Microsoft reported a 74% increase in the number of daily active users of Microsoft Teams in April last year. This level of mass adoption takes years of struggle to get departments and users onboard. Enterprise Service Management (ESM), much like Microsoft Teams, also helps organizations work more efficiently and effectively. Here, Hannah Price and Sumit De from TOPdesk, talk about some lessons from the pandemic that can be applied to ESM?
Microsoft recorded a 74% increase in the number of daily active users of Microsoft Teams within a single month after the COVID-19 pandemic set in last year. Why? The move to remote working in March 2020 forced workers online just to stay in touch with one another. And Microsoft isn’t the only collaboration solutions provider to see this spike in use – Zoom and Slack reported similar results.
When it comes to Enterprise Service ManagementOpens a new window (ESM), organizations dream of this type of mass adoption. But this is just a dream. The reality is often months, if not years, of struggling to get departments and users onboard.
We proved that mass adoption of a tool to elevate collaboration is possible. And while ESM and applications like Teams are very different, they both connect people across an organization at their core. So, why were collaboration tools so popular in 2020? And how can we take the lessons learned from their mass adoption and apply them to ESM?
The Differences
Before we delve into the good and bad of the adoption of collaboration tools in 2020, it’s important to note the differences between them and ESM.
Collaboration tools provide a platform for teams to connect through remote meetings, group chats, and working on a document together in real-time. Similarly, ESM connects an organization, however, slightly differently. It provides a unified area for logging and resolving service tickets and a collaborative space for cross-silo processes, and a one-stop-shop portal for all your customers’ service needs.Â
On a high level, ESM answers the big picture questions for organizations, whereas collaboration tools answer minor, short-term questions. In the realm of remote working, a short-term problem was the ability to communicate despite physical borders – collaboration tools solved this issue. However, they didn’t answer the broader problem of organizations working in silos (68% of businesses admit they do). The functionality brought everybody together, but it didn’t guarantee that each team contributed to the big objectives. On the other hand, ESM is as much of a commitment as it is a tool. We implement ESM to answer that bigger question, bring together our departments within a tool, and show them that collaboration is the key to success.Â
Learn More: Cloud Collaboration Tools: Risks vs. Rewards
Lessons from 2020: The Good!
We learned a couple of key lessons from collaboration tools in 2020: growth and continuous development. Let’s start with the former. Collaboration applications saw massive growth in the opening months of 2020, the type of growth that we haven’t seen in the B2B world before.
We could almost describe them as viral trends. The daily active users of Microsoft Teams in 2019 was 20 million. This grew to 44 million in March 2020, 75 million in April 2020, and 115 million in October 2020 – an 82% increase in under a year.
What can we learn from this viral growth in an extremely short space of time? There was a specific trigger – Microsoft Teams solved a pain point that was felt far and wide: an inability to communicate remotely. So, given the right ingredients and the right situation, a platform can truly thrive.Â
But it wasn’t just about getting their foot in the door that made collaboration tools so successful in 2020, it was also about constant development and updates they underwent. Over the last year, Microsoft Teams made more updates to its product than at any other time in its lifespan. And this continuous development sent it soaring past its competitors.
The above graph displays a comparison between the daily active users of Microsoft Teams and Slack. As you can see, the companies were fairly close together between 2017 and 2019, before the gap skyrocketed in 2020.
Learn More: 5 Ways Remote Teams Can Collaborate Better and Meet Business Goals
Lessons from 2020: The Bad…
There were also some less than ideal lessons we learned from collaboration tools in 2020, and these bring us back to the big picture. Utilizing collaboration software doesn’t suddenly guarantee that all parts of a business are working in sync, but in 2020 they somewhat masked this problem. People believed that because they are in a Teams channel or Zoom call, they’re collaborating. The reality is that this is a false sense of security, and silos still exist.Â
Collaboration tools have changed how we communicate, but they’re just a digital extension of the way they worked before. No one breaks down the hierarchy or organizational structure based on a team’s channel they have. The bigger problem of fragmented working is still very much alive.
ESM: Learning From ‘the Good’
How can ESM capitalize on these lessons? While the COVID-19-related shutdown was the trigger for mass adoption of collaboration tools, emerging silos, time-wasting, and cost-saving will act as triggers for the adoption of ESM worldwide.
At present, organizations are working in a siloed manner. This means bottlenecks, a lack of transparency, barriers to collaboration, dissatisfied employees and customers, and duplicating processes/resources. Time is non-refundable, so all those wasted hours replicating work or bridging gaps equate to lost potential progress. So, silos and time-wasting could be your trigger, but perhaps more importantly and most impactful is cost savings with ESM.
If there was a way you could save between 11 and 30% of your annual costs, would you take it? Of course! Fifty-seven percent of business leaders say this is what they save with ESM. There’s an immediate value opportunity to be capitalized on, and that’s our way in! But as we learned with collaboration tools, it’s not just about getting in; it’s about staying in.
We must remember the big picture: we won’t achieve success the day we implement ESM; we’ll achieve it by constantly evolving the way we work and breaking down those silos to become a unified organization. Microsoft Teams truly taught us a valuable lesson in continuous development: it’s not optional, it’s essential.
ESM: Learning from ‘the bad’
What worked for collaboration tools in 2020 is precisely where ESM can thrive. Platforms like Zoom, Slack, and Microsoft teams might not break down silos, but ESM is that problem solver. You can truly bring your organization together with a commitment to ESM.
However, we must be careful not to make the same mistake: masking silos by bringing them online instead of disbanding them. If we fail to take the right approach to ESM, the same thing will happen. Instead, we must consider what the big picture looks like but take small incremental steps to get there.Â
How will this work? Starting with one team, helping them to see the benefit, and encouraging them to become champions of the project. Then slowly bring the next team onboard, and the next, and the next. Slowly but surely, the collaboration will take off, and silos will become a problem of the past. People will wonder just how they worked before ESM, much like how we can’t remember a life before Microsoft Teams.
It’s Time to Beat the Fear
Mass adoption of ESM may have been a dream for many, but now it can be a reality. Often, organizations fear taking on such a project, believing they must perfect it before it’s even started. But were any of us truly prepared for what came in 2020? No. And did we manage to adapt with the help of collaboration tools? Yes.
Let’s beat the fear of ESM. If collaboration tools can do it, we can too. We’ve found our pain points (silos, time-wasting, and cost-saving), we understand things to avoid (masking the problem), and things that are essential (constant development). Now is a good time to make ESM a viral trend in our organization.
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