Think back to your most pleasant customer support experiences. Not the bad experiences, we know you can easily dig those up - think about the really great ones. It's difficult to recall, isn't it? The reason is that the really great customer service experiences are so quick, so easy, and so frictionless that they don't leave many artifacts behind. You came, you got what you needed, and you went on your way. (dusts off hands)
ServiceNow administrators strive to provide this same experience to their end user. You want your system to be so intuitive as to be nearly invisible - just a part of the daily routine that flutters in and out of the periphery as the need beckons.
How do we provide this to our users? There are 3 primary components to consider:
- User Experience - This is king. Modern users demand a pleasant, frictionless means to an end. If you can't provide it, there are other solutions that can, so always place this first.
- Information - We live in the information age, and your users expect to find the answers they need quickly and easily, and usually without dealing with another human!
- Process - Given easy access to #1 and #2, your users will fend for themselves in 80% of cases. For the other 20%, process is king. Process is what enables you to route work to a speedy conclusion, providing solutions to your users in a way that meets and exceeds their expectations.
Let's focus on #1 and #2 for the moment. When your users visit ServiceNow, they are looking for a solution to something they are experiencing, plain and simple. That 'thing' could be a technical issue; it could be a lack of something they need to do their job; it could be most anything. They want to know:
- Is there a known solution for whatever I'm experiencing?
- Does the organization already know about the thing that I'm experiencing?
- Are there other people also experiencing what I'm experiencing?
- Is there something I can procure to solve this thing I'm experiencing?
- If all else fails, can a human help me solve this thing I'm experiencing?!
As ServiceNow administrators, our very first task is to present the timely answers to these questions in a seamless, automated fashion. Everything else that we do flows from the user's reaction to these answers.
Best case? Knowledge is power, and the user is able to divine the solution to the 'thing' that they are experiencing - the user wants to help themselves, and we've allowed them to do so! (high five)
Worst case? The user now can provide a qualified request for assistance that our process can route to resolution, and maybe we have an opportunity to grow our knowledge in a way that helps the next user with this issue to more easily help themselves.
A new tool has just been released on ServiceNow Share that will help you with #1 and #2 - providing the experience and the wealth of information that your users desire at the moment they desire it. It's called the Dynamic Knowledge Search, and it provides contextual search results for the Knowledge, Problems, Incidents, and Catalog Items related to your users' issues. It happens in real-time directly from the Self Service portal, and it has the capability to provide a better user experience while significantly reducing incident submission. You're going to want to keep working to continually improve your users' experience, but we hope this is a step in the right direction!
Dynamic Knowledge Search on Share
