Playbooks in Service Portal

  • Release version: Australia
  • Updated March 12, 2026
  • 2 minutes to read
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    Summary of Playbooks in Service Portal

    Playbooks in Service Portal enhance user experience by guiding users through various business processes. The Portal Playbook widget allows Service Portal users to engage with playbooks efficiently, offering a consumer-grade interface for seamless interactions with business processes, including the ability to save and resume long-running tasks.

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    Key Features

    • Rich User Interface: Provides an engaging interface for activities during business processes.
    • Guidance: Offers support for lengthy processes, allowing users to backtrack and edit previous steps.
    • Task Visibility: Users can see their progress within the process and view specific tasks assigned to them.
    • Single Admin Experience: Streamlines the management of the entire business process.
    • Mobile Compatibility: Playbooks are accessible through mobile interfaces, ensuring flexibility.

    Use Cases

    • Business Account Onboarding: Facilitates onboarding for business customers, including requested services.
    • Loan or Mortgage Application: Allows users to save and resume their credit card or loan applications.
    • Insurance Claims: Enables policyholders to submit claims for auto or home insurance through the portal.
    • License Requests: Guides constituents in requesting new licenses from government agencies.
    • Customer Cases: Assists users in logging cases with necessary details for faster resolution.

    Life Cycle

    The playbook life cycle involves:

    • Building the playbook in Workflow Studio by a business process administrator.
    • Embedding the playbook into a Service Portal page and customizing it through the ServiceNow AI Platform®.
    • Customizing the playbook portal page by Service Portal administrators and developers.
    • Launching and running the playbook by end users (requesters).

    Use playbooks to guide Service Portal users through your business processes.

    Using the widget

    The Portal Playbook widget adds playbooks that your Service Portal users can run.

    Provide a playbook experience to your Service Portal users for a consumer grade user experience. Requests on portals are surfaced as catalog items, including any playbooks you make available in Service Portal. Embedding a playbook in Service Portal enables:
    • A rich user interface for activities during a business process​
    • Guidance for long business processes
    • Going back and editing any previous steps of a business process
    • Saving long running playbooks for a business process and resuming at a later point
    • Seamless transition for agents and teams to enter a business process
    • Visibility into where you are in a business process
    • Visibility on a specific user's tasks
    • Single admin experience for a whole business process.
    Service Portal playbooks are also supported in a mobile interface.

    A running playbook in a Service Portal instance

    Use cases

    Business account onboarding

    Onboarding a new or existing business customer with one or more contacts along with onboarding the services requested such as wire transfers, treasury services. Promote compliance and deliver​ a faster time to value​.

    Loan or mortgage application
    Intake of a new credit card application or loan application for both consumers and corporate programs​. Customer needs the ability to save the application and come back at a loter time to resume application.
    Insurance claims
    Policy holder submitting a new personal auto or home claim for an auto accident or home damage via portal.
    Request quote for a new policy​
    Business customer requesting a quote for small business insurance policy that includes liability and commercial property insurance The customer can start filling in the request and the agent needs the abilith to fill in the remaining on behalf of the customer.
    License request
    Constituents requesting a new license such as a business license, or personal license (fishing, driving or hunting) from a government agency via a government portal. These applications typically vary by service and state and constituents need to be guided through request.
    Customer cases
    Cases logged by users who need guidance to select the correct issue and enter all the necessary details, such as instances, steps to reproduce, best time to contact, etc. Enable faster case resolution.

    Life cycle

    The general life cycle of a Service Portal playbook can be summarized as:
    • A business process administrator builds the playbook in Workflow Studio. To learn more about building a playbook in Workflow Studio, see Building Playbooks.
    • An administrator adds the playbook to a Service Portal page and customizes the playbook runtime experience at the same time through the ServiceNow AI Platform®. To learn more about embedding a playbook in Service Portal and further customizations in the ServiceNow AI Platform®, see Configure a playbook for Service Portal.
    • Service Portal administrators and developers customize the playbook portal page. To learn more about using the Service Portal Designer to customize the playbook portal page, see Customize a playbook in Service Portal.
    • Service Portal end users, also called requesters, launch and run through the playbook. To learn more about launching and running a playbook in Service Portal, see Run a playbook in Service Portal.