Griffith University elevates service excellence with automation and AI

Service excellence: two university students sitting on outdoor stairs looking at a laptop

For higher education institutions looking for fast time to value, ambiguity of outcomes is not an option. Universities are looking for ways to serve their students, faculty, and staff more efficiently, but they must balance immediate returns and longer-term vision for user experience.

At Griffith University in Queensland, Australia, automation and AI-powered tools presented a fast track to connect disparate systems and siloed information, which were causing inconsistent staff and student experiences. The projected gains were compelling: greater staff productivity, improved overall service quality, and a seamless user experience.

“Our teams received over half a million requests for a range of services annually,” says Lori Burdon, delivery lead at the university. “Critical service management data and student-facing information were spread over 28 separate portals and hosted over 9,000 web pages and 70,000 SharePoint sites. Our faculty and staff were using over 200 shared mailboxes and 16 main phone numbers.”

This resulted in confusion for students looking for information, difficulty for service staff transferring data, and inaccurate reporting. Griffith wanted to elevate service excellence by providing one platform for all service management across the university. This would help deliver easy-to-access and easy-to-use services for all students, staff, and faculty.

Creating a seamless employee experience

The team defined more than 300 individual services across the university and realized 60% of them were delivered in duplicate to students and staff.

“We wanted to reimagine Griffith’s future digital service experience at a whole-of-university level and support our staff to align to this, regardless of department or location,” Burdon says.

The team decided to deconstruct the user experience and move away from organizational hierarchies.

“Our approach was to incrementally onboard every function of the university into the new way of working on the Now Platform,” explains David Stangherlin, senior business project manager. “At our technology layer, we designed and defined our enterprise architecture, integrations, and business intelligence, setting the foundation to co-define and mature our product roadmaps together.”
Within three months of going live, 50,000 tickets, from student requests to IT needs, were resolved, with approximately 70% closed out at the first contact.

Improving self-service and issue resolution

Within three months of the university going live on ServiceNow Customer Service Management (CSM) and IT Service Management (ITSM), approximately 800 support staff had been onboarded to the platform.

In that time, 50,000 tickets, from student requests to IT needs, were resolved, with approximately 70% closed out at the first contact—representing a 43% improvement in first-contact resolution. At the same time, web self-service increased from 21% to 63% for all IT ticket types.

The university’s CSM teams reported significant improvements across the board:

Griffith also added around 277 forms to the system, providing consistency for the agents serving the requesters, as well as more than 1,300 knowledge articles to help customers self-serve. These enhancements resulted in customer satisfaction averaging between 4 and 4.5 out of 5.

Phasing in AI and automation

Griffith’s aim is to deliver all university services on the AI-powered ServiceNow platform in four phases over 36 months to improve self-service rates and help ensure faster issue resolution.

Although many ServiceNow CSM rollouts begin with the IT department, the university’s first phase started with the library services team. This allowed Griffith to break the perception of ServiceNow as an IT ticketing system and showcase the enterprise capabilities and opportunities.

Phase two focuses on staff experience, encompassing ServiceNow HR Service Delivery and other corporate services (finance, HR, legal, and health and safety), and is scheduled to be onboarded by the end of 2024. The final two phases will see student services, research services, learning and teaching, marketing, and the university’s academic group onboarded to the platform.

Prioritizing service

Two instrumental aspects of Griffith’s change management strategy involved a co-design approach from the outset to guide, validate, and future-proof decisions.

First, an enterprise service management governance function was established, supporting engagement with third-party providers and in-house IT staff to co-define the problem and opportunity, and build upon an approach to mature their service portfolios.

Second, a reference group with representatives from each functional area helped ensure every deliverable in phase one would be relevant for all future phases and functions.

“A great example of the reference group’s impact is our decision to move away from SharePoint sites for service information,” Stangherlin says. “We now have a clear remit for where service information goes, versus service fulfillment, using a single source of truth.”

To get to that place, “we asked questions like, ‘If you need payroll information, how would you find it?’” he adds. “From there, we worked together to create new workflows based on what makes sense for people, rather than what our organizational structure dictated.”

With a clear governance roadmap, the team defined consistent customer satisfaction scores, service level agreements, naming conventions, and service portfolios for its service offerings.
We now have a clear remit for where service information goes, versus service fulfillment, using a single source of truth. -David Stangherlin, Sr. Business Project Manager, Griffith University

Bridging the support skills gap

One of the biggest mistakes organizations make when transitioning to a new technology platform is underestimating the resources needed to manage it. Given the current challenges higher education is facing, coupled with Australia’s tight labor market, hiring additional IT specialists was not an option.

Instead, the team relied on equipping current staff—technical and nontechnical—with new skills. The university is embarking on a journey to upskill support teams using ServiceNow Impact, an AI-powered value acceleration solution designed to help enhance time to value with ServiceNow.

“We've appointed a training and development officer as part of our program team, matching course modules with skills gaps for our staff,” Burdon says. “They can then undertake training at their own pace, developing expertise and gaining industry-recognized accreditation in relevant areas.”

For example, some people are more focused on HR Service Delivery, and others are more CSM-based. “We're also looking at skilling staff in some of the document intelligence and robotic process automation capabilities,” she adds.

“Once those operational people have completed their training, we’ll invite them to shadow our IT team. They’ll get to sit in on design meetings, learn how to apply a design approach, and eventually be able to provide a similar level of service.”

Building a foundation for generative AI

Having redefined the end-to-end student and staff experience, and completed the first phase of implementation, Griffith plans to adopt Now Assist—ServiceNow’s generative AI capabilities—to further improve self-service rates and staff productivity.

The university has opted to take advantage of Now Assist for CSM for knowledge generation, which will help frontline agents quickly create knowledge articles from cases and share them with content writers for review and approval. This capability is expected to boost customer satisfaction, deflect up to 10% of future cases by allowing users to self-resolve, and reduce time spent resolving requests and incidents by up to 25%.

Heading into the next phase, the stakes are high.

“Our intent is to deliver real value with each release, rather than rolling everything out all at once and damaging the user experience,” Burdon says. “We want to make sure we iron out any bugs and realize the efficiencies we need. It’s a more considered approach that we believe will see better results—and smoother change management—this way.”

Future-proofing experience

The university is leaning on data to drive decision-making. When a department requested an urgent customization on the platform, the program team let the metrics do the talking.

“We asked them to wait 12 weeks so we could track how their users were engaging with their services,” Burdon says. “It turned out that 90% of the requests that they wanted customized were being actioned in the opposite way. So that was a huge win, just to use data to make the best call.”

With the right building blocks firmly in place, Griffith is preparing to offer services to 53,000 students in its upcoming phases. According to Burdon, “Within the next 18 months, every function within the university will be using ServiceNow for its frequent, repeatable services.”

Find out more about how ServiceNow helps organizations boost employee productivity.