Guided Self Service in Employee Center

[SmritiGupta]

Academy Session

Feature Overview

We’re thrilled to introduce an intuitive Q&A-powered self-service experience called Guided Self-Service in Employee Center. Guided Self-Service helps employees self-serve easily on high-complexity and high-volume topics. 

It is often hard to provide effective self-service solutions for complex, yet frequently asked requests, such as help me understand my benefits or how to install a new software. There are many nuances in the answer, leading to a maze of information presented in the form of long knowledge articles, with a big table of contents, or multiple requests forms, which employees need to navigate. With Guided Self-Service organizations can now provide a visual and touch friendly Q&A experience to help users self-serve on these complex, frequently asked requests.

Guided Self-Service takes users are through a set of pre-defined questions, with clickable answer choices, to find the right knowledge article or request form that addresses their need. Admins can configure Guided Self-Service flows to appear either as a quick link or as a separate widget called . Once configured as a quick link, this Guided Self-Service flow can be displayed either on homepage quick links or on topic page quick links as well.

Key Capabilities:

1. Guide employees to the right article or catalog form through a visual Q&A experience.
2. Easy authoring for non-technical users with playbook designer with usability enhancements.
3. Leverage pre-built activities and templates for self-service help use cases, powered by playbooks. 

We have pre-built two Guided Self-Service use cases as demo data - ‘Time off request’ and ‘Know your benefits’ – to act as examples for this functionality.

The Guided Self-Service admin experience is powered by Process Automation Designer playbooks The playbooks designer has also been enhanced for improved usability, via an out of the box process execution record that allows admins to test the playbook that they’ve created, making it easier for non-technical authors to create and manage content.

With the November 2024 release we have enhanced the end user experience and added more flexibility for admins to provide answers or instructions as the result of the Q&A. See details on the enhancements below:

• End user experience improvements: We have made it easy for users to view or edit their previous responses with one-click. They can also restart the Q&A thread easily with new input parameters.

See below for the new run-time experience:

• Added additional playbook configurations for admins:Admins can now add text-based or rich media instructions as responses to guided self-service queries, in addition to knowledge article or catalog item redirects. This configuration is available as part of the playbook designer flow. It is particularly useful for guiding users to external sites or applications, allowing admins to add screenshots and detailed instructions on how to navigate those platforms.

How to get access? 

License & Family release compatibility – Guided Self-Service capability is available for all ServiceNow customers who have activated Employee Center application. Guided Self-Service capability is only compatible with Xanadu patch 3 family release.  

Plugins required – Guided Self-Service capability is delivered via a new plugin called Guided Self-Service in Employee Center application (version 2.0.2) and Employee Center application (version 35.0.2). The Guided Self-Service in Employee Center has a dependency on Process Automation Designer plugin, which must be installed in the instance.  

Technical Details- Guided Self-Service can be displayed either as a widget on the homepage and/or topic page or as a quick link. The Guided Self-Service experience can be configured by navigating to Guided Self-Service module under Employee Center. In terms of user roles, the user must have Employee Center admin role (sn_hr_sp.esc_admin) and playbook writer role (playbook.write) and playbook experience admin (playbook_experience.admin) role to be able to configure playbook activity definition via the Process Automation Designer and preview the guided experience.  

Refer to Guided Self-Service product documentation for additional details. To learn more about the Guided Self-Service capability, review the upcoming Employee Center Academy session for Guided Self-Service. 

FAQ's

1. How is Guided Self-Service different from Virtual Agent topics?

• Guided Help Q&A is powered by playbooks and it is separate from Virtual Agent. It focuses on providing a more visual experience through a series of predefined diagnostic steps. Here's how you could use both of these for different use cases-

[Alexander17]

I really hope that they made the question description field visible on the front-end. So that you have instructions or explanations of the question itself and its answers. The description field is there and works via the playbook test run process, but not via the front-end/employee center. 

[Chandler2]

@SmritiGupta  I activated the plugin. Now 2 parts:

1. Need to add it to the home screen: Any steps for that?

2. Made it available in AI Search: for this already done the index source, search source and added to search profile and published. When I search, it shows that there is one item in Guided service but when click there it doesn't show the item. Any suggestions?

[jtshone]

The video on Use Guided Self-Service shows the user guided self service as available on the ESC landing page.  So far our developer has only been able to add it under the Topics.  Has anyone manged to find instructions on how to add it to the ESC home page?

[Wildbeach]

I installed this in my PDI (Vancouver) but even though I load the demo data, there are no example Guided Self-Service Processes loaded.

[Pavan Teja]

@jtshone - There are two ways to add guided self service on home page. 

1. You can create a guided self service as a quick link and add it to the home page inside the quick links widget
2. You can add guided self service widget to the home page.