Building an enterprise-Grade Employee Experience

[Gaurav Bajaj]

In order to build an enterprise-grade employee self-service portal that delivers a consumer-like experience, we need to think of ServiceNow Employee Center as more than just a place for IT services. The out-of-the-box portal provides a strong foundation and sets you up for success, you can take it at another level of adoption with a strategy that balances simplicity, integration, personalization, and performance. By doing so, ServiceNow evolves into the true digital front door for employees, supporting every aspect of their work journey. I would like to discuss a few areas of elevating employee experience.

  1.   Integrated Action Center

The Integrated Action Center brings together all tasks, approvals, and to-dos into a single, unified view, giving employees and managers a clear “digital cockpit” for their work. Employees shouldn’t have to jump between ServiceNow, Workday, SuccessFactors, LMS platforms, or other enterprise systems to complete their daily tasks.

All types of work can be surfaced in the Action Center—open learning modules, pending approvals, procurement requests, finance tasks, and other HR or operational items—regardless of where they originate. Everything is actionable directly in ServiceNow: employees and managers can approve, reject, or complete items without leaving the platform, keeping workflows efficient and consistent.

ServiceNow provides out-of-the-box spokes for popular systems such as Workday and SuccessFactors to pull to-do information directly into the portal. There are also spokes for LMS tools like Cornerstone, enabling training assignments and course completions to appear alongside other tasks. Besides these, additional integration connectors and spokes are available for majority of enterprise level tools like SAP Ariba, S4 HANA etc.

 2.   Virtual Agent enablement

A good strategy to enable Virtual Agent (VA) in ServiceNow starts with identifying high-volume, repetitive employee requests, such as IT incidents, HR queries, or learning tasks. Begin with simple conversation flows using out-of-the-box VA topics, then gradually configure or customize for your organization.

You can identify the most common use cases for VA topics by leveraging various methods. You can simply evaluate by looking at most common type of incident or HR request based on their volumes such as password reset, leave balance etc or you can further dig deeper by leveraging clustering from predictive intelligence capability. Clustering helps identify common use cases for automation by grouping similar requests or tickets based on patterns. By analyzing historical IT, HR, or service requests, clusters reveal high-volume, repetitive tasks that are ideal for automation and hence to be automated via VA.

3.  Structure Content with an Employee-Friendly Taxonomy

ServiceNow’s taxonomy model in Employee Center Pro provides the foundation of how information and services are structured to provide easier navigation and reduce time to identify the desired service.

The structured taxonomy not only makes it easier for employees to browse content but also ensures that requests, knowledge articles, and catalog items are grouped logically. Combined with AI Search, taxonomy improves discoverability and improves navigation experience.

Continued in the next part.