations, guidance, and answers as employees work (e.g., in the “flow of work”). This feature unifies access to companywide information across various knowledge repositories and is easy to integrate with the click of a button.
Level 4 – Unified Results in Slack
Unified search results from within Slack pull information from various different content sources into Slack without having to leave the application. This is particularly important for companies whose main source of interaction and information exchange is Slack. The feature can be used for general and role-specific needs, minimizing the need to switch apps.
Trend #3: Mitigate Workplace Overwhelm
Employees increasingly deal with rapid shifts in technology, customer expectations, and an influx of information from multiple sources. This can be overwhelming, particularly for frontline employees who, according to a recent survey by Qualtrics, feel less prepared to adapt to changes to be satisfied with work processes versus other employees.
Having access to the most up-to-date information in real time, regardless of where it lives in your company’s knowledge ecosystem, empowers employees by giving them the tools they need to do their job. Real-time information retrieval ensures that teams can gain access to the most current information in real or near-real time. This is an absolute necessity for good employee and customer experience.
Coveo’s wide range of connectors, unified hybrid index, and vectors are designed to seamlessly blend with various platforms. These include Sitecore, Adobe, Salesforce, and ServiceNow. We have a range of user interfaces that include integration with tools like Slack and standalone search pages. This versatility makes it possible to support an intelligent digital workplace regardless of which stage of digital maturity you’re at.
Our aim is to enable you to leverage any and all knowledge sources you use across your organization so you can create a more responsive digital work environment that includes the resources you already have.
“At Coveo, we’re looking to be that intelligence layer connecting your systems and information. Teams increasingly need access to information in real time wherever they are and that’s why we are excited to provide a variety of UI interfaces where you can use Coveo right within your application like Sitecore, Adobe, Salesforce, and ServiceNow. We have a lot of options available to help you create that intelligent digital workplace.” Juanita Olguin, Senior Director Product Marketing, Coveo
Trend #4: Onboarding and Upskilling Look Different with Flexible Work
While a recent Resume Builder survey of 1,000 company leaders found that 90% of companies plan to implement return-to-office (RTO) policies by the end of 2024, another survey of 2,000 workers found that 68% of full-time workers support a hybrid model. Whether your company is considering a full RTO like Google or Goldman Sachs, experimenting with remote workers, or achieving Goldilocks status with hybrid work, choosing adaptable and flexible technology that equally accommodates new hires and existing workers is paramount.
Configuring your workplace experience so that Sarah in Alaska can access the exact same information as Pablo in London, requires a system that can easily connect different data sources and tools and retrieve information intelligently. Even if your workers are entirely on-prem doesn’t mean that information silos don’t happen.
Coveo’s latest innovations help with the onboarding process by addressing total experience – the holistic strategy that considers the interconnected experiences of customers, employees, and users across different touchpoints and channels. Offering a range of AI-driven features from connectivity and integration to search and UI to data and reporting, they allow you to fully support new and existing employees and aid in training and collaboration at scale. This allows everyone at every stage of their career to feel fully supported and to, in turn, fully support your customers.
Equipping new workers with the knowledge they need when they need it (and from wherever they happen to be working) should be part of every organization’s post-Covid onboarding experience. Coveo is composable, headless and agnostic, with both pro/low code customization options, which allows you to create consistent digital experiences as easily (and painlessly) as possible.
This connectivity allows you to include the newest hires even if they’re exclusively remote. The Qualtrics survey notes that employees with less than six months experience are often excluded from annual engagement surveys, contributing to what has become a disconnected onboarding process that doesn’t fully support new employees. Tools like generative answering, a capability combining search, LLMs and AI, help guide new employees to the correct information and people, making the onboarding and training process more personalized and connected.
“It’s quick and easy to get started with Relevance Generative Answering – this is based on testing with our beta users which include over 40 different customers. We are seeing this to be about a 90-minute implementation time [for existing customers], making it easy for your teams to set up quickly, get fast time-to-value, and help improve end user expectations.” Juanita Olguin, Senior Director Product Marketing, Coveo.
Ready for the Future of the Digital Workplace?
Our clients have been successful with integrating these new platform innovations, thanks to our intuitive interfaces and out-of-the box features. Our 11 AI models like query suggestions, content recommendations, and case classification are meant to be straightforward, point and click applications.
Low code and no code features mean you can plug new capabilities into your existing workflows and begin transforming your workplace experience in hours versus days or weeks.
Interested in any of the above described solutions? Contact us for a free consultation with a Coveo AI expert!