Covid brought a massive shift in how USAA employees collaborated and worked together. We learned to embrace remote working, and adopted methods to stay connected while we couldn't be in person. But with a return-to-office looming on the horizon, we faced a risk of returning to the way things were before - when collaboration required in-person meetings, and those remote, hybrid, or not in our home office were not included equally.
There were a wide array of services, offerings, and infrastructure provided as internal tools to enable USAA's workforce to do their jobs. A majority of those offerings were disjointed and disconnected from each other - from visuals to communications, from hierarchy to findability, from transparency to education. USAA employees were not able to interact with workforce-facing applications as a single entity.
IT service management (ITSM) at USAA was costly and slow. Costs averaged about $20/issue to resolve, and a majority of the most popular issues had easily-automated solutions (password resets, for example) that required an average of 10-15 minutes if users worked with a support agent to resolve.
Our IT Service Management (ITSM) processes were such that if a user submitted an issue on their own, without calling or chatting the service desk, a support agent would reach out to them directly to get the issue resolved. If they could not make contact upon initial outreach, they would try again up to 3 times. If they still failed to reach to person who submitted the issue, they would simply close it out, stating that they could not make contact with the user.
Prior to Covid, one of the highest-recurring pain points within the non-customer facing workforce was finding and booking a reliable conference room for meetings. Rooms were often booked out constantly, and when you could find a room, there was often a technology issue that prevented that room from being fully usable.