- Hello, everyone. Thank you for coming this afternoon. So, you're at work, you have questions, you need help. Where do you go? That is what we wanted to answer for our employees. I am Lauren LaFortuna, VP of IT Global Operations, and this is Sierra Plaut, senior manager for HR Technology. We're gonna talk about our journey with ServiceNow, and then we're gonna go into our unified portal platform implementation, and then some success metrics and some key takeaways so you guys can learn what what we did. First, let's talk about Arrow Electronics. We are a Fortune 109 company. You probably never have heard of us. We are the middleman of electronics, so we help with logistics and all of that. We move all the parts located in Denver, Colorado. All right, so our journey began in 2018 and we started with our CMDB, and we implemented that the very next year HR went live with HR service delivery and a portal called HR Connect. So, this is where employees could go for their HR questions. And then, in 2023, we, sorry, 2021. Jumped ahead, there. 2021, IT went live with their portal and ITSM. So, we had two portals at that point, HR Connect and Connect Now, for all of our employee questions and needs. And then, in 2023, we had the big question of a big project of putting it all together. Let's unify this. Let's give our employees one place to go so they don't have to keep figuring out which ones, and go from there. HR Connect, as I said, was the site for them to share HR help, right? You had typical search bar. You could create cases there, look into the HR knowledge bases. Typical portal for HR. And then, the Connect Now site was for IT and some other corporate services. And it obviously has a very different look and feel to it, but similar resources available. You could search the IT knowledge base, you could ask questions, you can make requests, all of that on that portal. But again, two sites, not very convenient to customers. You can go ahead. And so, we did wanna answer that question in bringing it together. Most of the time, people get it right. You know that you need an HR help or you know you need IT help. But let's say you need access to an HR application. Well, where do you go with that? So, when they would choose wrong, what our service desks had to do was say, "Thank you, but go away," essentially. "We need to close this ticket and you have to go over there and create a new one." Well, that employee experience was not one that we wanted to keep on going. We wanted to make sure that we were helping out our employees and giving them that unified portal. So, we planned a project team made out of two groups. We have our HR admins. They took care of and were responsible for the HR module. And, then we also had IT admins, and they were responsible for the platform and all of the other modules we have. And so, our project team was made up of HR folks, and then also, IT folks and our partner, Thirdera. And we formed this, it was a pretty big team, to be honest. Lots of expertise, lots of knowledge in there, but we had one common goal and that was to make a unified portal for us. And as, if anyone went to Dan Levy today, it wasn't about egos for us. It was all about making that solution, so whoever's idea was the right idea for our employees, we went with it. And we still continue to collaborate well within these two groups. So, let's show you what the portal looks like. This is our new, beautiful My Connect. I think one of the other ladies did that, right? My Connect. We have similar functionality, there. We have a search bar that is powered by AI and it searches both knowledge bases, so it gives you IT and HR results depending on your search terms. We also have our mega menu with the taxonomy, and Sierra's gonna cover a bit more on that, on our taxonomy, there. Then we have My Tasks, or My Items. And this is a great widget that we put on there and it groups everything together, tasks or actionable items that our employees would have to do, and just a great place to see their tickets and everything. The carousel in the center is a great place for news, and we like to keep that fresh. It revolves on its own and we always, at least every month, we're putting some new different stories in there, different links. It gives you a new look every single time you're going out to that website, so it's never looking stale. My Favorites is a favorite. This is the ability to favorite forms or knowledge articles, and it'll put 'em in a nice list for you. And so, you could easily access them. Our employees really like this favorites option so they can get to their forms quickly. And then finally, virtual agents. We both had a virtual agent on our site, and so we wanted to, of course, make sure we had virtual agent on this site. Now, one of the things to call out, there, if you're actually looking at it, you could see that it says for English and what to do there for IT support. That was one of our challenges. HR did translate their site into 13 different languages. IT does not. So, we have a mixed experience when it comes to, now, the unified portal. Our employees are used to it. They're gonna see some things in their native language, if they have that turned on for themselves, and some things in English. But it works. It's maybe not the most beautiful experience, but it certainly works, and our employees know how to work with it. We also implemented a couple of microsites. One of them here is the Global Career Framework site. This replaced a SharePoint site, so we finally got to put that thing away and have this beautiful site that is interactive, and it has the same look and feel to our portal. Another one is our application catalog. This pulls in data from our application table and it is a place where our employees can look for applications and see if it's allowed to be used, and if it is allowed to be used, how to get access to it. Talking about virtual agents, as I said, we had that on both of our sites. So, what we did is just combine all of those conversations into one list, so we end up having 10 conversation options for our employees and just combine those. Now, we're gonna circle back on that. Sierra's gonna talk a little bit more about that 'cause there's a couple key takeaways there for you. But one of the other things to note with the, going back one, sorry. (laughs) One of the other services that we had, HR had live chat. So, in order to keep those experiences the same, if they wanted to do live chat, IT needed to have live chat. So, we turned that service on within our IT service desk. Then, that way, there would be a similar offering, there. And then, again, to make it as simple for our employees as possible, we integrated with Teams. This gave that virtual agent experience right there in Teams and it allowed them to start those conversations. And you could see it's the exact same start, all the conversations that were there. One of the things that we did with our Teams integration is you can control what notifications go to Teams. And we didn't wanna overwhelm and make our employees hear all that noise for every single notification that you're maybe doing from the system. So, we only send notifications to Teams when there is action needed by the employee. Do we need their approval on something? That's when it would go to them within Teams. Otherwise, we're gonna keep with those other channels on the, through email or the portal. All right, and then finally, universal requests. We have a unified portal, we now could have unified requests. This was a nice, seamless handoff. Again, never, if they chose the wrong form, never do we have to tell 'em to go away. We'll just transfer the ticket over to the other group to make sure that they, it can get solved. Our employees don't care who's solving it, just solve it. Just answer their question. And so, that's what we made sure we did, here. But a couple lessons learned on that that Sierra will cover, so with that, I'm gonna hand it off to Sierra. - Awesome, thanks, Lauren. Let's talk about success metrics. A question that we get a lot is, "How is your adoption?" And I always joke that we forced all of our employees to go to My Connect with a redirect, so adoption is great, they have no choice. But we really do. All jokes aside, we do have great adoptions. You'll notice on that graph that we have about 3,500 employees access My Connect on a daily basis. Arrow Electronics has 22,000 employees, so we think this is great adoption. You'll notice it ebbs and flows at the weekend and then picks up at the end of the weekend when AsiaPac starts their day. A couple of other metrics that I wanted to call out is, since we implemented back in October, we've had 400 universal requests, and that's 400 incidents where employees had a better experience. We didn't tell them to go back to our employee portal and select the correct form. And then, finally, the last metric I wanted to call out is, since October, we've had 4,000 case and incident deflections where employees were able to utilize maybe search on the portal or use virtual agent, so we think that's great. Okay, I'd love to spend some time just talking about key metrics, and mainly lessons learned, so things that maybe we didn't do that you can do in your own portal implementation. I'm gonna talk about how we focused on UI/UX with our design partner, Thirdera. Some of them are over there in the row if you have questions afterwards. We'll talk about how we engaged our employee base and user taxonomy. This is super important and I wanna spend some time on that. I'm gonna speak briefly about our approach to organizational change management. I'll talk about merging two existing virtual agents and some key lessons learned. And then, finally, I will end with universal requests, specifically security around HR case data. So, starting out with UI/UX. Alongside our implementation partner, Thirdera, we approached the design by starting with wire frames. And now, the really cool thing about this is we used a tool called Figma. And so, some people looked at these screenshots and thought that they were actually builds that we were able to show our leadership, but these were all truly on the Figma platform. And so, we started with wire frames on the left side of the screen, and you'll notice that this was really black and white. So, the team was able to see functionality and make sure that the experience was gonna make sense from a functional side without the distractions of content or images and things like that. You'll notice we had a lot of iterations. We have comments, emojis, things like that. From there, we moved on to mockups, and this was a really important part of our design because it's fun, right? You can see what the portal's gonna look like. But this is what we presented to our leadership and we were confident that when we showed the mockup to our leadership, it was gonna be very similar to the build. And you'll notice that our final build was pretty similar to the mockup. Next up, taxonomy. For those of you that are unfamiliar with taxonomy, that's the mega menu at the top. And this is extremely important to get right, because this is how your employees are gonna browse for information. When they're browsing, it needs to make sense. They need to know where to go intuitively. So, what we did was engage with a global focus group. We pulled a report of all of our users that had opened an HR case and an IT incident within the last 30 days, and then we mixed them up, so we had Ics, managers, and then a regional distribution in AsiaPac, EMEA, and Americas give us feedback. And so, this tool is called a card-sorting activity, and this one specifically is Maze. And the ask is really simple. Under five minutes, take the cards from the left side of the screen and pull them into the category that makes the most sense to you. From there, we were able to get the details on how each card performed. You'll notice that Career, Learning, and Development, a lot of the cards made sense to our employees, but there were a couple that just didn't quite land. From there, we were able to iterate and make it an experience that just really makes sense to them. Lauren and I joke that whenever we were going through the implementation and we talked to other customers, we really wanted screenshots of what other people's taxonomy were. So, let's just take a moment. I'll show you where we landed. (both laughing) For human resources, you can see we have a couple of top-level categories, quick links. Of course, this is all based on user criteria. It's only going to show information that's applicable to you based on that user criteria. Next up, Technology, Hardware & Software. We got a little bit more granular and this has been really successful. Finally, our last one, last, but not least, is Corporate Services. This is our smallest category, but we're really excited. We have a couple of microsites in progress right now and they're all gonna live under this category. Okay, so let's talk about organizational change management. You'll notice we had a lot going on. We really wanted, throughout the entire implementation, to create awareness and to create buy-in for our employees. So, we pushed a lot of content out to our employees, things like teaser emails. Those focus groups, they got sneak peeks. And we didn't forget our warehouse employees. Arrow has a lot of warehouses globally. They don't have laptops, so we needed to make sure that we had flyers in place that were translated into their preferred language in that facility. We did that throughout the entire implementation. One thing I do wanna call out, I'm not gonna read every bullet point, but one thing that was really successful the week of go live was we knew we wanted to launch on a Friday morning, which means that we had a very short window of time on Thursday when Denver stops work and AsiaPac starts the next day to push all of our update sets. We had a very large team, we did a co-build. We had many update sets that had to go in a sequential order. And so, what we actually did that was very successful was we started the build in production three days before we moved our update sets. Now, the risk to this is that you're technically live. Someone could land there, so what we did to mitigate that is just simply create a friendly banner that said, "Hey, welcome to My Connect. It's still under construction. Come back on Friday and you'll be able to see it in its full glory." It helped immensely. We were able Thursday night to just push all of our update sets, and all of our employees came to work on Friday morning with a beautiful portal and a wonderful experience. Finally, the very last thing on this is, the day of go live was our big push. Obviously, I think that's a familiar sentiment. We had a global animated email with a video, and you can see the thumbnail at the bottom. It was under two minutes, really easy to absorb, and it was a big success. Okay, so, shifting gears, talking about how to optimize virtual agents specifically when you have two existing ones. In my experience, and Arrow's doing this, I would say the easiest thing to do first is just compare the two existing virtual agents. Identify those duplicate topics, things like, do you have the same survey? Do you have the same greeting? Does it make sense to keep those? The next one is, identify those different workflows. For example, on the IT side, their virtual agent, and just in IT, they allow for escalation of IT incidents. On the HR side, we don't. We do not do that. And so, we needed to create an experience that if somebody entered an HR case number, what happens? It still needs to make sense for them. So, this is a great exercise that we went through. One thing we did not do that I highly recommend doing, I think we oversimplified how complex it would be to take two existing virtual agents is just go back to the basics. For those of you that have implemented virtual agents, something like this might look familiar where you map out every single scenario. You see the bot prompts, the user actions, the backend actions. This helps you identify gaps. Because we did not do that, we identified a lot of gaps right at the end of testing that resulted in a lot of rework. So, take the time. Do the work to go back to basics. Map everything out and identify those gaps. Okay, my last takeaway is universal request and security around it. Our initial approach to universal requests was that we were gonna take two catalog items. You'll notice there's Ask HR a Question and IT Support. Honing in on Ask HR a Question, uses predictive intelligence. About 90% of our HR cases come in through this form and we wanted our employees to be able to have that seamless experience. So, we thought, let's just enable universal requests directly from that record producer so that we have the ability to do that. What happens when you do that is every single time somebody opens an HR case using Ask HR a Question, it also opens a universal request on the universal request table. In theory, someone could come to this table that is outside of HR, and they can see HR case details. They can see the short description, they can see the description. As you can imagine, that's very sensitive data, so this was not a risk we were willing to take and we rethought the whole approach to how we configured it. We actually simplified it, and what we did is we backed out all of that configuration from the catalog item and we limited how universal requests are created on the HR side. It's very simple. We created a UI action directly on the HR case form, and this ensures that an HR professional actually reviews the details before they decide that it needs to be sent over to IT. Super simple. They're right in HR agent workspace. They click IT Transfer, and then it not only creates an IT case, but that's when it creates that universal request, so we completely mitigated the risk of those details being out in the open. That was fast and furious, but just to round that out. Focusing on your UI/UX, take the time to do those wire frames and design. Include your users in your taxonomy definition. They are going to give you the best feedback for you to iterate. Invest in that organizational change management. Think about your approach. Take the time to do the work for virtual agent. It's gonna make a big difference. And then, think about security when you're implementing universal requests. We have 10 seconds, so we don't have time for Q&A, but there's our contact info and we'll be over here if anybody has any questions. Thank you so, so much. - Thank you.