Picture this: You’re working from home as your office is experimenting with the hybrid workplace model. Suddenly, your VPN stops working when an important email is due. The mail has to reach your client in two hours so you try calling the IT helpdesk, but you’re unable to get through to them as the team is working from home. Once you finally manage to connect with someone, you raise a ticket. The fix, you later find, is a simple reboot, but because you are working remotely, it took longer for the IT helpdesk to resolve the issue. By this time, the email you had to send to your customer is long overdue. Typically, if everyone was in the office, the issue could have been resolved in minutes. A self-service portal can reduce this turnaround time even further.

A recent survey of US office professionals found that 54% wasted time searching for critical information and much-needed files in cluttered online systems. This problem is not limited to new recruits or mid-level staff. The survey reported that upper management office professionals (41%) are more than three times as likely to say quick file search is the top problem to solve. “Loss of time negatively impacts companies and cultures as workers waste energy that would be better spent on planning, strategy and overall company growth,” the report observed.

ServiceNow enterprise service management offers a self-service portal with a variety of widgets to streamline workflows, allowing employees easy access to key information and processes and eliminating the need for increased human intervention. The portal serves as a one-stop-shop that organizes all relevant information for employees across various departments such as HR, IT and others.

ServiceNow Self Service Portal

What you gain from a self-service portal

Self-service portals are at the heart of enterprise service management. ServiceNow self-service portal brings automation to the forefront of business operations. The platform offers an easily accessible and user-friendly interface while providing businesses with the option of customizing the portal as per its convenience and needs. All features and services are listed in one space and the portal is available across devices with the layout automatically adjusting to the device in use.

In the scenario mentioned earlier, if your office had adopted ServiceNow IT service management, you could easily log in to the self-service portal and access the knowledge database to figure out what the issue was. You could raise a ticket, if the issue hadn’t been addressed previously or access the chatbot for solutions. You could resolve the issue all by yourself in minutes without the calls and long wait.

ServiceNow’s powerful chatbots can solve up to 92% of IT-related issues. Not only can they help resolve issues with minimum human intervention, they also typically take less time than when end users elicit the help of an associate. ServiceNow even offers Natural Language Understanding (NLU) models so virtual agents can understand user statements in automated conversations. By feeding oft-used phrases, words and sentences, you can help the system offer a richer and engaging conversational experience. However, many still prefer some human interaction when it comes to getting our problems sorted. Community posts help bridge this gap.

Smart collaboration saves time and costs

ServiceNow self-service adoption doesn’t mean an enterprise completely does away with all human interaction. Effective enterprise service management banks on connecting end users with the right experts, specialists or peers with experience in a certain domain to get their queries clarified. Take community posts, for example. An issue you may be facing may not necessarily be a new one. With a few keywords, you can search for posts in which your colleagues have detailed the same problem and how they fixed it. This simple approach saves about 30 work hours, a $11 phone interaction and frees up the IT helpdesk team. You can also update the post to let your peers know if the fix still works or if you found an easier shortcut. This keeps the community engaged while building knowledge.

ServiceNow enterprise service management makes it easier for a company to create and maintain a dedicated space on the portal for all its announcements, automated employee campaign email blasts, calendars, events and discussion boards. Important announcements can be displayed as banners at the top of the page so users can’t miss them.

Self-service portals are great for reducing costs, dependencies and resolution time. With the right methodology and a detailed roadmap, businesses can benefit from ServiceNow self-service adoption. Powered by AI technology, chatbots, self-service, and predictive analysis, ESM can maximize ROI and productivity.

 

 

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