Building a solid ITSM foundation
ServiceNow has always
invested in its service desk capabilities, so it should come as no
surprise that we had a robust ITSM foundation for Mirza and his team
to build on. By 2017, we had already:
- Automated more than 200 service delivery tasks such as access
provisioning, saving 8,000 hours of effort per year
- Achieved 85% adoption of IT self-service
- Saved $1.6
million annually in operational and resource costs
Not only did we reduce costs and streamline workflows, we also
provided quality experiences for our employees. For example, we broke
down incidents in our service catalog by service type, allowing users
to select from a simple drop-down list of common incident types—rather
than having to fill in a form. With this and other service delivery
optimizations, we attained a 97% employee satisfaction rating.
How Mirza and his team turned good IT service into spectacular IT
service
As Mirza took over the service desk team,
ServiceNow continued to grow by leaps and bounds. That created
significant challenges, even though ServiceNow had a well-established
service desk.
“We were under increased pressure because ServiceNow was adding
hundreds of employees every month. My team couldn’t simply add more
staff. To scale, we needed to improve how we did things, providing the
truly frictionless experiences that ServiceNow employees—and my
team—deserve. By leveraging new technologies that built on our
existing foundation, we could enhance the employee experience while
dramatically improving my team’s productivity,” says Mirza.
Let’s look at how Mirza and his team achieved this goal.
Increasing agent productivity and responsiveness with Agent
Workspace
To address our most pressing IT service
issue—scaling the service desk—Mirza knew he needed to increase agent
productivity. For this, he turned to ServiceNow®
Agent Workspace.
Mirza says, “To accurately resolve incidents, our agents need to
deal with multiple types of information and interactions—phone calls,
chats, knowledge base articles, similar historical incidents, and
more. They ended up juggling multiple windows for a single incident,
making it nearly impossible to work on multiple incidents at the same
time. Using Agent Workspace has fixed the issue by centralizing
everything in one place and giving our agents the contextual
information they need.”
Darpan Patel, an IT support specialist on Mirza’s team, agrees.
“With Agent Workspace, handling most incidents is a five-minute job.
I’m not flipping between browsers anymore, and I can even fix issues
directly from the workspace. It takes half the time it used to. And,
with a separate tab for each incident, it makes multitasking easy.”
That simplicity has delivered impressive results, including slashing
incident resolution times from 36 hours to 11 minutes—more than a 99%
reduction—and keeping the rate of reopened incidents below 2%.
“We’ve increased agent productivity, but it’s more than that. Now,
agents can fix incidents in real time, rather than putting them on the
back burner for later analysis. That means employees get an almost
instantaneous resolution, which in turn increases their productivity.
It’s a win-win situation,” enthuses Mirza.
Giving time back with the Walk-Up Experience
ServiceNow
has had tech lounges—places employees can come when they need
face-to-face IT support—for many years. Mirza explains, “While we’re
focused on self-service, we know that employees still want
personalized service when it matters. Tech lounges are a great way to
do that. They provide a structured environment with dedicated staff,
rather than having to deal with disruptive ad hoc walk-ups. And, our
employees love them.”
However, Mirza and his team knew that they could make our tech
lounges even better by rolling out ServiceNow®
Walk-up Experience. With Walk-Up Experience, employees can join
a virtual queue using their PC or mobile device, rather than
physically queuing at the tech lounge. They can easily monitor their
estimated wait time and head to the tech lounge as they approach the
head of the queue.
“It’s another way of giving time back to our employees,” says Mirza,
“Rather than hanging around the tech lounge at peak times waiting for
the next available technician, employees can use that time for other work.”
And, what do ServiceNow employees think of the Walk-Up Experience?
It’s a resounding thumbs-up, with our tech lounges scoring nearly 98%
employee satisfaction.
Using artificial intelligence to scale with company growth
Mirza and his team are using our own extensive artificial
intelligence (AI) capabilities to deflect incidents and automate
repetitive manual activities. According to Mirza, “AI is an absolutely
essential component of our strategy. But it’s not about replacing
agents with machines. We’re using artificial intelligence to handle
mundane work so our agents can focus on high-value activities, such as
resolving complex incidents. That makes the best use of our skilled
resources and helps us to deliver better service levels.”
ServiceNow®
Agent Intelligence is a perfect example. As soon as a user
starts to describe their issue online, Agent Intelligence can suggest
knowledge articles and other information that may help the user to
resolve the issue by themselves. If they still need to raise an
incident, Agent Intelligence uses AI to automatically route the
incident to the right support team based on how similar incidents were
routed in the past.
“With Agent Intelligence, we don’t waste time manually triaging and
routing incidents. It’s less effort, and we respond faster to
employees. In fact, we resolve 77% of our incidents on first
assignment,” says Mirza.
Mirza and his team have also made good use of ServiceNow®
Virtual Agent. According to Mirza, “We used our historical
ServiceNow data to identify repetitive incidents and requests, such as
password issues, locked out accounts, and application access requests.
We then build corresponding conversations for the Virtual Agent. Now,
users can interact with the Virtual Agent 24/7 for these common
issues—and there’s no delay waiting for a live agent. And, every time
they do, we’re freeing up our agents to serve other users.”
What have we learned from our ITSM journey?
If you are
thinking about transforming your IT service desk capabilities like we
did, Mirza offers the following insights:
Invest in your foundation. “Your foundation doesn’t have to
be perfect, but you do need a certain level of maturity. For
example, you get more value out of Agent Intelligence and Virtual
Agent if you already have self-service in place.”
Don’t just focus on cost reduction. “IT productivity and
great employee experiences go hand-in-hand. Look for opportunities
to elevate both and remember that it’s not just about IT—it’s about
helping your entire business work faster and smarter. Do that, and
IT productivity will follow naturally.”
Think about the entire IT service journey. “Employees don’t
just access IT services one way. For example, if they simply want to
reset a password, they’ll use self-service. On the other hand, if
their laptop keeps on rebooting, they’re probably going to want to
chat with an agent or even bring their laptop to IT. All of these
channels are opportunities to do things better. Also, think about
how these channels are connected—and how you can help users
transition seamlessly from one to the other when they need
to.”
Apply the 80/20 rule. “Take our Virtual Agent implementation
as an example. We didn’t try to create conversations for every
possible scenario. Instead, we looked at our historical data to
identify high-volume incidents and requests. That way, we got the
most bang for our buck rather than chasing diminishing returns.”
What’s next? The possibilities are limitless
Mirza and
his team have already delivered spectacular results for ServiceNow
employees, including that astonishing 99% reduction in incident
resolution times. And, they have also driven massive increases in IT
service desk productivity. For example, in Q1 2016, ServiceNow had one
service desk resource for every 140 employees. By Q4 2018, the ratio
was one resource for every 246 employees—an increase in productivity
of more than 75%.
Mirza sees more opportunities that include:
- Integrating ServiceNow with communications tools like
Slack
- Using sentiment analysis to measure and improve the
effectiveness of Virtual Agent conversations
- Creating
virtual tech lounges for remote workers
- Using Amazon Alexa
to connect conference rooms with virtual tech lounges for real-time
IT support
According to Mirza, “The possibilities are almost limitless. For
example, with Mobile Studio 2, our users will be able to automatically
submit an incident simply by taking a photograph of what’s broken. We
are continuously looking for ways to make getting IT service as simple
as possible.”
The bottom line
IT is now responding by creating a
frictionless IT service delivery model using new
technologies—technologies that are already integrated into ServiceNow.
However, while meeting employee expectations is incredibly
important, the value of consumerizing the IT service experience goes
beyond this. As we have shown with our own service desk, it gives back
valuable time to employees while dramatically improving IT service
desk productivity.
By using the Now Platform and its advanced capabilities, our service
desk team has:
- Maintained an impressive 97% employee satisfaction rating
- Slashed incident resolution times by an incredible 99%
- Increased IT service desk productivity by 75%
Mirza sums it up, “We’ve had great results, but we’re not
superheroes. When you focus on the service experience, along with the
technology, processes, and people, you need to make it happen,
everything else falls into place. Anyone can do this.”
