ServiceNow and Microsoft power virtual agent collaboration on Teams for the new distributed world of work

On-demand collaboration happens fast nowadays. Service agents, from IT, HR and other departments, need to collaborate quickly to resolve employee needs before they become larger issues. Great employee experiences demand end-to-end integration and execution at scale.

No longer a nice-to-have, productive collaboration has become essential for business continuity and enterprise resilience, as some workers start to return to the physical workplace.
Today, we’re announcing the general availability of integrated capabilities with Microsoft that allow HR and IT agents to collaborate more effectively and resolve issues directly within Microsoft Teams—continuing the companies’ deep commitment to accelerating digital transformation for their joint customers and to creating great service experiences for employees within their suite of productivity tools.
As we’ve seen throughout the pandemic, the combined power of business agility and collaboration has never been more critical. Enabling collaboration within workflows in Microsoft Teams, agents can tackle complex issues together and swarm resources to ensure that incidents are taken care of as quickly as possible.
These breakthrough capabilities, available now, include:

• Chat-to-Call: Agents can invite an employee to a Teams call directly from a live chat to quickly understand and resolve an issue. Chat-to-Call also enables video calling and screen sharing, allowing agents to significantly reduce time to resolution by quickly diagnosing an incident. In more complex situations, agents can join employees via video to provide a more human touch.
• Major Incident Management, including meeting extensions: Agents can rapidly collaborate in a group setting to address organization-wide incidents through a structured process. With meeting extensions, key information can be shared from the Now Platform® directly into a Teams meeting to give agents a shared understanding of the incident at hand and enable more rapid responses.

The innovations announced today support agents through the distributed workforce model by facilitating rapid and direct lines of communications within Microsoft Teams to meet employees where they are. Simultaneously, agents now have the resources to prepare for increased incidents and requests as employees return to the physical workplace and require assistance in their transitions back to the office. Once an incident is resolved, all of the activity is captured in the Now Platform so that in the future, others can also benefit from the interaction.
During the pandemic, customers have found that virtual agents provide employees answers and drive agent productivity so they can focus on the most complex issues. At ServiceNow, we have seen substantial growth in customers rolling out intelligent chatbot experiences. In 2020, Virtual Agent deployments increased 300%, and self-service usage by employees grew 15-fold.
You can learn more about our continued efforts with Microsoft to enhance the employee service experience and agent collaboration in Teams in an upcoming session at Microsoft Ignite digital experience, on March 2-4 and on-going here on the Digital Hub.
Check out our latest capabilities in the ServiceNow store:

• IT Service Management Integration with Microsoft Teams
• HR Service Delivery Integration with Microsoft Teams
• Notify Connector for Microsoft Teams

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