Creating a personalized experience for your employees is more than a nice-to-have in today’s digitally empowered workplace. According to Gartner research, “Leaders driving intranet initiatives must be keenly aware of the No. 1 reason for intranet failure: employee neglect… Employees don’t use intranets willingly or effectively because they often aren’t designed to satisfy their needs.” Leaders can increase intranet user adoption by tailoring a solution that actually solves employee problems.
For instance, personalization in your intranet or employee portal provides concrete benefits for communication, ensuring that important information cuts through the company noise and reaches employees. With the right personalization, employees are able to do their jobs better, which improves morale and confidence, and companies see overall increases in productivity as less time is spent sifting through irrelevant information.
Types of Personalization for Intranets
When implementing an intranet solution, organizations are faced with deciding between a platform solution or an intranet point solution. The latter tends to be rigid and marketed as a “one size fits all,” suggesting that they will instantly work for any kind of business. While these point solutions do decrease time to market, a platform solution provides far greater flexibility and scalability for large or complex organizations. More specifically, a digital experience platform (DXP) provides the architecture for enterprises to produce personalized, omnichannel experiences for every audience, from employees to partners to customers.
Liferay DXP offers a mix of personalization tools that can be combined to achieve the right experience for any team.
Six Tools for Personalization
1) Role-Based Content Delivery for Large Teams
Liferay DXP allows for multiple user types to access a single URL and see a unique page view, announcement, blog post or any type of content based on their role or organization. These permissions can be executed on an incredibly granular level from unique dashboards to specific widgets. This allows for faster development of personalized experiences, especially for large enterprises with many teams and departments.
An example of two different announcements tailored towards two different users.
2) Audience Targeting for Customized Campaigns
This dynamic application allows users to create custom campaigns based on dynamic user segments like profile attributes or pages viewed. For example, audience targeting can be used to send out varying content based on different franchises’ locations. When those employees log into their intranet, they know about promotions, new products and other information relevant to their location and are not confused by different content that applies to another location.
Audience targeting is simple in Liferay DXP. Take advantage of user segments to deliver personalized content and notifications.
As a result of custom audience targeting, only new hires will see the relevant notifcation to them on the right side.
3) Access and Permissions to Streamline UI
A common pain point with intranets is the inability to easily find information. Storing information is necessary but this hinders employees from finding the content that they actually need. Site administrators can grant access to employees depending on the type of content they need to see. By simplifying content repositories and streamlining the intranet UI, employees will have a much more clear view of the content that is relevant to their job.
Leverage the incredibly granular permissions included in Liferay DXP. For example, control what users can write, view or edit blogs.
4) Team Sites for Increased Collaboration
Liferay DXP’s built-in site hierarchy increases team collaboration as department, teams and even individuals can have sites of their own, with public and private pages. To control access, admins can be assigned to each child site so that teams have one place to go for their current projects and updates without creating more noise for the rest of the company.
Liferay DXP allows users to edit site hierachies, add child sites and manage members in these sites.
5) Personal Individual Dashboards
Each user has a custom dashboard based on the applications used daily. Using a drag-and-drop designer, employees can optimize their dashboards to really suit their needs.
Users can personalize their own dashboards based on the applications and content they want to see.
6) Topic Subscriptions
Employees can control what notifications they get based on topics they are subscribed to. These can be email or push notifications through the intranet. Direct notifications can save time, making sure that employees receive important information to do their jobs well. Allowing employees to opt in or out of notifications also empowers them to adjust their intranet experience according to what works best for them.
Users can choose what notifications they recieve and how they recieve them.
How Tailored Does Your Personalization Need to be?
Personalization can be resource-intensive, so it should always be weighed against the potential to increase productivity and efficiency in your intranet. Personalization can vary according to company objectives and desires. To begin, intranet managers should identify the desired outcomes achieved. Do you want employees to be more productive? More collaborative? Employers should then gather information from intranet users on what features they would like. It only makes sense to personalize certain experiences that employees actually want. Identify where your current intranet fails to meet those user needs. These guidelines offer a good starting point to building a personalized digital workplace.
Whether customizing daily tasks to increase engagement or personalizing around team goals to increase collaboration, providing these tailored experiences will encourage intranet adoption, enabling employees to do their job better.