Strategies for providing Mobile App and Mobile Agent Support

[Christopher Sik]

We are in the process of developing the mobile agent for our support techs. And in terms of providing them with support, we are running into some challenges:

1) Most of our techs are offsite when they come to us for support. So it is difficult for them to share their screens when they come to us with an issue.

2) As admins, there is no way to impersonate other agents/users in the mobile app/agent.

3) There is no mobile app or mobile agent view or emulator within the base platform that would allow us some ability to troubleshoot mobel app/agent issues.

We are aware of a service called Bluestacks (https://www.bluestacks.com) which allows us to emulate various types of devices and install the Servicenow mobile app/agent there. But our company policy blocks this site. So we can only use it on a personal device, which also violates our company user policy.

Basically the only way we can provide support, is to install the app on our personal smartphones and then try to replicate the user's issue while logged in as ourselves. But as admins, our view within the app is different than most techs.

We considered creating test accounts for certain personas, but this would require the purchase of additional ITIL licenses for these accounts. 

We have also reset the user's password so that we could login as them. But this option, is an inconvenience to the agent and also violates our company user account policy.

Is there any way we could get the mobile apps to open in a regular desktop browser so that we could take advantage to the impersonate user feature?

Are there any plans in the works to add such a feature in the near future?

Has anyone used any other strategies successfully to provide support that were not mentioned above?

Thanks!

[PaulSylo]

Hi @Christopher Sik  -

I understand your issue. I will tell you how we are trying to work, we typically recommend users connect via Microsoft Teams (installed on mobile) and share their screen for troubleshooting (since most users are within the organization), I understand you might not be able to do that.

HEre are few suggestion updated by Community experts - 

https://www.servicenow.com/community/mobile-apps-platform-forum/mobile-app-emulator-service-agent/m-...

https://www.servicenow.com/community/mobile-apps-platform-forum/how-to-test-now-mobile-or-now-agent-...

But As an administrator, you should have access to an impersonation option. This would allow you to temporarily access another user's account to troubleshoot the issue from their perspective

https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/washingtondc-mobile/page/administer/tablet-mobile-ui/concept/mobi...

[Christopher Sik]

Hi @PaulSylo ,

Thank you for these helpful resources. Unfortunately, the emulators require us to download and install files, which is also blocked by our internal device security policy.  Our company uses Webex to communicate internally and we had thought to ask agents to install the Webex app on their phones and contact us and share their phone screen through that. We can certainly suggest that. But it's hard to rule out other issues with their phone configuration when we don't have a more direct option to baseline their user experience against. This is where the impersonate user feature really shines. In the base platform, if a user has an issue with access or loading a given page, I can immediately impersonate them and verify if it's the platform or just an issue with their browser. It's usually the latter. So I suspect issues in the mobile apps will also land heavily on the user side of the equation. And even more so with the wide variety of devices being used in the field. So having an easy way to rule out a bug in the apps would be critical in our efforts to provide support. Without that we will end up chasing issues we can't readily reproduce should we need to involve HI support.

But I realize I'm preaching to the choir on this one. It's encouraging to see that ServiceNow has acknowledged these challenges and is implementing a an impersonate user feature in Washington. We just upgraded to Vancouver, so we'll be here for a while. But getting this feature will certainly quicken our pace towards Washington.

I greatly appreciate the help, all the same 😀.

Be well!

--Chris