servicenow advanced work assignment benefits

ServiceNow® Advanced Work Assignment (AWA) - a clever automation of your workload distribution

The proper distribution of tickets and workload is a key factor in providing rapid resolution and enhanced user experience in all enterprises. It used to be that assignments would go through several iterations and many conversations, sometimes even with end-user involvement, until the task finally landed on the proper agent to work on it. All of this is time-consuming, error-prone, and both a bottleneck and a single point of failure in the process. As an illustration of the nature of the challenge, consider the steps involved in finding an agent with the appropriate language skills in a multi-language environment.

The ServiceNow® Advanced Work Assignment (AWA) feature is a way to cleverly automate your workload distribution. Assigning work items to your agents is based on their availability, capacity, and optionally, skills. AWA uses queues, routing conditions, and assignment criteria to select the best-qualified agent for the task.

Figure 1. AWA Overview (Source: https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/paris-servicenow-platform/page/administer/advanced-work-assignment/image/awa-overview-flow.png)

AWA was introduced with the Madrid release in early 2019 as a way to manage agents’ ITSM tasks. In recent releases, it has become available across the whole platform to take advantage of the huge benefits it offers.

AWA functionality is available and embedded into the Workspace environment, which is an advanced UI created and enhanced for fulfillers and agents. There is a dedicated inbox section where fulfillers and agents can monitor incoming tasks and requests. Agent availability is set according to their schedules and includes omnichannel presence, but the system also allows the agent to set their presence across one or more channels.

Figure 2. Agent availability in Workspace Inbox

Customers can interact with ServiceNow through different service channels such as incidents, cases, walk-ups, and chats. When the customer makes a request, a work item is created. This is a single piece of work that can be handled by an agent from start to finish.

Advanced Work Assignment allows the system to push work to agents. It uses configurable criteria to automatically route work items to queues that focus on various support channels. This lets the platform enforce assignments to the proper group or agents.

Queues collect and store a specific type of work item for a dedicated service channel. Queues can be configured to focus on a certain type of support, such as VIP customers or critical cases. AWA routes work items to queues based on specific conditions or requirements that you define, such as customer status or region. Groups assigned to each queue then handle the incoming work items. Once work items are placed in a queue, AWA can assign items to available agents based on assignment rules, agent availability, and capacity. In each queue, there is a possibility to set a timer that allows agents to respond to the work item.

Agent capacity is also configurable. Agent capacity is the maximum number of work items on a particular service channel that an agent may actively work on at one time. Another characteristic that is measured and managed by the platform is the agent affinity. There are three major types of affinities:

• Historical affinity, in which AWA tries to identify the best agent based on the agent's history of serving the same customer;
• Related task affinity, in which AWA tries to identify the best agent based on the agent's past assignments on related tasks.
• Account team affinity, in which AWA tries to identify the best agent based on the agent's responsibility or role in the account team.

If multiple rules are relevant, they can be ordered to be able to achieve the maximum result for this capacity.

Another adjustment is the possibility to set up the layout of the inbox. This is set in a configuration tied to a service channel that defines which fields of a record representing a work item are shown in agent inboxes. A layout defines what the agent sees in their corresponding Workspace area.

If a work item is rejected, the agent must provide a reason, such as being in a phone call with another customer. When a rejection occurs or the job is timed out, the work item is returned back to the queue to find the next available agent. Whenever an entry is missed by an agent or is timed out, AWA automatically marks the status of the user to ‘away’ to avoid sending additional assignments to them until they are available again.

After an agent accepts a work item, all relevant information is available to them, including historical data. During fulfillment, there may be a need for additional skills to complete the request; in this case, rerouting is an option.

Skill-based routing and assignment is an advanced part of AWA. One example of its usage is when a chat is initiated from a specific location, a required language skill can automatically be added to the conversation. This means that there is no need for separate dedicated queues only to the required skill - availability and capacity should be measured to properly route this work item.

AWA Overflow Strategy is another key feature. It automatically kicks in when one of the channels becomes overloaded - a backup group of agents can be utilized to work on the items. In this instance, cases are automatically routed to secondary or tertiary support groups to help take on work. There are two major benefits that this brings: First there is no proliferation of separate queues, which offers simpler queue management. Secondly, the work item stays in the queue, which means the integrity of the queue reports and work item reports is maintained. This is a very powerful concept which few competing products can match.

Advanced Work Assignment provides dedicated reports and dashboards, which enable managers to monitor work item handling so that agents can better support customer needs.

Figure 4. Advanced Work Assignment dashboard for Operations

The helpdesk or call center manager and team leads are the most experienced people within the team and their time is critical. By utilizing this feature they can be freed up from manual assignment to focus on monitoring, coaching, and training agents, which would be a better use of their time.

From a customer standpoint, there is less wait time and improved customer satisfaction, also known as CSAT.

This article was written by  Bulcsu Boros , Principal ServiceNow Consultant at GuideVision.

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Servicenow adds powerful new solutions to the now platform to transform the employee experience and simplify work across the enterprise.

New Digital End-User Experience, plus enhancements to Contracts Management Pro, Security Operations, and Field Service Management, streamline processes and drive collaboration

New ServiceNow Project RaptorDB database offering provides businesses with the speed and flexibility needed to thrive in the modern AI-driven landscape

LAS VEGAS, May 08, 2024 --( BUSINESS WIRE )-- Knowledge 2024 — Today, at ServiceNow’s annual customer and partner event, Knowledge 2024 , ServiceNow (NYSE: NOW), the AI platform for business transformation, announced the addition of powerful new automation solutions to the Now Platform to transform the employee experience and simplify work across the enterprise. The Digital End-User Experience solution helps improve employee productivity and satisfaction while reducing costs. Enhancements to Contracts Management Pro , Security Operations , and Field Service Management streamline processes and drive collaboration. New ServiceNow Project RaptorDB, a Postgres-based database, provides businesses with the speed and flexibility needed to thrive in the modern AI-driven landscape.

Employees’ day-to-day work experiences affect their job satisfaction, the quality of customer care they deliver, and ultimately business outcomes. According to Gartner ®, "when employees have a positive EX ( employee experience ), they are 54% more likely to report high intent to stay with their employer, 63% more likely to report high discretionary effort, and 55% more likely to be high performers 1 ." ServiceNow’s innovations streamline the way employees work by simplifying processes across the enterprise, driving stronger engagement and collaboration, to transform every corner of the business with a single, trusted AI and data platform.

"Experience is everything in the fast-paced digital workplaces of today. Inefficient tools and processes lead to bottlenecks and disengagement that businesses can’t afford," said CJ Desai, president and chief operating officer at ServiceNow. "ServiceNow continues to focus on delivering new integrated, intelligent solutions that help our customers create better employee experiences and drive business growth, all on one platform."

Arming teams with insights needed to predict productivity roadblocks and create seamless user experiences

As the workplace evolves, enterprises need connected solutions that can drive productivity and impact for employees. ServiceNow addresses these needs with new solutions and capabilities that empower IT teams to continuously improve employees’ technology interactions.

Digital End-User Experience (DEX) provides IT teams with a complete overview of how employees interact with technology, linking their desktop experience with the Now Platform. This helps ensure that IT can enhance employees’ daily work by having real-time visibility across devices and applications, understanding usage trends, proactively identifying problems, speeding up issue resolution, minimizing outages and risks, and streamlining workloads. Often, when employees hit a technological roadblock, they create inefficient, short-term workarounds rather than reaching out to IT to solve the issue – DEX removes that extra step and ensures IT is looped in from the start. This new solution also includes additional features that drive impact across employee experiences:

Application and Device Health equips IT teams with more information about the applications and devices employees are using, allowing them to proactively conduct maintenance with necessary updates, help prevent interruptions and malfunctions, and safeguard employees’ work.

Desktop Assistant directly connects employees to AI-powered self-service features, enabling them to troubleshoot issues, run local tests, or chat with a Virtual Agent or human agent. This functionality is expected to be available later this summer.

Collaborative Work Management (CWM) offers a central hub for knowledge workers to plan, visualize, and engage with their teams — reducing the need for non-integrated tools. The new solution is customizable to the way teams work and leverages data already on the Now Platform, promoting more efficient cross-functional collaboration and organization with fewer tools. With CWM, teams can stay aligned on critical work while improving visibility from one single trusted AI and data platform.

Simplifying business processes across departments

Business leaders are focused on reducing complexities and inefficiencies across the enterprise to make it easier for employees to focus on impactful work. To do so, they need solutions that allow their workforce to get simple tasks done in one place, like investigating a cyber incident, creating a contract, or working with third-party vendors.

Threat Intelligence Security Center is a new threat intelligence platform within the Security Operations portfolio that reduces the number of tools and manual work required to manage the lifecycle of cyber threat intelligence — including threat feed aggregation, prioritization, threat sharing, threat hunting, and collaborative case management. The new solution elevates Security Incident Response and Vulnerability Response capabilities by driving enhanced threat context and accurate threat assessment, combined with workflow and automation capabilities. This accelerates ServiceNow’s rapid security workflow innovation, allowing security teams to automate complex and data-intensive products to access more insights within and beyond the Now Platform.

Contract Management Pro (CM Pro) is an agile, cost-effective, workflow-based solution for customers considering a contract lifecycle management (CLM) tool. Built in close collaboration with ServiceNow customers, CM Pro delivers the highest-value capabilities of a legacy CLM – but is easy to implement, configure, and use. Legal, Procurement, Sales and IT teams can use CM Pro to drive efficiencies and reduce risk — key capabilities include self-service, templates, repository, audit trail, and obligation management via enterprise-grade workflow capabilities. CM Pro also comes integrated out-the-box with ServiceNow Sourcing and Procurement Operations , allowing procurement teams to tap into the power of the solution to further streamline the procurement process.

Field Service Marketplace, a new feature within Field Service Management, transforms the way field service organizations collaborate with third-party contractors for easier communication and coordination. Field service organizations often lack visibility into the "who, what, when, where, and why" of working with external workforces, which creates friction and lack of transparency. Field Service Marketplace addresses this with a more secure, connected, and integrated process, which also fosters stronger vendor partnerships. With features like advanced contractor selection, dispatchers can efficiently assign jobs to the most suitable contractor, considering factors like availability and service ratings. Additional features include push notifications for outsourcing work and automated task assignments that expedite the outsourcing process while decreasing the cost of managing outsourced tasks.

Improving data efficiency and scaling data processing to supercharge agility

Every year, poor data quality costs organizations money and resources. In today’s data-driven world, organizations need to handle multiple workload streams on the same data model without compromising on performance, scalability, or reliability. Many traditional databases are not designed to support such hybrid workloads, resulting in slow queries, high costs, and complex architectures.

ServiceNow Project RaptorDB , based on Postgres, the world's most advanced open-source database, acts as a foundational data layer that will allow ServiceNow customers to process massive volumes of transactional data on the Now Platform in real time to meet the demands of AI-powered applications.

The new database, made possible through ServiceNow's acquisition of Swarm64 in 2021, significantly boosts processing speed, achieving up to a 70% reduction in database query times over five seconds, a twelvefold increase in queries per second, and an 87% reduction in configuration management database (CMDB) list view load times-- meaningful increases that will power faster, more resilient business at scale.

Whether it's online retailers that need to access customer history and geographical information to provide personalized experiences, energy providers that need to combine device data with analytics to manage smart power grids, or businesses that need to engage in root cause prevention by identifying patterns in historical and real-time data, ServiceNow's new RaptorDB database is engineered to support hybrid workloads with unmatched efficiency and scalability. This architecture is key to harnessing the power of AI, providing businesses with the speed and flexibility needed to thrive in the modern AI-driven landscape.

What customers are saying:

NFP (DEX) "Innovation drives every part of our business, which is why ServiceNow has been such a great partner on our digital transformation journey," said Frank Natividad, assistant vice president of technology at NFP. "We're excited to see how ServiceNow's new DEX solution can provide further value to NFP with its ability to automate day-to-day processes and drive self-service capabilities for both IT teams and employees, helping them re-focus on improving processes, procedures, and tools."

Elara Caring (FSM) "At Elara Caring, we're committed to delivering personalized in-home care to patients," said Chris Mate, chief information officer at Elara Caring. "ServiceNow Field Service Management has been integral in helping us match the right caregiver with the right patient based on skill sets at the right time, ensuring optimal care delivery while enhancing patient and caregiver experiences. ServiceNow gives us a platform that allows us to differentiate, streamlining processes and removing friction for clinicians so they can dedicate more time and attention to patients."

Availability

Innovations announced today are generally available to all customers in the ServiceNow Store on May 7. ServiceNow Project RaptorDB is available now.

Additional information:

Learn more about ServiceNow Knowledge 2024 here .

About ServiceNow

ServiceNow (NYSE: NOW) is putting AI to work for people. We move with the pace of innovation to help customers transform organizations across every industry while upholding a trustworthy, human centered approach to deploying our products and services at scale. Our AI platform for business transformation connects people, processes, data, and devices to increase productivity and maximize business outcomes. For more information, visit: www.servicenow.com.

Forward Looking Statements

This press release contains "forward looking statements" about the expectations, beliefs, plans, and intentions relating to its generative AI innovations announced at Knowledge 2024. Such statements include statements regarding future product capabilities and offerings and expected benefits to ServiceNow. Forward-looking statements are subject to known and unknown risks and uncertainties and are based on potentially inaccurate assumptions that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expected or implied by the forward-looking statements. If any such risks or uncertainties materialize or if any of the assumptions prove incorrect, ServiceNow’s results could differ materially from the results expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements made. ServiceNow undertakes no obligation, and does not intend, to update the forward-looking statements. Factors that may cause actual results to differ materially from those in any forward-looking statements include: (i) delays and unexpected difficulties and expenses in executing the product capabilities and offerings, (ii) changes in the regulatory landscape related to AI and (iii) uncertainty as to whether sales will justify the investments in the product capabilities and offerings. Further information on factors that could affect ServiceNow’s financial and other results is included in the filings ServiceNow makes with the Securities and Exchange Commission from time to time.

© 2024 ServiceNow, Inc. All rights reserved. ServiceNow, the ServiceNow logo, Now, and other ServiceNow marks are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of ServiceNow, Inc. in the United States and/or other countries. Other company names, product names, and logos may be trademarks of the respective companies with which they are associated.

1 Gartner, How the EX-Ready Model Boosts Employee Experience Technology Initiatives, 27 February 2024

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20240508862498/en/

Courtney Johnson 925-405-2446 [email protected]