Pacific Life Eliminates Email Notifications with Web Alerts

[sarah_manning]

April 15 was the deadline for the 2013 Innovation of the Year Award. To celebrate, we're handing the blogging reins over to our customer Pacific Life. Read on to learn how the IT team at Pacific Life leveraged ServiceNow to reduce or eliminate email notification volume.

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As the popularity of social media continues to grow, email as a communication vehicle has become less desirable. We received input from both Pacific Life customers and the process user community stating that ServiceNow email notifications have compounded an already problematic situation, overwhelming email volume. Finding meaningful, actionable communications amongst the noise is becoming increasingly difficult. Traditionally our ServiceNow implementation offered one method for notification, email.

We recently developed a method for notifying users via web alert as an alternative to email. We realize that this option may not be suitable for everyone so we offer it as a communication preference configurable by each individual user. The application is full featured notifying you when a message arrives, displaying a status of read or unread as well as offering the ability to resend a message from your sent box. An innovative use of the ServiceNow platform to develop and alternative to email communication!

The feature allows users to view emails being sent and received with in Service-Now in one easy to use UI that is accessed from the Nav. Once selected a new window will appear listing emails that have be sent to you with in the system. At the end of each email displays a Flag indicating if an email has been read. Clicking on the email will automatically open a preview of the email selected. Then the "Not Read" Flag will disappear.

Different actions can be taken when the email is open. The user can reply to email or open the case the email came from. While the Application is open it will continue to monitor the email table and if a new email for the user is inserted the application will notify the user by fading in a box informing the user of a new message and it will automatically adding the new entry to the list. The New Email message will fade out after 5sec then the window title text scroll "New Email" and will go away once the window is in focus.

FYI: In CHROME and Firefox by adding the Tab notifier plug-in a tool bar message will be called. Sent Emails can also be viewed by changing the Type. From the Sent box the user can view sent emails and have the ability to resend them at customer's request jus by clicking the button.

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Best of luck to Pacific Life and the rest of our Innovation of the Year participants! We can't wait to see you at Knowledge13.