Lunch & Learn Recap: Enhance Self-Service Experiences with ServiceNow

A recent Lunch & Learn event focused on delivering better self-service experiences using ServiceNow.

Jeremy Mandle, Service Portal and user experience lead, hosted the event. He emphasized the importance of making human experience your north star since it's humans — whether it be your employees, clients, or customers — at both ends of the of potential problems.

The past two years have shifted business as we know it, and as we know, relationships are the backbone of a business. Here’s how to know if you have the resources to deliver excellent self-service experiences in the new year.

The Experience Design imperative

There are three qualities that any great business solution should have: usefulness, usability, and delightfulness.

One might think that all solutions are useful, but that's not always the case. A useful business solution solves real-world problems based on a real need — quickly. When one thinks usable, they should think intuitive, effortless and easy to maintain. "Busy" is at the root of business, which is why the goal for usability is to require minimal training.

Delightfulness may not be the first word that comes to mind when you think business, but it should be. When you think delightful, think forgettable. Your quick trip to the automated ATM or the seamless online customer service experience — solutions so simple that when you're asked, "how was your day?" at the dinner table, they slip your mind.

The key takeaway?

To deliver a great experience, aim to provide what people need, when they need it, wherever they are. By following this principle, you guarantee that the people you're supporting know where to get answers, have easy access to the information they need and have consistent omnichannel experiences.

Delivering unified self-service experiences

When providing self-service experiences, the most common roadblocks are:

• Engagement layer is decentralized
• Content is not organized in employee-centric terminology
• Navigation is not intuitive
• Support content is siloed

 

How can you avoid these hiccups? Department-specific portals may seem like the most intuitive way to categorize information, but they can decrease productivity and platform ROI. Instead, shift to a single experience model to unify service delivery departments for shared ownership and decision making.

 

Visual design is a key, sometimes forgotten, component of providing self-service experiences. When choosing content layouts, use them as an opportunity to promote your brand to remind employees, clients or customers why they chose your company.

Remember our key takeaway? By unifying your platforms and integrating visual design, you're making it easier for people to find what they need, when they need it, however they work.

Using the Rome release to optimize self-service experiences

It's true, all roads lead to Rome (well, ServiceNow's Rome release). If your company is thinking of upgrading or has already upgraded to the Rome release, you're probably wondering how the release aids in the improvement of self-service experiences.

The release includes the all-new Employee Center, a standard, multi-department, dynamic portal for service delivery and employee engagement. The center enables employee product and development teams to push out enhancements and updates quarterly, saving your company money and time. The center also allows organizations to curate self-service experiences through dynamic top and mobile pages.

AI Search (AIS), which debuted in the Quebec release, is back and better than ever for the Rome release. AIS returns actionable results 5x faster with an enterprise-grade consumer search engine. Search results vary based on user behavior and context, not keywords, so it truly does get better with time.

Interested in learning more? You can watch the event on-demand in its entirety