Developing tomorrow’s leaders
Located a short distance from the United States White House and the Capitol building, American University (AU) is aligned to the rhythm and culture of Washington, D.C. The institution’s student body is renowned for wanting to make a difference at home and abroad through public service and leadership roles. AU’s eight schools and colleges have produced generations of change makers, scholars, dreamers and activists—among them, Pulitzer Prize and Nobel Prize winners, Congressional leaders, ambassadors and foreign heads of state.
AU strives to provide its students with the support they need to thrive. A campus initiative called Reinventing the Student Experience (RiSE) was launched to break down the silos between departments and transform how information is shared with students, faculty, staff, parents and prospective students. RiSE yielded a plan to replace the university’s longstanding service delivery system with a modern self-service portal that would provide immediate access to a wealth of campus-wide information.
“For a long time, students, faculty and staff had difficulty finding resources because they were spread across multiple tools, if they were available at all,” explains Terry Fernandez, Assistant Vice President, Customer Service, Office of Information Technology at American University. “We knew that we could resolve this issue with the latest technology and at the same time mature as a service organisation.”
Everything on one platform
Following an extensive market review of service delivery platforms, the Office of Information Technology (OIT) team, together with representatives from academic and administrative departments, unanimously selected ServiceNow. Through a single platform powering IT Service Management, Customer Service Management, Strategic Portfolio Management and IT Operations Management, the team gained the means to deliver holistic, easy-to-access Service Operations support across the institution.
“We chose ServiceNow because it offered the self-service capabilities and automation to power the all-in-one portal we envisioned,” says Fernandez.
Using ServiceNow, Fernandez and the AU team created help.american.edu. The site is AU’s first-ever, unified, 24x7 service portal for students, faculty, staff, parents and prospective students. Currently used by 20 departments, the portal hosts six extensive knowledge bases covering everything from IT, housing and parking to student laundry services.
Content can also be accessed via phone, email, physical walk-ins and Virtual Agent-based chat. With so many convenient options, it’s easy for people to find the information they need. Virtual Agent was further integrated with Microsoft Teams to allow people to tap into knowledge bases or check the status of tickets through the familiar app interface.
As a result of the team’s efforts, the university’s audiences enjoy consistent, personalised and engaging experiences across AU communications channels. They can decide what information they want to receive and how it should be delivered, and self-service means they get the support they need faster.
We’re proud that we were able to scale and launch the portal in just three months,” says Fernandez. “We achieved this by using ServiceNow to develop standard repeatable processes and templates that our departments and internal organisations could use to join the effort.”
Relevant content for all
Appreciation for the portal’s newly consolidated knowledge base has inspired AU’s departments and organisations to adopt the approach and actively contribute content. Since its launch, the service portal has grown its knowledge article base threefold. Scheduled review cycles ensure that teams get visibility into article maintenance, and that information is kept up-to-date and improved based on user feedback. Additionally, initiatives for new content are being developed to meet the needs of parents and prospective students.
Fernandez says there is an emphasis on accommodating different learning styles, too: “Since people consume information in different ways, we’re starting to develop content in different formats. For example, a knowledge article might be paired with a step-by-step video to make the topic easier to understand.”
Achieving operational transparency
The breadth and depth of the unified service portal requires an extensive back end to support it. Real-time analytics and business intelligence reporting are used to manage incident, problem, change, knowledge, and self-service activity in a timely and efficient manner. In addition, KPI dashboards have been created for various applications so that different audiences, from customer service agents to senior university leaders, can readily access the reporting they need.
“The ServiceNow dashboards help keep everyone aligned and engaged on projects,” says Fernandez. “In OIT, for example, our entire team can see how many incidents or service requests are open, how many are unassigned, how many knowledge articles have been viewed, and whether the Help Desk can keep pace with anticipated user demand. That enables us to implement surge staffing when required to maintain service levels.”
This transparency is supplemented by the Service Mapping capability within IT Operations Management, which helps Fernandez’s team understand the context of every resource involved in a business service. She says: “With Service Mapping, you can clearly see who is or could be impacted by a service issue and communicate with them accordingly. We’re also publishing outages and service degradations on the portal, so everyone has visibility into disruptions.”
Resolving tickets faster
To facilitate communication between customer service and help desk agents and different audiences, AU implemented ServiceNow Agent Workspace.
“Agent Workspace provides a single pane of glass through which our agents can view and manage all our communications channels,” Fernandez says. “Key metrics, history and AI-assisted answers come together to help the agents resolve queries faster.”
Strategic Portfolio Management enables the team to track and manage both operational and project workstreams in a single environment, increasing productivity and efficiency. It also supports AU’s focus on agile and hybrid, as well as traditional waterfall delivery models, providing the flexibility to scale to the requirements of different types of project management and execution.
Investment pays off
Overall, the efficiencies of the ServiceNow environment have enabled AU departments to increase service quality, decrease service costs, meet compliance goals and realise return on investment. In fact, Fernandez estimates that there is a 30% efficiency gain for any department that uses the portal.
Meanwhile, the use of self-service to access knowledge articles has increased by 600% since the portal’s launch, with 60% of viewed content relating to technology or learning support services. There are now 2,550 knowledge articles and governance best practices in place to maintain them.
Mean time spent resolving user tickets has decreased by 34%, from 19 hours to 12.5 hours; and 86% of Help Desk queries are resolved on the first contact. Moreover, because standard, repeatable tasks have been automated, OIT and Help Desk staff have more time to address complex issues. They’ve also been able to add 42 new systems to the support portfolio over the past five years—an achievement that would not have been possible without ServiceNow automation.
On the technical front, IT Operations Management allows relationships between applications, services and hardware to be mapped for the first time, including 262 business applications and over 9,100 AU-owned workstations. The data provides the AU OIT team with better control over operations and improves decision-making.
Fernandez credits the role played by ServiceNow’s technical support team in the project’s success: “We’ve had a great relationship with ServiceNow from the start. Their product managers and developers have helped us reduce customisation by building our requirements into product changes and updates. That maximises the value we get from the ServiceNow platform.”
Future ambitions
Looking ahead, Fernandez sees plenty of scope to expand the portal’s footprint. For instance, AU’s law school—Washington College of Law—plans to use it to facilitate knowledge sharing and IT support for students, faculty and staff.
To take the technology to the next level for the university, Fernandez plans to extend the use of Service Mapping, roll out Event Management, leverage ServiceNow Workday integration for HR and finance functions, and explore new applications involving robotic process automation and artificial intelligence. The new capabilities will enable the university to deliver a more powerful, centralised experience for portal users while streamlining back-end management for the OIT team.
“I’m proud of this project for many reasons,” says Fernandez. “Using ServiceNow, we’ve created a service culture to transform the experiences of 20 departments supporting students, faculty, staff, parents and prospective students. We can also share our learnings and best practices with our institutional peers—reaffirming the progressive role American University plays not just in higher education, but in wider society.”