Committing to better wellness
Promoting healthier living and improving the quality of lives are goals that drive everyone working at American Specialty Health (ASH). For nearly 40 years, the health and wellness leader has delivered fitness, nutrition, and musculoskeletal health programs that empower people to live healthier.
Fulfilling its commitment to customer wellness requires reliability, safety, and innovation. Most importantly, it requires strong support from employees working together to realize the company’s vision.
Luis Gonzalez, Director of IT Service Delivery, oversees technology that creates seamless experiences for employees, and he saw opportunities to modernize both IT service and operations management. “Making us more efficient as a company allows us to spend less time manually fixing internal IT issues and more time focusing on helping our employees deliver,” he says.
Building a foundation for success
With the ServiceNow AI Platform, IT Service Management (ITSM), and IT Operations Management (ITOM), ASH has complete control of its IT services and operations. This unifies its business data on a single platform, laying the foundation for AI capabilities and workflows that span the entire business. ASH deployed ITSM and ITOM to replace legacy systems and manual processes with automation and streamlined experiences. And, with Service Operations Workspace, teams use a single pane of glass to collaborate on incidents, monitor performance, and keep services running without interruption.
According to Shane LeBlanc, Manager of the ServiceNow team, strong collaboration with ServiceNow and support from implementation partner AHEAD helped them roll out the base-ITSM core capabilities in just six months. Having all data and processes on a single platform opens the doors for seamless end-to-end workflows.
AI out-of-the-box
ASH built on that foundation and upleveled its experiences for employees with the addition of out-of-the-box AI capabilities, including ServiceNow AI Agents.
LeBlanc and his three-person team added AI capabilities that help eliminate time-consuming, manual tasks so employees can work more efficiently. For instance, with centralized data in the CMDB providing understanding into how systems interact, AI agents can pull together reports that allow IT teams to handle incidents more easily, reducing resolution times and improving experiences for employees.
“Seeing tangible improvements in how we work and serve our employees motivates me,” says Gonzalez. “When you add AI to a strong IT foundation, you can do anything. ServiceNow helps us achieve more.”
Self-service AI support
A new virtual agent built using the ServiceNow AI Platform enhances productivity and accelerates service desk resolution times. With ServiceNow’s Now Assist platform, the virtual agent can tackle complex, multi-step/variable processes, understand intent, and take action.
Because ASH didn’t need to spend time training its own models, the IT team started testing and refining the virtual agent almost immediately. This sped up development time, allowing them to deploy the AI-powered virtual agent in just six weeks.
Employees now have many different ways to request support, including through email, chat, and the service portal. The virtual agent provides a self-service avenue where employees can ask common questions, submit tickets, and accomplish basic tasks such as resetting passwords. Monitoring and reporting capabilities measure the number of users, how often it results in answers, and where gaps might be to continually improve response.
With a recent hardware upgrade and the support of the ServiceNow platform, ASH reduced Level 1 support tickets by 43% and Level 2 tickets by 49%. Now, service agents spend more time focused on more complex, high-level support requests.
“Working with the virtual agent has changed the role of the IT Service Desk agent from support to oversight and innovation,” says LeBlanc. “We’re upskilling staff in AI basics, empowering them to find solutions and deliver on the company’s vision.”
Focusing on high-value projects
The service desk also uses ServiceNow’s AI features to streamline administrative processes and improve productivity. When a service desk agent looks at a ticket, they can use AI search to quickly find information based on knowledge articles. Incident summaries and notes on steps taken are generated autonomously. If the ticket needs to be escalated to an engineer, it can be reassigned quickly through the centralized ServiceNow AI Platform, with the generated notes providing better context and visibility.
Service desk agents can now focus their time on solving issues rather than completing administrative tasks. They can move on to the next call faster, resulting in faster resolution times for employees and reduced operating costs for ASH.
With extra time available, many service desk agents have time to train and level up their technical skills. As a result, ASH can take advantage of the extra IT bandwidth to work on more technical, higher-value projects that further improve the employee experience.
“Leveraging ServiceNow’s AI functionality, we’re resolving internal employee tickets faster, which frees up our agents to focus on other high-value projects and initiatives that ultimately enhance the end-user experience,” says Gonzalez.
Empowering employees with AI
ASH is expanding the use of ServiceNow AI Agents to support a range of tasks, including autonomously triaging incoming tickets based on their context and urgency, as well as drafting knowledge articles from resolved cases. In the near future, AI could assist with predictive maintenance and help personalize the end-user experience. The company is also exploring ServiceNow AI Agents to improve AI oversight and governance and to unlock new opportunities for productivity.
“When we give our employees a stable working environment, it empowers them to achieve faster resolution and better customer outcomes,” says Gonzalez. “ServiceNow’s AI capabilities provide that extra boost to productivity and engagement to get to the next stage.”