How to optimize work assignment over time in ServiceNow with 6 out-of-box capabilities
Deflection of customer calls toward self-service, IVR (Interactive Voice Response) and chatbots is a sound investment to improve the efficiency of your IT Service Desk. Customers can quickly self-resolve low complexity issues or simply log their issues without the intervention of an agent. Fewer phone calls for assistance on low complexity issues frees up agent time to where it’s most needed.
But deflection isn’t the only opportunity to optimize your efficiency. Inaccurate routing can cause
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Too many transfers of task ownership leading to delays
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Overloading of teams with tasks they can’t ultimately resolve
Routing work efficiently and effectively is crucial for timely resolution of incidents and completion of tasks.
ServiceNow provides 6 main capabilities of routing work to agents.
1. Manual Assignment
2. Assignment rules
3. Advanced Work Assignment
4. On-Call scheduling
5. Predictive Intelligence
6. Workforce Optimization
Key Recommendations
This article tells you where to start with work assignment in ServiceNow and how to build greater efficiency into your process over time:
- Establish your foundational data. For assignment to work, some basic data needs to be gathered and loaded into ServiceNow including:
- Assignment groups
- Agents within those groups
- Operating hours for those groups
- Get a basic understanding of the 6 main capabilities Manual Assignment , Assignment Rules , Advanced Work Assignment , On-Call Scheduling , Predictive Intelligence , Workforce Optimization
- Take a layered approach and enhance work assignment maturity over time. Adopting a crawl/walk/run approach to assignment will ensure you get value quickly and build sustainable improvements over time.
- Start with manual assignment. The IT Manager Dashboard should be used for quick queue reviews and manual assignment. First line agents should use a configurable workspace like Service Operations Workspace(SOW) to quickly review their assignments. Using SOW also simplifies the introduction of advanced work routing capabilities later.
- Analyze task data after 90 days and build some simple assignment rules. After around 90 days, there is generally good data available on where work is being resolved. Analyze this data for patterns and identify around 5 high impact rules to implement. Repeat this review weekly to identify further assignment rule opportunities.
- Use Advanced Work Assignment (AWA) when new contact channels are introduced. New channels, like chat or walk-up, make a great use case for AWA. Agent skills should be determined for optimal routing and linked to training opportunities. On-Call Scheduling for critical system support should also be introduced.
- Add Predictive Intelligence (PI) when sufficient data is available. PI further builds on assignment rules and AWA. The classification framework fills in field values and aids the agents through the similarity framework by suggesting similar records. It can be implemented in parallel with AWA or just before it as part of a Hyperautomation strategy.
- Add Workforce Optimization to balance workloads. Workforce Optimization complements and extends Advanced Work Assignment and helps optimize the workforce through improving visibility to workloads and team performance. To fully optimize at this stage Process Optimization should be considered.
Recommendation Walk Through
1. Establish your foundational data
There are a number of steps that are required in establishing the required foundational data. These steps are covered in Foundation Workshop but in summary: -
It is recommended that the following foundational data is provided to support ITSM processes:
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Companies
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Departments
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Locations
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Business Units
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Support Groups
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Approval Groups
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CMDB Groups
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Group Members
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Role Assignments
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Users
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Product Models
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Contracts
In addition the CMDB should also be populated with: -
Operational/Technical Data
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Servers
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Network Great
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On-Prem Datacenter
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Network Printers
Application and End User Business Service Data
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Laptops / Desktops
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Non-Discoverable CIs and CSDM-aligned data points
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Application Focused
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Service Focused
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See CMDB Process Guide for further prescriptive guidance in this area. Define ServiceNow data governance provides guidance on getting started defining standards that govern how you manage and use data on the Now Platform.
2. Get a basic understanding of the 6 main capabilities
These capabilities provide routing on a range of different criteria. Below is a quick cheat sheet on these.
3. Start with manual assignment
Manual assignment can be done from list views. Dashboards, such as the IT Manager Dashboard in Performance Analytics, provides a comprehensive overview of the work that is presented to the desk together with the ability to drill down into the records and assign to agents.
Drilling down into the records allows agents to be assigned to them.
4. Take a layered approach and enhance work assignment maturity over time
ServiceNow work assignment capabilities complement each other. Building a maturity roadmap helps introduce capabilities over time and enhance efficiency in a sustainable way. Our recommended approach is outlined below: -
A robust data set is key to automatically routing work as you are reliant on the correlation between the data used for categorization and routing to the correct assignment group.
The initial aim should be to look for routing opportunities with high volume / low complexity work e.g. 90% of the tasks consists of P3 and P4’s (low level of difficulty/ common) that are easy to route with the remaining 10% P1/P2’s complex that would be assigned manually. The 90% that can be automated free up the desk supervisors to manually assign the remaining 10% and perform other tasks.
To achieve this there are some pre-requisites
- Assignment group structure accurately reflects the work coming in
- Data that the routing is based on is established
- Skill requirements (optional)
It is highly recommended that the CSDM data model Is followed to allow the solution to scale over time.
The example data analysis below is routing around ‘Category’ but depending on the structure of the Service Desk you maybe routing based on other factors :-
- Geography (e.g. Service Desk AMS, Service Desk EMEA, Service Desk APJ)
- Service (in this case the Support Group on the Service Offering record should be used)
- CI (in this case the Support group record on the CI should be used)
Target should be a 70% correlation between categorization and assignment group.
Example data Analysis
To avoid unnecessary reassignments it’s important to look for repeatable trends in the data.
Analyze the last 90 and 180 days of Category -> Assignment group for closed tasks (incidents / cases)
Tip: Once you have your top 3-4 assignment grouping also check the re-assignment count for those
Example: Running a report shows good correlation between the ‘Database’ category and the assignment group.
This is a good confidence level to setup automated routing.
There are still areas for data improvement e.g. Network approximate 2/3rd go to Technical Services Support and 1/3rd to Other assignment group. Working to reduce assignment to ‘Other’ would lead to improving the ability to automate assignment.
Aim for at least a 70% confidence level for routing to avoid unnecessary re-assignments. Not all the data has to be fixed instead consider a continuous improvement cycle as the data is analyzed and adjustments made to improve the correlation of the routing criteria to the assignment group.
6. Use Advanced Work Assignment (AWA) when new contact channels are introduced
New channels, like chat or walk-up, make a great use case for AWA. Agent skills should be determined for optimal routing and linked to training opportunities. On-Call Scheduling for critical system support should also be introduced.
AWA routes work to queues and agents based on conditions defined by admins. Agent Affinity maybe used with AWA to assign work items by an agent's work history, related task, or account team affinity and used to customize the AWA assignment process and identify the agent best suited for the work item. Where critical systems or afterhours support is required then On-Call, with the prescribed support, can be especially effective and should be considered at the same time as AWA.
Further information can be found in these videos Routing work based on skills in Advanced Work Assignment (AWA) and AWA Implementation Guide
7. Add Predictive Intelligence (PI) when sufficient data is available
PI further builds on assignment rules and AWA. The classification framework fills in field values and aids the agents through the similarity framework by suggesting similar records. It can be implemented in parallel with AWA or just before it as part of a Hyperautomation strategy. For further information see Predictive Intelligence Deployment Guide and Predictive Intelligence docs. For a wider description on Predictive Intelligence see video ITSM: Get started using Predictive Intelligence to radically improve your IT service experience
8. Add Workforce Optimization to balance workloads
Workforce Optimization complements and extends Advanced Work Assignment and helps optimize the workforce through improving visibility to workloads and team performance. To fully optimize at this stage Process Optimization should be considered.
