ServiceNow customers work on the forefront of Employee Experience. There are many aspects to this, but one that customers raise frequently is the desire to deliver personalized experiences. My friend
From the Nielsen Normam Group Article:
Personalization is done by the system being used. Developers set up the system to identify users and deliver to them the content, experience, or functionality that matches their role. Personalization can be done down at the individual level (e.g., Amazon.com’s suggestions based on past browsing and purchase history), or at group or audience level (e.g., an intranet displaying information specific to those in a certain location or a certain role, such as a job function).
Customization is done by the user. A system may enable users to customize or make changes to the experience to meet their specific needs by configuring layout, content, or system functionality. Customization may involve moving items around an interface to reflect the users’ priorities, selecting topics of interest, or altering colors or other factors related to the visual design of an interface, for example.
From the ServiceNow perspective:
There are many ways in which we support both methods.
Personalization
1. Targeted Content and Campaigns support Personalization by allowing the content managers to apply audiences to individual pieces of content, whether they are banners, announcements, upcoming events, videos, links, emails, text messages, or push notifications. Audiences can be defined at any degree of specificity: employee type, position, location, tenure, status, phase within an employee journey (e.g. about to start work, preparing to take a leave of absence), etc…
Example of Targeting Content Dynamically by Audience
2. Machine Learning is a great way expose Recommended Content to employees based not only on their profiles and other employees with similar profiles, but also based on their actions. What pages did they visit? What did they search for? What knowledge articles did they read? Our partner Coveo offers this capability today and ServiceNow endeavors to provide this functionality in the future based on our acquisition of Attivio in the fall of 2019. Machine driven recommendations are a great example of Personalization.
3. There are many examples of Dynamic Widgets that rank and sort content based on popularity or highest ratings. Content Managers can also designed certain articles as Featured, which ensures they show up at the top of search results, much in the same way that advertisements show up at the top of Google search results. This is Personalization.
4. Knowledge Articles and Catalog Items honor User Criteria and HR Criteria to ensure that the employee only see what is applicable to her. This is a common form of Personalization.
5. Multi-branding is a technique in which different portal themes apply automatically based upon which company a particular employee belongs to. This is a nice touch of Personalization for customers who own more than one company and wish to maintain the brand uniqueness for each subsidiary.
Customization
1. Customers may extend the employee profile page with fields that allow the employee to designate their interests, so employees may make selections that influence which widgets show up on their portal pages and what content shows up in existing widgets. These designations affect User Criteria and HR Criteria. Those may both be used to show or hide entire widgets, as well as, filter the content that shows up within widgets. This is an example of Customization that personalizes the employee experience.
2. Some customers configure functionality for Favoriting content, which allows employees to designate their favorite Applications, Catalog Items, and Knowledge Articles in a personal space on the portal pages. This is another example of – Customization
Example of Favoriting Apps
3. Employees may choose which Team Forums to join and subscribe to and which members to follow for a heightened level of notifications related to their topics of interest. This is another example of Customization.
4. While employees cannot rearrange the order of Widgets on portal pages, they can collapse or expand widgets to optimize portal real-estate.
5. Similarly, I have seen a solution in which the employee may click a gear icon in the corner of a widget and then select check-boxes to dictate what content they wish to see in that widget, another Customization that gives the employee the power to choose what is most important to them.
6. Similarly, I’ve seen customers deploy collapsible sliders on the right and left sides of the portal to allow employees to Customize what they see in front of them at any time.
