Keeping up with the community

The City of Raleigh continuously ranks high on the list of livable cities. And, for good reason. A planned city built as the state capital, it anchors the Research Triangle Region, which includes the cities of Raleigh and Durham and the town of Chapel Hill. The region is home to three major research universities: NC State University, Duke University, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, making it a hub of science and technology. Raleigh boasts friendly drivers, safe streets, and a tech-savvy community of residents.

Serving its diverse, engaged community provided the local government with the chance to innovate and modernize services. Envisioning AI as a key enabler of city services, Raleigh chose the ServiceNow AI Platform to transform how the city enables employees to work smarter and improve everyday public services.

With the help of the ServiceNow AI Platform, Raleigh is streamlining processes for busy staff and empowering residents with simplified self-service experiences. IT can also now do more because employees can participate more fully in building out services, freeing expert time for higher-impact projects.

Changing conversations for better outcomes

To enable employees to quickly find answers to common questions, Raleigh added a virtual agent called Ral-E to its self-service portal and Microsoft Teams. The portal offers city employees easy access to IT and HR services.

City business and IT leaders were excited to increase the range of questions Ral-E can handle. Using ServiceNow AI capabilities, the AI Agent is able to leverage the city’s extensive knowledge base.

Now, Ral-E carries on the conversations using relevant internal data from their knowledgebase. Answers are always direct, summarizing key knowledge articles or steps in a service catalog item. For example, if an employee needs to find out about a name change, they can enter a keyword into Ral-E, like “name change.” The AI searches the catalog and comes back with, “Here's how you update the ERP. Here's how you update it in the Directory. Here's how you order business cards.”

“Our knowledge base became a stronger resource for employees when they could get direct answers from it, dynamically generated by the ServiceNow AI Platform,” says Beth Stagner, Assistant IT Director, City of Raleigh.

Saving time and effort for help desk staff

Raleigh’s IT and HR service desks buzz with activity as support staff work to resolve issues for employees. Ideally, they guide employees on how to solve issues independently so they can address future questions on their own. However, the high volume of tickets makes it challenging for agents to find the time to summarize steps taken, write clear notes, and create interaction summaries.

Leadership took action to ease the pressure on help desk teams by using Now Assist for IT Service Management (ITSM). Now, incident summaries and resolution notes are automatically generated from initial agent notes and related content like interaction transcripts. Help desk agents can focus on editing the generated content instead of writing complete narratives.

With this improved documentation, agents provide employees with a more thorough answer to what actions were completed, helping employees get answers fast while freeing up high-value teams. Plus, ticket escalations and transfers no longer require side conversations. As a result, employees can now find answers more quickly. On average, the help desk saves one to two minutes per ticket, reducing wait times and improving the quality of resolution notes and documentation. With over 13,500 incidents created last year, this would have translated into almost an entire work-month of saved documentation and effort. All of this translates to higher employee satisfaction and more time to focus on programs and projects that make a difference to the community.

 "Our help center survey results show that people are happier with service outcomes now that they know what agents did, and the thorough summaries and notes generated by the ServiceNow AI Platform make that possible,” says Chris King, IT Manager, City of Raleigh. 

Deploying AI Agents for Service Fulfillment

CIO Mark Wittenburg envisions utilizing the ServiceNow AI Platform to create a guided AI experience designed by IT. This system would empower any employee with the skills to define a workflow, allowing even inexperienced developers to generate code using AI text-to-code capabilities.

Once automated, Ral-E will autonomously and efficiently handle the most complicated workflows, like laptop orders and email username changes. For laptop orders, Ral-E would guide employees through authorization and configuration, providing automated status updates and only escalating to a support member when needed. By the end of the conversation, all necessary changes are initiated, saving time for employees and service desk agents. The city has already automated 20 workflows, with more to come.

“The ServiceNow AI Platform allows us to keep a person engaged where needed and then do more by taking some of the work off their plate,” says Stagner. 

Expanding into the community

Raleigh has bold plans to take all it has learned out to the community, launching a self-service portal for residents, businesses, and visitors, expecting to increase online interactions and deflect some of the nearly 300,000 annual calls made for city services.

Hiding complexities and jargon will be essential to making the City of Raleigh more accessible to the public. Whether reporting a pothole or requesting a bus stop enhancement, residents can easily get what they need with Ral-E or the help desk—no complicated and lengthy forms or staff to call.

“ServiceNow positions Raleigh at the leading edge of online citizen services and establishes a solid digital foundation to continue building a people-focused smart city,” concludes Mark Wittenburg, CIO, City of Raleigh.