Design an optimal agent and rep experience

What's in this Success Playbook

This Success Playbook will help you create an iterative process to design an optimal experience for your service desk staff, customer service agents, and support representatives who rely on ServiceNow^® to execute and manage fulfillment processes, tasks, records, and reports. It provides best practices for:

• Understanding the requirements for improved experience design
• Working with process owners to resolve process inefficiencies and configure relevant ServiceNow capabilities
• Resolving adoption issues to increase the use of the product and features you’ve implemented

Key takeaways

The most important things to know

Great end-to-end experience goes beyond configuring a fancy, new user interface (UI) and depends on three key factors:

1. Designing—or redesigning—processes with users in mind
2. Building or implementing relevant ServiceNow capabilities (including ServiceNow products, applications, and features)
3. Ensuring the UI meets the organization’s and users’ needs

Not all experience pain points are due to design issues. Work closely with process owners to remove process inefficiencies and bottlenecks. Don’t try to resolve them with design changes.

The payoff of getting this right

With an effective agent and rep experience, organizations can avoid rework, optimize handoffs between teams, and improve productivity. Service agents and reps are less likely to adopt or promote user adoption if ServiceNow products and applications aren’t effectively configured based on their needs and preferences. Having an optimal design will not only help you scale ServiceNow across your organization, but it will also reduce the time it takes to onboard process users and increase their satisfaction..

Steps covered

Step 1: Evaluate the current process user experience

• Learn about the business issues you want to resolve by creating a better process user experience.
• Define your measures of success.
• As part of your analysis, identify the barriers process users face when they perform high-value activities.

Step 2: Identify opportunities to improve the process user experience

• Instead of taking a one-size-fits all approach, tailor your requirements and opportunities for improvement based on process user needs.
• Start by looking at fulfillment processes. A new, improved UI cannot resolve process inefficiencies that negatively impact the process user experience. 

Step 3: Configure ServiceNow for an optimal process user experience

• Engage process users as you configure and design their experience in ServiceNow.
• Diagnose and resolve barriers to using products and services so your design doesn’t fail.
  

Step 4: Help process users adopt and use the platform effectively

• Communicate the value for process users—that is, how the design changes benefit them—in order to drive adoption and effective use.
• Use metrics that encourage process users to collaborate and promote a better experience. 

Step 5: Help process users adopt and use the platform effectively

• Set up a process to look for design gaps and resolve them.
• Create a robust decision-making framework to approve, prioritize, and schedule design changes.
• Don’t aim to control all design changes in ServiceNow. Instead, give process users some flexibility to develop and change configurations.