Everyone wants their implementation to be a success, but it is extremely easy to get a few things wrong early on which make it more difficult to achieve your business objectives.
These are my top tips to setting yourself up for success with your Customer Service Management implementations.
Make sure the right people are involved
- Business stakeholders. The people who are directly involved in your customer service processes.
- You already thought about your agents and their supervisors, but what about management above the team supervisors? What do they need from the system?
- Some small specialist customer service teams may work a little differently to your main, frontline agents.
- Knowledge should be integral to your implementation, so who is going to look after this area?
- The customer can sometimes be a bit of an afterthought. Often you cannot directly involve customers in the project, but someone in the team needs to be advocating for the customer experience.
- Technical stakeholders. Often from your IT group, they will have deep technical knowledge and/or will be involved in maintaining the system.
- You will probably be integrating with external systems. Detailed knowledge about these systems early on can help you avoid making incorrect assumptions about what data is required from where and how it can be moved between these systems.
- Your IT department will often have data and security policies that need to be considered from day one.
- Your Customer Service Management administrator may be a different person to your ServiceNow administrator, and this is something to consider early in the project.
- Project stakeholders. Some roles only exist during the project.
- Who will create and deliver training material?
- Who is going to act as the test manager?
- Who is going to be the release manager?
This is clearly not an exhaustive list, but hopefully prompts you to ask yourself who might be missing from your team.
It is also particularly important that your team is willing, able, and empowered to make prompt decisions. If the decision makers are not heavily involved, then delays to your implementation are inevitable.
A complete and reliable sales to delivery handover
This means that unless you get a complete and accurate sales to delivery handover then expectations within the project team are not going to match reality, and that will end with delays and/or change requests.
Make sure your project team knows the answers to these questions:
- What problem is this project meant to solve?
- What software licenses and what implementation services have been bought?
- Why have these services and software been purchased?
- What is the existing level of use and knowledge of ServiceNow within the company?
- What training/knowledge transfer is needed before the project starts?
- What outline plan/project roadmap has been discussed?
- What expectations have been set?
A shared understanding of the project scope and governance
- Who needs to be involved in workshops, requirements gathering, etc?
- Who can make decisions?
- How can things be escalated?
- How are changes requested?
This shared understanding must also continue, and get deeper, as the project continues
- What does the data model look like, and where is data mastered?
- What is planned for each sprint?
- When do decisions need to be made?
Understand and adopt baseline ServiceNow functionality where possible
A fundamental example is that you should use Customer Service Management to look after your customers. You could take ITSM (Information Technology Service Management) functionality (incidents, problems, changes, etc.) but your customers probably won’t respond well to being treated like broken IT services, and the additional costs and complications of customising ITSM to deliver a good customer experience (and separate it from true ITSM) makes it not worth attempting.
If you have been involved in software implementations then you have probably also heard something like, “We have always done it this way in the past.” Just because the previous system worked in a particular way does not mean you should make ServiceNow work the same way. Focus on the desired outcome instead of the process to achieve it, and you will find your business needs can normally be achieved through configuration of lists, forms, rules, and flows.
Using demos and quick prototypes can help everyone understand how ServiceNow baseline processes work in the context of your specific implementation and help get consensus on the right configuration.
Prepare your organization for change
There are three flavours of change to consider:
- People
- How will your organizational hierarchy change?
- What roles are going to change, be created, or disappear, and who will be doing them?
- Will your headcount be increasing/decreasing? How are you going to handle this?
- Process
- How are the processes people will follow different in the future?
- Will requests come into the system via new channels, or with different information?
- Are there new processes being introduced, or old processes being retired?
- Technology
- Do your users know what the new systems look like, and how to interact with it?
- How will your users be trained? How can they ask for help if they have questions?
If organization change management is not handled well then you will get a lot of resistance from your employees at go-live, just when you need them to be doing their best to help it succeed.
Focus on your people and communicate positively and honestly to let them know not only what is changing, but also why this project is happening, and how it is going to benefit them both holistically and in their day-to-day lives. Expose them to the system as early possible through demos of key functionality and do your best to answer questions and accept feedback.
Spending a little on organizational change management up front can save you a lot more down the line, and remember, “if you fail to plan, you are planning to fail.” The technology is here to enhance the employee experience and increase process efficiency, not to replace them.
More information
These are just my experiences of common mistakes in implementation projects, so it cannot cover everything. If you are interested in more in depth, you should take a look at Essentials for ServiceNow Implementation Success.
You will no doubt have your own thoughts on this, so let me know: What have you found to be critical to the success of your projects?
