Guided Self-Service in Employee Center

  • Release version: Zurich
  • Updated July 31, 2025
  • 2 minutes to read
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    Summary of Guided Self-Service in Employee Center

    Guided Self-Service (GSS) in Employee Center empowers employees with intuitive, step-by-step self-service experiences to improve productivity and efficiency. Delivered via a new plugin (snexspgdhelp), GSS enables employees to navigate complex work scenarios through a visual Question-and-Answer (QnA) interface. This helps employees quickly find relevant articles or catalog items, facilitating access to information, processes, and resolutions for common day-to-day tasks.

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    GSS leverages AI-powered search to help employees discover and use self-service processes based on titles and descriptions. It provides a user-friendly, visual workflow experience powered by playbooks, which streamline authoring and enable non-technical users to design adaptable self-service workflows for various employee needs.

    Key Features

    • Visual QnA Experience: Guides employees through a step-by-step process to relevant knowledge articles or catalog forms.
    • AI-powered Search: Helps employees find GSS processes easily based on content titles and descriptions.
    • Playbook Integration: Uses prebuilt activities and templates in playbooks to design guided workflows, improving ease of authoring and customization.
    • Flexible Deployment: GSS can be displayed as a widget on home pages, quick links, or topic pages within Employee Center.
    • Usability Enhancements: Focus on simplifying playbook design for non-technical users to optimize self-service capabilities for complex, high-volume topics.

    Prerequisites and Setup

    • Activate the Employee Center application before installing the Guided Self-Service plugin from the ServiceNow Store.
    • Have Workflow Studio and Playbooks components installed to create and manage guided workflows.
    • Assign appropriate roles such as playbook.write for editing playbooks and playbookexperience.admin for previewing guided experiences.
    • Gain working knowledge of Workflow Studio, Playbook Builder, and creating flows and playbooks to design effective guided self-service experiences.

    Practical Benefits for ServiceNow Customers

    By implementing Guided Self-Service in Employee Center, ServiceNow customers can:

    • Increase employee productivity by enabling self-help with clear, guided navigation.
    • Reduce support overhead by empowering employees to resolve their own issues with minimal assistance.
    • Deliver consistent, easily updatable workflows that accommodate diverse employee knowledge levels.
    • Leverage visual playbooks for efficient creation and maintenance of self-service processes, even by non-technical administrators.

    Empower employees with easier self-serve capabilities through guided experiences to improve productivity and efficiency.

    A new plugin Guided Self-Service (sn_ex_sp_gd_help) in Employee Center enables employees with an intuitive Question-and-Answer (QnA) powered self-service.

    Guided Self-Service (GSS) overview

    With an in-context visual way to navigate the complex work scenarios, admins can design adaptable self-serve workflows that can enhance overall organizational productivity, engagement, and efficiency.
    Using the Guided Self-Service, employees can self-serve with step-by-step assistance and navigate their way to the relevant article or catalog item. Guided Self-Service can
    • Self-serve with easy access to information, processes, and resolutions for day-to-day work.
    • Discover and use the GSS processes through AI-powered search.
    • Make information and solutions easily accessible to employees with varying levels of knowledge or experience.
    • Guide employees to the relevant article or catalog form through a visual Question-and-Answer (QnA) experience.
    • Leverage prebuilt activities and templates for self-service help use cases, powered by playbooks.
    • Streamline authoring for non-technical users with playbook designer usability enhancements.
    • Optimize the employee self-service capabilities for complex and high-volume topics.
    • Streamline authoring for non-technical users with playbook designer usability enhancements
    Figure 1. Guided Self-Service experiences
    Guided Self-Service in Employee Center and its intuitive uses.
    Provide Guided Self-Service that caters to the frequent needs of employees. You can display Guided Self-Service as a widget on the home page or as a quick link or as a widget on topic pages.
    Note:
    Discover and use the GSS processes through AI-powered search based on the title and description.

    Prerequisites

    Guided Self-Service in Employee Center has a dependency on the Employee Center and applications. Ensure you complete the following steps before getting started with GSS.
    • Ensure you activate the Employee Center application first before installing the Guided Self-Service in Employee Center app from ServiceNow Store.
    • Ensure you have Workflow Studio and its components such as Playbooks.
    • Ensure that the sn_hr_sp.esc_admin user has the playbook.write role to edit the playbook design and playbook_experience.admin to preview the guided experience.

    Know more about Playbooks and Workflow Studio

    Playbook provides a visual representation of step-by-step process involved in self-servicing employee needs and requirements such as Know your benefits and Time off request.
    • Design the visual workflow to guide employees to find relevant article or catalog items.
    • Use the playbook capability to help employees with the what-to-do-next option.
    • Provide a way to visualize and interact with the workflows in real time via a simple and task-oriented view.
    Understand the basics of playbooks and workflow studio. Ensure you have working knowledge of the following processes: