During the pandemic, organizations worldwide had to adopt the work from home model to ensure business continuity. Adapting to the new work order gave rise to issues like lack of flexibility, connectivity, communication, prolonged wait times etc. This affected collaboration and had a direct bearing on productivity. It also put a question mark on the effectiveness of the new model as a viable and sustainable alternative to work from office model.
However, with ServiceNow, organizations have been able to make work from home a highly productive model. The strength of this platform as a digital workflow enabler helps businesses build standard or customized business workflows with great ease. Besides, the platform helps to build portals for real-time collaboration with external customers. The combination of custom workflows, real-time portals, and remote collaboration has helped organizations sustain their operations during the pandemic.
In recent times, ServiceNow has added more features to its solutions to make work from home management smoother and more seamless. In this article, we will explore such features that will result in an enhanced employee experience management:
ServiceNow Employee Experience- Agent Client Collector (ACC)
Providing quick response to service issues has always been a big challenge for businesses working in a distributed work model. This is because such models comprise multiple departments with multiple agents working across them. As a result access to information on time was next to impossible. During the pandemic, when the work force operated remotely, the challenge became stiffer.
To solve this challenge ServiceNow has introduced the Agent Client Collector (ACC), a unified agent solution that gives teams the ability to capture and monitor data—and get data visibility —across hardware, software, and cloud infrastructure. ACC is designed on a Sensu framework and comes as an add-on to the monitoring capability provided by the ServiceNow platform
ACC is installed on a machine to generate and send output data to the ServiceNow instance through the MID Server. Based on the Now Platform, ACC supports workflows across IT service management, IT operations management, software asset management, hardware asset management, and security operations. Through ACC, ServiceNow introduced a single agent that can collect information across all the departments and accelerate query resolution.
Further, this feature automates incident resolution process. ACC enables proactive identification of problems. This is a big advantage for employees working remotely because any serious service disruption cannot be immediately addressed owing to the absence of physical infrastructure and agents.
Here’s looking at the important features of ACC that enhance remotely working employees’ experience:
- ACC’s application monitoring functionality eliminates the need to maintain any standalone monitoring tools. This helps organizations to optimize their investments in IT infrastructure.
- Live Asset View feature allows clear visibility on a system’s configuration and derive performance data in real-time. This enables agents to troubleshoot issues without having to move from their workstations.
- Automation Playbooks for Service and Operations Teams automates the process of incident resolution that helps employees to move on with their operation. This feature allows operations teams to continuously monitor cloud and on-premises infrastructure. Such a capability reduces the chances of unwarranted system breakdown. This is a huge advantage for employees working remotely who cannot reach out to IT teams immediately for a quick resolution.
- Automation Playbooks for Hardware Asset Management generate real-time information on hardware performance. This helps organizations to take an early and optimal hardware investment decisions.
- Automation Playbooks for Software Asset Management provide real-time data on software tools inventory and usage. This allows organizations to take informed decisions on software license spend and compliance.
Mobile Applications to Enhance ServiceNow Employee Experience
Some of the common issues that employees face while working remotely are non-functional VPN connection, faulty laptops, and lack of visibility on any organizational policy changes. Resolving these issues on-time is also a big challenge because of siloed operations, disjointed process flows, multiple portals etc. This impacts employee productivity and result in a bad employee experience.
ServiceNow platform’s mobile applications are built to provide a consumer-grade experience to employees by simplifying the process of raising service query and getting it resolved in time. However, these features are more than just query resolution for employees. Here’s looking at ServiceNow’s mobile applications suite to deliver better remote working experience for employees:
Now Mobile
It is a downloadable mobile application that allows employees to raise service requests or report incidents and get access to company’s knowledge materials all within a single application. The Now mobile application helps employees conduct the following actions:
- Quick issue resolution by submitting requests.
- Raise and manage approval requests
- Access and complete tasks
- Use global search option to access company knowledge base
- Upload various attachments to ServiceNow records
- Get immediate help from Virtual Agent and Agent Chat
- Complete common tasks using pre-configured Siri shortcuts
Mobile Agent
The ServiceNow Mobile Agent app allows employees to upload records, get in touch with coworkers, and most importantly continue working offline through a mobile device. Here’s a list of the functions it can perform:
- Mobile agent app provides a single mobile interface to access requests, address, and then resolve requests.
- Specific applications within the Mobile agent app can be configured to offline mode to allow employee to work despite no Internet connectivity.
- ServiceNow Agent mobile app’s location tracking feature enables employers to keep a track of the working locations of their employees.
Mobile App Builder
The Mobile App Builder (MAB) is a configuration tool based on the Now Design System. It creates and manages records and screens that designs both ServiceNow customer workflows and employee workflows with a mobile app. It’s architecture and navigation option make a good platform to facilitate speedy and intuitive creation of ServiceNow mobile apps. Employees can use MAB for the following benefits:
- MAB organizes records entered by employees based on their hierarchy. This allows quick reference and access to specific records.
- It streamlines mobile configurations by:
- Allowing employees to edit multiple records in a single screen
- Guiding employees to create appropriate records relationships and auto populate fields when building records relationships.
- Averting faulty configuration choices
- ServiceNow MAB allows employees to do hierarchical tree navigation to understand the relation between each record and bind all into the mobile app configuration.
- Allows employees to edit all ServiceNow base system mobile app features.
Employee Experience Management- ServiceNow Employment Center
Personal interaction with mentors, workplace camaraderie, and employee journey experience are some of the biggest casualties of the remote work model. In the current situation, employees feel alienated from their teams and video meetings are not enough to relive their connection with colleagues. This is impacting their mental health which will have a bearing on their productivity.
This is a serious concern for enterprises of all sizes. To address this concern, ServiceNow has announced the addition of Employment center to its platform in the Rome Release. It is a digital portal that unifies all the departments across an organization. This portal creates a single interface that allows employees and employers to perform a range of tasks. Such tasks include requesting service from a particular department, employers can create pages on a particular topic for employees to easily find answers, find personalized information, and many more.
Employee center portal has two different applications which are:
Employee Center
It is a multi-department service delivery portal through which employees can raise service requests, report issues, find quick answers related to their operations, and complete and track their daily schedules. This portal can be accessed without any additional charge.
Employee Center Pro
This portal adds more features to standard employee center capabilities to enhance employee engagement and communication. It keeps employees updated on events and news related to their organization and also find cross-enterprise answers. Accessing this portal requires additional licensing.
Here’s listing out the key features of the Employee Center portal:
- It can scale up to unify multiple departments for service delivery.
- Portal pages can be personalized with organizations’ theme and logo.
- The employee center portal uses unified taxonomies to enable unified browsing for all kinds of content.
- The portal is embedded with extensibility points across widgets and page navigation controls to improve enterprise service delivery and encourage organization-wide adoption. Pre-enabled widgets enhance home pages support multi-department tasking.
- A portal that unifies multiple departments helps to create integrated workflows that automate common operations.
- Employers can create pages with specific topics. This allows employees to get quick answers related to that topic.
- It enables Intranet-like communication and engagement that has,
- Enterprise search
- Curated content based on machine learning algorithms
- Actionable campaigns
Employee Journey Management
This is an important addition to the Now Platform that is designed to enhance employee experience. It is relevant for employees who undergo life changing events during their employment. Such events can range from inter-department transfer to events on a personal from such as marriage or becoming a parent.
The employee journey management feature provides templates that allows managers to curate transition plans for employees, design surveys to gauge experiences, provide learning opportunities suited to employers’ abilities, and automate lifecycle events during employees’ tenure with their organization.
How We Assist You with ServiceNow Implementation for Effective Employee Experience Management?
We have catered to clients from diverse industries by leveraging ServiceNow platform. Our team has provided effective consultation services to clients to successfully digitize employee workflows and integrate the ServiceNow platform to their existing infrastructure.
It is a difficult task to ensure employee satisfaction within complex infrastructure while dealing with various challenges operating in a remote work scenario. In view of this, we advise on ServiceNow solutions like interactive self-service portal, virtual agents, collaboration tools, and many others. These features will ensure seamless communication between departments, provide quick access to specific data, route service requests to concerned persons instantly, and minimize service disruptions.
We assign dedicated implementation and integration experts who will help you choose ServiceNow solutions befitting your organization infrastructure. The team includes QA analysts who will ensure the proper functioning of solutions. Our ServiceNow consultation services suite will help you create a remote working environment for your employees that is functional, proactive, and efficient.
Who Are We and Why Are We Considered as An Industry Authority?
This article is penned by experts at FlatworldEdge, an industry leading ServiceNow consultation services provider. Our scope of consultation services include implementation, advisory, optimization, remote administration, among others. Contact us to know how our ServiceNow consultation services can enhance your employee workflows in no time.
