recording sure and yeah welcome again everyone to this session of knowledge and we're excited to have you all here and let's now go ahead and get started well thank you Lisa and welcome everyone at this success Meetup my second success meetup at knowledge 20 and this time I'm taking you on the journey with our implementation of creating a one-stop shop service portal and really focusing on that ultimate user experience and so my name my name is Valtor avow and I'm working full fruition partners in the Netherlands I am a surface now certified master architect and I have about eight years of experience with implementing this ServiceNow platform and in these ages I've worked on the different products that are within the ServiceNow platform started all with the ITSM then also touched on HR and security operations and of course many different things in the platform and all of these projects that I've done it at customers I've always focused on the service portal and every time implementing that and focusing on the user experience and getting the most out of it for them and with that experience and with my current project that is also implementing a service portal right where they're having focused on user experience that has a large knowledge management setup with many different knowledge bases but also have a large surface catalog in there with many integrations and automation so that experience and the journey that we went through with that customer in the implementation of the service portal I'm bringing that into this presentation and showing you how we do that with service port implementation if you really focus on the user experience all right so feel free to put any questions in the chat or just unmute yourself and and interrupt me if you have any questions about our implementation journey so seven topics for today to talk about and to take you on that journey and I want to start off we're talking about design thinking and thinking about the design for our service portal and maybe not even thinking about the specific service portal with inscription now release take one step back and think about what do we want to provide to our users right not even thinking about service now or any other tool that can provide a portal so really that design thinking in the first place but then moving on to the project itself any implementation and finding out the way of working what skills do we need within that DevOps team that we are to implement the service portal who do we need what is the mindset that we need from the people to make this a success who do we need to involve what are some rules that we have set up and then I'll show you some things that we've done within the service portal some changes that we are making to the ServiceNow service portal that we get out-of-the-box from the baseline and seeing the improvements that we are doing right I'm really seeing how we can get that quick failure but still achieving the ultimate user experience and it also brings us to the demos that we gave within the organization and we are working like a Joe in the DevOps team so we gave demos a lot to different audiences and also get that feedback from the users and processing that feedback so I'll show you how we do that and what the process is and then finally closing up with the challenges that we faced within the project but also what our next steps are now that we have a noise portal what's our next steps to improve and I'll leave it leave you up with a few key take notes takeaways three so let's start off with where the implementation and where service portals can start right so this implementation started about one and a half a year ago and in that time we thought with the customer saying well what do we want to provide to our users what should we give them okay they want order something right the one order left they want to find the information if they're looking for that they want to know what equipment they have what he finds is on the name what software they own maybe what benefits have if you're not looking into IT right so what things do they need and how can we provide it and we're doing that by thinking about the different personas that are involved in a service portal who is coming to your service portal the different maturity levels of these different personas we have some with a lot of experience within IT the are you a modern company or are you you know maybe an old-fashioned company and that I mean you know it's not really using these IT thinks most of the users are nowadays I guess but to keep that in mind during the design thinking process so if you have these personas think about the different processes that they execute what do they do when they come in in the morning right are they going through your service portal do you expect them to go to the service portal and take a few actions but you can imagine of course if you are an agent right you work on incidents or it didn't help desk you go to service now when you open your dashboard with the latest incidents or maybe the highest priority incidents right so the same thing you should do for the service portal why I use is coming to your service portal and when do you want to use is to come to your service portal so think about the different processes and the tasks that they execute to do that for something they are looking for information right they go to your service portal maybe they search for specific information or they navigate to a specific section of your service portal depending on what you want of course right and if they're not able to find the information what do they do right what's the next step behind it so in that phase in a design thinking phase which is really important to give a good idea and understanding of what you want to achieve right and also selecting the right application or right framework to you to do that so they'll call that and I took some photos of our implementation phase of the design thinking right these are real photos from our project so you can see that we have a task flow timelines what are you doing and when are you doing specific things and what do you want to receive within such an activity or a process right is there emails is there a status update there's or anything else that you want to see maybe different devices right some users will be sitting it at your laptop or a large screen but some will be on the road and maybe have their mobile device so different device that you will need to take care of and that's all part of that design thinking what do you want to do think about the different functionality that you want to offer to your users are using what ServiceNow provides out of the box but if that's a approach you can take but also think well what do we want to give to our users and then provide that with the ServiceNow service portal framework we're really thinking about the different activities and the functionality that should be available and combining all of that right so there was a long week for us where we had a week of design thinking and created all these post-its and categorize them and what do we want to do and also this will help us in prioritizing what should we pick up first right make sure that everyone is on the same direction we have the mindsets correctly maybe set up some guidelines to make sure that when we're working with the service portal we are good to go and we can build as we have aligned with each other so let's design thinking more that is of course tone of voice right think about what what language do you use on your service portal is it friendly for more funny are using Smiley's or no making jokes as well so think about all of that within your design thinking process and it's basically before you start your work I mean definitely want to liked on this project is that we have an approach saying well we want to achieve the ultimate user experience that's our main goal we want to have happy users right they should find whatever they are looking for and that's always the goal that we have and really focusing on that and then the tool that is coming there is based on the second place but we chosen for service now because we are sure that we can achieve that ultimate use experience and leverage everything from the ServiceNow platform by having at Service Catalog I have a knowledge management by having intelligence now really making the most out of service now and still get healed my Jewish experience later on I'll show you an example what we did within the service portal all right since we had that design and we had some guidelines we set up our DevOps team and that team in earnest existed of a user experience designer and the UX designer we had two portal developers which were experienced service portal developers and we have a back-end developer with experience with setting up catalog and integrations we also know how to set up knowledge management and maybe integrations for knowledge with external systems but it knows everything about the backend of service now so we need both wheels when we talk about the service portal and other you're fully focusing on the search board itself and you have other teams working on the backend sometimes that's the case but in this case we were fully responsible for the service portal user experience and then look and feel but also make sure that knowledge management was set up properly and a service catalog was working properly on the service portal and so users can order a laptop and it's automatically delivered to them by offering an integration to a supplier that would then configure that laptop and send it to them so different types of persons also a content manager who's responsible for all the text that we have on the portal so you can remember right the portal developers and the back-end developers are not really specialized in the language and different content that we have from the service portal so we have someone specialized in that from the organization and we have a product owner and a scrum master and we were gonna add our way so we have our regular screen meetings we have sprints of two weeks and we started off with our sprint planning with our daily meetings right our stand-ups we have our refinement sessions including that with stakeholders and people from the business if we have any questions or requirements are not clear we invite them I'm having our review sessions bi-weekly at the end of the Sprint we'll ship never short demo but also have a retrospective in there right so just a regular student meetings will have that as well within these implementations but in the design thinking phase and in our way of working we have set up clear guidelines and so how are we designing what's what if we have a widget that was showing a service border when we have a service border page what should that look like we've set up some guidelines some rules for us that will help us in speeding up that process and have our meetings go smoothly right so if we talk about a specific page or functionality that we want to add we always know our DS or the guidelines it should minimal stick to this and that will help us really unit that conversation and get everyone on the same way but always we focus on the quick value and part of our mindset and I would really say it's a mindset let me say we focus on quick value many customers are saying of course and many companies are saying we focus on MVP and we start with MVP and then we'll see what the next steps are but that's really part of our mindset say well we deliver value today right and we might improve tomorrow if that is needed dead of course gets us to the next bullet point saying well using the baseline widgets use whatever serves now provides out of the poops and if we can use that make sure to use that if that functionality is shaped by it out of the box we won't implement it then we want to use it with minimal configurations from our end or minimal customizations right but there needs to be that good balance if you are focusing for the ultimate user experience there always has to be that good balance and in conversations with the UX designer and saying well this is what ServiceNow provides out of the books and this is what the ultimate user experience is right and bringing that together so we don't customize too much we still good with upgrades right and we don't have to do much impact whenever we upgrade that call portal is broken and we need to test everything again we want to prevent that right so use a base language it's but sometimes we have to customize them or copy them and create our own version of that but still using the core technology from ServiceNow right we don't want to have too many impact there and also go live early so after using that baseline widgets and focus on quick failure we want to make sure that a Porto is life as soon as possible and get our feedback and feedback is one of the important things within the implementation and within our mindset as well let's say so whenever we release after sprint we are directly asking for feedback and monitoring for feedback and you know if people are using that the people are not using it or there we get more tickets more incidents by for example we know that some things might not be working so so with that edge away working right we deploy your features after this prints every two weeks and maybe if we have an important update we'll released and even faster and bringing that failure you fast to the business right that's what we want to achieve that's what we are achieving with this approach so having a sprint demos bi-weekly by the end of the Sprint I'll show you a little bit later on that how that looks like and have some fun photos from it but also big demo so larger audience maybe for all departments or just if anyone from the customer wants to join the demo on how we do that service portal yeah they're free to join it but we are benefit of that feedback and getting early feedback because we are definite right so whatever we deploy and if something is not working we will get our tickets on our own team also we will have to make sure that users are able to find their information that they need right or can order specific item otherwise that will result in many tickets for our team which we want to prevent so we benefited of having a noise experienced and happy users so what did we achieve in the last year well we achieved basically too much to explain it to you in this 30-minute session but I've picked up the the home page that we have created and also a second page that we've catered for knowledge management and what you can see is the home page which still did welcome text right you remember that from the out of the box service portal that you get it serves now so we still have a header right we changed a little bit and applied it to the customer style we can change our language etc but we also have a search bar right that is by default and under standard service port asset as well however we did a proof that improved that so what we did is to categorize the search results and make it clear to a user if it's a catalog item that they can order or it's information that they can read right but also making sure if they search something and the answer is not providing research results what do you do right so that's a feedback that we got from the users saying well I'm going to the service portal to find information right to get some help but you're not providing me help you show me a few resource which are not helping me what is my next step and so try to avoid these dead ends because we are there to help the users otherwise they will create a ticket for us right and we want to prevent that we have to answer the questions during a incident for example or maybe another type of question that I can raise so what we did is well if you search you're searching for specific categories or business services that you can raise a incident for right and make sure that it's assigned to the right group directly so we're removing these dead ends and always helping the user from somebody from your knowledge article you say what's not helpful all right so what's the next step if it's not helpful how can we still help you do you want to start a chat with the future agent do you want to race a ticket for example right so always give a next step to be using just simple mindsets that we happen going through all the functionalities that we're deploying seeing well does the functionality yeah doesn't have any dead ends for example right is it translated as well so a few checks that we are doing also with searching and as we were setting up mullets management which I'll talk about later is well should we have all that information in ServiceNow right if we have knowledge management set up and for example we are migrating to office 365 do we have all these knowledge articles within our ServiceNow instance well probably not right because office 365 has about a hundred thousands of articles within the microsoft.com website so you want to enable the external search and when I use the searches in here and we cannot find an internal article we want to search at the Microsoft web site to show them articles that might help them which are not customer specific which are still helping them in their office 365 application so using the ServiceNow search sources you make it happen and to really make that external connection if we scroll down we have the four most important elements of the portal the shop which is the service catalog right but then different wording so really based on that feedback and service catalog right doesn't mean anything to the users they're just ordering something or creating something right so it's it's more like a shop experience that we give them knowledge support we also have something like my environment and that is something that we've created for them and that's also from my safest perspective where you can say well it's important that the user knows what is on his name right what does he own was so fair does he use which laptops does he own so he knows the cost of that as well and then you get a good feeling of well I don't need that piece of software let's release that or maybe my laptop is stolen right so on in my environment section I can then go to my laptop and market one a stolen which then automatically triggers a workflow and triggers that back to the departments that need to know that my laptop is stolen and make sure that I get a new one right and it's all from the my environment page which really shows you what is on your name it is something we added as well looking at knowledge experience out of the books if you go to this serf now or the service catalog let's say right to the shop experience you go to an homepage first to go to a search catalog homepage but if you click on knowledge you are directly going into the knowledge bases and then directly few articles so we said well let's create a knowledge homepage as well and make sure that we promote popular knowledge bases or articles in there I'm really helping the user in navigating through knowledge management and this because within this customer we have a knowledge base for each DevOps team and so we end up with about well a couple of hundreds knowledge bases in the end I've explained at him a previous session and so if you're interested in it how set up Lola's management make sure to check out my previous knowledge 20 session other things that we did is whenever they migrated to office 365 right there was a whole new experience for the users so well let's put something on that on the service portal right so we created a separate Learning Center for any guy guidance on how to install office 365 and use the different applications and based on the persona or the experience we provide them different knowledge articles sources in my environment that I was talking about which has a large impact but in the organization and gives a good insights in what our user owns or anthem and finally what we also have done is you know if we talk about training of course we're setting up a service portal which should be self explaining right there should not be need of much training however if you have a new employee or you're releasing new functionality you might want to give an introduction to your users right so we are using the service now guided tours for that we have a guided tour that is working on your homepage as soon as you open the portal for the first time you get an introduction message and you can go step-by-step through the whole portal starting on the home page but then going to show up to knowledge and support weight that step-by-step instruction and really highlighting it and that was same force a lot of time in answering questions for new employees and creating a training because we just have two guided tours on there I'm in virtual agent that we have as well all right then it's about the service portal and then some changes that we've done I can talk for hours about the changes that we're done for the service portal and about their new experience but I also want to take you on a journey and more things that we are doing within that implementation and as I mentioned demos and feedback are really important for us and really important for the customer as well so within the Sprint at the end of the Sprint we have our sprint review and we invite our stakeholders and the users that are using that specific functionality requested that functionality but also we are doing these demos in an open space and your face right you can imagine nowadays of course we are doing that remote will be in flight still many people in there but a few months ago we did that in your face and just in an open space we gave a demo but we have delivered and everyone was welcome to give feedback or to ask questions or maybe provide ideas for a next release unless we have to these sessions we are gathering a feedback right then you can imagine that during such a session we have a nice board where they can place their post-its on with things that went well that are good rather they like but also new ideas or things that I want to have improved and we get that feedback as a group as a DevOps team and we analyze the post-its or the feedback and removing duplicates and prioritizing the things that we really want to do and put on our metal so you can see in the middle photo that is that is something that we did get into post-its and make sure that we place them right and and take the things back then really what we need them process that but also processing that feedback and show the actions taken right because if you just get our feedback and you never show the reset of that yeah that will give a better experience for the users right they will not feel listened to so they will not give you feedback again so you have to have that close contact with your user base and make sure they want to give you feedback so they can see improvements in the next release I noticed then in the next demo that we do right we showed the improvements that we have done and things that are placed on the backlog and when they can expect that or no because we work edge of course we never know when that they expect it but give them a little bit feeling on when to expect it so some of the challenges that we had within the implementation because if you have that approach of going through or achieving the ultimate user experience sometimes you have a better or discussion in what you should do right are we going for the ultimate user experience are we using service now out of the box so we had some discussions around knowledge management if you want to pronounce base per team we end up with hundred two hundred three hundred knowledge bases in the end or maybe more right what's the impact of that no one has that much of an experience with that right it should work because ServiceNow supports it and we did it and so we try to do that by having that content and guidelines set up really that governance team around that not really a technical thing that we solved however we added that knowledge homepage right to it to get a better navigation and experience for the users but also with search and search is really important in a service portal so if you're searching and they're not finding something you know they were in a way unhappy so that's really important in focusing that and doing checks before you release it make sure that whatever you can search for that it's able to find it as well right so make sure that the keywords are correctly defined at a catalog at a knowledge but also that the right way for the field is set up right if you're searching for knowledge articles do you have made a text do you have an important at the short description or the title of the Moller Stronach right or do you think your body is is important for the knowledge article so make sure to configure that and to improve the search something's in catalog right if you want order for someone else for example there was a nice question that we got well for example if you have a developer laptop right that you can order if you are a developer and if you can order for someone else how does that catalog opens do you still see that developer laptop and then you opened that you fill in a specific name for who it is but then see well he is not a developer so you cannot order that or maybe if you open that catalog and the developer laptop is not there which actually one ordered it for someone else I wouldn't work right so say well we have to change the order of that can change the process move order on behalf of in front of the process right before the catalog renders make sure that you select for who it is and then seeing different items that he can order right and that helps us in make sure that anyone can order for someone else of course there are a few exceptions some items are not feasible for someone else right so we have that limitations in there really thinking about that process and about the journey that each persona goes through in the service portal other things that our challenges is deployments if you talk about data if you talk about what is captured in an update sense right that's that might be challenging an instruction service portal project and you have a lot of content to add right is a catalog item for some Western development or will there be seen as data that you can then change on production right how do you do that basically the goal andrew is that whenever it's kept in an update set you know its development you do not change that on on production directly or if you look at knowledge articles that is purely data right and you do that directly on production so we a lot of conversations with the customer in explaining that that in different instances and how we deploy and when they can expect something versus what do you have directly available what can you change directly on production and finally we are every investing in automated test framework but of course that sometimes challenging with the service portal some of you might have experienced with that as well some things that can easily be tested with automated test framework right if we testing catalog items for example you can easily do that but of course there are some challenges in the current version without a major test framework and I know there are some improvements with that with innuendo release so that will definitely help us in use ATF more and make sure that we can deploy you from faster all right so I see I'm running over time so let me go through the next steps for us and then explaining that we have now a nice framework set up we really have a service catalog which we can have as many catalog items with a good experience we have a knowledge based framework that we can use we already got a lot of feedback on that right so it's working for the current community and they can have as many knowledge bases as they want and we're showing all these knowledge article in a uniform way so now it's time to actually onboard new departments we're not only focusing on IT when we can also focus on facility or finance or marketing or any other department within the organization because we have that framework we just have to unboard them so then if we have that service portal users are asking well ok good to have that service portal and I can access it via mobile but there's also a mobile app right the ships now a mobile app the next step for us is make sure that we have the features from the service portal also added to the mobile app and of course uses you know when they ordered something they wanna know when they get something if you really have that Amazon experience or any other webshop right you get a track and trace when when is it delivered to you if you order a new accessory a new adapter for your laptop when is it shipped at your home for example right we want to give their track and trace to the users as well within our organization a nice Notification Center starting with the Orlando release as well we want to push notifications to the users via a virtual agent into the Microsoft teams we have that integration in as well with my sub teams to the to agent so we actually give the choice to the user in which a channel they want to use to reach us right they use swipes of teams to use the virtual agent to find their information or order the things or just go to the service portal predictive intelligence that is of course introduced as well and we want to leverage that to make sure our users can better raise a ticket right they have some feud's automatically pull played it what's the category what's the business surface based on your short description of your issue so that's some things that we definitely go into ad but also improving the search based on predictive intelligence that's all functionality that is available within the orlando release any proof in the my environment with more applications that we put in there so users know what they are using and also know if they don't want to use anymore they can remove something or take an action on things that I own and we we came up with this list really in doing that together with our DevOps team and our stakeholders and in order and please let's say and I really created these post-its and functionalities that are that are really required or requested and prioritize them based on the impact and effort and then see what can we pick up right now or what should we wait for I want to close up wait a few takeaways and how to get you started and again there's there's a few different approaches to this right so I was explaining that we started one and a half years ago with the service port implementation and it sounds like a long time right but if you are imagined that we have the service catalog set up with all the integrations and knowledge management set up as well of course that takes some time with the team and the skills that we have so it's important that you start small you know what you want to achieve right with the design thinking what do you want to achieve do you want to have the ultimate user experience from the beginning or are you going with ServiceNow out-of-the-box and then improving your user experience but two different approaches well for help of course really thinking about that from the beginning who gave you the same approaches we had and in the end I'm sure it will give you probably a better user experience but start small right start with a few pages that you want to improve start with your own pace for example that you give for your own styling and make that to the new styling and get their feedback real quick all right so go live soon as possible if people using your functionality and maybe with a pilot loop for example write and get our feedback and improve that feedback and process that and show the actions taken for that feedback so users will give you more feedback later on and are really feeling involved in your implementation journey so the other thing that we have seen is that data is key for success you can build so many nice features but if people are not able to find information yeah they are still not happy with your nice service portal so make sure the right content is there in the right search is implemented to find that data and of course that requires guidelines for content creation all right then we did I want to close off I'm seeing running again a little bit over time but there's so much to talk about when we talk about the service portal and user experience and I can talk for a few more hours about any service portal set up or support approaches where you have set up a one-stop shop just one in the end we want to have the ultimate user experience for the users and the easiest way and the quickest way of achieving their goal all right I don't see any questions in the chat at the moment do let me know if you have any questions about the implementation journey there's also a link in the chat to the community website where this session will be posted later on and you can also ask questions in there as well and share that link with other colleagues if you wish to let them know implementation journey and let them ask questions okay then I want to thank you for your participation in this session and next week there's my final twenty session about predictive intelligence and how we are using predictive intelligence in the agent workspace but also in the service portal to help our users creating incidents or any other type of ticket and by providing this short description they fill in more information based on the history so happy to take your net journey as well next week I hope you enjoyed my session and might see you next week right thank you all so much everyone and again this recording is available on that community link you see you there and in our next session so have a great day thank you