ServiceNow Coaching App: A smarter real-time Coaching solution for IT agents and employees

[Manjeet Singh]

Digitization is transforming the role of the IT Helpdesk and contact center Agents. The demands facing help desk staff are becoming more complex, more varied, and more valuable. The unplanned and traditional appraisal methods to coach and train your people are ineffective improvement tools in today’s fast paced environment. Unfortunately, many organizations are still relying on these outdated methods. See survey results from BACK2ITSM group on Facebook.

The % value shows how coaching is primary done today.

What is the problem?

The traditional methods are really ineffective for many reasons.

1. Supervisors are busy and agents are not getting enough coaching cycles when it’s needed the most.
2. Coaching is often poorly targeted. Randomly picking a few incidents often misses key issues or opportunities for improvement.
3. Coaches often approach their work with the wrong mindset and focus on the wrong metrics for improvement.
4. Appraisal periods are stressful and provide a limited opportunity for improvement feedback.

A better way: ServiceNow’s Coaching App

We improve our performance through practice and feedback loops, but for real acceleration we need to take a fresh approach that can provide real-time coaching and deliver micro learning to improve the agent’s performance right when it’s needed.

The ServiceNow Coaching app allows managers to set triggers for coaching moments on any process in ServiceNow platform, and then deliver targeted coaching when those conditions are met to enforce best practices and improve an agent’s performance.

Coaching can be applied to any task-based and non-task-based process (Incident, Problem, Change, PPM, SDLC, custom apps).

Who are the Coaches?

The Coaching module is designed to be a lightweight process. Various people can play the role of coach. Large organizations able to invest in the concept of coaching may choose to have dedicated coaches. You may choose to configure coaches for geographical regions — the local IT manager assumes the role of coach for his local team. Teams with specific technical expertise may be coached by seasoned database administrators or router gurus, for example.

Who are the Trainees?

A trainee could be any employee in the organization. For example, in the IT org, it will be an agent working on resolving incidents or fulfilling requests. In customer service, it could be a call center agent or field service agent. In projects, it could be your product managers.

Coaching Opportunities

Coaching opportunities define the critical moments within the process. In the previous incident management example, three coaching opportunities for the “first response”, “transfer of incident” and “proposing solution” would be created.

Identify critical moment for success

We are all familiar with process flows or diagrams that map out the various stages of a process. When designing an adoption of coaching, an early stage is to review the process flow and identify the critical moments for success.

 

Coaching Assessment

Assessments are the task-based records that are assigned to the coach group. They have fields that allow the coach to offer feedback for the trainee along with a simple scoring system. Once a critical moment has been reached in the process, an assessment is created for the coach to offer feedback. The coach is now able to offer feedback to the trainee and assign additional micro learning using KB, Videos, or best practices.

In order to track performance over time, the coach would rate the quality of the data at this point in the process. The coach can select from a pre-defined list or use a granular survey questionnaire to provide the trainee with a data point, tracked over time to ensure that performance is being incrementally increased.

Virtual Coaching

Supervisors and team leaders may struggle to keep up with all coaching task on time, as they juggle meetings, administrative duties, and special projects. This is where inbuilt Virtual Coach capability will help save a ton of time for the team leaders (Coaches). The Virtual Coach will automatically deliver contextual learning content (KB article, videos, best practice tips), can rate the performance based on the criteria and can move the assessment task to the resolved state automatically — all without any involvement from a real coach.

Coaching Insights: Prebuilt Coach and Trainee Dashboards

Use the Coach dashboard to get insight into an agent’s performance and see how it compares against multiple performance indicators. You can then target coaching interventions at the topics that will most improve agent performance.

Coach and trainee can leverage the out of the box integration with Surveys and Assessment integration to provide more granular feedback and identify items that need future follow-ups or additional training outside of a coaching assessment task.

Evaluate Coaching ROI

One of the more straightforward ways to evaluate the effectiveness of an agent-coaching program is to look at how performance evolves over time. For experienced agents who have been in their current role for more than six months, metrics such as average time to resolve a ticket (MTTR), first-contact resolution (FCR), or customer satisfaction (CSAT) should show a broadly upward trend. At the same time, performance differences among agents should gradually decrease.

A gap of much more than 30 to 40 percentage points between agents in the top performance quartile and the bottom suggests weaknesses in the coaching frequency.

Coaching use cases and sample best practice contents:

The coaching demo data that you can choose to install with the application provides lots of good examples of coaching across Incident, Problem, Change, Survey, HR, and customer service.

1. Coach users new to a process.

a. As your service management capability matures, you will add new processes.
 Engineers that are experienced in Incident management will start to interact with Change management processes. Consider offering intensive coaching to users that move to new roles and responsibilities.

2. Help users that have performance problems.

a. Employees sometimes struggle to perform to acceptable performance levels — you might find your coaching loops uncover undesirable behavior like incidents with poor resolution information or change requests with no risk assessments.

3. Examples of critical coaching moments in ITSM processes.

In Summary:

The Coaching module facilitates the coaching of employees on their work through the use of coaching opportunities (critical moments in a process) that can be conditionally configured. Combined with your ability to influence the outcome of the process by coaching from the beginning, the process is a powerful catalyst for improvement.

 

• Use Coaching to improve agent/employee performance.
• Coaching must be an iterative, on-going process. Irregular appraisals don’t work.
• Coach on fresh data to make it meaningful.
• Coach early in the process to guarantee a successful outcome.
• If you want a world champion organization — you need to do what the world champions do: Achieve high performance through continuous coaching and training.

Frequently Asked Questions:

1. What will happen to old "Coaching Loops" app?

We plan to retire old Coaching Loops plugin starting from NewYork, because its data model is complex, and hard to setup and maintain. New Coaching App is build from scratch in Madrid release. Customer using old Coaching Loop can migrate their existing data to new Coaching tables (see products docs for steps)

2. How can I get new Coaching App?

Coaching modules is available through ITSM Pro. only. They cannot be purchased stand-alone or added to another product line bundle through a custom package. Task to your account rep for details.

3. Can coaching be tuned to target individuals in a team that need additional coaching?

Yes — the coaching opportunity record has a coach on every opportunity field that          guarantees  an assessment task for users. You could also define a sample % size to define  how frequent the coaching needs to be for the trainee group.

4. Can coaching be used for any table in ServiceNow?

Once you are entitled for the Coaching license, which is included as part of ITSM Pro and    CSM Pro, it can be used for any task and non-task table.

5. Can the trainee disagree with the coach’s score?

Absolutely. By using the review assessment button, the trainee can move the assessment  to a state where a conversation can be held using live chat or in-task work notes.

6. Do users know that they are progressing through the process and generating opportunities?

Yes. An email is sent to trainees once an assessment is created for them. You can disable

the notifications if you do not want to notify them.