Employee Service Center 101—What is it and why do you need it?

[Dawn Jurek]

Are all of your employee communications taking place via endless email threads? Are your HR agents tracking requests on sticky notes? Your employees’ experiences could be more streamlined and efficient if your organization provided a single place for employees to quickly and easily get all the services they need.

In this installment of our NOWSupport best practices series, we provide a primer on the Employee Service Center:

• What is it, and what services are commonly offered?
• How do employees submit requests, and how do agents manage them?
• What are the options for configuration?

Be sure to check out our videos embedded in this article for more details, and to see the Employee Service Center in action! Note that these videos were recorded in Kingston, but all features shown are available in London. 

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What is the Employee Service Center, and what services are commonly offered?

The Employee Service Center is built on the Service Portal framework, and it is designed to serve as a one stop shop for employees to get the information and services they need. Here’s a sampling of commonly offered services:

Company or cross enterprise information

Company or cross enterprise information can be provided to employees, and personalized to their needs. This content can be targeted to users based on information in their profiles such as location, role, etc., and may include:

• • Announcements,
  • Event and holiday calendars,
  • Training materials and videos, etc.

Knowledge Bases

A knowledge base (or bases) can provide users with the opportunity to self-serve. By searching for and finding the answers to their questions, users may save time and not need to make HR requests. User criteria can be defined at the knowledge base and article level, so users can access only the content appropriate or applicable to them.

HR Communications Channels

Users may have options to communicate with HR, such as chatting with a live agent.

Case and task information

A case is created when an HR service is requested through the Employee Service Center. Cases are automatically assigned to the appropriate agents to receive support.

To see all of these features, watch our overview video:

How do employees submit requests, and how do agents manage them?

See a demo of a user submitting a request and an agent managing the request in our video below: 

What are the options for configuring the Employee Service Center?

The Employee Service Center is fully functional in the base system for quicker time-to-value. To configure the content for your organization’s needs, you can customize the existing example content. You can also define criteria that will filter the content so that it will appear for the targeted audience.

To customize the portal’s look and feel, you can use the Service Portal Branding Editor.

To see examples of configuring Employee Service Center content, as well as the look and feel, see our video below:

How do I get the Employee Service Center?

A dedicated HR Portal was introduced in the Geneva release, with ongoing innovations and new features in each release since. Learn more about functionality included in the Kingston release in this article: What's New in HRSD Kingston Deep Dive #2: Employee Service Center.

The Employee Service Center is available with a separate subscription to HR Service Delivery. Activate it by installing the Employee Service Center plugin (com.sn_hr_service_portal).

For more information:

Employee Service Center (product documentation)

Employee Service Center video playlist (NOWsupport YouTube channel)

What's New in HRSD Kingston Deep Dive #2: Employee Service Center (Community blog)

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Behind the scenes here at ServiceNow, the Knowledge Management and Multimedia teams work closely with subject matter experts to disseminate critical information to our customers. We've found that certain topics come up frequently, in the form of best practices that can help you keep your ServiceNow instances running smoothly. This series targets those topics so that you and your organization can benefit from our collective expertise. If you have a best practices topic you'd like us to cover in this series, please let us know in the comments below.

To access all of the blog posts in this series, see our NOWSupport best practices series list.