Building an enterprise-Grade Employee Experience - Part 2

[Gaurav Bajaj]

Continuation from the last blog - Building an enterprise-Grade Employee Experience 

 4.   AI search

ServiceNow’s AI Search capability makes this possible by consolidating knowledge from both internal and external sources into a single, unified experience.

First, invest in developing a strong knowledge base across departments—IT, HR, finance, facilities, and more—and make it easily available to employees. Comprehensive, well-structured internal content ensures that most queries can be answered quickly without escalation.

Second, For the information that resides in other systems, leverage external search capabilities External Content Connector (XCC) - ServiceNow can index content from SharePoint, Confluence, JIRA cloud, platforms, or custom enterprise systems, making this information searchable directly from the portal. Combined with Generative AI, employees can get concise, contextual answers while still accessing links to the original sources.

5.   Portal Analytics

Launching a portal is just the beginning. Analytics help you understand how employees use ServiceNow. Track search patterns, zero-result queries, task completion rates, and portal engagement to identify friction points.

ServiceNow provides various OOB Analytics dashboards across various areas to help to make this easier. For example, you get:

• Search Analytics Dashboard – shows search volumes, popular queries, and avg response times, self-solve rates etc. helping you refine content and taxonomy.
• Virtual Agent Analytics Dashboard – provides insights into conversation volumes, deflection rates, and most common intents.
• User experience Analytics - provides metric visualizations to better understand the Service Portal user experience and identify how to improve it.
• Catalog Analytics Dashboard – tracks request volumes, submission success rates, and fulfillment patterns.

With the above dashboards, you can continuously evolve by identifying the pattern and improve the services provided from the employee center.

6.   Optimizing Performance

 One common pitfall is when clients add a lot of customization in widget with additional JS libraries or heavy on-load scripts or non-optimized server calls that bloat pages and slow things down.

You can plan to regularly check the performance of the portal using Performance Analyzer. Out of the box, Performance analyzer highlights performance bottlenecks by showing widget load times and various server level script time(Business rule, ACL, Ajax call times etc). This will help you identify any performance bottleneck and can pinpoint where scripts are introducing delays. With this insight, you can work with developers to refactor or optimize customizations before they degrade the employee experience.

The goal is to keep portal pages lightweight and efficient. Prioritize asynchronous loading, minimize unnecessary scripts, and test performance regularly.

Another capability to leverage is portal analyzer which allows you to track widget customization and no. of visits on pages. This can be combined with outcomes from performance analyzer to monitor performance.