How do you make ServiceNow easy to access and use? How do you bring a more interesting and engaging user experience? How do you reduce the learning curve and make it easy for even novices to access organizational data? The answer can be as simple as chatbots. The ServiceNow platform is a powerful tool for the enterprise but adding a chatbot makes the platform that much easier to navigate.
Reimagine ServiceNow in a whole new direction. In the following V-Soft use cases, we leveraged artificial intelligence (AI) and the many benefits of chatbots to take conventional instances of ServiceNow and it's functionality to the next level.
When an employee is facing an HR-related issue, they send an e-mail to an HR executive. This takes time for humans to sort through their inbox, understand the issue, and figure out a solution manually. Consequently, the email string back-n-forth might continue for many days as the HR administrator zeros in on what the employee needs.
What if there was an HR chatbot available in a chat window, with whom the employee could talk about the issue he/she was facing in natural language?"
No longer delayed by emails, HR can immediately handle the request personally and friendly. In fact, this request could have come across at any time during the week, even when the employee was home on their couch while the HR administrator was enjoying a weekend with family. An HR ServiceNow chatbot is always available and ready to serve employees.
This intelligent chatbot accesses related issues and solutions from the ServiceNow knowledge base and suggests solutions. If this doesn’t help, the bot will raise an HR case for a human HR administrator to take action. The time and cost savings are substantial given that most HR departments agree that 90% of queries they receive are a set of FAQs which only need a standard response. Learn the benefits of using chatbots in your HR department here.
In a traditional ITSM configuration, the user would place a call or write an email to the IT support team providing the details of the incident or service request. Utilizing a ServiceNow chatbot, users can report their IT problems and engage with the IT chatbot instantly.
The user can simply explain the problem in natural language and the bot suggests workarounds if available, or raises an incident/service request on behalf of the user.
If you're like most organizations, you use your own custom internal applications to track unique data that is critical to your company. For example, V-Soft uses it’s own ServiceNow Expense Tracker Application for employees to track expenses and get reimbursed. Another example is our PTO Tracker which makes it easy for employees to keep track of and request paid time off.
All of these custom applications adds one more thing each employee needs to be trained in to use effectively. Here again, chatbots and AI are the solutions - just chat with your personal bot to log your PTO, travel requests, and expenses. Just ask, “What is my PTO balance?” and the bot comes back immediately with, “Your PTO balance is 9.25 hours.”
The regular ServiceNow user has to visit various parts of the system to check status changes to things like tasks assigned to them. They have to visit and refresh a widget/report then read the report in their own terms.
A chatbot can intelligently answer questions to complicated questions.
“How many high-priority incidents are currently assigned to me?”
“You have 5 high-priority incidents assigned to you. Here they are…”
A ServiceNow chatbot goes further and provides links to relevant incidents. In another scenario, the user asks the bot to notify them when there is an important event happening in the system, like “Please notify me whenever there is an SLA breach in any tasks assigned to my groups.” The bot then pings the user on their chat window whenever there is such a breach.
The above video is a quick case study on how a ServiceNow chatbot helped one V-Soft Digital client improve user satisfaction and processing times.
If you are using ServiceNow’s Project Portfolio Management module for your project management needs you could get quick snippets of information on chat as you request. “What is the end date of the current sprint in LSP project?”, or “Please mark OUL-235 as Coding Complete, and assign to QA.” It completely changes the way people work with PPM software - it literally puts the users back in command of the system.
Getting a quick response on “How many critical incidents are pending?” or “How many requests breached SLAs?” or “What trends are there on defined KPIs” during an executive meeting saves time lost reviewing cumbersome dashboards or requiring the know-how of the system of record. All a person needs to do is chat away.