ITSM Highlights in London

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A star service-desk agent

Meet Trevor! Trevor is a star service desk agent at Acme Corp. He is very dedicated and loves helping employees, but is growing frustrated with the barrage of requests and incidents coming in from the organization lately. The volume of incoming incidents and requests has been greater than ever, but the size of the support staff has not changed. 

Growing pains at Acme Corp

A big reason for increased activity is that business is booming at Acme.The 5,000-member company added 500 people this year alone. Acme has a good onboarding process, but the large number of new hires is bound to bring a higher number of requests.  Additionally, improvements to existing processes are flooding the help desk with questions and incidents from long time employees as well. The IT organization’s walk-in support desk is burned out. The lines are long and lately, employees are joking about the DMV like service at walk-in IT hub.   

A hands-on CIO

The CIO Meredith is a very hands-on leader focused on making IT a driver of business. She takes pride in her team’s performance but is also aware that the IT organization could use more help.  She is acutely aware of how IT is being perceived at the moment. Machine learning and greater automation, she knows, is a must to scale the business. She has had extensive discussions with the CFO and CEO on Acme’s digital transformation and she knows IT needs to continue to lead the way. Meredith has experience sitting in the drivers’ seat. She is engaged, active and excited about Acme’s growth and future prospects. She knows she needs to overcome these growing pains and fast, for Acme to be successful.

Acme’s ServiceNow Journey

Thankfully for Acme Corp, ServiceNow is not just a vendor, but a strategic partner. They’ve been on the ServiceNow platform for over 8 years, using ServiceNow to maintain IT service excellence across the organization. The team believes London will be their best version of service management yet. Trevor has been anxiously waiting for London, ever since he returned from Knowledge 18. Here are some of the highlights from London that Acme is excited about.  

24x7 employee help desk with the ServiceNow Virtual Agent

The ServiceNow Virtual Agent will finally give Acme’s IT organization the ability to scale their support without having to add more staff. Meredith will save support costs while providing 24x7 support to employees.

ServiceNow Virtual Agent is a conversational bot platform. More specifically, it is a chat bot which simulates human conversations and interactions one would typically have with a live agent.

• Available out of the box with pre-built conversation flows, Acme can easily add more conversations or modify existing conversations.
• Trevor wants this now. He will now be able to focus on tasks that actually need his attention, rather than have to respond to every routine question coming in through the help desk.  And because the virtual agent can seamlessly hand off to a human agent, the service desk can always ensure the employee’s needs are met. Acme will name their virtual agent “Adam”.
• Adam will be the first line of support for the help desk, awake and serving employees whenever they need help, even in the middle of the night.  Among other things, Adam can update the employee on the status of their request or open a request or an incident on behalf of the employee.

Automatic categorization and routing of incidents and requests with Agent Intelligence

And once Adam (or the employee) raises an incident, ServiceNow Agent Intelligence uses supervised machine learning to automatically categorize and route the incident to the right resolution team. Accenture’s research shows that this capability can save up to 12% of the agent’s time.

• Importantly, Agent Intelligence adapts to Acme’s own processes as it learns from Acme’s operational data in 6-8 hours and is ready to categorize and route incidents right after. 
• Acme will not spend on data scientists to implement this. Anyone that can build reports in ServiceNow can just as easily train the models on Acme’s data.
• This capability eliminates the bottleneck created by manual triaging at Acme, which often leads to more reassignments and delays in incident resolution. 

New levels of Customer satisfaction with Walk Up Experience

This will be a welcome relief for Acme’s walk-in IT hub. As noted earlier, Acme had set up the IT hub to help employees resolve urgent issues. But the foot traffic was heavy and erratic and the IT team was struggling to manage staffing and demand. ServiceNow’s Walk Up Experience is the perfect solution for Acme’s needs.

Acme can now boost customer satisfaction with a streamlined walk up support process. In fact, Gartner predicted that 50% of enterprises will have the walk-up support channel established by 2018. Meredith had the foresight to set up the walk-in IT hub nearly 18 months ago, but it needed more automation and better stock room integration.

• Acme’s employees are frustrated that they need to wait 40 minutes before their turn is up at the IT hub.  ServiceNow’s Walk Up Experience allows employees to sign in remotely through the service portal and walk up the IT hub when their turn is up. 
• Real time queue updates allow employees to track their position in the queue and enable the IT staff to manage work better. 
• With integrated inventory management, Acme will reduce their time to resolution and incident backlogs.

Continual service improvement becomes a reality

Meredith feels that although this might sound the least sexy of all capabilities, it is in fact, one of the most important for the organization. It will now give her organization an organized and structured way to measure and improve services across the enterprise.

• The application enables anyone in the organization to suggest improvement opportunities. For example, if the help desk manager is seeing the CSAT scores dipping, he can suggest an initiative to improve CSAT scores.
• The Improvement Manager will then examine the request to understand the KPIs and Critical Success Factors that impact the CSAT score. Once the suggestion is accepted, the Improvement Manager collaborates with the process owners to improve and track specific KPIs that are impacting the CSAT score.
• In addition to an easy to use workbench that displays all improvement initiatives in motion, the application has a rich dashboard (see screenshot) that shows the result of all improvements in line with business goals, giving Meredith the complete picture on how the budgets for service improvements were utilized.

Acme is ready for London. How about you? Let us know how we can help you take advantage of these capabilities. Your ServiceNow team is always ready for you.

We’ll have deep-dive blogs on these capabilities in the next few weeks. You can also post questions and comments below that we will gladly address in our deep-dive blogs. 

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The London release broadcast on-demand

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