Self Service Leading Practices

[AJ Siegel]

In our Now Learning course, From the Experts: User Experience (UX) Leading Practices, we define a set of 5 leading practices for delivering great self-service experiences. These practices will guide your implementations decisions to ensure that the needs and expectations of the user are prioritized. We find that when customers follow these leading practices, it improves their adoption outcomes and drives more user satisfaction.

Here in this article, we review the 5 practices, connecting them to the relevant platform capabilities you can leverage to follow the guidance on the ServiceNow platform.

These practices apply to any project where you’re implementing a self-service experience. It includes, but is not limited to Employee Center, CSM/CSP Portal, and ShoppingHub

1: Focus on Service Delivery

Self-service is only as successful as the underlying workflows ensuring users' requests are fulfilled accurately and efficiently. As you implement the catalog items and services your users will access, you need to ensure the workflows that power them are efficient, effective, and intuitive.

Use journey mapping to understand how the process works today and explore where the user pain points are. Review the journey for dead ends; steps in the journey where a process gets stuck because of a human or system problem.

With the pain points in mind, work with your ServiceNow SMEs (architects, admins, developers) to identify how to leverage automation through Flow Designer, Integration Hub, and Robotic Process Automatic to streamline processes.

Once implemented, find ways to improve by using Process Optimization to monitor and track the performance of processes.

2: Ensure information finds the user

With self-service, we must remember that your end users don't live in the experience every day. They don't have the opportunity to become experts. Make sure they immediately see what needs their attention or will solve their problems.

Your implementation may have hundreds of catalog items and knowledge articles but that does not mean that every user needs to see the entire universe of content. Explore how user criteria can tailor the content experience based on the user’s profile.

Many of your users will leverage search to find the content they need. It is critical that you use metadata effectively to ensure that search results reflect your users’ intent.

Once users find what they need, they then need to track the status of what they requested. Useres should not have to hunt around the solution to find their open items. Look no further than the My active items widget for an effective way to consolidate different request types.

3: Don’t follow the org chart

It is important to recognize that the self-service experiences you create need to support a wide variety of users from different roles and levels of experience. Your site's ability to present information to get users the value they need quickly will impact their likeliness to come back the next time.

How you write matters and following plain language guidelines to ensure users understand what you are saying at first encounter is key to success. This also helps make search results more reliable.

One tenet of plain language is to avoid acronyms and jargon. These terms typically develop from experts in a service area and aren’t shared with the general population. If you expect your content to be consumed by non-experts, or even less experience users, avoid shortcuts where possible.

Beyond the words that you write, you need to ensure that content is organized based on users’ expectations, not an organizational map. Conduct card sorting exercises and user interviews to structure content effectively.

Analytics from the existing solution can help as well. If you are using ServiceNow, consider reviewing your AI Search Analytics and Service Portal events to see how users search today.

4: Prioritize consumer over providers

Historically, service owners create catalog based on their needs and their knowledge, without acknowledging that their users may have a different understanding of the service than they do. This puts a large burden on end users to enter technical information that may affect the outcome of their request.

Instead, service owners should consider what information can be provided by the data on the system, integrations with other systems, or through business rules and calculations from other inputs. Reducing the number of questions your users are expected to answer will increase their satisfaction and efficacy.

It is also important to use the right types of variables or field types based on the inputs you are expecting from your users. Follow our form guide to make the right input decisions.

Across your catalog, your solution should ask for information in a consistent manner. For example, two different catalog items should have the same set of fields to collect a shipping address. It shouldn’t matter who created the item, they all should follow consistent guidelines. You can leverage question sets (variable sets) to help ensure this consistency.

In conclusion…

This article is just an overview of the leading practices for self-service. Make sure to take the Now Learning course to learn more and level up your users’ self-service experience.