all right it looks like just about everyone is in so again welcome to glad fast on air I'm Jenna mesh I'm the VP of Marketing here at glass consulting and I'll be moderating today's webinar CSM in higher education the Boston University solution and I'm very excited to introduce you to our presenters we have Tiffany Roya servicenow developer and service delivery manager FS consulting and top ten T service our architect and service delivery manager here at guide fast but before we get started we'd like to give you some background information on god fast so cough s consulting is a consulting firm that is dedicated exclusively to service now we're an elite service now partner and our expert team of developers and architects have worked on both sides of the table so on the customer side and on the consulting side our company was actually founded by ServiceNow architects and we're very proud to have a team of over a hundred experienced consultants that have a wide range of certifications we have an average CSS score of 9.6 and more accolades that you can see here on this screen so before we get started we will be monitoring the Q&A so definitely throughout today's sessions feel free to send some questions over to Tiffany and top and we'll make sure that there's time at the end to go through all those questions so feel free to send those over and we'll leave time for them to talk through those live and as another perk of attending today we'll be giving away a $50 Visa gift card so if you stay on till the end of the webinar we'll be announcing that at the end of the session so definitely you know stay on there's gonna be a really excellent presentation we have lots of great information a live demo so looking forward to that so with that I will be handing things over to our presenters who dive in I am Tiffany Royer I'm a ServiceNow developer and delivery manager I've been working on the platform for about two and a half years and I've worked on various implementations in the federal and commercial space everyone my name is talked Angie I'm a ServiceNow architect and delivery manager I've been working in service now for about six years or so and primarily focused in Sears I'm a little impatient for about the past two years and then our customer which this presentation is based on is Boston University and more specifically the financial affairs department so we'll go ahead and just jump in here prior state problems so what problems were we trying to solve what issues did financial affairs have I'm the biggest issue here was that they had about seven different shared mailboxes four four different groups or four different groups supporting those mailboxes they were receiving upwards of 10,000 emails per month these emails came from vendors potential vendors potential customers and also internal bu personnel as well and then as you can imagine trying to track track your work manage your responses really any kind of question management case management through email it's just not efficient not not ideal they they did send out a survey and the respondents of the survey expressed their huge dissatisfaction on responses in response time the financial affairs they weren't able to provide a specific response time for therefore further customers they couldn't guarantee that responses were even being sent back to their customers because again they're just working strictly out of email in addition to that the emails were also going to the incorrect groups as well so if you think about it from the customer side you know if I if I have some business with Boston University and I know two or three different email addresses I'm not quite sure which one to send it to most likely I'm gonna send it to either one or maybe all of them right but my expectation is that that email is going to get routed to the correct person and I'll see a response in my inbox eventually what our so on the customer side you know not a big deal but for financial affairs you know they're getting emails from from different or getting emails into different mail boxes to the Ronald mailbox they have to figure out where it goes and that just slows down the overall response time and overall customer satisfaction so well the request from financial affairs financial affairs was already they're already familiar with ServiceNow Boston University is is and T information systems and technology department was also using service now for ITSM as well as an internal self-service portal so being familiar with ServiceNow financial affairs was already interested with serves now as a platform they also talked to a couple other organizations you could see here on the right-hand side American University who uses a CSM uses DC a seventh application and she's d-o-t who uses the scope tap and also MIT Sloan School of Business who uses the scope tap which was actually built by class sounds as well so ultimately the decision was made to use CSM some of the reasons here the primary reason was that a lot of the business for financial affairs was dealing with external customers so people outside of Boston University these could be potential vendors current vendors they also had a need for an external facing portal which also came with the CSM application the case management life cycle fit perfectly with financial affairs business process so the concept of going just getting a case into a new state I'm getting it assigned out and having that case listed adds open gathering more information from the customer in the awaiting info state and then ultimately resolving in closing that case and lastly also workflows and auto-assignment that was another key benefit to using CSM so the glide fast engagement actually I'm gonna pause here real quick I was meant to send out a poll not sure if that was already sent but I was curious to see how many how many of you the attendees here are using a one or more shared mailbox to manage customer inquiries or questions yeah it looks like the poll is up now so yeah back to the presentation a glide fast engagement so we started with an initial engagement to capture business and technical requirements from Boston University there there isn t team as well as the financial affairs team and then our second engagement was the delivery and development of the gsm application so the the whole project consisted of the CSM application implementation we created a service catalog with several catalog items financial financial affairs we created a user portal for external customers as well as internal and then also we had a few external forms which were publicly accessible forms that didn't require any kind of authentication to submit so some of the we'll talk about some of the customizations and configurations we we made on this project so one of the customizations here we was using the user table versus the contact table and by that I mean so in the baseline CSM application you have contact field which typically references a contact table which is an extension of the user table the idea behind the contact table is that these would all be external users or external individuals outside of the Boston University network this didn't quite fit the need for financial affairs because they also worked with internal bu individuals as part of their business process so we needed the ability to be able to select internal bu individuals as well as external contacts so since the contact table is extended from the user table we just simply reference the user table instead that allowed us to select internal users external users and we did require for example internal users to manage two different accounts they could use the same login and and have the same have the same user record that we're using for case management as well as the on the ITSM side for external forms so we we had to make a couple forms publicly accessible this was mainly used for vendors or potential vendors for financial affairs and we'll get into a more detail with this but basically external form publicly accessible and we used a Google reCAPTCHA to prevent any kind of attacks and for human verification and then lastly we set up some departmental case access security so what this allowed us to do was identify which which departments the case belong to and in addition to that we set up roles that corresponded with the Department joist values so that you could only see the cases in which you are that that belong to your department so for example if we have financial affairs and let's say in the future bu bu health decided they wanted to use CSM as well financial affairs would only see their their cases and then once bu was on boarded our bu health was on boarded they would only see the bu health cases now that doesn't mean that you know that that's how it has to be restricted forever so let's say for some for some reason financial affairs also needed to see bu health cases it would just be a matter of granting that role to the correct individual or group and then they would have access to now both Department cases so key decisions and success factors so some of the key decisions here we had to decide on whether we wanted to use a single portal or the current portal current IT portal or use separate portals one for IT and then a new one for financial affairs we decided on using a separate portal for financial affairs mainly because the branding was completely different the customers were were different and that the needs were just different overall and thinking into the future when other departments would be on boarded and they most likely are going to be requesting the same their own flavor of branding and requirements so the path forward here is that a new departments coming in if they required a portal they would get their own portal another big decision here which I'll admit I was surprised with this with this decision was that we are not going to allow email in take to create cases so I say I'm surprised with this because that's usually a big a big hurdle for a lot of companies to say you know customers are so used to sending emails right now we are just going to cold turkey and cut them off and that's that's pretty much what we did here we said that we're gonna we're gonna send out the the portal the links to the portal you know educate customers on how to submit requests through the portal and no longer accept the emails or no no longer allow email for case creation next we have success factors so the biggest success factor here was a strong client lead we worked very well with the stakeholder from financial affairs as well as the is and T team any issues that came up you know we were able to just move right right through them you know the stakeholder from financial affairs was very willing to adapt and change their process a bit too to make sure things work correctly in the system and get away from any kind of significant because customizations that would impact them in the future handoff document in a repeatable process so this goes to a little bit about the department case access so be you did want an easy way to onboard other departments onto CSM if if that need was there so we were we came up with that solution where we can easily add a new department which was just a matter of adding a new choice to the choice field it would require creating a group that represented that department it will create required creating a role which we attached to that group and then there pretty much off from there we also provided it within that documentation the basics of the portal that we created for financial affairs and that kind of showed you know how to how to change key key pieces of the portal and and easily stand up a new portal for for a new department and then lastly the Service Catalog so since we split up the Service Catalog but by Department so financial thirds had their own the plan forward there would be that other departments assuming that those catalog items were specific in terms of functionality and business use to that department then every department would have their own service catalog you so glide fest built out the customer portal with the financial affairs branding and then users with the belonging can come in here view knowledge articles open cases or view existing cases next so because bu has a single sign-on implemented they needed some external forms where customers didn't need to log in to submit the form these forms were created by placing the UI pages on the assist public table and then making record producers or variables public using the public role and then when someone fills out these forms it takes that email address provided checks the contacts table and to see if there's an existing record if there's no existing record a new one is created for that email and then any existing or future cases will get linked together using that email and then because these external users I can't log into to be you system the financial affairs agents would communicate with the external users via the additional comments which then triggered an email and then the external users could reply to that email and their response would automatically get captured in the additional comments on the record next so for internal forms we created for users that did have a bu account and this allowed variable-sweep pre-populated with user information and then it also allowed them to to view cases within the portal next so when you're creating forms there's a lot of things that you want to consider you want to prioritize what you need what are your frequently requested items what are your existing and well-defined processes what are your critical services you don't need everything built out at once but start with what's most important to you and then continue expand as you grow you want to ensure process owners are involved in the development demo what you build along the way to ensure that their expectations are met or if you need any more modifications keep naming conventions consistent you don't want users confused about what forms to fill out or what information to provide and then as you build to consider any workflows or automatic automation you want to add and determine if you should use variables or variable sets so variable sets are reusable and can be added to two forms quickly it also provides a single place to update which you would then apply to every form that that uses the variable set but if you have a field that's kind of unique or has a unique function you probably don't want to include that in a variable set you want to keep questions simple and understandable and make sure you ask all of the necessary questions upfront so agents can resolve the case as quickly as possible and use categories so users can find what they need quickly and user criteria to limit who can access certain forms or certain knowledge articles next so now we're going to kind of jump into a demo we show you how you can kind of quickly expand your catalog we'll create a record producer a new category user criteria and a knowledge article top can you stop sharing there you go thank you all right can everyone see much pain alright so right now we have just your add a box standard customer service portal where users can come in and create cases so you have different categories in different forms that they can go to to create a case so now if we go into the backend we're going to create a record producer to add another form for them so this create case is the the standard add a box one so if you had a record producer that you wanted to use a lot of the same functionality what you could do is you can copy it why aren't you opening up but you can actually copy the record producer and that would actually copy all the variables and any of the other related list items and then you can modify it from there so if you hit this copy button hey Tiffany do you kind of zoom in just slightly I think I mean not because my eyes are going out but in some people my name you need to see the text a little bit better perfect anyone else can let us I think that maybe one more you can have people submit if it's good yeah that's great I think that looks good thank you so this created like a copy of this record producer and it also copied all of the variables and cloud client scripts and everything like that so you could continue to build and modify from there if you had one that you wanted to replicate but what we're gonna just create a brand new one so we're going to create one for invoice discrepancies so this will allow a user to select a company and the specific contact they want for that case and then will also allow them to submit whatever invoices that they're having some issues with so we're going to put it on the customer service case table we're going to hit save this allows us just to stay in this record producer instead of getting redirected if we hit submit button I'm just going to create a favorite real quick because as I'm developing I always like to have a quick way back to the item that I'm working on so we're going to create some variables and variable sets so I'm going to first create a variable it's going to be a reference field and it was going to be for the account and that's going to be looking at the account table and then we're going to have a filter so we're going to want it to be where the customer is true and then we can actually specify a default value if we want so we can go ahead and put in whatever the company that current a the current user is logged in their company and we're gonna put an order of 100 so it'll be the first item on our form we're actually going to a map it to the specific field in the backend so it's going to map to the account table account field on the case table let me go ahead and hit submit then we're going to create another variable this is going to be for the contact and so it's going to be another reference field and for this we're just going to put the customer contact and for this we're going to put you them and advanced one so this is one that I actually just took off with that at a box record producer field so always you know reuse what you can so this is actually going to look at the account field on the form and it'll pull back all of the contacts that are associated with that company with that account and then for this we can also have it just kind of Auto populate first to the current logged in user and then we'll set this order for 200 that should be good I forgot to actually map it to the field so we can go back in and so this is actually going to go map to the contact table contact field on that table and because I am allowing the user to change the account and the specific contact I'm going to want to add in a client script that clears the contact field if the account changes so let us call this clear we're going to do an on change of the account variable and in here I'm just going to do G form don't clear value and then the variable that I want to clear contact and I said that too also it applies to both the front end and the back end and hit submit so now anytime someone changes that account field just going to clear the value of the contact field next I'm going to make some variable sets so if you had existing variable sets you could come in here and just hit edit and then pull over which items that you wanted on this field or on this form but we're going to go ahead and create a new one so right now we're just going to create a single row variable set I'm gonna name it this priority short so I'm going to have the priority field and the short description in here now we can go ahead and go back to that priority and create the variables and because I'm putting both of these variables in the same variable set they will always be together in the location of the forum so you can't separate them out when you're changing the layout if you did want them to be able to be separate they would have to be in their own variable set so I'm going to name it priority and have it as a first one and because this isn't a variable set it doesn't have that map to field option but if you name the variable the same name as the field on the actual table it'll map to it and I need to make this a select box and the choice table I'm actually just going to use that case table and the priority field so it automatically brings over which choice fields are on that table and I'm going to have the default value before so that's the lowest priority you can go ahead and submit that and then the next field I'm just going to do a short description so I'll probably do like a multi-line text and again naming it the same name as on the table then I'm gonna put that as order 200 I'm gonna hit submit and then I need to change the order of the the variable set that I want as well but I'm going to actually just go back to that record producer real quick so right now my first two variables are 100 and 200 so I'm going to make this one order 300 so it's the next item and as you're building you can hit try to see how the layouts coming if you need to modify it and then lastly I'm going to make another variable setup I'm gonna make this one a multi row variable set and this is going to allow us to enter in multiple invoices and problems so I'm going to name it invoice and issue and for the variable set attributes I'm going to do max rows equals let's do 10 so this only allows them to enter in 10 items we can go back into that variable set and create some variables so the first one I'm going to create just a single line text it's gonna be the first one on there and I'm going to name it invoice and then I'm also going to say it could only be numbers because for some my invoice I know it's always going to be numbers and then we go ahead and submit that and then we're going to have an option let's do a select box and it can be for what kind of error they're having with that invoice can have it be 200 we can it save just so we can stay on this record then we're going to make some some choice options for them so we can say like over charge and duplicate and say other we can change the order of these two to show which order we want the choices to be in and then the next one let's put like a description field for for each of the invoices so we can do another single line item and put them details and say maybe for this I only want them to be able to put in say a maximum of 75 characters in that field so now that we have that multirow variable set setup we can go ahead back to the record producer see how it's starting to look so I see I need to change the order around again so I'm going to want that invoice issue to be last so we can go back in and make this order 400 and so now right now we only have it not available for external users so we can go ahead and make a new available for criteria and let's say I only want this to be for specific users within a specific company so we can go ahead and select that so now this you could user criteria will only show the this form to users that have that company and then we can go ahead and get rid of this not available for because I don't I don't want people to be excluded from this and then we can also add it to a specific catalog so we already have an existing one so we'll put the customer service catalog and then we can go ahead and also create just what create a new category for it so we can call it invoice mm-hmm select the catalog that's going to be on hit submit so now when we come back to the portal we should see the new category and voices we can also see that new record producer that we created so it's invoice discrepancies then we can come back here so with the multirole variable set that created what I want to do is I want to bring all of that information and put it in the description field on the on the case so what I can go and do is I can iterate over that multirow variable set and then take each item and push it into the description so what I did here was I made a variable I'm parsing the specific multirow variable set so it's producer dot whatever your variable set item is and I also made a description blank array and then for every item that is in that multi row variable I'm going to push the this item into this empty array so it's gonna be invoice and then whatever that specific invoice was on that row error that error and then details whatever that details field was and then what I'm going to do is I'm gonna join all the items to make it just a single text field and but then they're gonna be on new lines within the description so we can go ahead and save that and now we should be able to go ahead and test this out to see how it would look for a user so right now I'm going to impersonate a generic employee so right now it's Auto populating with the person that's I'm personating Karl and then same thing a lot of populating with his account but because his account has lower sub counts he can go ahead and change that so if you change is it you can see that it's going to clear out that contact field like we want and then still and only shows which contacts are so associated with that specific account so we can go ahead and select that specific item the priority field was auto default to number four but we can go ahead and change it if we want so we have short description please fix these invoices and so this is the multi-role variable set that we created so we can go ahead and add some of the items so if I tried to add in some letters it's saying it's not a number because we had that checkbox to say only allowed numbers and we can go ahead and add in the invoice number and we're going to say this is going to be a duplicate of and say duplicate invoice 1 2 3 4 we can go ahead and add that they would continue to add whatever other invoices issues we have problems for we can say this is going to be over charge of line 5 and then you can come in here and hit that pencil icon if you need to make any edits to it in case you have a typo or anything like that you can also hit the X button to remove that specific row and so once that's all finished we can go ahead and submit we can see how that information transferred over to the case we come back in here go back to impersonating the admin account we can go ahead into the cases and come into the case and so you can see the account was mapped over the contact was mapped over the priority was mapped over now you have a short description and then in the description it's showing each of the invoices that I had problems for and then if you wanted to create a knowledge article for users that are wondering how they can go ahead and submit information on discrepant invoices you can go ahead and create a knowledge article so we're going to k and since we created that user criteria and this form is kind of only for that specific company we can go ahead and put in that user criteria to say who can read it and then we can go ahead and put in whatever body of text that we want this is an HTML HTML field so you can go ahead and put in a lot of different things and format it as you wish then we're going to actually come back here real quick so we can actually get the URL though so we can actually redirect them directly from this knowledge article and we can call it just form and we can go ahead and submit that and then I'm gonna publish it and then you should be able to now search for it on the portal so if you come back in here so you can see we have the knowledge article that I created and this is how it would be displayed with ever text that you had and I'm gonna have a link to that form oh I guess oh because mm maybe I'm not associated with that let me try not sure why oh you know I think I might have typed in the wrong catalog item URL let me try that again let's go back in here let's go back to that knowledge article and go ahead and make sure this link is correct philetus oh you know what I think I had a previous knowledge article that wasn't going there correctly and so it brings you to that discrepant invoice form now and so as your you know you're building you know you definitely use you know reuse as much as you can and keep you know everything as consistent as as possible that's all I kind of have for this demo so I'll hand the controls back over great thanks Tiffany excellent so thank you top Thank You Tiffany for a great presentation and demo getting some kudos coming in here so all of you saw on the phone let's definitely send it over some more questions we did have a few come in that top did respond to but I'm thinking we can go through a couple of those so everyone can kind of hear and see their responses so we can we can start from the top so the first one that came in from was from Michelle thanks Michelle and it said she asked can you give some examples of catalog items for the financial department where they use for internal use so top if you wanted to talk through that answer that you provided yes so I had a couple examples here one was credit card payment enablement so as as a department another department within bu they can request for the ability to accept credit card payments for their their department and that would go through the financial affairs group another one is a credit card refund so if refund needs to be processed for for some payment they could submit that refund request through the financial affairs catalog excellent all right and we had another question there it was after the change online ticket creation only what happened to emails sent to the deprecated email addresses what was it an autoresponder that was set up yeah so the emails are still going into the mailboxes an autoresponder was used to share the link to the portal the mailboxes initially we're still being monitored during the transition phase although I don't know what has app since then if those mailboxes have been deprecated completely or not but that is something I'll follow up with on would be you to to find out sounds good they probably to hear from you again excellent and then another question did you do address verification such as click here to verify your email address with those auto created accounts from the public portal so for this implementation we didn't although that is a great solution if we want to ensure the accuracy of that email address we we talked about it for a little bit and we ended up following kind of how all a lot of the other forms work online so anywhere where you're registering a new account or you put in like a user ID or you put in an email address usually they only ask for that entry once unlike you know your password would ask for for double entry just to ensure accuracy so we kind of went with that method and just assume that the person entering the email address was entering it correctly the first time perfect alright and then Ashley michelle sent over a follow-up question to her catalog previous Kahala question and it's since each department has their own service catalog does the maintenance of the catalog items stay in the department yeah so during our engagement with bu the maintenance of the catalog items still remained if within the service be used service now team so I don't think there was a plan to try and transition that the maintenance piece of it of the service catalog or the service of the catalog items to the individual departments I know it was talked about for a little bit although I think it's it's a much bigger much bigger process to to take on with um you know education knowledge transfer of you know how to how to manage catalog items and training and things like that if you know I think hopefully eventually they can get to that that place but right now it's still being all managed within the service out team they're great Michels oh thanks so and then top we have one that just came in regarding like challenges with industry so the question is what are some of the challenges higher education customers face that are different than other industries kind of put it on the spot yeah yeah so you know I've worked with just a couple of higher ed customers um I don't know I don't wanna say this specific to higher ed but just from what I noticed it did seem like when working with higher ed and and the implementations there and the requirements there they they were much more willing to give the customers what they wanted rather than trying to push back so that luckily with with Watson University you know as long we were able to communicate you know why why we should push back here the the ServiceNow team also was on our side and it you know if it all made sense we were able to relay that back to financial affairs and you know there might have been one or two requirements that was an absolute need where we we tried to push back and they came back and said no this is really why we need it and you know and we ended up delivering it but for the most part I've seen in other places where more more enterprise organizations where they you know they have their set standard this is a this is how they're gonna deliver the requirements but it does seem like higher ed they're more willing to take in taking the customer requirements as is and and deliver exactly what they want perfect thank you all right it doesn't look like we have any questions additional ones so thank you everyone for joining us here until the end of the webinar thank you top and Tiffany incredible presentation now I will open it up to you announce the giveaway winner yeah drum roll all right so thank you Jonathan Tyson for staying on till the end and joining us today you are the winner of the $50 Visa gift card so congratulations we'll e-mail you the prize directly so thanks again and congrats and if you didn't win today don't be discouraged every on-air webinar you attend for both life s and our sister company fair coat counts as an entry into our on-air grand prize giveaway so we're giving one of these mirror workout mirrors so really nice if you're spending more time at home and still want to get in a good workout and it's a $1,500 value so do you know ten more on air where have these running until the end of June love to see you on some additional ones and with that thank you everyone for attending again we really hope you enjoyed this session if you have any more questions feel free to reach out to us on social media we'll be sending this recording via email to all of you so you can also respond directly to that email and we can get you in contact with top air Tiffany or anyone else in the team for some follow-up questions so thank you again if you want to see more of our sessions that are coming up you can visit Goff ascom for a fast on air and you can see our whole programming and reach out to our team via our website and anywhere else on the Internet so thank you everyone I don't know Tiffany and top you want to jump in and find some final last words oh no just that yeah thank you thanks everyone for participating and joining in yet say no thank everyone great all right thank you everyone and have a rest of your day