Considering a Q&A Feature in Employee Center — Thoughts?

[Stefan Budovsky]

Hello — I'm exploring ideas for a Q&A feature in Employee Center. The idea is that after searching the knowledge base, an employee could post a question instead of creating a ticket, and an SME or community member would answer. I know ServiceNow offers Communities - Self-Service Experiences - ServiceNow, so I’m looking for feedback from anyone who uses it or has considered it but not implemented it.

A few specific questions:

• Is a Q&A/community tool still useful in the AI era?
• What alternatives did you consider or adopt?
• Do you have an integration with Employee Center?
• Any lessons learned, pitfalls, or best practices?

Any insights or experiences would be really helpful — thanks!

[Mark Manders]

Whether or not it is still useful really depends on your industry. What kind of SMEs are you thinking about? If, for instance, somebody wants to know about PTO and can't find it in any article, they won't turn to Claude or ChatGPT to ask the question there, they will want an answer from HR. But how often do you think that will happen? And what is the upside of the community related to a generic 'ask any question' catalog item?

Also: where are you on your AI journey? If you are just starting, a community could really help in teaching your AI what information is out there, but will it be worth the effort? 

Just check your usecase against your own question. Why did you ask it here? Because you wanted to hear from people that know about it or can share there opinion so you can form your own. No AI can do that for you. It can tell you how something works and maybe something about what could go wrong, but not the thought process behind it. 

If it will help your usecase that you are connecting people, you should definitely use/create your community. But don't invest time/effort/money in getting it running if you run the risk of it being used 3 times per month and no SMEs are going to pick it up.