[Music] hello everyone welcome to the glyphosate our thank you all for attending today and joining us this afternoon I'm Janet mesh I'm the VP of Marketing at guy fast Consulting and I'll be moderating today's glass on air webinar business services portal implementation the lifetime fitness solution very excited to introduce you to theis Pulliam she's one of our ServiceNow architects here a cry fest consulting led this project with the lifetime fitness team they will also be joining us later in this conversation specifically for the question and answers portion so if you do have questions we would love for you to submit those in our Q&A polling and we will have some time towards the end of this conversation too to get to those so thank you all again for joining also before I kind of get started I think several of you may have attended Tice's presentation at knowledge net 2019 last year she also presented on her portal work alongside Travis to listen on our team so we're really excited for her to be doing this again I'm showing what the solution she's provided to your client specifically lifetime fitness so before we kind of kick things off I would love to pass it to Bob DiNapoli on our team he's Director of Sales for guy fast and he's just going to give us a little bit of detail on guy fast services for everyone Thank You Janet and good afternoon everybody thank you for joining I'm Bob DiNapoli I served as the Account Representative I work directly with tyese and the lifetime team and I saw some of the great things they did firsthand but I'd like to just give everybody a little overview of who Glide fast is is an organization just to give everybody a better idea about who we are right so you know glide fast consulting is a firm that is dedicated exclusively to service now as an elite service not partner or expert team of developers and architects have work on both sides of the table on the customer side and the consulting side we're pure-play service not partner we focus entirely on the ServiceNow platform right some key differentiators we were founded by ServiceNow architects we have over 400 ServiceNow certifications between our 100 plus consultants in 2019 we were named a service delivery partner of the year we've also been recognized by Gartner as a top ServiceNow provider we've completed over 540 projects as a consulting firm and we've been able to maintain a 9.6 average customer satisfaction rating as well and in 2018 we're named a top three partner in the Americas so those are just some of the accolades we've gained throughout the years and if you'd like to learn more and our choir about our services please reach out on our website at wwlp.com and you can contact us at info at GLAAD fast comm so thank you very much and I enjoy the presentation thanks Bob all right excellent so before I kick it over to theis just wanted to share some exciting things we have planned for today including our giveaway so if you stay on until the end of the webinar so definitely you know staying down to Mable about the last five minutes we will be picking a winner from all the attendees and you will be entered to win a chance to get a $50 Visa gift card so definitely stick around would love to get some questions in with everyone so please do submit those and stay tuned to the end after our Q&A we'll be announcing the giveaway winner and with that I'm going to hand it over to ty yeast to start the presentation and tell us more about lifetime fitness and the successful project Thank You Janet hi everyone thanks for taking the time to join today I am very excited to be kicking off this entire series of slides fast and I really hope you all have a good time so I'm introduced myself a little bit my name is ty slim for those who don't know me I work in ServiceNow the service no space for five years now and I am an architect I dedicate my work specially to service porter implementations and I used my phone and web development and user experience design background to create beautiful portals and centralize these engagement for the past year I have been working with lifetime fitness and helping them completely revamp their knowledge base oriented service portal lifetime design built and operates high-end fitness centers across the United States in Canada they have extended the use of service now from IT to finance in early 2017 when they launched the business services team from that we began using the platform in March 2017 and went life initially in June of the same year the business services portal contains about 300 internal and external knowledgebase articles and multiple customized form when glide shot started working with them the usage of articles was very low and most users could not easily find what they were looking for this caused a gap on information availability resulting in a way larger the necessary number of tickets in a lack of organization with our help lifetime was a butch lunch I'm entirely updated portal where users from different departments can view their own information either on a global scope are segregated in a smaller portal dedicated to each department when trying to find help users get directed to different categories or subcategories they give them suggestions and articles or catalog items to help them efficiently get the help they need while maximizing ticket deflection and gaining customer trusting the tool so let's dive in ok so before coming up with a strategy of implementation for any project you need to 30-hour major pain points in our eyes time said nosey was not any different based on the initial conversations we had with them I was able to outline the major areas that we need an improvement number one lifetime knowledge based categories were structured in a way that it was not compatible with the desire design two had in mind for the portal a lot of the content was misplaced and needed to be reviewed number two all of the hours will be used by lifetime in your knowledge base consistent with PDF attachment that has an article content inside of it this created a problem because it made users need to download the file every time they needed access to an article also the knowledge article page in the portal looked empty with nothing but a PDF attachment to it this made a confusing experience and quite annoying for the users and finally and I think perhaps most importantly number three their oath portal was extremely wrong InDesign hard she used and had a confusing positioning of content on the pages so has anyone here ever experienced going to a website that just confuses you it's so confusing that you just give up and you don't do what you were supposed to doing there this type of problem is bigger than we realize because it draws users away from the whole purpose of a self-service portal it clearly was imperative that we came up with a solution that was very appealing to their user base something similar to the user experience that they were accustomed to on lifetimes website and other portals so that they would give the business services portal a chance and drive up usage of articles to prevent unnecessary tickets to be created so our first step was designing a prototype that reflected their branding guidelines and focus on the ease of you see on the left side their initial compensation department portal and in the right you can see the same portal after we went live with it a couple of weeks ago now I want to take this time to talk about a few key points and what is happening in each one of these so on the Left can you see the red flags that exist in this portal from a user experience perspective I think it's pretty clear to everyone that out of the bat we can see the alignment of the entire content it's a little bit up the title splash to the right of the screen which causes confusion from a user experience perspective resorting the user not knowing what to look at first we can also see the left side below the breadcrumbs we have a floating question with no specific compass explaining why that's in there we have no collars or asteroids splitting to making this page appealing or pre to the user and clearly when faking a page like this the users first instinct is should turn away from it pick up the phone and just call help us to flood them with even more requests okay so now let's shift our focus a little bit into the right side of the slide I want to break down some of the things that make these user friendly okay so first we have the title of the page creaming right outer faces life times business service portal is divided within eight sub portals for different departments that means that when exciting a support o such as compensation like in the example that we have here one of the examples that it's going through we need to make sure that we know exactly where we are at from a global port of respected we use the branding they're actually the the font-family from their branding and a great spacing of the fonts to convey the message and clearly signal to the user the current page we're in one thing I want to highlight is also our choice of subheading the page to add a touch of branding and welcoming through into the user this acts as a distinction so that when accessing different sub portals I know I am in a different domain even though I am still the same Business Services code as a user now let's notice the use of image imagery as a background we selected different images for each one of the sub portals which also helps guide the user to a sense of categorization and locating themselves or seeing a business services portal all images that we are using here are correlated to the company's nation and branding which gives a sense of familiarity to the portal something that you want to use the search is easily accessed from any page within this portal we moved it to the same role as the breadcrumbs which is an expected location for it we created a main menu widget as well using color colder scholars there a brand approved then a four boxes guides that you see there the user to select a top level of knowledge category in a category topic so they can choose if they want to go on this subcategories or the categories depending on their selection they will be taken to a different page and that is clear seeing the links underlined when are when you're hovering them doing get underlined the same menu is available on all the pages of portal so the user really has kind of a remote control kind of feeling where they know where to go to go back and forth between pages and all of the content in this page is clearly labeled and contained within a specific area so that makes it easy for the eyes to know where to click and where to go depending on the desired outcome okay so step two for us one of the main attack on user experience we know the design and our statue this was very important to this project one of the main challenges that we had dealing with this was the fact that lifetimes entire knowledge base consists of PDF articles and they need to remain this way since they follow standard branding for distribution within their company in service now as many of you might know the articles are created as HTML or rich text when that is followed the article displays on the page properly with all of its content but in the case that your article using a file you pretty much have two options only one of them is to attach the fire to your article and the second one is to rewrite the whole article in HTML format now the second option was completely out of the question considering we're talking about at least 300 articles in here so initially were lifetime did where she is the attachment options and service table which my son pretty decent until you realized that what happens in the portal when you attach a file to an article is that the article shows as a link to the attachment but that must also be clicked and downloaded in order to be viewed now top that with the fact that the entire contents of the file itself it's inside a PDF and absolutely nothing else was showing up on the actual page in the actual body of pages HTML and now you have the user going to a page that for one is blank and has a tiny link for a download so that doesn't really help ok so some people might ask me about what about the attachment link functionality service now this is for those who don't know it's a checkbox that can be used in articles so that when accessing them on the portal it would take you straight to downloading a file in opening a page viewing it on a browser rendering or a new tab and yes it was last time was using for quite a while but the issue on this approach is that it takes you out of the portal now you either still have to download the file or then when you're opening a new tab there is no links whatsoever to navigate back to where you were and that in general folks is just as bad as a user experience so all that to say that we weren't really happy with any of the out-of-the-box options we had for this issue so to solve this in a classier way we developed a PDF rendering widget and replace the old portal knowledge page with the new one they had a widget in it what that does as you can see the slide is a rendering of the PDF file or files right on the portal page this was huge because now we have the users access to the article in a portal page that has pretty robust breadcrumbs we still have the rating and comment functionality the links back to other pages and we can see the entire content of the article right there pretty cool huh and talking about breadcrumbs as a bonus this was also one of the main focus authors implementation considering we are talking about eight support O's inside of a business services portal that is a child to a global central portal we definitely needed to make sure that the user had an easy way back and forth between pages so all the pages had a lot of work putting to them on developing the breadcrumbs she heat the users a robust path from top to bottom finally um this was the third point that we had to tackle a proper structure ization of the knowledge-based categories that was crucial to our implementation see the way that we did the Sporto is that you have two levels of categories you access so if you are on the PNL sub portal for example you have the option to choose between four top-level categories when clicked dos take you to a secondary page where you can see all of the sub level categories within the chosen one as well as related category sorry as related catalog items the same category so now we are solving two problems in one in here because why our users can go to let's say questions and female category and see all of the subcategories in there they can also write on the same page here related form such a request P&L requests and let's not forget but all this happening if you have access to the quick search from any page in case they do know specifically what they're looking for but let's say in case they don't quite know where to find what they're looking for but they have a notion of where it should be this creates a framework where it's so easy to find help because everything is categorized in a proper manner and it's just so easy to use a website it's just so easy choose any website when is intuitive and what what we did here that's exactly what we're striving for and I think that the gave us a good overview of what we did for lifetime while this was a just a quick overview of the key components of what we implemented for them I think we were able to highlight some of the shining star pieces that really made a difference for us in our porter implementation we have lifetime lead away importer functionality by using a learning plan layout we've improved search ability that on top of improving their Service Catalog forms which was also a big part of this to reduce ticket volume since our lunch they are up at least 50% in clicks of articles and we are averaging almost 5,000 clicks per month where last year we could only track about 17,000 clips in the entire ears 2019 so it's really simple math folks if your users are getting answers from the knowledgebase via self-service they will not be putting in a request that should have not been there in the first place for numerous reasons but mainly the repetition of the same question over and over again and when I mentioned we implemented for a lifetime I should actually correct that and say with lifetime since the engagement of the stakeholders in any project is so important and they were definitely involved in the decision making making themselves available and truly engage the 14 so we could reach a bigger go together so I just want to cover a few takeaways of her presentation today that could help you out when implementing your own portals and career solution within ServiceNow first please please please this is so important take the time to invest in your user experience I have met so many people that don't realize the importance of this by showing a cloud-based tool until they see the difference that it makes in user engagement and how that affects your data it's not just about the pretty colors but believe me those pretty colors will pay off ii know your pain points you cannot tackle any problem in life at all if you don't know who you're fighting against if you're not able to clearly outline where your pain points are but just know that you are not they're not worried where you want to be asked for help sometimes is not as easy to understand where your problem is coming from and with some guidance you can come up with the specific list of issues that you need to tackle third you make yourself available make your team available if you want to succeed in any implementation you must be engaged the faster you give your developers and consultants the materials they need to succeed the quicker the project will see the light of day and fourth if you don't quite know how to fit our develop service not solutions to your company needs talk to your partner we are here to help and have tons of experience in dispute to know just what could be right for you and that's that I want to move into the next slide I want to call two of my dear customers also Denali and Jessica see who I have the pleasure of working with throughout this project Elsa and us go out with design decisions made themselves available to give feedback on my architecture suggestions and provided materials needed to this project in a timely matter all I did was really put their ideas to work so I want to thank them for the opportunity and I'd say them but let's actually let them say a quick hi since this is a chat after all so Elsa are you on the comm yes I'm here hi everybody I'm Elsa Donnelly I'm the senior manager over lifetimes business services team and we loved working with Tyson team it was an excellent experience and we're very happy to share our experience with all of you today thank you all yes go do you wanna clear keyword Thank You techies my name is Jessica Speights I am the technical lead for lifetime business services I've been with also since we started this team and I want to say that tyese and Bob were fantastic to work with the whole way through they took all of our ideas and really made them made them work within the portal whenever we had a problem they came up with a solution and it was a really great experience so thank you for all that you did thank you that's nice to hear awesome this is Janet back here I says we have everyone Tice I was thinking we could look through the questions and we can send those over to you also and Jessica and see if anyone attending has any questions about what you all did while working together for the portal so real let everyone take a couple minutes maybe to ask some questions in our Q&A and we can have a little bit of a live conversation that sounds good so we do have a question that came in Tice so Jeffrey here said that it seems like the background picture the of the carousels around seems to take up a lot of the page so I think maybe we pan back to one of the slides there um and just want to know if that was something that was standard in the design and maybe you guys want to kind of talk through the decision-making of the background pictures that you selected right absolutely does I don't know what do you mean by standard I don't know if you're talking about service also out of the box usually it's not as much as that but we definitely went for something that what soon as you land on the page since it's supposed to be a sub portal and not just a page we wanted to give a feeling that this is our home page so you were arriving there and it has this big picture with a button the face intro and that by the button will take you to a video page where you can just learn how to use that sub portal so we really went for that kind of feeling that really just gives these are okay here and then they can scroll down yeah that was definitely the the intention that we were going for and it's pretty standard for that when you're trying to give us feeling out the homepage it's definitely a good look actually like several questions rolling and things are on suspending them definitely keep them coming we love this I do see they're the same person asked if this is best practice so here's the thing best practice no a user experience perspective I mean you can do anything you want right from if you're trying to make a homepage so at the same time for I'm trying to give an example for example easygoing the IT service portal which is just it's something that a lot of companies have right this is a little bit of a different portal that we worked on in here usually would have a bigger image which is something that is definitely used if you're trying to leave that homepage feeling so yes our user experience perspective that would be a best practice from ServiceNow perspective it really won't affect anything so it's not either a best practice or not a best practice it's definitely something that you can be done that can be done without affecting anything in your system or causing any issues at all so it's a great proof it's not going to cause any problems so it really depends and what are you trying to go for so if you have a home page I would definitely suggest doing that and also want to top that with the image studies done there it was not actually a carousel it was a carousel for our presentation so the actual portal has just a flat image that it's it's pretty much the whole time okay we have a few more questions I hope that answer your question yeah it seems like takes a lot of people were very have a lot of questions the PDF budget so do you want to take this one one of these here and of course like Elsa and Jessica if you want to add some color to but there's one from Kevin he says yeah PDF widget yeah it calls out to customize all the ridges to go to display and LU of the normal widget does it work more on click of the link or does it display right away so maybe if you wanted to give ya a little bit on the PDF because a lot of people here interested in this functionality on the on portal yeah so Kevin bad widget I did have to to customize other widgets and when I say that one good tip is don't ever customize something out of the box most of the time service I won't really even let you do that so you have to clone anyways a widget so what I did is I created a new widget that has a wrapping that it's similar to the out-of-the-box one so but then I I pretty much created a new code that renders a PDF instead of the HTML because for this specific case scenario they only have HTML sometimes they have some text they don't sorry they only have PDFs and sometimes they have some text in HTML so what we did is that we customized as we coded a new widget and then we put that in place in a new page so we're not even using the day out-of-the-box page we created a new one to just keep everything out of the box untouched and then in there we have the PDF rendering inside right on the page so you don't have to click to download it and then they it's a viewer pretty much so you can curl down and opping since you the entire PDF right there on the screen and then you can also see if there's anything additional choose the article itself maybe there is a text or something else you can view they're chewing and it shows all the attachments so if they have more than one PDF attached or something like that they can view everything there great and then I use I think a nice fall fur from Kim here's was a PDF render available on a service now share site sorry what's the question it was asking it was a peed a little no it is not right now maybe that's something that we could do in parts of you so yeah I have a question from David and and he created David noting home and he created your own way and parts you insure upgradability correct correct so we would make sure that we followed all best practices to make sure that this was something that they wouldn't have problems in the future and we made sure to keep all that out of the box things untouched in there so they can receive upgrade from service now and then in the future there's new functionality that we can use because you know folks a lot of times we have to do we have to find ways like this to really work with you and in your your needs but service I was also releasing a lot of things and one of the things we actually have in this project when we started this project service out didn't have yet the multi-role variables for example and when he has to come up with a solution for that which is something that they - my needed and once they did launch that my service now we were like okay so let's now move to the service now functionality because that's just going to make it be easier for you in the future to you know upgrade and everything so that's something that it's always good to keep when you have to upgrade you need to make sure that you're making something that it's a great proof but at the same time you always need to go back and review what he did and see if there is ways you can improve them because you can always be able to improve something so I hope that kind of answers your question great thanks Hayes I really like this question that just came in and I was thinking maybe even also and Jessica could jump in if they have any feedback for it - so the question is can you provide any of lessons learned or takeaways on user adoption such as driving users the new portal you hear yeah they're interested in like what the user some user adoption takeaways and you know what you're now seeing with the portal being live and maybe some of the I think you talked to us on the presentation theis but being a be great to dive a little deeper into some of these um user adoption solutions mm-hmm first though I want to say that we had a really fun cake when this was launched and I think that definitely helped within the company that we had something like but I'm going on that was really fun we had a really nice cute cake with lifetime dumbbells and all that stuff but I would actually would like to bring Elsa and Jessica in for discussion and ask them how if there's anything else additionally that you guys are taking within the company to to help the users and have you heard any feedback from them or is there anything else that you would like to add yeah this is alsa we like to make sure communicate out to our end users anytime that we make large updates to to the portal and so we've definitely we've definitely done that we've made sure to reach out to specific groups within the company regarding regarding certain content we've sat down with the different user groups within within the finance teams and let them all know what the new content is so that they can make sure and share it anytime that they're answering tickets as far as lessons learned you know if we were to implement a different portal or you know help with other departments as they implement you know sub portals of our platform I think that you know really utilizing the the ideas and the structure that tyese put into play for us would be very helpful you know when we first designed we didn't think we didn't think through you can't think of everything right and so thinking through you know really that self-guided user approach that I use helped us do I think that that's something that we would that we would for sure implement across the board if we were to do we're gonna do another another portal from scratch and I just did you have anything to add on that yeah so I think that we to use the portal we also want to I'm gonna bring up that when we started this especially now that we have it so well developed with Glide fast we have communicated with those that are resolvers really strongly of if someone comes to your in your email we always push them to the portal or will forward that email to the portal and answer to that way so we always do that and then we include links to the knowledge documentation constantly so using those templates to respond pushing them to that and then also providing we found we also looked at learning styles as much as possible and looking into how our today is today's workforce learning and how can we make our content work for people's learning styles to give them what they need in a short period of time but so that they can always feel like they can come back and find that answer and so we've been trying to push up our video content and things and we also used I wish that we could have shown the forums a little bit here because our forums are really great that I use go for us because it also pushes back to our knowledge content if they're asking a question in a section that it has that really they don't need to be submitting a ticket to it'll actually stop them and say hey actually if you're a corporate user you can find this information click here and be directed to that knowledge content even our own boss one day though he thought he forgot he had access to do something you know you do something and you forget about it and he went on to submit and said hey I need to do this and it said hey actually you can do this and he was like hey this is great I forgot that I could do that so we see it even in those that we work with on a regular basis even though we kind of were given all this information constantly everything we do it just kind of works together to push them back out to that knowledge and so everything is always focused on getting them back out to that knowledge that they can get out and do their work quickly and efficiently excellent there's not some one year yeah the forms are great we definitely didn't include them at this time but um that was definitely a fun part a big part of the project and I would say the bread crumbs and the searching functionality chew and I think like sure I can talk a little bit more of that I see that we have a question here from Robbie Stone see ServiceNow has improved we're coding isn't always necessary how much coding such as JavaScript is necessary to make the lifetime fitness redesign so that's an interesting question because we did try to use those some of the things out of the box but when we working with something for example as this lifetime we wanted to really focus on the user experience and making this very particular to their branding so we definitely used some heavy coding in here everything you know a great proof and with best practices involved but we had and that's kind of tidying up to what I was starting to talk about we also have we had a lot of work done on their search functionality so because we have different portals and different pages and different each page looks different so if they're accessing quarto on HR they're taking sure different knowledge base page it looks a little different then than other pages on their different quarters which for example is on business services so we have to do a lot of coding in their search functionality for example to redirect them to the right places and also have the breadcrumbs working properly because ServiceNow gives you a baseline of breadcrumbs but you definitely have to add on if you have you know your own kind of structure and the architecture of this portal was built older friend and you know just here and there we have a lot of layers of pages so you can access the category and then you can exert a subcategory and then you can access for example the knowledgebase article and because you clicked in four different pages you get there then we want to store that information and send that via you know coding so you can access and click back to each one of those pages on the breadcrumbs so you don't have to just go back to the home page and you don't everywhere and we did the same thing for example for the form so if they are accessing this one from the home page or let's say they access the form from the sub category because we also we have those pages this part is really different than anything that service now provides in terms of how they architecture is placed of things so if you are accessing a form from a sub category page for example we call it a topic page you have hearing the topic page the knowledge articles that you can access and the forms related to this so now you should access a form you want you have the breadcrumb telling you where you access the form from because if you're like oh this is not really the form and I want to go back to that page then now I can access those breadcrumbs and come back so obviously we had a good amount of coding involved in here but that's sad yes service now that has improved a lot and there is tons of things that you can do if you want you have something more out-of-the-box and if your process is more simple if you're maybe starting with your for 18 service portal something that you know it's a little more out of the box then you can actually make use of that functionality it really depends on it goes back to the slide that I had of your pain points right he first have to figure out what your pain points are and then from there you can decide okay can I be okay with something more basic or do I have to have something a little more robust excellent thank you all that was that was great so we we had a couple other questions but it seems like we we honestly did answer off with your responses so unless Titus did you want to answer one more and then we can announce the giveaway winner yes look see I'm not sure if there was anything like when you've actually there's maybe just the final one could be I think someone was curious how long it this project took to come up with a parcel to build the portals maybe that could be the final yeah I think yeah we it's been about a year project because we had about eight sub portals in here so we had the parent portal so I think we took was it a year Elson just here I think that's about a year is great so we took on this they need two prototypes that was pretty quick so we started with the prototypes and the wire framing then we have the initial portal and then just really making it better and better we had two or three phases of this so I think the entire process is about a year great thank you all right well with that we're gonna close out the Q&A section of our webinar and really appreciate everyone who submitted questions if we didn't get to you specifically of course you can reach out to us and tyese and we can definitely provide answers to those afterwards you can find us online guys calm and on social media specifically LinkedIn so I'm gonna shift it over now to announce our giveaway winner and the team at the end pulled the name out of the virtual hat and we would like to congratulate Tracy Talman as the winner of the $50 Visa gift card today so congratulations Tracy we will be following up with you via email to give you the details to claim your prize and thank you for joining and thank you everyone who joined today really appreciate it no worries though of course you didn't if you didn't win today's giveaway you will be entered today to our grand prize giveaway so for every on-air session that you do attend will be an entry to our grand prize giveaway we also have a couple other webinars happening with our sister company fair code and also for glass all the way until June so very exciting tons of opportunities to learn more from our ServiceNow experts and of course I want to say a big thank you to tyese for an amazing presentation and alsa and Jessica from lifetime fitness thank you so much for joining us and everyone who else who attended today if you want to give some final words how you feel free to jump in now before we close up yeah absolutely thank you so much everybody for taking the time to join us today it was really fun I really like answering your questions and if you Genet that if you have any additional questions please reach out to us we are literally everywhere YouTube LinkedIn so we've definitely get back to you yeah and this was really fun thank you so much everyone and thank you for Jessica was so nice having you on this question and yeah excellent all right well thank you again everyone and as we've mentioned you can reach out to us on our website Caiphas comm check out more webinar sessions that are happening now through June for a class on air you can tweet us messages on LinkedIn reach out to us online and we'd be happy to continue the conversation [Music] you [Music]