When you’re at the grocery store and grab a piece of fruit, how do you decide which one to choose? Do you evaluate the color, the size, the shape, the texture, or the firmness of the fruit? You’re probably using some (or all!) of these factors in your decision-making process, and you subconsciously consider some of these characteristics to be more important than others.
So what does picking the best piece of fruit have in common with ServiceNow Performance Analytics? You might be surprised to know that Performance Analytics has had this same kind of selection capability built-in since the Istanbul release through Spotlight — a weighted scoring engine that allows you to evaluate multiple facets of each record before ranking the results. Picking the perfect piece of fruit to bring home depends on many factors and you might miss the best piece if you only used a single criteria to make your decision. Identifying the business-critical work that needs your attention the most is no different — if you were to rank records only by a single dimension such as priority, criticality, SLA, or age, you might unintentionally miss what you should really be looking at. Spotlight solves this issue by letting you define the logic that determines where your focus should be — it uses your organization’s business rules to highlight the perceived importance, value, or concern level of a record.
Where to apply Spotlight
Sounds useful, right? We think the possibilities are endless, but let’s look at a few examples of how Spotlight can help your organization be more proactive.
Prioritize agent focus
As agents resolve and close records, which one should they work on next? Spotlight can account for a combination of criteria like how many times an incident has been reassigned, its priority level, and whether it’s in danger of breaching an SLA. Accounting for each of these factors allows you to ensure agents are working on the items most important to the business at any time.
Increase customer satisfaction
You might want to pay special attention to newly launched products and services — it’s important to make sure customers are having a great experience with your latest offering. A case classified as Priority 2 (P2) or Priority 3 (P3) might usually be addressed only after all Priority 1 cases are resolved, but you probably want some immediate attention on those P2 or P3 cases if they related to the brand-new product. You can use Spotlight to apply a weighted score to a specific category representing the new product so that cases related to the new offers are addressed first, at least for a period of time.
Improve talent retention
Frustrated employees are the most likely to look for new career opportunities somewhere else, but you can use Spotlight to help identify employees that may be having trouble getting their HR issues addressed. Consider using Spotlight to look at employees with HR requests that often take a long time to resolve or are reassigned multiple times. These signals can point you towards employees (or departments) who may be growing frustrated and need some extra attention.
Build healthy competition
Many individuals and teams are motivated by seeing how they compare to their peers. Spotlight can be used as a way to regularly rank and recognize the best (or worst) performers by accounting for different metrics like average resolution time of resolved incidents, the number of reopened incidents, and the percentage of open incidents with a missed SLA. Using multiple dimensions in the ranking index ensures all metrics important to the business are considered before identifying the leaders. These rankings can help encourage the low-end performers to do better because no one ever wants to be at the bottom of the list. We’ve also seen customers use this method to deliver an all-around score in regular performance reviews with third-party vendors.
Create great communities
ServiceNow Customer Service Communities provide a channel for employees, customers, partners, and prospects to engage, but forums and posts with stale or unanswered questions might be off-putting to new visitors. Community Managers can mitigate this issue from by raising awareness of areas with a high number of new members and unanswered questions. Try using Spotlight as a way to continuously guide your attention to high-traffic areas so these problems don’t go unnoticed.
Prevent security breaches
Security incidents that were once classified as low or medium priority, were then reassigned a few times, and haven’t been updated in quite awhile sound like just the type that everyone has forgotten about. But that incident which has since fallen off everyone’s radar could be just the thing used to exploit an organization. Spotlight’s ability to look at multiple facets of an incident helps your team regularly review these kind of forgotten, but not-yet-resolved incidents.
Empower self-service
Providing an effective service portal allows employees to resolve their own issues but it’s critical to provide high-quality knowledge articles and catalog resources in order to actually reduce the number of requests arriving at the service desk. You can use Spotlight criteria to regularly look at knowledge articles that have a lot of active questions and views, but maybe have a poor rating — a sure sign of a popular topic that probably needs an update. Or think about pruning the catalog by examining items that are often requested, but wind up cancelled or rejected.
Get started with Spotlight today
We have some fantastic enhancements coming to Spotlight with the upcoming London release (we can’t share the details quite yet!), but you can start taking advantage of Spotlight in your organization at any time. Get focused on the right things by trying one of our suggested use cases, or account for multiple factors in any situation by building your own Spotlight criteria. Check out the videos below for a closer look at how Spotlight works and how to configure Spotlight.
Additional Resources
And here are some additional resources to help you get started.
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