We are back with another exciting release for Employee Center. The May 2024 release will cover enhancements for Employee Center Pro. Note: The May 2024 Employee Center (not Pro) application update only includes bug fixes.
This article summarizes the key new features and enhancements included with the May 2024 store release, including:
- New Employee Experience for Deskless Workers– Employee Center Pro Kiosk
- Enhancements to Integrated Experience and Service Feedback
Download the latest Employee Center (version 33.0.2) and Employee Center Pro (version 31.0.4) from ServiceNow Store to get access to the below features and enhancements.
Employee Experience for Deskless Workers – Employee Center Pro Kiosk (requires Employee Center Pro)
Deskless workers are employees who don’t sit behind a computer to perform their day job. They are often disconnected from HR and corporate support, with limited communications, manual processes, and long wait time to get help. Moreover, their needs and constraints drastically vary depending on their job characteristics, access to technology, market-specific laws, digital literacy, and more. Our vision is to enable all deskless workers to self-serve, leading to improved productivity and operational efficiencies for the organization.
We’re thrilled to introduce the new Employee Center Pro Kiosk experience, specifically designed to serve the needs of deskless workers. The May 2024 release for Employee Center Pro Kiosk includes a simplified, touch-friendly homepage, designed for Kiosk or Mobile form factors, and tailored experiences for viewing time-off and shift schedule, two of the most relevant use cases for deskless workers.
Below are the details of our initial, May 2024, release for Employee Center Pro Kiosk:
- Simplified homepage – We have built a ‘front-door’ kiosk experience for all deskless workers needs. The simplified homepage provides easy, at-a-glance access to important information, such as upcoming shift and time-off balance, and requests. The new header also includes an AI search widget that allows users to find relevant support content - Knowledge Articles and Catalog Items.
The May 2024 release includes support for username/password, single sign on, or multi factor authentication. Organizations can leverage ServiceNow platform’s Certificate based authentication to provide access to deskless workers via badge scans.
- Time off and Schedule Information (with pre-built Kronos integration) – We have built an integration with the Kronos platform to display the upcoming shift schedule and time-off balance summary on home page. Additionally, we have provided the ability drill down to the detailed schedule and time-off balance reports on the My Profile page, accessible through the My profile menu in header or directly through the home page widgets.
The Schedule tab in My profile provides a calendar view of the worker’s schedule, including work shifts, holidays, time offs, and transfer scenarios in a day, week, or month format.
Additionally, the Time-off tab provides a detailed summary of current leave balance across different time-off types, with a provision to view the leave balance on any other date within the current year.
In our future releases, we plan to enhance the Kronos integration to make it possible for workers to request time-off and changes to shift schedule directly through this experience.
- Get Support – Similar to the Get Support experience on Employee Center portal, we have included a get-support experience on Employee Center Pro Kiosk home page to provide workers with quick access to key self-service resources, such as:
- Ask HR Question – This out-of-the-box Catalog item allows employees to submit queries or seek assistance from the HR department.
- Report Health and Safety Incident – This Catalog item, available via Health and Safety Incident Management Plugin, allows employees to report any health and safety incidents or concerns.
- Request Profile Update – The Employee Profile displays basic work and personal details in a non-editable format. However, the 'Request Profile Update' catalog item enables employees to request changes. Approved requests result in updated employee profile information.
Organizations can configure the get support widget to provide access to the desired self-service resources, as per their worker’s needs.
The Employee Center Kiosk experience is built using the Service Portal Platform, so organizations can apply any of other out-of-box or custom widgets they have built on top the above experience to build their desired employee experience for deskless workers.
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Technical Guidance
License and Applications – The Employee Center Pro Kiosk is available by upgrading the Employee Center Pro application (version 31.0.4), Employee Profile application (version 11.0.3) and Employee Center Pro Kiosk application (version 1.0.3). For accessing Shift and Time-off related features, organizations would need to deploy the Ultimate Kronos Group (UKG) integration, HR Service Delivery Integration with Ultimate Kronos Group application would be required. For accessing Health and Safety Incident catalog item, Health and Safety Incident Management application would be required.
How to get access - The new kiosk experience could be accessed via the new kiosk homepage (eck_home). In terms of user roles, the user must have kiosk user role (sn_ex_sp_pro_kiosk.user) to access Time off and Schedule widgets.
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Refer to Employee Center Pro Kiosk product documentation for additional details.
Enhancements to Integrated Experience & Service Feedback (requires Employee Center Pro)
In our February 2024 release this year, we launched Integrated Experience and Service Feedback capability. This capability allows organizations to continuously improve their employee experience by enabling experience owners and service managers to capture in-the-moment feedback at critical touchpoints across channels, spanning portal pages, mobile screens, service workflows, and email notifications. With this release, we have integrated it with ServiceNow’s existing survey capability and added many more enhancements to allow for more granular configurations options such as trigger points. See details on them below:
- Service Feedback via surveys in Portal and Email – Organizations often want to capture more detailed feedback through multi-question surveys. To cater to this need, we’ve enabled the ability to launch a survey as part of any of the feedback widgets. It is built on top of Now platform survey capabilities, so organizations don’t need to rebuild their existing ServiceNow surveys.
Admins can configure the survey-based feedback to be displayed inline on the portal page or as a modal with different trigger prompt conditions for nudging the user to provide feedback.
Additionally, this functionality of capturing feedback via surveys will also be available as an actionable message on Microsoft Outlook email notifications. For organizations already using Outlook Actionable Messages for surveys, this will enable delivering the service update and the actionable survey in one email rather than two – one for the service update and the second for the actionable survey. Thereby reducing email notification and survey fatigue.
Note: The survey-based feedback can be configured only for service feedback flows as of our May 2024 release.
- Additional enhanced Feedback Configurations – The May release introduces increased flexibility for admins regarding the timing and method of user feedback prompts.
- Modal interface for Service Feedback: In addition to the in-page widget, admins can capture service feedback on the portal pages using user-friendly modal interface. Admins can trigger the feedback modal exactly when it matters the most – whether it’s upon loading, after a specified time delay, or at a designated scroll point.
- Slide-out drawer for Experience Feedback: The drawer widget for experience feedback can now be configured to present a slide-out drawer, along with the modal form available as of Feb release. This slide-out drawer can be configured to be prompted either on page load, or with a time delay or at a particular scroll point.
- Mitigating feedback fatigue – With robust admin and user controls, organizations can effectively manage and mitigate any potential saturation, ensuring that the users stay engaged and enthusiastic about sharing their thoughts. These feedback fatigue controls ensures that the admins can control how many modal prompts would be served to a user in a single session and enables users to click on ‘Remind Me Later’ actions which disables modal prompts for the rest of the user session.
- Feedback analysis via UEX Analytics dashboard – The experience and service feedback responses have been integrated with User Experience Analytics dashboard to offer a consolidated view of feedback data.
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Technical Guidance
License and Applications – The Integrated Experience and Service Feedback enhancement is available by upgrading the Employee Center Pro application (version 31.0.4). For configuring Service Feedback via email notifications, organizations would need to install the latest Outlook Actionable Messages store application (version 4.2.1).
How to get access - For experience feedback, all deployments will have the drawer widget enabled upon upgrade/first install. For Service Feedback, admins will need to enable and complete the full configuration via Feedback Definition table upon upgrade or new installation, as they don’t come pre-enabled. At the same time, admins can decide whether they want to display out of the box feedback questions or deliver a survey.
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Refer to Experience and Service Feedback product documentation for additional details.
In addition to the above enhancements, the May 2024 release also includes:
- Enhancements to ServiceNow’s integration with Microsoft 365 suite of applications where business rules based custom actionable notifications have been replaced with actionable VA notifications.
- Web Applications available as part of App Launcher can now be made searchable via AI Search. With the enhancement made in May 2024 release, AI Search results will adhere to user permissions and display only the applications available to the user.
What to know what lies ahead? Join us for Employee Center Confidential Roadmap Webinars to stay tuned on the latest advancements and insights on how to make the most of our enhanced features and capabilities.
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