What Else is New for HR Service Delivery in the Rome Release?

[Allison French]

You’ve probably read about the major Rome release features in the What’s New in Rome for HR Service Delivery blog and the Rome release notes.

Hopefully you’re also registered for the What’s New for Employee Workflows in Rome Community event on September 30 (or you’ve watched the recording if you’re reading this after the event).

If you’re looking to dive deeper, more information is coming on the following topics and will be linked below:

• Employee Center
• Journey Accelerator for Rome
• ServiceNow + SumTotal Boosts Productivity with Learning in the Flow of Work
• Employee Relations in Rome
• Document generation Made Simple Using Document Blocks
• Universal Request for Rome
• Empower Employees with Granular Delegation

This blog covers what else is new for HR Service Delivery and dives into additional capabilities and enhancements you may not already be aware of.

Table of Contents

• Predict the time to resolve an HR case
• Tailor experiences for new hires in Now Mobile
• Specify field values and user segments during HR Bulk Case creation
• Tailor Virtual Agent greeting experiences and enable NLU models for additional languages
• Lifecycle Event enhancements
• HR Agent Workspace enhancements

Predict the time to resolve an HR case

An Estimated Time to Resolve Predictive Intelligence solution is now available for HR Service Delivery Professional and Enterprise customers. This solution predicts the time it will take to resolve an HR case based on a machine learning algorithm that’s trained using historical HR case data in a customer instance.

By default, this estimated time is displayed to both agents and employees/requesters.

There are also two properties that control whether this estimated time is displayed to agents and employees for each Center of Excellence (COE). This accommodates use cases where the time should not be displayed for some HR COEs (e.g. the estimated time should not be displayed to employees for Employee Relations cases).

• Property for agent visibility: sn_hr_core.COE_ETTR_display_agent
• Property for employee visibility: sn_hr_core.COE_ETTR_display_employee

 Employee view

Agent view (classic UI)

Agent view (Agent Workspace)

Tailor experiences for new hires in Now Mobile

The Now Mobile app can now be tailored for new hires and can evolve to support employees both before and after their start day. This eliminates the need to leverage the separate Mobile Onboarding app that was previously available.

Note: The Mobile Onboarding app will continue to be available for customers who have deployed it, but Now Mobile is what should be used for mobile onboarding use cases going forward.

The default new hire experience in Now Mobile is streamlined to present only what a new hire needs. This includes limited tabs in the navigation, a media section, a My onboarding card that will display open and overdue tasks, and a My items card. This experience can also be easily configured to meet various requirements.

On day one, new hires will have access to additional functionality, such as knowledge articles and catalog items they now need as an employee.

Before day one, new hires can use local login or SSO for authentication to Now Mobile. Once the new hire has employee credentials on their start date, a feature is included that will automatically log them out so they can log back in with company credentials. A configurable push notification is also sent to inform them that their new hire session has ended and to login with company credentials.

Before and after day one (left to right)

Specify field values and user segments during HR Bulk Case creation

To better accommodate large-scale transition projects and other common scenarios, the HR Bulk Case creation tool now allows users initiating bulk cases to define field values and specify user segments before cases are created, allowing for more specificity and validation. Upon opening a new bulk case request:

• Users are prompted to define one or more User segment groups, which are the groups of users that should be included or excluded during bulk case creation. This can be based on HR criteria, User criteria, a static list of users from a file using the Upload file option, or by building conditions off the HR profile or User tables.

• Once one or more User segment groups have been added, HR service field values specific to the selected HR service can be defined for each segment. Note: Field values defined in an HR template for the selected service will be pre-populated but can be modified as necessary.

• When a user clicks Create cases, a confirmation window will appear confirming the number of bulk cases that will be created based on the criteria provided.

Tailor Virtual Agent greeting experiences and enable NLU models for additional languages

• Tailor Virtual Agent greetings. Virtual Agent admins can now provide a more personalized greeting experience for employees, as greetings can be tailored based on how the chat is initiated (e.g. a portal, an application, or device type). Certain topics can also be promoted that may be more relevant, and AI search fallbacks can be defined if topics aren’t returned.

• Enable NLU models for additional languages. A Store app released in cadence with the Rome family release provides additional HR Service Delivery Natural Language Understanding (NLU) support for German, French, Spanish, and Japanese (in addition to English). The models contain intents, utterances, vocabulary, entities, and annotations data to handle conversations in their respective languages. The models are read-only and should be cloned, tailored, and trained before being published. See this Community article for more information on enabling NLU.

Lifecycle Event Enhancements

The Lifecycle Event engine continues to be an area of investment, with several Rome enhancements directly requested by customers:

• Personalize HR Tasks for employees by adding relevant variable fields. Admins can now bring personalized information into HR task Short description and Rich Description fields (e.g. name, start date, due date) by adding variables from a picker. This can be configured via an HR template for the task and the variables are inserted for each task accordingly. Note that the variable picker and values are available directly within the Rich Description field, and the values can be copied into the Short description field.

Configuration view

Employee view

• Create dynamic Lifecycle Events by adding an audience to an Activity Set. To trigger an Activity Set only for users who meet certain conditions, admins can now specify an Audience for Activity Sets. This better accommodates use cases where an Activity Set only applies to a certain population, such as a specific country, and should be hidden for other populations (e.g. a series of onboarding activities in an Activity Set only apply to employees in France and should not appear for others). We have also enhanced the Lifecycle Event testing tool to identify activity sets that don’t apply to the test Subject person, as well as identify potential conflicts between the Audience on the Activity Set and its individual Activities.

• Configure the employee-facing display order for activities. Easily control the display order for Lifecycle Event activities by dragging and dropping them in the Manage Lifecycle Event builder or by using Display order, which is a field that now updates according to any ordering made via dragging/dropping. Admins can then set the In the employee view, sort activities by field to Display Order.

Manage Lifecycle Event Builder view

Display order field

In the employee view, sort activities by field

• Sort and filter activities as an employee. Employees can now sort and filter activities within a Lifecycle Event. Employees can sort by the Short description in alphabetical order (A-Z), Due date, or view in Recommended order. Employees can also filter to understand what is Required, Optional, Completed, and Upcoming.

• Usability enhancements to employee view. The Details and Activity areas of the ticket page have been converted to tabs for easier navigation. Additionally, if an employee completes a task and later navigates back to it, an updated message making it clear they’ve completed the to-do/task appears.

HR Agent Workspace Enhancements

The following enhancements will be provided to the HR Agent Workspace in the Rome release:

• Support for encrypted fields. Encrypted fields are now supported in Agent Workspace to better accommodate security requirements.
• Case creation enhancements. Several enhancements were made to the case creation page. Admins can now configure user search tables (e.g. HR profile, User), define the number of returned search results, and update the order of the returned search results from being alphanumeric to relevance-based. Additional enhancements include the ability to configure related lists for the case creation page, and the addition of topic detail to the HR service selection list.
• Access Agent Assist from an Interaction. Agents can now leverage Agent Assist to search for relevant knowledge within an Interaction record.