In one sense it could seem this data point is one to hang your hat on, but in reality it doesn't really tell us that much. Mainly the issue is that everyone HAS to go to the site so we're not sure if they are actually finding value.
What we don't know is:
- How many are finding what they need?
- Will they come back — did they find the site useful?
- Did they have a great experience while they were there? If not, what needs to change?
When you are building a site for the enterprise — covering multiple departments and functions — it's critical to go beyond the highlight analytics. As important as development and content are, testing and analytics have to start playing a role. What does that mean specifically?
Talk Like A Normal Person
I know how it goes: you've opened your ServiceNow instance, set up your Catalogs and your Knowledge Bases, spent time putting everything carefully into those precious categories and even went through the exercise of building out a Portal. Then you launch and people are complaining because they can't find anything. Or they are finding multiple things that seem like they might be related.
The way you talk about the services you provide are not necessarily the same way an end user / regular employee might talk about those same functions. You have to test. Specifically, gather a cross section of employees and have them walk through a script. See how they respond. Run your categories by them. Test and improve and test again.
You have to plan for this sort of testing and improvement as part of the project otherwise it won't ever happen. You will get busy trying to get everything in place and then launch without any real insight outside of the war room you're in.
Use Analytics to Drive Decisions
You might think everyone is as excited about that cool functional widget you've created, but do you really know? Are people even visiting that page that everyone is all worked up about? Are you going to spend 75% of your time optimizing for mobile when only 5% of your customers are accessing via their phones? We don't know unless we put in some analytics and then check the data relentlessly.
There are some great (and free!) tools you can implement right now to gain further insight into your Portal and how it's being used. Google Analytics is a top solution that at a minimum you should implement with your Portal. You can see things like the flow people take throughout the site, top pages being viewed, entry/exit pages, which types of devices are accessing the info, etc. It doesn't matter what you use in reality, just pick one of the tools out there and really dig in. Check it weekly. Make adjustments based on the data. Rinse and repeat.
Service Portal has its own Log Entries that are quite insightful for the last 90 days of activity on your various portals. You could even just start there and build some reports with the data to give you a good picture as to what is going on with your Portal.
What's great about the ServiceNow platform is that nothing is built in stone. You are working on a growing, organic platform that can adjust as you find out new info. The launch is just the beginning if you truly want to build that enterprise service management portal experience.
