In a highly competitive education sector, delivering amazing experiences is increasingly seen as a key factor in giving universities an edge when attracting students.
Technological advances also impact how students assess university education and experiences. For example, the initial touchpoint with the university for prospective students—especially international students—is crucial. Making it easy and intuitive for them to navigate the university’s services and digital landscape can influence their final decision on whether they choose Western Sydney University (WSU).
WSU is in the top 2% of the world’s universities, offering comprehensive undergraduate, postgraduate, and research options to 50,000 students across over a dozen campuses both within Australia and internationally. Despite its excellent standing, the university does not rest on its laurels and always strives to improve. This is why, as part of its digital transformation strategy, WSU adopted the strategy to roll out an enterprise service management program to seamlessly provide a full array of services to both students and staff via multiple channels, including phone, chat, and mobile, and moving away from email.
The goal of WSU is to always fulfill customer expectations and deliver consistent user experiences. “A successful enterprise service management platform is instrumental to improving our service at Western Sydney University,” says Peter Pickering, Vice President, the Division of Finance and Resources at WSU. “ServiceNow has been at the heart of this.”
Over the past decade, WSU has many years of experience using ServiceNow IT Service Management Professional (ITSM Pro) to standardize and consolidate IT service requests. To further transform the university into a service-oriented organization, WSU implemented three service portals with ServiceNow Customer Service Management to provide a single, connected platform for students, staff, and external parties. The portals enable access to over 300 services around academic, teaching, research, and support for placements, finance, procurement, real estate facilities, and building management for campuses.
“Staff and students are the beating heart of what we’re doing here on services,” says Kerry Holling, Chief Information and Digital Officer at WSU. “With ServiceNow Customer Service Management, we have re-engineered and simplified the way we deliver services to enhance the user experience.”
Improving operational efficiency and staff productivity
Through Knowledge Management within the Customer Service Management solution, WSU has developed over 18 knowledge databases—and the number is increasing as the university adds more services. It also created over 3,600 knowledge articles, enabling students and staff to quickly browse services and knowledge articles to find answers related to their requests instead of calling the customer service team.
Through integration into Adobe, Microsoft, the Ellucian education ERP system, and the Blackboard learning management system, WSU created another 400 knowledge articles related to student management systems. With the automation, WSU now has over 60,000 knowledge article views by students and staff per month and minimizes the number of calls to the customer service team.
Through ServiceNow’s automated workflows, staff no longer need to spend up to 15 minutes hunting for an email in their inbox to action an inquiry or request. It also means any inquiry will not be redirected to yet another group email, as was sometimes the case previously. Now, it takes just seconds to log a request via the service portal compared to four minutes or longer in the past, which sometimes involved the completion of paper forms.
As WSU looks to decommission over 32 shared email addresses, staff can now quickly and easily track actions related to cases and resolve issues without going through 14 separate touchpoints. Digitized workflows have also helped WSU to eliminate the majority of paper forms and save time previously spent signing and scanning requests. Consolidating forms into services has also reduced their number by an estimated 40%. And in the age of remote working and learning, the impact of digitizing workflows goes far beyond the time savings.
When deciding on ServiceNow Customer Service Management, Peter Tow, Executive Director of Strategic Project Implementation and Improvement, and Head of Enterprise Service Management at WSU, says the university undertook a strategic review of potential solutions.
“Having an extensive history and familiarity with ServiceNow, they understood what our best practices were and gave us a high degree of comfort to achieve a desired business outcome,” he explains.
Digital transformation accelerated with ServiceNow
A robust and quick digital transformation aimed to ensure that students and staff had easy access to key services from anywhere. “The whole organization needed to pivot to be online for almost all its service delivery,” Peter explains. What’s more, the ServiceNow platform gives WSU the flexibility to quickly create new processes and respond to changing guidelines. It was a total transformation.
Peter adds that ServiceNow was seen as able to provide a core platform for its Enterprise Service Management program. “Now, we have the ability to automate a range of services to improve operational efficiency,” he says. “As the platform has matured across the breadth of the organization, we are seeing up to 5,000 cases per week across the ServiceNow platform, between Customer Service Management, ITSM Pro, and HR Service Delivery.”
With the full implementation of ServiceNow Customer Service Management and HR Service Delivery in the pipeline, the Enterprise Service Management program will continue to help WSU deliver better services to students and staff and save avoidable costs.
“Once the program is fully embedded with ServiceNow, we expect to achieve up to 5% to 10% in cost savings from the deployment,” says Kerry. “That alone is enough for the program to pay for itself.”
The partnership developed between ServiceNow and WSU’s Information Technology and Digital Services unit (ITDS) has been key to the successful rollout. “ServiceNow has proven to be a terrific business partner,” Kerry adds. “I’m delighted that we can rely on ServiceNow and be successful through our partnership.”
Peter adds that WSU has also leveraged ServiceNow Impact to provide a better understanding of its processes, so staff can make the most out of the ServiceNow platform and deliver more benefits to the university.
Leveraging generative AI for continuing success
Much of the ongoing work by WSU has been about creating a foundation for the future—one that will drive efficiency, productivity, and a better experience for staff and students. This is why ServiceNow Now Assist, a generative AI product, is something the university immediately found interesting.
“The advent of generative AI is amazing,” says Peter. “It’s not just a shiny, flashy tool. We see the opportunities that come from generative AI and what they could mean for our customers, staff, and students.”
WSU plans to use Now Assist for Customer Service Management (CSM) and Now Assist for ITSM. The university has been working closely with Deloitte, a ServiceNow partner, to focus on this application. “We have been working to develop a series of potential use cases,” says Peter. “In fact, we’re looking at up to 60 potential use cases and opportunities to address in due course.”
For example, Now Assist for CSM and Now Assist for ITSM could create genuinely human-like conversational experiences for students and staff when dealing with the platform. Generative AI allows for this within chatbot and search interfaces, giving end users a more intelligent, self-service experience that speeds up the process of finding answers in a more human way. What’s more, Now Assist for Search will help students and staff quickly find the most relevant answers based on more than 3,600 knowledge articles, showing the true search intelligence of the platform.
Support agents will also be able to use generative AI with incident and case chat summarization. This will increase their productivity by removing the time-consuming tasks of rewriting content about interactions that have already happened. Other AI benefits could include automatic work assignment with predictive intelligence and task intelligence, as well as process-mining to uncover trends and patterns to optimize business processes across the hundreds of thousands of inquiries WSU receives each year.
“We’re really excited about the potential of Now Assist to create new content automatically, based on existing data,” says Peter. “This could include things like intelligent search results, work notes, and new Knowledge Base articles. And it will give us the ability to take the hundreds of inquiries we have each day and provide the next generation of knowledge articles based on addressing the direct questions, inquiries, and challenges that our staff and students experience.”
The current and ongoing successes are clearly paving the way for future developments. With the solid foundation of the ServiceNow platform, the university can focus on the generative AI future.
“We’ve had a great journey with ServiceNow,” says Peter. “And given how fast ServiceNow is innovating and evolving, it’s really exciting to see what will come next.”