Delivering greater self-service through automation
Established in 1870, Federation University Australia has evolved to become one of Australia’s leading regional universities. It offers a full range of courses in both vocational and higher education across its network of campuses located across the state of Victoria.
With world-class teaching and research facilities in Ballarat, Berwick, Gippsland, and the Wimmera, Federation University is rated by the Good Universities Guide as the number one university in Australia for first-generation student enrolments and is ranked number one in Australia for Overall Education Experience in the Engineering & Technology and Law & Paralegal disciplines.
For the last five years, Ben Cushing, Manager for Service Support at Federation University, has developed a vision to improve student experiences while driving greater self-service through automation and knowledge creation.
“Back in 2018 and 2019, over-reliance on phones meant we had a self-service rate of around 11%. Most queries were also quite basic in nature,” Ben explains. “With just four full-time service desk personnel providing support to all students and staff, it could be challenging when they were tied up on the phone. They couldn’t focus on priorities.”
With the implementation of ServiceNow IT Service Management (ITSM), Ben and his team have seen a phenomenal rise in self-service rates to 60%.
“By building the IT service portal with ServiceNow ITSM, we saw an 18% increase in the self-service rate and 48,000 views on knowledge articles throughout 2023,” Ben explains. “As a result, 70% of incidents are resolved at first contact and our customer satisfaction score is now above 90%.”
To grow the self-service rate further, Federation University adopted ServiceNow ITSM Professional (ITSM Pro) at the end of 2023. The goal was to leverage the features of Employee Center, Virtual Agent, AI functionality, and Performance Analytics to increase service desk efficiency and elevate the experience.
Simplifying user experience with a single platform
Federation University was using 12 separate portals to manage service requests from multiple business units such as HR, finance, legal, IT services, and student services. Users had to constantly jump between portals to submit requests, making it confusing to find what they needed. Other challenges were the tendency for staff to gravitate toward phone support and a lack of visibility into the IT service portal.
“We wanted to reduce the complexity of our portal environment and ultimately improve experiences,” Ben says. “With the move to ServiceNow ITSM Pro, we have consolidated 12 portals into a single interface using the Employee Center feature. This has significantly simplified how students and staff access services, and improved user engagement.”
Since the adoption of ServiceNow Employee Center, six additional business units have established a presence on the platform. This includes legal, corporate communications, government relations, the aboriginal education center, commercial services, and digital editing.
“Without the additional features in ServiceNow ITSM Pro, it would be challenging for us to improve self-service further,” Ben adds. “Thanks to ServiceNow Employee Center, we have reduced the effort to roll out a new service by 50%.”
This time-saving has allowed the service desk to focus on more strategic tasks such as knowledge creation, and provide faster and better services to users.
“Every time a ticket is closed, we come together as a team to determine whether the issue could have been resolved by a knowledge article,” Ben explains. “If it could, we then create and add a new knowledge topic in the platform.”
He continues: “Our focus is on lifting ITSM maturity through knowledge creation and automation. This means our team is no longer constantly being smashed on the phone and is therefore much more productive.”
Increasing self-service with Virtual Agent
With continuous focus on increasing service visibility and driving greater self-service, Ben and his team saw the opportunity to use ServiceNow Virtual Agent with Microsoft Teams to provide a guided support channel outside normal service hours.
“By embedding ServiceNow Virtual Agent within Microsoft Teams, we have seen a 10% decrease in phone support in six weeks,” Ben notes. “It has also delivered significant cost savings to the university.”
ServiceNow Virtual Agent Topic Discovery now provides a better understanding of topics the team needs to develop, and thereby achieve a higher deflection rate.
Ben and his team have initially developed 15 topics for a range of common support requests, such as email, multi-factor authentication, Wi-Fi access, Microsoft Teams, and SharePoint, using ServiceNow Virtual Agent’s Natural Language Understanding (NLU) function and topic recommendations.
“Our goal is to provide a 24/7 self-service channel for common issues. Based on the ServiceNow Virtual Agent Conversational Analytics dashboard, there is potential for up to 40% deflection through these topics,” Ben explains. “We expect the game to change significantly with the availability of generative AI within the ServiceNow platform.”
Driving continuous improvement with analytics
Federation University is working to implement the Performance Analytics capability to assist with KPI reporting and enable managers to drive an agenda of continuous improvement. This will support faster decisions based on real-time data and predictive forecasts.
Another important milestone is the university’s move to interaction records rather than call records. This empowers IT services to use the Service Operations Workspace capability to drive efficiencies, increase first-point resolution, and reduce service times. These are supported by improved access to AI insights, task automations, and the availability of all information necessary to manage interactions within a single view.
Delivering ongoing project success
To ensure a successful implementation, the university decided to engage with a ServiceNow Partner, Sysintegra, to benefit from the increased functionality available within ServiceNow ITSM Pro.
“Sysintegra was able to bring a depth of knowledge and experience in the pieces we were going to implement,” Ben says.
With support from Sysintegra, Federation University completed the implementation of all the new features two months ahead of schedule.
“Sysintegra assisted us through the journey by challenging our thinking,” Ben explains. “At the start of the process, we asked them to be a strong voice when our discussions or directions were deviating from best practices or would result in unnecessary customization. This guidance certainly resulted in us achieving a better outcome.”
Over the coming year, the university will look to expand Employee Center to more business units. It will also adopt AI functionality and continue to use Performance Analytics to ensure that the new portal is meeting user expectations and elevating the experience.
“ServiceNow ITSM Pro is a significant step up in functionality,” Ben concludes. “The analytics are also some of the best I’ve seen. It is well worth reaching out to ServiceNow to explore the benefits to your organization.”