Tag: ServiceNow

Part Three: ServiceNow Hyperautomation – Process Mining

ServiceNow, a leading platform for process mining and automation, recently launched its Utah release with several new features and enhancements, including multidimensional mining.

Part Three of this blog series will explore how you can analyse and improve your IT service management (ITSM) workflows using process mining and automation.

What is Process Mining?

Process mining is a technique that applies data science to discover, validate and improve workflows based on event logs from information systems. It uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to automatically extract process models from your ServiceNow data and visualise them in an interactive dashboard. You can then use the dashboard to identify bottlenecks, inefficiencies, deviations and best practices in your ITSM processes, and take action to optimise them with automation solutions.

How can ServiceNow Process Mining help you to enhance your organisation’s incident management process?

ServiceNow Process Mining can help your organisation enhance your incident management process by providing you with valuable insights into how your process is actually performed, how it deviates from the expected or desired behavior, and how it can be improved.

Process overview shows you the key metrics and statistics of your process, such as the number of cases, the average duration, the throughput time or the compliance rate. You can also filter and segment your data by various criteria, such as category, urgency, assignment group or resolution code.

Process Map provides your organisation with a graphical representation of your process model, which is automatically generated using your data. You can see the flow of cases from start to end, the frequency and duration of each activity, and the variants and deviations of your process. You can also drill down into specific cases or activities to see more details.

Process Analysis presents you the results of various analyses that are performed on your organisation’s process model, such as bottleneck analysis, root cause analysis, conformance analysis and best practice analysis. You can use these to identify and understand the causes and effects of problems and opportunities in your process.

Using these three capabilities, you can gain a comprehensive understanding of your organisation’s incident management process and discover ways to optimise it through elimination of unnecessary steps or automation of repetitive tasks.

Final Thought

As an Elite ServiceNow Partner, JDS can help you navigate the complex and fast-changing world of hyper-automation. We have the expertise, experience and passion to support your organisation’s digital transformation journey. Whether you need to automate your business processes, optimise your IT operations, or leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning, we can guide you every step of the way.

Part Two: ServiceNow Hyperautomation – Proactive Automation Resilience

What is Automation Resilience?

In today’s fast-paced digital landscape, automation is becoming increasingly vital for businesses. However, as with any technology, it’s important to be prepared for unexpected disruptions and failures. This is where automation resilience comes in.

Automation resilience is the ability of an organisation’s automation solutions to withstand unexpected interruptions and recover quickly from failures. Without automation resilience, any downtime or disruptions can lead to significant financial losses and negatively impact the customer experience.

ServiceNow understands the importance of automation resilience, which is why capabilities to enable proactive monitoring and management of automation solutions have been developed. Configuration Management Database (CMDB) is a crucial tool that allows your organisation to track automation solutions and dependencies in the same way you track other facets of your tech stack.

With ServiceNow’s automation resilience capabilities and CMDB, businesses can operate their automation solutions with confidence, knowing that they are prepared for any unexpected disruptions. There is no need for downtime or interruptions to negatively impact your business.

Establishing Proactive Automation Resilience with ServiceNow

Disruptions are inevitable in the fast-paced digitalised business environment, that’s why it’s crucial to have the right tools in place to anticipate, prevent, respond, and adapt to them. ServiceNow’s hyperautomation technologies and capabilities enable organisations to do just that, by leveraging multitudes of technologies.

Intelligence (AI) and data insights are examples of such technology, enabling ServiceNow’s hyperautomation to assist your business with predicting issues, reducing user impact, and streamlining resolutions. It also involves automating the right processes in ServiceNow to improve efficiency, productivity, and customer satisfaction. With ServiceNow, your organisation can serve customers more efficiently, deliver products faster, and protect its workforce more effectively.

ServiceNow’s automation center allows your organisation to assess every aspect of relevant change management details, not just the execution details of your RPA bots. By viewing a graphic depiction of their bot’s process infrastructure dependencies, organisations can identify potential disruptions such as maintenance windows or unexpected configuration errors.

Moreover, ServiceNow’s AI-powered root cause analysis and automated remediation actions enable your business to effectively reduce mean time to resolution (MTTR). This means that your data can be analysed from various sources, such as logs, metrics, traces, and events, and identify the source of problems in your IT operations. It can also trigger automated workflows and actions to fix issues faster and prevent them from recurring. By doing so, ServiceNow helps your organisation to improve service quality and performance, while shortening the time it takes to resolve incidents.

ServiceNow’s innovative solution empowers your business to gain a competitive advantage by providing exceptional customer experiences and satisfaction. By using insights gained from service quality data, your organisation can proactively communicate with your customers, addressing pain points before they become a problem. With the ability to map out the entire customer journey, your business can tailor your customer service strategy to meet their needs. With ServiceNow’s hyperautomation, you don’t have to wait for disruptions to occur.


Watch: Establish Proactive Automation Resilience | ServiceNow

Part One: ServiceNow Hyperautomation – Process Optimisation

Improvement Initiatives

As businesses grow, IT processes become increasingly complex and difficult to manage. This is where Process Optimisation comes in, providing a way to evaluate and enhance the performance of your IT processes using data from your systems. In other words, it’s a method of making sure that your IT processes are running as smoothly and efficiently as possible.

One of the key components of Process Optimisation is ‘Improvement Initiatives’, also known as ‘Continuous Improvement’. This approach involves using data-driven insights and best practices to identify opportunities for enhancing the effectiveness and efficiency of your IT service management processes. By continually refining and improving these processes, you can ensure that your organisation is operating at peak performance, and delivering the best possible outcomes for your customers.

Whether you’re looking to get started quickly with API-driven processes or planning for the future with Robotic Process Automation (RPA), the ServiceNow platform can help you achieve your goals. If you’re already using ServiceNow, the leading platform for digital workflows, Process Optimisation and Improvement Initiatives are built right in.
Read on to learn more about ‘Improvement Initiatives’ and explore RPA and API in more detail.

Understanding APIs

In the world of software development, an Application Programming Interface (API) is an essential building block that enables different applications to communicate with each other. APIs are like the ‘bridges’ that connect different software components, allowing them to share data and functionality seamlessly. Without APIs, software applications would have to be built from scratch every time, making the development process much more time-consuming and resource-intensive.

An API typically consists of a set of rules and protocols that govern how software applications should interact with each other. These rules and protocols define the methods that can be used to retrieve, update, or delete data, as well as the format of the data that is exchanged. APIs enable developers to create complex systems that can be easily integrated with other applications.

APIs are used in a variety of settings, from web and mobile applications to enterprise software systems. Many popular web services, such as Google Maps, Twitter, and Facebook, provide APIs that developers can use to access their data and functionality. In addition, many enterprise software systems, such as customer relationship management (CRM) software and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, offer APIs that enable developers to integrate their applications with these systems.

APIs are critical components of modern software development, enabling applications to communicate and share data with one another. By providing a standardised way to interact with software systems, APIs simplify the development process and make it easier to create powerful, integrated software solutions.

Understanding RPA

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is a revolutionary technology that promises to transform the way we work. Essentially, RPA involves using software robots (or bots) to automate repetitive, rule-based tasks that are typically performed by humans. This means that employees can be freed up to focus on higher-value tasks that require creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving skills.

RPA tools are designed to mimic the actions of a human worker. For example, they can log into applications, copy and paste data between systems, and enter information into forms. By automating these tasks, RPA can help organisations to improve efficiency, reduce costs, and increase accuracy.

One of the key benefits of RPA is that it can be used to automate a wide range of processes across different departments and industries. For example, RPA can be used to automate invoice processing in finance, customer service inquiries in retail, and claims processing in insurance.

RPA is an exciting technology that has the potential to revolutionise the way we work. As businesses look to stay competitive in an increasingly digital world, RPA is set to play a key role in driving productivity, reducing costs, and improving customer satisfaction.

API vs RPA: Understanding the Difference

In today’s world of increasing digitalisation, businesses are always looking for ways to improve efficiency and reduce costs. Two technologies that are often mentioned in this context are RPA and API. Both technologies can help businesses automate processes, but they have different approaches and capabilities. It is a common misconception in the IT industry that RPA is only used when API is not available. In fact, RPA and API have their own strengths and limitations.

The key difference between RPA and API is their approach to automation. RPA is focused on automating specific tasks or processes, while API is focused on enabling different systems to work together. RPA is typically used to automate repetitive and manual tasks that are prone to errors, while API is used to integrate systems and data sources and enable real-time communication and data exchange.

RPA and API are two very different technologies that can help businesses automate processes and improve efficiency. Depending on the needs of your business, one or both of these technologies may be useful in achieving your automation goals.

Unify your Hyperautomation Landscape with ServiceNow (Automation Center)

ServiceNow Automation Center is a cutting-edge platform that offers a centralised solution for managing and executing Hyperautomation strategies. By utilising powerful features such as workplace, dashboard, executive dashboard and RPA vendor integration, businesses can streamline their automation landscape, making it easier than ever before to implement a comprehensive automation strategy that can improve efficiency and reduce costs.

One of the key benefits of ServiceNow Automation Center is the ability to integrate disparate automation solutions across different third-party vendors. This can help to maximise the business impact of automation initiatives, as well as consolidate automation opportunities across the entire enterprise. With ServiceNow Automation Center, businesses can manage the entire automation lifecycle from intake through to execution, providing a holistic view of automation activity across the organisation.

In addition, ServiceNow Automation Center provides a powerful visualisation tool, allowing businesses to view benchmarks for automation business goals and activity in one centralised location. This feature makes it easier to track the progress of automation initiatives and make data-driven decisions to optimise their impact.

ServiceNow Automation Center also provides a comprehensive solution for monitoring and managing robotic process automation (RPA) jobs in CMDB. This means that businesses can keep automation activities active, with full visibility of their status and performance.

ServiceNow Automation Center is a powerful platform that enables businesses to achieve their automation goals through centralised management, seamless integration, and comprehensive automation monitoring and reporting.

Stay tuned for Part Two: Proactive Automation Resilience


Watch: Unify Your Hyperautomation Landscape | ServiceNow

Introduction to ServiceNow Hyperautomation

Imagine this…

You’re at work, and suddenly an application you’re using stops working. You’re in a rush and can’t afford to spend hours on the phone with technical support. But what if there was a way to get your problem solved quickly and efficiently, without ever having to speak to a human being?

The ServiceNow Virtual Agent is an AI-driven conversational chatbot that is equipped to efficiently tackle your IT issues. With just a few clicks, you can explain your problem and get instant assistance. Using a combination of ServiceNow Automation Center and Flow Designer, the ServiceNow Virtual Agent will quickly identify the submitted query and proactively initiate a conversation for resolution, without the need for human intervention.

In our initial scenario, the ServiceNow Virtual Agent would have promptly diagnosed the problem and triggered the ServiceNow Automation Center bots to restart the application service through the use of Robot Process Automation. Simultaneously, a ServiceNow incident ticket is created through the ServiceNow Flow Designer, allowing your IT department to track the issue and ensure it doesn’t happen again. All of this happens in a matter of minutes, ensuring that you can get back to work without any further interruptions, and with minimal human interference.

This is a practical example of Hyperautomation in action.

Automation vs Hyperautomation

Automation has become a buzzword in the world of technology and business, but what exactly does it mean? Simply put, automation refers to the use of technology to perform tasks or processes that would typically be performed manually by humans. This can include everything from using software bots to handle repetitive tasks, to using machine learning algorithms to make decisions based on data.

However, automation is no longer limited to simple, repetitive tasks. With the emergence of advanced technologies such as RPA (Robotic Process Automation), AI (Artificial Intelligence), and ML (Machine Learning), we have entered a new era of automation known as Hyperautomation. Hyperautomation involves using these advanced technologies to automate more complex and sophisticated tasks, such as decision-making, data analysis, and even creative work.

The goal of Hyperautomation is to create a fully automated end-to-end workflow that can deliver business value by improving efficiency, reducing errors, and increasing productivity. By leveraging the power of automation, organizations can streamline their operations, reduce costs, and free up their employees to focus on more strategic tasks.

ServiceNow Hyperautomation

ServiceNow offers a platform that combines several automation technologies, including Robotic Process Automation (RPA) Hub, Process Automation Designer (PAD), Automation Center (AC) and Integration Hub (IH), enabling organisations to automate complex, end-to-end processes.

With ServiceNow Hyperautomation, organisations can improve their overall processes, efficiency and productivity. This is achieved through the use of workflows, bots, and other automation tools that can automate everything from simple, repetitive tasks to more complex decision-making and data analysis processes. ServiceNow Hyperautomation has become an increasingly popular solution for businesses looking to stay competitive in today’s fast-paced, digital world.

Up Next…ServiceNow Hyperautomation: Part One will look at Process Optimisation, API vs RPA

Read Next…Part One: Process Optimisation

Watch: Hyperautomation and Low-Code | Knowledge 2022

Virtual Agent: Understanding The Limitations Of LITE

Understanding the difference between Virtual Agent LITE and the full Virtual Agent offering is a must when planning your organisation’s Virtual Agent journey.

The following matrix will help you to understand the benefits of the Virtual Agent LITE product as a starting point, whilst clearly highlighting the immense value that can be realised in proceeding with the full Virtual Agent offering.

Want to know more? We’d love to hear from you via [email protected] or 1300 780 432.

ServiceNow & ReactJS

Technology Background

Like any enterprise platform, ServiceNow has a complex relationship with its underlying architecture. Originally, ServiceNow was built on Java using Jelly XML for server-side component rendering. For its time, this approach was cutting edge.

As the Internet matured and social media ramped up, Google developed a clever client/server binding language called AngularJS that allowed for dynamic HTML pages to be rendered. ServiceNow adopted this only to have Google discontinue AngularJS in its original form. ServiceNow’s implementation of AngularJS as found in the Service Portal is world-class, but unfortunately, the underlying technology is no longer actively supported.

At this point, the architects at ServiceNow sat back and took a long hard look at emerging technologies and trends among the tech giants. It would be fair to say they were once bitten, twice shy. In developing their Agent Workspace UI, ServiceNow settled on using ReactJS (with GraphQL for data management) because of its broad scale adoption across the industry.

ReactJS is used by Facebook, Instagram, Netflix, WhatsApp and Dropbox to name a few, so ServiceNow are on safe ground with this technology.

Implementing ReactJS In ServiceNow

Whereas with AngularJS, ServiceNow provided an online IDE for widget development, at the moment the only way to build a ReactJS application for ServiceNow is to work offline. Once built, your ReactJS file can be deployed to ServiceNow as a packaged application.

There are pros and cons to this approach. On the positive side, ReactJS applications can be deployed with little to no overhead from ServiceNow, making them astonishingly fast and scalable. The only con is you need your own Node JS environment and ReactJS development platform.

Why Use ReactJS?

Why would anyone develop a ServiceNow application with ReactJS?

The answer is:

• ReactJS is an industry standard and so there is a vast pool of experienced web developers to draw upon
• ServiceNow provides a highly-scalable platform for ReactJS
• ServiceNow has built-in granular data security and APIs to manage data access
• ServiceNow is extremely efficient at workflow management and integration supporting ReactJS

Rather than building and managing a full-stack service platform for a ReactJS app, your app can be deployed quickly and easily through ServiceNow. Given the amount of effort and due-diligence required to operate a full-stack service at an enterprise level, ServiceNow provides a convenient shortcut.

When it comes to ReactJS, ServiceNow is effectively operating as PaaS (Platform as a Service). Think of your ReactJS app as a beautifully designed architectural home. ServiceNow allows you to position it as a penthouse suite without the need to worry about the rest of the building beneath it.

Creating A ReactJS Application

We’re going to create a nice simple ReactJS application listing contact details.

I recommend using the Code Sandbox for ReactJS applications as it is easy to use and provides an instant preview of your work.

To keep things simple, I’m going to use the ServiceNow REST API for Tables as my data access point.

Once you’ve signed into the Code Sandbox you’ll be assigned to one of their temporary virtual servers. The first time you run the code below it will fail because of cross-origin resource sharing restrictions (CORS).

If you look at the console log, you’ll find your temporary virtual server name. From there, you can set up a CORS exception that will allow access to your instance. Once that is in place, the application will work properly.

Without getting into too much detail, about how ReactJS works, we’re going to set up two files, our core Apps.js and contacts.js. We’re going to create a new folder called components to hold our contacts.js template.

Notice how when I hover over the line src folder in the Code Sandbox I get options for a new directory and a new file. This is how I added /components/contacts.js

Let’s look at the code used to retrieve contacts from ServiceNow and display them using ReactJS.

App.js

import React, { Component } from "react";
import Contacts from "./components/contacts";

class App extends Component {
  render() {
    return <Contacts contacts={this.state.contacts} />;
  }

  state = {
    contacts: []
  };

  componentDidMount() {   
    //this is a sample web service you can test with
    //fetch('https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/users',{
    fetch(
      "https://{your-instance}.service-now.com/api/now/table/sys_user?sysparm_query=emailENDSWITH{your-email-suffix}",
      {
        withCredentials: true,
        credentials: "include"
      }
    )
      .then((res) => res.json())
      .then((data) => {
        console.log(data);
        this.setState({ contacts: data.result });
      })
      .catch(console.log);
  }
}

export default App;

As you can see, our Apps.js file refers to /components/contacts to get an HTML/ReactJS template. It also includes a simple REST call (fetch) that uses the ServiceNow Table API to retrieve information from ServiceNow.

To get this example to work, you’ll have to replace…

  • {your-instance} with your ServiceNow instance name
  • {your-email-suffix} with your organisation’s email suffix (ie, gmail.com, etc)


contact.js is our HTML/ReactJS template. It takes the data retrieved from the fetch and formats it for display. It’s pretty straight-forward and intuitive to read.

contact.js

import React from "react";

const Contacts = ({ contacts }) => {
  return (
    <div>
      <center>
        <h1>Contact List</h1>
      </center>
      {contacts.map((contact) => (
        <div class="card">
          <div class="card-body">
            <h4 class="card-title">{contact.name}</h4>
            <h5 class="card-subtitle mb-2 text-muted">
              Email: {contact.email}
            </h5>
            <h6 class="card-text">UserID: {contact.user_name}</h6>
          </div>
        </div>
      ))}
    </div>
  );
};

export default Contacts;

That’s it.

That’s a ReactJS application.

At this point, your ReactJS application should work. If it doesn’t, look carefully at the console log in your browser and check you’ve completed the steps listed above.

Deploying A ReactJS Application

ReactJS applications need to be packaged and deployed.

Code Sandbox integrates with Netlify to provide online packaging and deployment.

The deployment may take a few minutes.

Make sure you have a Netlify account (I use my GitHub account for all of these services so everything is centralized)

Once you’ve signed into Netlify, Click on the little download arrow to get your package ready for deployment to ServiceNow.

Deploying on ServiceNow is simple enough, but it is a little bit of a hack.

This advice may change over time as ServiceNow develops its offering further, but the sanctioned approach at the moment is to deploy ReactJS as stylesheets.

The reason for this is style sheets are resources that can be accessed without authentication. In essence, you separate your JS and CSS into different stylesheets and then reference them from an HTML page (such as a UI page or a portal widget). So long as ReactJS is listed as a dependency for that page, it’ll load in the background, recognize your React JS in the stylesheet and run accordingly.

For more detail on ReactJS deployment in ServiceNow, please refer to:


Have fun and happy coding!

Working With ACLs In ServiceNow

 

ACLs or Access Control Lists are the process by which ServiceNow provides granular security for its data and can be applied to individual records, as well as fields within those records.

When working with ACLs, it is extremely important to note that the order in which an ACL definition is evaluated has performance implications.

These are:

  1. Roles
  2. Criteria
  3. Script

 

ROLES: FASTEST

Roles will evaluate extremely fast as they are cached in server memory, so using roles is always highly recommended.

CRITERIA: FAST

Conditions are based on values in the current record and will evaluate quickly, but only after the role has been checked.

Although you can have complex criteria using dot-walking (“Show related records”) these will incur a performance overhead as ServiceNow needs to load the related records.

In this example, the criteria is based on the company of the assigned person for that record, requiring ServiceNow to load TWO additional records to evaluate.

Remember, performance does not scale in a linear fashion.

Although criteria like this may seem blisteringly fast when looking at a single record in a development environment, it will be much slower in production as lots of people access records—and particularly if it is applied to a READ rule in a list view as the criteria has to evaluate for each and every individual row being displayed (multiplying the performance overhead).


SCRIPT: SLOWEST

Although slowest here is a relative term, ACL scripts will evaluate at least slightly slower than ACL roles and ACL criteria for a number of reasons.

Scripts are often needed in ACLs, but they should always be carefully considered for performance implications.

The best practice with scripts is to have them shielded by roles and criteria. In this way, the script won’t even run unless the ACL first matches the role and then matches the criteria, potentially sidestepping a performance overhead before it occurs.

Consider the following two ACLs. Technically, they’re identical, but one will run considerably faster than the other.

Even though they’re technically identical, the second ACL will be slower because:

  • The script will be run for ALL users and not just those that have the ITIL role
  • The script will run on ALL records not just those that are active
  • ServiceNow’s JAVA layer has to invoke a Rhino Javascript engine to evaluate this script

Ideally, scripts should only be used on ACLs that already have roles and criteria to ensure they’re only running when absolutely necessary.

ServiceNow is optimised to run ACLs extremely fast, but they can introduce a performance overhead on large instances with millions of records.

JDS is experienced in optimizing ACLs and can use a variety of methods to drastically improve ACL performance. For more information, reach out to the JDS ServiceNow team.

To learn more, contact our team today on 1300 780 432, or email [email protected].

How ServiceNow’s ‘Virtual Agent’ can assist your organisation: Part 4

This blog entry is part of a four-part blog series on how ServiceNow’s Virtual Agent can assist your organisation.

See Part 1 HERE

See Part 2 HERE

See Part 3 HERE

Part 4: Experiences Matter

Through this blog series I have spoken about, through Virtual Agent, it is easier to empower users, create more opportunities for contactless resolution and create better operational insights and accuracy.

This is to achieve an end goal.

This end goal is to achieve a better service experience for users and customers. Virtual Agent really drives this home by focusing on the elements mentioned throughout this blog series. This is largely due to the Virtual Agent’s ability to evolve as your employees and organisation does. It allows a user’s or customer’s experience to be front and centre, as it provides the opportunity to improve consistently, even if there is staff turnover.

This is done by bringing across the knowledge from previous employees to the current and future employees as a sort of synthetic genetic history (through the Virtual Agent's flows). Although in theory, staff turnover should happen less as agents can refocus on more engaging work due to the virtual agent taking over most of the daily mundane work. These blog entries have largely been focused on positives and the next point has only been touched upon previously, but a Virtual Agent is there to offer another option, not replace completely, for users to interact with the service desk. The key point there is that it is an option.

Offering Options

These articles have been centred around the reasons why Virtual Agent is a useful addition to your organisation and how it can dramatically improve the service experience, but Virtual Agent should never replace all other avenues that users can use to access the information or raise issues.

Some users know where to look, so forcing them to use the Virtual Agent would frustrate them. Not only that, sometimes it is an emergency, so being forced to go down the Virtual Agent path will just delay something that should not be delayed.

It is important not to forget the fact that accessibility is also important, so offering a phone helpline may also be helpful for users with poor eyesight or bad internet connections. In addition to this, there are some queries that are just so specific that doing anything other than chatting to a person will not be efficient or beneficial.

As a result, a Virtual Agent should not replace all other options as an attempted cost cutting measure or in an attempt to be “cutting edge”.

It may be tempting thought as your Virtual Agent matures that you consider outright replace certain options, but this should not be done without ensuring there are other clear options for your user base and that the service experience is not negatively impacted as a result.

Evolving Your Business

When you begin your Virtual Agent journey though, it may not solve the issue alone, but can gather more information before handing it off to a person via web chat or otherwise, which ensures the service desk can focus their efforts on more complex issues or necessary contact.

An example of this is serving the users better who need to user a different resolution method, such as a phone call. When a Virtual Agent becomes a more prominent element within you organisation however, there will be time for people to work on other more, previous considered “only if time persists” projects.

This is important for several reasons, but largely because it opens agent’s time to be able to work on a variety of other initiatives in the organisation. They can up-skill and learn skills to provide newer and more useful services to their customers. Service agents can strive to become more user experience focused and become experts in understanding how to help customers, as opposed to regurgitating the same information day in and day out.

Your business will be able to review new initiatives to either become more profitable, by being able to focus on what you currently offer or expanding and investigating options that previously seemed untenable due to resourcing constraints. Chat bots and Virtual Agents tend to be over-hyped, but using it correctly can be a huge benefit to your organisation.

Even if the Virtual Agent only helps in evolving your business only slightly, some of that hype is warranted as that may be enough to bring your organisation to the next level.

Summary

Over the past couple of months, this blog series has largely been focused on positives, but with every positive and idealistic plan in mind, it is important to have a dose of realism, which this blog entry focused on.

That’s not to say Virtual Agent is not a worthwhile endeavor, quite the contrary, but starting a journey with only the positives in mind can be potentially damaging to your organisation. In summary, in the first blog entry we focused on the concept of empowerment. Not only empowering users, but also service agents and the organisation as a whole.

This was further highlighted in the second entry when we focused on the user and service agent level by discussing the concept of contactless resolution. From a user perspective, this was being able to raise issues out of hours and solve it on their own when is convenient for them, without staying on hold whilst they are asked to turn their machine off and on again.

From an agent’s perspective, contactless resolution allowing service agents to work on different projects and stop working on mundane tasks day in and day out and now being able to focus on service experience. Then focusing on empowerment on an organisational level, as discussed in the third blog entry as a virtual agent assists with improving operational insights and accuracy. This meant using newly gathered and accurate data to improve the experience even further and potentially solve more issues proactively.

Finally, this article highlighted the fact that even though Virtual Agent has all these benefits, this is a journey that needs to properly be planned for and not used as the singular point of entry for a user or customer. This journey can be made easier by people who have helped other organisations down this journey, as they can bring their experiences and suggestions in the best way to introduce it slowly and effectively.

Without making this sound like a sales pitch, this is often where consultants come in to play and can recommend a good starting point to start this journey and equip your service agents for the future. Regardless however, I hope this blog series has been informative and has ensured that your customers and users are more a focal point than ever. Thanks for reading!

 

Thank you for taking the time to read this four-part series. If you have not already, take a read of the earlier parts and see what you missed!

If not, reach out to us at JDS Australia if you want to begin your virtual agent journey. In doing so, we hope that we can assist in empowering your people, allowing a higher rate of contactless resolution, improving operational insights and accuracy and ensuring that that experience of your users, matter.

How ServiceNow’s ‘Virtual Agent’ can assist your organisation: Part 3

This blog entry is part of a four-part blog series on how ServiceNow’s Virtual Agent can assist your organisation.

Part 3: Operational Insight & Accuracy

Every day that a service desk is operational, it creates data, both useful and not so useful.

As time continues though it can become quite overwhelming and the data that was once useful can be poisoned with data that makes it less useful. People tend to have different opinions, differing working styles and language quirks that is amplified when there is staff turnover.

As a result, the data they create is only as insightful as its consistency when dealing with a large amount of it.

Accuracy

Data accuracy and data in general is one of the most common issues in any organisation.

This can be due to several reasons, but there are some ways that inaccurate data that gets in the system can be avoided. When entering data repeatedly, it can be mundane, boring and although not done purposely, accidents can be and will be made. Not only this, individuals will normally only enter the information they want to or need to, so some insights that would be useful to know or capture simply won’t be. In making that more and more information mandatory however, it may even cause more mistakes as it is more work that does not appear immediately valuable to the people who enter it.

These are just some of the things that could be alleviated in a few different ways if required.

Virtual agents can assist in doing this entry without error, without complaints and because it will just do the same thing over and over, the mistakes will occur when done manually should not occur. This makes the resulting data more accurate. It is not only that however, it is something as simple as if someone has been worked on and has been resolved without contact.

You can track this, and the record will close once the conversation has closed with the virtual agent. In day to day work, you may be working on something that has been resolved, but you then go to lunch and forget to close the record, causing SLAs to breach and information to be forgotten. Once again, another possible data point that is compromised.

As a result, the way we attempt to resolve requests without contact needs to evolve, as the added complexity in certain issues of today’s world are not answerable with the previous methods described.

Insights

Accurate data and information is all well and good, but what is the point if it does not offer any real insight in how to improve your processes and business? This is likely because a lot of the information that is commonly captured is done only for contractual reasons.

Agents are not focused on improving service, because trying to capture this information and making it meaningful is a long and drawn out process This is often simply because everyone thinks differently and may enter the same different information differently.

Having a virtual agent alongside the journey though can assist in making this information consistent and capturing more information along the process in a logical matter as standard. Let’s think about the example of a few employees who are having issues connecting to the VPN.

In the various calls that had been made regarding VPN issues this week, Sam, Roger and Cameron have all been resolving these in different ways, but it has all been down to the singular issue. Sam has been saying it is because people are using their wrong username to connect to the VPN. Roger has been saying that people are attempting to use their email address to use the VPN. Cameron has been saying that people are not using their windows login username to use the VPN. If you read this on face value, they all appear similar, but requires someone that understands the issue to understand it it is all related to the same key issue.

Let’s just say now that these phone calls have now become a virtual agent flow that Sam, Roger and Cameron have designed with their years of experience on the service desk. They have created a flow talking about common VPN connectivity issues and listing off possible solutions in a logical step by step and conditional manner. In this flow, they also asking after each troubleshooting step if it helped or not. As the next person who has VPN connectivity issues continues along the process, they too have an issue that relates to the above scenario.

Now the virtual agent is answering it and provides the solution and tracks that a misunderstanding in what username should be used as a login method is extremely common and easily reported against. This is the case as the wording is consistent now. As a result of this, Sam decides that before people even request VPN access, he would highlight what format the username should be. In the meantime, Roger and Cameron are looking at what other common support issues they can resolve through the virtual agent and now have a more complex skill set then they did before through this design and continual improvement process.

This issue went through a few steps to get to this point but now is being proactively resolved by Sam highlighting the username format. As a summary, these steps were:

1. Reactive resolution: Numerous people called the service desk talking about service desk issues and spoke to Cameron, Sam and Roger about VPN connectivity issues.
2. Contactless resolution: The service desk realized this coming up and spoke about it in their daily standup, so Cameron, Sam and Roger created a virtual agent troubleshooting flow, capturing when this issue has been resolved.
3. Proactive resolution: Sam notifies users before requesting VPN access they need to enter a specific username and no more support calls are raised, minus the few that do not read the necessary steps correctly.

As issues progress towards the proactive resolution stage, the NPS and CSAT scores of the service desk improves, as less and less people need to wait in a queue to have their issue resolved or wait until they are answered from an email. This scenario, although may seem as a best case and overly convenient for the sake of a blog entry, is surprisingly a common situation that people find themselves in and can be brought across different less conveniently written scenarios. Even if the proactive resolution stage does not occur and the contactless resolution only occurs in half the scenarios, it is still a net improvement of never attempting to solve the issue. Out of the box, ServiceNow’s virtual agent can hook into its powerful survey application, so understanding what the service experience is easy to gauge as the weeks continue.

 

In the long run however, that should be a focus for the organisation as virtual agent assists in improving the service experience and as it should be highlighted, this matters.

In the fourth and final part of this four-part blog series, we will discuss just that, how service experience matters.

In the meantime, check out this great Virtual Agent demo from ServiceNow.

How ServiceNow’s ‘Virtual Agent’ can assist your organisation: Part 2

This blog entry is part of a four-part blog series on how ServiceNow’s Virtual Agent can assist your organisation.

Part 2: Contactless Resolution

Contactless resolution, no contact resolution and zero contact resolution are three ideas that are similar in concept, but are all trying to get essentially the same result.

This concept is not new at all, despite it getting more recent attention. Searching for zero contact resolution in my search engine, brings up a link to something created in 2008 discussing this very topic.

What this concept means and how it can be made a reality though has evolved and will continue to evolve as time continues as the technology to support this evolves.

What Does This Mean?

Contactless resolution means being able to resolve something without contacting a person. In other words, getting a result from self-service and without requiring involvement from another person.

This is different to proactive resolution, which is the ideal scenario and realistically this is something built upon years of experience and data. There will always be issues and requests that cannot be proactively resolved though, as people will always have questions and issues that cannot be predicted or have not been raised before.

Historically this was done through expecting a user to find a knowledge article and using the information from that knowledge article to solve their issue. Before that and outside of anything IT related, you could think of the opening times posted on the window of a local café as a method of contactless resolution.

You could go into a building to ask the opening time from a person, but in terms of contactless resolution this would mean reading a poster outside of it to get the same result.

However, as we as a species become more advance, so do our questions and issues.

As a result, the way we attempt to resolve requests without contact needs to evolve, as the added complexity in certain issues of today’s world are not answerable with the previous methods described.

Virtual Agent

This is where virtual agents come in.

A knowledge article and a poster on a window are all well and good for simple questions and queries, but it does not really evolve as the query evolve. It is a static bit of information. Also, these sources can be information overload (a bit like these blog entries some would say), so are not effective for complex questions. Imagine if you will that you are having printer issues. Historically, you would have searched in search engine with your printer make and issue and browsed around 10 websites, until you realise you do not have the permissions on your machine to be able to resolve this issue alone. Either that, or you will call the service desk, only for them to provide you a knowledge article with a step by step guide that they developed using the official website as a guide. Both “may” work but cannot evolve as your situation evolves without continual contact.

Let’s look at it from a ServiceNow virtual agent point of view.

Fortunately, your organisation has made the effort of saying what printers are assigned to what person and locations in your ServiceNow instance. You browse to your Service Portal and decide to “try” the virtual agent experience. You tell the virtual agent that the printer will not turn on and that takes you to the virtual agent topic related to printer issues. The virtual agent confirms you are working from a certain location with you and then understands that the printer you are having issues with is from a certain manufacturer (as your configuration management database is up to date and your user record says you are working from that location).

In doing this, it can provide step by step trouble shooting issues specific to that printer within a matter of seconds, simply from you typing your initial query and confirming your location. You try a few different steps and then get asked if it was able to solve your issue. It does not, however provides another solution that does. The virtual agent asks if the new recommendation helped and by saying yes, you record this information that then can be reported against to improve the virtual agent in the future.

All in all, this saves you the time of waiting on the phone waiting to talk to IT support, trying to find a website on your own and saves the service desk agent time. A simple sign may help with the opening hours of a business, but won’t help in deciphering complex issues, empowering users to solve their own issues and tracking what the common solutions are to issues to potentially proactively solve them in the future.

However, what does this mean for the service agent now that a “robot” has stolen “their job”.

Service Agent Concerns

One of the most common concerns when looking into virtual agents is how it may impact your service agents’ daily activities. It may not directly impact them, but they may feel as though that their day to day activities will change or they will simply be made redundant.

Yes, their day to day activities will change, but organisations can use this newly procured time to put their service agents to work in improving the virtual agent experience, improving their overall service experience and more importantly improving their business with this newly found time.

Service agents are just that, agents and individuals in place to provide a service to their customers. What can happen that instead of taking the same phone call day in and day out can therefore be exchanged with improving their applications to perform better and creating new services for their end users.

This will improve employee satisfaction and as a result, the retention of employees as it provides a more fulfilling job experience.

Their jobs will not be filled with mundane tasks that require data entry for the sake of data entry, Operational insights will also be more accurate to provide an even better service to their end users as it is no longer manually entered.

Although contactless resolution appears like a negative to the service agents without investigating it, it becomes a positive when it is implemented.

 

This is what really highlights the potential results you can get with a Virtual Agent at all levels of the business.

In the third part of this four-part blog series, we will discuss operational insights and accuracy.

In the meantime, check out this great Virtual Agent demo from ServiceNow.

How ServiceNow’s ‘Virtual Agent’ can assist your organisation: Part 1

 

This blog entry is part of a four-part blog series on how ServiceNow’s Virtual Agent can assist your organisation.

 

If you talk to someone about the present state of the IT industry, artificial intelligence, virtual agent and chatbots are topics that commonly surface in one way or another.

From forcibly having to “deal” with it while trying to raise a support query from your internet provider to something less prominent to having a popup in the bottom right part of your screen asking if there is anything they can help with.  These concepts have become front and centre in the drive to provide a better customer experience to users.

They are often get implemented with the best intentions, but when not implemented with the right strategy can turn a previously acceptable user experience, to a frustrating one where you are constantly getting distracted by notifications.

  • Is implementing a virtual agent the right thing to do?
  • Will it really provide a better experience for users?
  • Will it improve satisfaction for all members of my organisation and my customers?

In a word, yes.  This blog series will discuss four main topics that should be front and centre when talking and thinking about virtual agents for your organisation, as well as some small bits of wisdom to take on your journey.

We at JDS Australia would love to help you on this journey, and fortunately ServiceNow has a great Virtual Agent out of the box that you can utilise.

Part 1: Empowering People

When Virtual Agent comes up in conversation, the concept of empowerment comes up but normally only focusing on the end user.

In reality though, Virtual Agents help empower both sides of the coin.

What does this mean though?

How can virtual agents empower both end users, service agents and the organisation and their customers at large?

The End Users

To start, let’s start with a thought experiment.

You and everyone else reading this article is an end user somewhere.  Whether for your internet service provider, mobile provider or even as a patron of your favourite fast food chain, you have experience as an end user and will have seen an evolution in how this is done.  In your head, what do you consider a good experience? What do you consider a negative one?  What do you think would help that experience?  Fast food chains introduced self-service terminals where you can order without talking to someone and various telecommunication organisations introduced Virtual Agents, both with varying levels of success.   Now think about the place that you work or the customers that you serve.  What is something you answer day in, and day out based on a question that is commonly asked?

Frankly speaking, Virtual Agents have a bad habit of being introduced and forced onto users, whereas really it can be introduced to empower users, by offering them options and saving time.  If we investigate the last question in our thought experiment, the joke answer is “have you turned it on and off again”. It may be seen as a joke, but yes, it sometimes helps (despite our reluctance to do it before calling).

In a more complex example, what about access and permissions to an external system?  The most common response is to call up IT or ask your friendly IT support team to do it off the record, but what happens if you could do it yourself?

Various systems and applications offer a range of web services that you can hook into with ServiceNow via an integration.  Through these integrations and details you may find on a user record, you could simply automate it.  Where does Virtual Agent play into this though?  Before getting access to a system or understanding permissions, there are often a variety of questions based on the application you are speaking about.  The Virtual Agent can ask these questions first and respond based on the answers provided.  It may not necessarily remove all human interaction to make the request possible (such as requiring approvals), but it will handle the questions that need to be asked that may cancel a request before it is even raised.  Saving the time of the end user, as they no longer need to make time for a phone call and saving the time of the service agent, as they no longer have to spend the time to have the conversation, which includes the time to get back into the groove of what they were working on.  This gives the end user the feeling as they solved their own issue and provides them with the confidence to try to solve this issue first without calling the help desk.

What does this mean for the service desk agent though?  If they are not on the phone with end users, how does this empower them?  Doesn’t that make their job redundant?

The Service Agents

In a word, no.

In fact, having the various service agents involved to in the investigation of how they can better serve the end users is more important than ever.  These are the people who now can spend more time on more complex questions and fulfilling the manual requests when needed and know what is best when serving the end user.  The Virtual Agent empowers these users even more than the end users, as now they can be involved in the development and continual improvement of the Virtual Agent.  This provides the service agents the power to be directly involved in the improvement of their services to the end users but using their experience to ask the questions they need to, to get a better outcome.

That is the main opportunity for Virtual Agent when the service desk agent is directly involved.  They can help in improving the questions and topics that a Virtual Agent asks the end user, so they get the information that they need to resolve the query first time as they continually improve it.  That is what is important to note and the reason why service agents do not simply become redundant.  Implementing a Virtual Agent is not a one and done, it’s a continual process to ensure that as your understanding of your newly empowered end users improves, so the mean time to resolve tickets improves.  Up to the point that this no longer even becomes a metric for some requests, as through asking the correct questions, these issues can be resolved without even contacting the service desk.  This is a concept known as contact-less resolution and will be spoken about in more depth in the next part of this blog series.

So if the end users now feel empowered, as they are now able to solve more issues in their own time, out of hours and without picking up their phone and service agents now can focus on improving these experiences and can spend more time on more complex tasks, what does this mean for the organisation as a whole?

The Organisation

The organisation itself also is empowered as a result of this.  People now feel a sense of autonomy as they are not necessarily required to spend their work hours doing what they use to, as the Virtual Agent assists in alleviating some of the needs around this. The organisation can bring forth new initiatives to improve their service further.  The organisation can direct users down the path they need them too to achieve their goals… but the change on the organisational level is not so much about empowerment, but how the operational insights can move your organisation forward.  That topic however, will be discussed in a later part of our blog series.

What is the end goal when it comes to implementing a Virtual Agent?

How can this can be taken even further?

In the next part of this blog series, we'll cover contact-less resolution.

In the meantime, check out this great Virtual Agent demo from ServiceNow!

ServiceNow Upgrade Process

 

With ServiceNow committing to two major releases a year and only allowing customers to operate on n-1, having a well understood upgrade process is not a luxury, it’s a necessity.

To reduce the risk of disruption to the business during upgrades, JDS recommends organisations adopt a clearly defined strategy for upgrades.

  1. Prepare Environments
    • Back up any update sets in non-production
    • Clone production over non-production so the latest configuration and data is available for accurate testing. The clone should include the audit history and the system logs.
    • Upgrade non-production to the latest version of ServiceNow
    • If necessary, reapply update sets, although the recommendation is to suspend custom development during the upgrade process
  2. Bottom-Up Analysis—Review of the upgrade logs:
    • Review skipped updates to understand any potential impact on the upgrade. Although the focus is on skipped records from the latest upgrade, it is important to understand previous skipped records as there may be dependencies that cause complications
    • Focus upgrade testing on areas where updates have been skipped to ensure there are no adverse effects
    • Provide recommendations on where skipped records should be restored or merged to future-proof the organisation
  3. Top-Down Testing—Upgrade testing
    • End-to-end business process testing to ensure the veracity of the upgrade in non-production
      • Business involvement from SMEs (subject-matter experts) is critical to the success of upgrade testing
      • Where possible, follow previously established test cases
      • In the absence of established test cases, JDS recommends a random sample of records, following the audit history of each record and duplicating each step with a new test record (including impersonating users and replicating each of their updates)
      • Automated testing is intended to supplement manual testing
    • Integration testing
      • As much as possible, verify integration works as expected in non-production
      • Inbound email actions can be replicated by manually importing the relevant email XML record from production into non-prod and manually activating the “reprocess email” command
      • Outbound emails can be viewed in the email queue
  1. Defect identification and resolution
    • Based on the results of the previous steps, defects will be classified as
      1. Relating to the core system and therefore the responsibility of ServiceNow support
      2. Relating to the customised system and therefore the responsibility of the customer
        • Where possible, JDS will propose and implement defect resolution in consultation with the customer
        • If issues cannot be resolved, JDS will propose and implement a workaround
      3. User Acceptance Testing
        • UAT should not be confused with the upgrade testing. The bulk of end user testing should have already occurred under the upgrade testing phase. This particular UAT is intended to verify defect resolution.
        • UAT validates the issues exposed during the upgrade process have been rectified to the satisfaction of customer.
        • It is important to note that UAT need not be exhaustive as it's role is to confirm that defects exposed during upgrade testing were resolved
          • Additional defect resolution may be required if additional issues are exposed.
  1. Go Live
    • Upgrade production environment
    • Apply update sets based on the defect identification and resolution
    • Clone back to non-production environments to ensure all environments are in sync and on the latest version of ServiceNow
  2. Go Live Support
    • JDS recommends a go-live support for a period of two weeks
      • Any issues raised during the go-live warranty period will be subject to development and testing in non-prod and will require change management approval before deployment in production
      • If no issues arise, there’s time for enacting best practices and enhancements

The focus of upgrade testing is risk mitigation. The amount of time and effort spent on each of these phases will differ from one customer to the next depending on the size and complexity of their ServiceNow instance, along with the criticality of ServiceNow to their business practices.

If you want to learn more about upgrading ServiceNow, talk to JDS.