5 Tips by Best Buy® for acing Employee Center Deployment

[SmritiGupta]

We are excited to be back this quarter with another inspiring customer spotlight where we take you behind the scenes of a large organization deploying Employee Center through Customer Show and Tell webinars hosted by Live on ServiceNow. 

During our Q1 2024 event, Best Buy® detailed their deployment journey, emphasizing their commitment to continuous improvement and integrating user feedback to elevate their portal experience.

Below are 5 tactics they shared to successfully deploy and realize value from Employee Center: 

 

1. Simplify implementation by embracing out-of-the-box solutions

Throughout multiple iterations of portal implementation, Best Buy learned and advocated a crucial insight: adoption of out-of-the-box capabilities. Their vision of consolidating all employee resources into one platform led to the decommissioning of outdated technology and swivel chair experiences, paving the way for the unified Employee Center Pro portal. In their implementation strategy, they consciously avoided extensive customization, opting instead for out-of-the-box solutions to minimize tech debt and ensure a standardized experience across different services.

The team structure at Best Buy responsible for overseeing their OOB Employee Center Pro Portal across three key areas: engineering, product, and UX.

Are you looking to learn more about various out of the box capabilities offered with Employee Center Pro? Refer to the features and capabilities section on Employee Center community product hub.

2. Build coherent and scalable Employee Taxonomy & Topic Pages

While trying to migrate from Service Portal to the Employee Center Pro portal, they moved away from customized individual topic pages to out of the box taxonomy topic page designs to reduce the tech debt and standardize the employee experience across the portal. This was achieved by building out HR taxonomy and topic pages as a starting point and building a process around it that could be replicated for other departments as well.  

Explore Employee Center’s Mega Menu Configurations to design an employee taxonomy that works best for your organization

3. Enhance content visibility with microsites on Dynamic Topic Pages

They have 15 different COE’s (Center of Excellence) within their HR department, each catering to different use cases for the employees. While the main aim for these COE’s was to provide valuable resources to the employees during their emotionally charged moments, in an easy-to-find manner. They utilized rich content editor to display critical information at the top of the topic page, which eliminated the need for employees of having to search manually in the pool of resources linked below. One such example was displaying different types of leaves upfront using the rich content editor. 

Looking to understand how you could build such beautiful microsites for your employee portal? Explore the Dynamic Topic Microsites here.

4. Ease the user search experience via AI Search and Virtual Agent chat

They have significantly improved their search experience on their portal via AI search and Virtual Agent implementations. 

a. They migrated to AI search in mid-2021 from a third-party search engine, which was proving to be ineffective for their highly complex audience requirements. Since their migration to AI search, they have seen a surge in their annual article clicks by more than 80k than the previous search. 

b. The genius results have made their search experience even more powerful by summarizing content from most requested knowledge articles. 

c. They even boosted some resources in search by analyzing search metrics via AI search Analytics dashboard such as self-solve rate, Average click position, average response time, queries with no clicks, queries with no results and so on. 

d. Their Virtual Agent chat has well-built use cases for ITSM that has helped reduce cost of delivery by increasing self-serve rate and improving efficiency

Looking to improve user search experience for your portal? Explore AI search and Virtual Agent chat here.

 

5. Listen to the end-user feedback

They lay heavy emphasis on listening to the feedback from their end users. They have a dedicated UX and Research team that collates feedback from the end users and makes suggestions based on that feedback. Additionally, they often rely on their analytics dashboards such as User Experience Analytics and AI Search Analytics dashboards for validating these user feedback quantitatively. They are even exploring implementing the out of the box experience feedback functionality available via Employee Center Pro. 

Looking for portal analytics and ways to collate end-user feedback for your employee portal? Explore User Experience Analytics and Integrated Experience & Service Feedback here.

Thank you to Best Buy® for being the true star of this show and for reminding us that together, we can continue to shape the future of our portal. 

Stay tuned for the next chapter of Customer Show & Tell webinar with another motivating customer spotlight. More details here.

 

Session Q&A 

Question	Answer
Who is BSA in your team structure?	Business Analyst
Is the UX team dedicated to ServiceNow platform?	We do have dedicated UX partners that we work with, but they also support other areas outside of ServiceNow
On your team structure you shared....is the Engineering team you referenced just for Employee Center administration and development? Or the entire ServiceNow platform? Assuming there are similar product owner teams for each module you have implemented on the platform?	The slide we showed highlights the team we have that works on employee center. We also have another ServiceNow squad that focuses on the HR case management, ITSM, and other overarching platform needs
I did not see SPM mentioned, but do you happen to have it for managing your Agile Development process and for expanded Demand, Project, and Portfolio Mgmt.?	Yes, we have senior PM that helps drive overarching enterprise objectives.
To follow-up on a previous question: since EC is a product that is shared by different BUs, how did your governance look like to make sure that other product development teams are continuously in the loop (e.g. HR) and their specific requirements are considered?	Quarterly planning is the first step to identify work that will require partnership with different business groups. Then we share that broadly and meet regularly through demos and individual meetings with key business partners.
Do store employees access the portal? if so, just managers or all employees? shared kiosk? mobile devices? thank you!	All employees, managers and hourly have access to these portals
How difficult was it to get the owners of your separate systems (HR, Comms, Intranet) to agree to put all their eggs in the 1 ServiceNow basket? Did you have to migrate data from those systems into SN or did you start from scratch with new connections/integrations into the legacy systems please?	Initially it was a bit chaotic to align different stakeholders since each wanted to provide different service experience to their users. We aligned on the governance by trying to understand what is it that each service owner was trying to achieve for their end users and not necessarily fixating on the tools that they were using. We just ensured that these service owners had the right tools to deliver the right content and right experiences to the right audiences at the right time, by providing autonomy without overstepping on some other group’s service levels.  We didn’t really do any integrations with the legacy systems, just the HR content was the only piece that undergo lift and shift and was refactored into the SN system, for all other departments, we built the content gradually.
Did you use a third-party SI to implement?	For our initial implementation we did use a third party. We have since taken over that work internally
Was the Product Backlog significant and/or how tolerant were you reference to the MVP quality?	The backlog was significant. In part because of the number of systems we were targeting for decommissioning. This did create very basic experiences for our first iteration. Which also was part of the reason we quickly went back to them and improved them
About how many knowledge bases do you have to manage these different content needs and audiences? Do you have a central knowledge team monitoring to ensure that the tool is used effectively?	Overarchingly, we have 6 different knowledge bases across IT, HR, Field Communications, SOP, Company News & Resources.
Do your field employees have network IDs for access or are you using some other type of authentication?	Yes, all access is authenticated users
Did you have super users responsible for updating and maintaining content or was it done by a central team?	We have a team called Strategy & Knowledge with which we collaborate closely for partnering with all these different business groups. Then we have key admin players for these different business groups such as HR Admin, Communications Admin for partnering closely with these business groups.
How do hourly employees’ access shared kiosk?	Yes, shared kiosks, iPads, mobile devices, etc...
What was your approach working with developing the taxonomy and topics? Together with controlling the user experience	We started the taxonomy work with HR, it was a collaboration with key players being HR, research, user experience. That learning helped us develop guidelines so when we moved to the Job focused portal, we could share best practices and guidelines.
Did you also implement anything regarding service requests for things like HR requests, Application Access, etc… to your implementation or has it purely been focused on Communication and Knowledge? If not, was there a reason you didn’t?	Our primary focus was knowledge and communications, we do provide the ability to see requests and tasks from the portal. We hope to continue to expand those abilities in the future
Do your COEs take ownership of this content?	We set guidelines and recommendations to ensure the portal has some consistency. Rich content does involve us. However, the content and goals of these topic pages are set by the various business teams and their goals
Do you have any guidelines on how many topics to have in the mega menu? We have some areas of the org that want to drill down really deeply but only have 2-3 articles within the topic	Yes! This was not easy work. We built out some analytics to see how deep into topic pages people navigated to and are finding they don't actually go very deep at all.
How are you monitoring/measuring UX?	User Experience Analytics dashboards within ServiceNow, we are also exporting page loads and some specific events to learn from changes we make
What is your current process to govern updates to existing microsites or creation of new ones? Are you standardizing with specific templates?	The topic page has a set layout, when teams want rich content, we meet with them to understand their goals and pull in UX to help
Are you using advanced portal navigation?	Yes, heavily use mega menu, and topic taxonomy
With AI Search, have you leveraged genius results, results improvement rules?	Yes, we have leveraged AI search analytics dashboard to analyse metrics such as searches over time, average click position, top queries, queries with no clicks, queries with no results and so on to optimize search based on these metrics.
What department does your Product Owner sit within - what's their expertise?	I sit within the product org, I have been in product for about 3 years, and we also have senior product leadership involved
How much training was required by store employees? did you feel you had fast adoption and what was the carrot to get those users into the portal?  TY	we had some communication plans and a short video at switchover from the legacy systems
Is the AI suggestion in the search results powered by Virtual Agent or is this something that can be added with basic AI search?	That is not part of virtual agent although I believe the logic is the same, but you can set it separately within AI Search
Are you using Now Assist?	Not at the moment.
Do you have any tools to monitor/measure user sentiment?	yes, we did the SUPR-Q survey to measure user sentiments that is an industry standard user sentiment survey around various parameters such as navigation, credibility, appearance and so on.
Do you use Mobile App or Responsive browser on the mobile?	We are not using ServiceNow mobile app currently, however these pages are all mobile responsive
On search of an application, can everyone see all the apps? or only the one that they have access to?	I believe all can see them, and the access is limited by the application.
Apologies if you stated this already. What is the driver for your two portals – Employee Portal & Job resources portal?	Off the clock rules - employees should not access job content if they are hourly and not punched in
Are the bookmarks equivalent to favourites?	Yes, we just renamed them to match up with other best buy systems
How are you using user criteria?	Currently we use HR Criteria more, that may get linked to User Criteria for some of our knowledge content, but we also use Audiences for our Content Publishing content, that can again be linked to the HR Criteria which allows us to create audiences around records beyond just User and HR Profile
Can you share your reasons for not including the NOW app as part of strategy?  And focusing on ensuring mobile responsive?	We have a pre-existing mobile app, but from a mobile web experience perspective we work with our UX team to ensure the mobile responsiveness when building out our experiences
UX dashboard part of the core functionality from SN?	Yes, it is. It is called user experience analytics.
What were the drivers for using ServiceNow EC versus SharePoint?	Best Buy had covered that in the beginning. The rationale is essentially a much better and more unified employee experience
For your Steps to reach article -- are you pulling that directly from User Experience Analytics?	Combination of that and Search Analytics