Planning Guide for a Successful Virtual Agent Implementation (Part 1)

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Introduction

Many organizations have digital transformation as a strategic imperative, but few state a vision that translates into tangible and realistic measures of success that can inform planning and budget decisions.  

A clearly defined and communicated transformation vision with outcomes sets a North Star for teams that are implementing the Now Platform® to deliver business value. It helps them understand how their work contributes to broader business goals and helps senior managers see the benefits of their technology investment.

It is very important to dig into your own data to find the types of requests that account for a high percentage of workers’ time. This high level of incident analysis approach will be covered in this document and assist in discovering the prioritization of topics to begin with.

In this three-part blog series, we’ll cover Identifying the three main aspects for a successful Virtual Agent Implementation:

• Goal
  • What you want to achieve
• Business Outcome
  • What you want to get out of the virtual agent
• Objective
  • The steps to get there

State Your Transformation Vision and Outcomes

Goal

The first step is to determine the overall goal. What is the achievable outcome? This is generally broad and long-term. This involves understanding the business initiatives and Virtual Agent benefits.

The following are some aspects to consider when identifying an overall goal:

• The goals of your organization and senior leadership.
• What are the CXOs priorities for the year.
• Organization's financial reports.
• Organizations strategic plans for business lines. 

Knowing the Benefits

With Now Intelligence in the Now Platform, you can:

• Deliver a better user experience. Make it easy for users to get what they need, whenever they need it, with an always-available virtual agent that understands user intent and carries out requests.
• Route and prioritize work effectively. Assigning tasks to the right team and prioritizing said tasks appropriately is a critical part of the workday; however, the triage process can be subjective and error-prone when done manually. Now Intelligence automatically routes and prioritizes work to reduce errors and to ensure the most important tasks are performed first.
• Provide easy-to-find answers. An organized knowledge base helps reduce service requests and call volume by empowering users to find answers to their issues themselves. But a knowledge base that’s missing solutions to common issues, is difficult to search and navigate, or is full of duplicate or outdated content will frustrate users. Now Intelligence organizes and manages your knowledge bases to supply a better experience for users.
• Make your agents’ job easier. Now Intelligence makes life simpler for your service desk agents by suggesting relevant tasks and content that helps resolve issues faster.
• Identify major incidents ahead of time. Now Intelligence can quickly detect and categorize critical issues and problems by proactively identifying similarities across open incidents or cases. This helps you discover hidden patterns, anomalies, and potential areas to focus your improvement efforts.
• Discover opportunities. Gain the tools to easily pinpoint improvement areas along with detailed guidance on potential savings and solutions to deploy.

For the full PDF, visit this community article: Now Intelligence for Dummies

Identifying Virtual Agent Goal

To clarify the goal, it is time to develop a transformation vision. A strong transformation vision should address four questions:

• Vision – What’s the ideal future state for our customers and team?
• Expected business outcomes – What measurable business value will we realize?
• Desired business capabilities – What strategies do we need to achieve this vision?
• Key measures of success – How will we know when we’ve realized our goal?

Creating an effective transformation vision is composed of five Steps.

1. Assess your transformation opportunity: A strong transformation vision needs to align with the strategic and operational aspirations of the organization. To identify the right direction for your vision, start with an understanding of your organization’s goals and the opportunities you or your team have to support them.
2. Conduct a visioning exercise: A vision statement is a simple description of a to-be state that the organization or team wants to accomplish. It provides a shared understanding of where the organization is going and what changes are required to get there. Draft a vision statement describing what you want to achieve and the business value you want to create.
3. Capabilities and Measures
   1. Identify the capabilities you need to build: It can be difficult to connect to ground-level work to the vision without a clear description of the capability gaps that must be resolved to reach the to-be state. Identify and document three measurable business capabilities—to ensure focus—that you want to enable with Virtual Agent and other conversational interfaces that ServiceNow also provides.
   2. Define measures of success: Effective measures of success set objective targets.  They also help you track progress of the expected business outcomes associated with the vision and they can flag issues for timely corrective measures.
4. Socialize the vision and outcomes: Effective socialization of your vision and outcomes ensures that leaders can articulate your vision, how their team contributes to it, and how ServiceNow will enable their business outcomes. Lead your socializing efforts by explaining how the future state will be distinctly different and helpful in achieving the defined goals. Proactively answer questions and concerns to build clarity and trust.
5. Review and expand on the vision: It may take several iterations to refine and validate your vision and business outcomes. Along with regularly tracking your progress, reevaluate your assumptions to ensure your vision remains relevant, and look for opportunities to expand the vision as new business opportunities emerge.

For the full slide deck, visit this community article: Transformation and Vision