okay hello and welcome everybody welcome to this 37 platform Academy session today I'm being joined by my wonderful colleague Eliza from the US originally from New Zealand I think we'll do introductions in a second today we will be talking about some service portal uh foundations uh which isn't exciting but also a little anxious topic for everyone I hope we can answer most of your questions today so first introductions my name is Lisa hoenstein I'm an app on product manager for the now platform I've been with servicenow for about four and a half years I joined early in 2019 as a solution consultant and worked for a customer before I was the admin developer service owner uh pretty much everything for the platform and I also got the chance to work with our service portal uh back then be part of the implementation project so I remember some of these things even if I don't work with it daily and more my main products are the workflow automation products so you may have seen my content on the community in the work of automation Center of Excellence but today uh we will be talking with Eliza so Eliza please give a quick introduction to yourself Epsilon Eliza um I am based in the US actually in Alabama right now um but yeah originally from New Zealand so that's it's kind of muddled by an area so I've been in service now for just over two years now um background a lot of products but I am now settled in my new home on Surface board also really excited to get into into it um and yeah looking forward to hearing from you guys as well the next one is the Safe Harbor slide so in the case that we might be talking to any uh forward-looking statements please don't make any purchasing decisions based on uh what we see today this is part of a longer a series of academies we have different academies and different topics um there's another slide later in this deck to give you all the links you can also get to the overview from uh from this QR code we have academies about virtual agent next experience we have uh Ai and some of the other Academy Runners also in our audience which is so awesome that you come and join us today uh we have an academy on platform analytics and and more mobile I think so be sure to check out the other ones as well very interesting content so I think with that I can hand it over to Eliza so the first question I really want to cover is what is service for them so service photo really is a front-end interface for your employees and when I say employees these are those employees that you know won't actually be within Services out proper interacting with those lists and forms and modules that you have all set up so they have servicenow ads these are the people actually coming in wanting to self-service their requests or find you know by finding knowledge articles exploring the service catalog or even just going in and looking at the account tasks like approvals um submitted tickets anything like that that is a primary use case for service portal and what does we like to call it a front-end interface because it really is it uses front-end technology stack um to surface all these and the great thing about it is that it's flexible you know I say it we primarily designed to be a self-service experience but it is super flexible so if you have a custom application you can build in an entirely custom front-end service portal for you for your employees to go ahead and access that um so it doesn't have to be what you see on the screen there um and just if you want to know what this the GIF is showing is actually the employee Center which is our most modern version of the service portal um now most commonly if you've used service portal before in any capacity you'll probably have looked at introducing them the service catalog knowledge base instance cases folding all those up into one easily digestible self-service experience within the service portal so these are the key components that generally make up a service portal be it you know using a one of our other service portals or the employee Center one itself um these are the generally the three kind of primary data sources for you but as I said before it's super flexible you can even have bring in stuff from different apis and service that information within the portal as well we do have a number of stock portals available just to jumpstart your implementation or even before you do use out of the box if you don't have strict branding requirements or um don't you know require that many changes so going left to right we've got employee Center which you saw before on the GIF this is our kind of primary service folder that we recommend for you to use if you're looking to go down that route what it is is um so employee sensor is a single unified hub for all your departments to have that front end available so you can fold in HR I.T you know even like Risk Management they can all be brought in to the single user interface and have their requests catalog items um cases knowledge bases they can all be folded up into the single taxonomy that is then presented within employee Center in the middle we have the CSM service portal so this is if you have people accessing your services portal who don't have accounts within service now so this might be customers coming in vendors anything like that for those use cases you'll have to use CSM or CSP service portal which is in the middle there and just as an example um on the right we do still have some I don't want to call them Legacy because they're not you know deprecated or anything you can still use them but they're just a little bit less modern um with the HR service portal so they still exist you can still use them there's nothing wrong with them it's just not the modern experience that um we are pushing the employee Center so if you're currently using the HR service portal or the slash SP service portal um anything like that we genuinely do recommend that you look towards migrating towards employee Center um but so nothing wrong with them still works and then they that's what you want so what does the portal made of so the base service portal and all those portals that you saw just on the previous slide they all made up of front-end technology so what this means is we use angularjs CSS HTML any sort of front-end developer will understand how that works um and you're able to use those languages to configure how the look and feel and user experience of your service portals um we do use bootstrap as well which is what you see in the middle there how it's out of the box it's kind of grid based so this you can think of it similar to a table where you've got rows and columns um that you kind of fit your little components into and then out of the box it is responsive that's one of the best things about bootstrap and why we went that way is if you change the size of the window it will also change the size of the components within that so then you know any sort of screen size experience people will still be able to use it within the service portal we use widgets to contain various pieces of functionality so if we go ahead to this page here you can see this is a service portal page again it's employee Center which is what we recommend but I really want you to look at what's in the bright green boxes because they are all individual width rigids and Richard normally just contains a specific set of functionality um and here we've got you know down the bottom we've got the how can we help in search bar so that's contained within one widget and the nice thing about widgets is you can create as many instances of them as you want so you can actually reuse them across multiple Pages even multiple portals um and you basically just drag and drop them onto the page within the service photo editor so it's pretty neat at this point you might be asking what can we do to make the portal owls there's a few main things that you can do the first one is Brands the portal so this is where you're actually looking to bring in your company specific Styles into the service portal what you see there on the left is just a screenshot showing the theme editor which we have available for service portal where you can change which colors exist with like the buttons and particular items but if you need something a bit more in detail than that then you need to go in and actually edit the CSS of the theme or the particular widget that you're wanting to change the look of um it's all pretty flexible as I said because we it is based upon front-end development language um that front-end Technologies you can pretty much do anything you want with it as long as you have that foundational knowledge of CSS and HTML and how to edit and display that next up so configuring the content in the middle there so what this means is using things such as user criteria to determine what you used to see within each page and making sure that someone who only operates with an I.T space doesn't see any things specifically relating to HR or if someone's working within New Zealand they don't want to hear about the Fourth of July holiday you know they don't get the day off so um making sure that their content is really tailored to each individual user or User Group and lastly create new elements so on the screen there on the right what you're seeing is a widget editor and this is where you can go in and change the workflow change how it looks change what the experience is when you type in to the search bar do you want type ahead um in there so that you can basically have people's search text or they're completed you can pretty much do anything and if you have specific functionality you need go ahead and make it um yeah I do want to show off the potential of service portal so these are just some examples of service photos that um one of our developers has actually gone and created just so you can see you know what what is possible with the portal so this is for an imaginary Telco company and it's just very very customized so you can see that this looks probably nothing like any of the portals you've seen um just kind of out of the box from us and that includes employee Center or slash SP the traditional one but this is all you know if you can zoom in your screen enough you can see in the URL this is the service now um this is within the service now instance and it is a service portal page so you have options and don't be afraid to spend the time changing it up making it consistent because that is one thing that we do recommend is really making sure that the look and feel across all your different various intranets have consistent running have consistent looking feel um it would just make the use experience so much better now I do have a question for everyone and that is what use cases have you seen a service portal used for in the past I'll give it a minute here for people to populate in the comments what use cases you've seen so one example of a use case that doesn't fit the traditional service portal mold was actually my first ever servicenow project where I was working with a law enforcement enforcement agency to build out the front end for um you know members of the public to come in and submit you know incident reports so this would be if they saw someone walking around um like breaking into car windows they'll be able to go onto their service portal and submit a ticket to say hey this means someone suspicious around this neighborhood um so that's been one option there's also some use cases that I've seen where they actually opened up to Ventures to populate an embedded Excel sheet um so yeah this pretty much I just really want to use this time to reiterate that serviceable is flexible if you've got a use case you've got a customer application you can build out the service portal and have that front end be available to you and your users to kind of I also just documented out some additional use cases that in which you can use a service portal for so as mentioned we've got the searching within the knowledge base helping to use a self-service requests I'm contacting a live agent or you know using virtual agent to resolve their queries themselves it's also a good interface to drive action through asking you know people for approvals asking for them to trigger the next step in the workflow um do you also have the option for going you know creating that front-end for custom application so if any of you work with the CCPA or gdpr regulations having a service for the front end for those people coming in to request their privacy statements you need that front ends so you can have them submit their requests via that service portal and then have that request go ahead and trigger a workflow within service now so lots of options here just some food for thought if you are looking to actually work on the service portal um there's a lot of different use cases that you can have applied there so what's Trends and Service delivery this is really we basically just sat down and really looked to see whether people using service photos what do they expect when they come to a you know an intranet a website that you guys provide so three main points first up anywhere anytime access is super super key because you have fuel Service agents working out you know in the middle of nowhere they just have their mobile devices but then or their iPads you need to make sure that um they are able to access what they need um but then different formats and also make sure that the workflows actually work well with those different types of devices and when you're not just at the computer in the middle we talk about consumer experiences so what this really means is people today are used to things such as Apple products or Instagram these consumer grade products that deliver really amazing user experiences um because you know if a consumer downloads an app it doesn't look good the functionality doesn't feel intuitive they're going to drop it so get used to that level of you know experience so you really want to try and mimic that within your service portal just so that they can want to come back you want to make it easy for them and lastly self-service is really key and that's a lot of the reason why um people go towards using service portal because it really is a great user interface to surface so self-service items such as using virtual agent having a search bar that covers your knowledge base your service catalog it's just another method for you to surface though that materials and you know they don't have to call up your help desk every time they can resolve their requests themselves so some impediments to Great experiences so if you've implemented service portal you've probably run into these lessons already but these are the typical pain points that we see when looking at service portals so the first one are to find content search is an index correctly or it uses terminology that employees just don't understand or the user experience they click on one item they expect a but instead they're receiving B so making sure that your content is serviceable it's huge um lack of search relevancy so if you have the search bars in there which you probably should in the service portal generally depends on your use case as always but um you're making sure that people are actually able to retrieve and like useful search results so we have a product called AI search which is really really incredible for servicing up you know the most relevant um information to the user based upon using artificial intelligence so if you're not using that already AI search that's great um we'll have some neat enhancements for that in the future so keep your eyes peeled um third in that line is content isn't tailored to me so I've already kind of mentioned this earlier but just making sure that the content is relevant to the user you have all the information on the user profile so why not use it you know what department there and you know which geography they're in what language they are they operate in so you set information to your advantage and show them the things that only met that actually matter to them um at the bottom left inconsistent experiences so this just making sure that you know things such as branding and colors or the way that a form flows should be consistent across all your internets all your various tools that you might use within your organization trying to mimic those experiences just so that if one person has been using a particular tool for five years now they don't have to relearn an entirely new platform or new tool when you give them your service portal to look at it should be intuitive and just making sure that it's consistent across those experiences really helps with that and then lastly just low confidence and low confidence and take it so this is one thing that we found where people just won't bother to submit a ticket or if they do they don't expect very resolution because they don't have feedback coming back to them saying hey your ticket is in this state um and so yeah like many employees just kind of see the tickets it's not really the way to go so um really populating self-service is a really great way to avoid that so then they can resolve the incidents themselves rather than relying on the ticketing channel for 100 on issues and these are just some user needs um that's kind of correlate to those pain points the part about the content that you mentioned earlier uh people who joined us two weeks ago when Ashley was talking about Knowledge Management uh we uh we shortly hit on the the content uh Parts in employee Center so being able to use user criteria roles or groups to surface the right content to the right people this is similar to how content blocks work in knowledge as well so if you combine the two and make sure that the KBS that are being surfaced through the portal um only contain the content that is relevant to the audience that is looking at it so related to those pain points we had some leading practices so each kind of slide will cover a different user need and then the leading practices that kind of other outcomes of that and how to essentially resolve those pain points so the first one is you really need to understand the current state people with going and doing anything take a look around you look to see you know if you've already deployed service portal look into a user user experience analytics dashboard to find out how your users are using your service portal today now I just bring up a screenshot all that user experience analytics dashboard here and you can see it provides so much information um you really get an understanding of course how many people are using your portal how many sessions so how many times they're actually coming back to that service portal and the thing that I always like to point out is in the bottom middle there is something called funnels so this is really really important it's a really powerful feature because what a funnel measures is how many people went on the particular Journey the use case on this particular dashboard was they were looking to measure how many people created the case how many people ended up viewing a knowledge based article or how many just simply visited the homepage and then quit out you can create your own custom funnels to measure what do you users doing within the service volume you can see how many people navigate to search and then go to a particular request item from that serve so you can get some really really interesting details and just learn you know how people using your portal today and then that can really help narrow down what you should focus on Within you know future builds of your service portal so going back to this previous slide so using the analytics dashboard I just showed to get an overview of how people are using your portal today using the surveys in surveys and assessments tool just to get that customer feedback understand you know people who just interact with your portal what are they thinking but with the caveat that people are generally more likely to give feedback if they're upset or if they're frustrated by something um so don't be surprised if you see a lot of bad ratings I promise you it's probably not that bad and then also make sure that you know you've done usability studies and if you haven't deployed service portal yet understand how they're using tools today that provide the same functionality ask them you know what do you enjoy about this experience what is frustrating and work to make sure that your service portal avoids those pitfalls one thing that's really interesting is on my first ever project you know I work with a lot of developers and we were we built out this amazing service photo we're super happy with it and then we went to do a usability study with someone from the accounting team completely different department completely different backgrounds and we were so confident going into it that we laid out a set of challenges asking them to go okay we want you to find out how to reset your router or how to submit a particular case we gave them you know a list of Journeys that we wanted them to go on and let me tell you they struggled there are so many little pitfalls along the way that we just didn't see we're blind because we're the ones looking at it day in and day out and you know here's this user who doesn't have that knowledge all the standards that we use and so they struggled so really making sure that you use those the use the people around you use of the employees to actually give yourself support they'll go before you start um building it out or before you release it to a writer group is really important so oh no make sure that you understand what the problem is or you know what the current pain points are what what's frustrating your users so then you can actually go ahead and alleviate those concerns that sounds like a very uh good recommendation for testing anyways have other eyes on the code and on the products that you build because you will always see the happy path and what you were building for but users will find all of the nooks and crannies that you overlook next up is focusing on Service delivery so you just really at the end of the day they just want to be confident that you actually go ahead and address their issue in a timely manner and the best way of doing that is first of all resolving it fast having slas in there but then also giving them visibility into their progress if it's going to take a week let them know what to expect so best practices to really present this is um making sure that your workflows are reviewed you want to make sure that they're streamlined efficient can you order me particular things can you leverage Flow Design or integration Hub just to make things a little bit more efficient in your processes and then also making sure that there's no single point of staying there so this is something that catches some people up where you've got an approval sent out for something that person's away for two weeks so really try to use use assignment groups use slas that notify a manager if they're about to be breached because you don't want tickets sitting there for two to three weeks waiting for someone to come back for a vacation um but yeah just making sure that the service that your service portal provides and Promises is actually met um really resolves a lot of issues yeah I think there are several ways to ensure these things don't happen slas is definitely a good a good way to be sure these things don't land into the Nirvana when it comes to Integrations it's always a good idea to make use of error handing or retry options and then if things run into errors notify the right people to change the setup or maybe use new versions of an API there are a lot of recommendations that we have and if you are looking at your processes and there aren't necessarily errors but you don't quite know why certain things take longer than you expect we do have a product I think it used to be called Product process optimization I think it's getting renamed to process Mining and that one will help you identify those time sinks in your processes so that will analyze your data see what our long-running processes long-running steps in your processes and help you optimize them and then a third one when we're talking about self-service um there's I think there are options to get suggestions for what can be automated and what are common search topics that you might want to create virtual agent topics for for the self-service part as well next episode information finds the user I feel like I've hopped on about this a little bit in this um Academy but really just making sure that the content that you showed is personalized to the particular person's role location Department job type and to do this what you need to do really is just making sure that your items are consolidated you know your average employee they don't care if they submit an HR case and an incident and technically they belong to different departments they just know that they submitted two tickets and they want to see them all in one place so consolidating where you can that really helps with consistency as well which is really kind of talked about a little bit it's super important um and also using the information that you have on them to drive what that user sees so using user criteria to tailor what is presented in a news Banner or what announcements they get just to make sure that anytime you actually surface something to a user it's actually relevant to them and they don't get kind of information overload or information fatigue where they stop actually looking and one time it's real actually relevant and important they're going to miss it because they're so tired of just looking at it and lastly making sure that um the like the like metadata the tags the keywords that you have for your knowledge base your service catalog and mentions what the user will actually say so if someone types in a request such as I need to reset my RSA token that that information actually gets presented to them so that's via search virtual agent if you're familiar with virtual agent the natural language understanding component of that the nlu model that's very much what we're talking about here where it's making sure that you are able to cover each potential occurrence and making sure that you know each way that the user can say it will actually lead to the outcome that they need next up don't follow the old chart so making sure that content is easily discoverable and organized in a way that actually makes sense to a user so what this really means is kind of hiking back to that example before where they submitted something related to their I.T department and something related to the HR department they don't care that you know there's separate parts of the organization um just try and you know keep things consistent keep things organized in a way that you know the user can just find what they need and this might be you know writing content and the user's language and this just means avoiding acronyms or jogging that you know only an I.T professional will know because this is an I.T request No it should be consistent um tone grammar everything like that try to maintain that across each separate departments components that are presented but then the service portal just to give that consistent experience and making sure that the user knows what to expect the third one on here that covers the logical content structure so this is especially relevant with the employee Center where you go in and Define taxonomy what appears in that Mega menu that you might have seen in the example that it gave or it's you know a drop down list of all the different categories making sure that it makes sense to the user and that the user knows how to navigate your website and find the content they need um it's super super important and can really be surfaced with those usability studies that we mentioned earlier foreign ers one example of this that I like to give is it drives me nuts when I'm logged in to a website I have my user profile all my information is on there and they asked me to populate my name on the field or populate my email a little time you'll have that information so help them out a little bit you know pre-populate what you can try to make sure that they are just in that that your users actually just verifying data um and only providing what is actually net new um it really just makes experience so much better so in terms of best practices in here so you know keeping it simple um you know use the data that you have use Integrations that you might be able to introduce in business rules just to reduce the need to ask user for information you just want them to get in and get out as fast as they can and you know it'll make everyone that much more happier um reducing technical jargon so making sure that the questions that you ask on the forms it sounds confusing or if there's a term or something that they might cause some confusion have a little tool tip or something just to explain what you're actually asking for and lastly complete collecting information in the right way so this is specifically relevant to service catalog so using variable sets really can ensure consistency across the catalogs and make sure that you the user if they open up a catalog item from one group and then they open the catalog item from another group that they get the same type of experience because the questions are similar as you know it just really helps build out a great user experience and it also helps your teens because they're not going to have to go back and ask the user for more information or ask them you know hey you'll email address and that you put on the form it's different to the email address we have for you like which one is it like little things like that can be avoided if you just go ahead and repopulate it it's one of my pet peeves when I'm a customer or I have to fill out forms if is if I'm already logged in to a web shop an online vendor or something and then I click on the contact form and they ask me for my email address and my name and I think well you already have it I am elected you should know who I am and how to contact me so uh that is definitely something and similarly for uh info like your manager your cost center the address to ship things to these things should be in your master data and you should have a system that determines what the master data is what where you have these uh this information saved to we want to know your best practices going beyond what we've just seen have you developed any best practices that you want to share with us or the other attendees or people who watch the recording later let put let us know put it in chat keep this up for a second and then I think we can move on yeah so I will jump to the next part and that is one of my favorite things is measuring success and I think we've seen some of that before already so let's take another peek at this so measuring success we've already kind of touched upon this but primarily look to use the feedback that you can gather and that we provide methods of you for Gathering within your service photos so that might be enabling feedback on your knowledge articles using the user experience analytics dashboard to understand how people are using your service portal and then also including the survey so this might be a survey once someone has completed using virtual agent or just even like a pop-up on the service portal home page if they visited three or four times um these are just different ways of measuring success and really looking when you've got all this data you really need to know how to break that down so we have another one what types of questions should you ask while reviewing usage data I love this one because it's not just the data you want to know where you're going with the data right here just some examples where it's like okay you can look to see what are users searching for uh like what's the most popular search we generally find you know if someone has a service portal for their it Department they're looking for password resets that's a main driver so can you highlight that item on the main page within your virtual agent can you have it appear straight away within a promoted topic um those are just some ideas uh people actually for the second question it's like are they finding helpful results when using the search operation and this is where the funnels from that use experience analytics dashboard might come in we can create a funnel to see okay how many people search with something then they actually went to a catalog item or how many just ended their Journey there um and then you can understand if you need to improve your keywords if you need to improve indexing of your search um there are some really a kind of more generic so just looking to see what is what isn't popular or what catalog item gets access the most and seeing if you can improve there so it really helps the prioritization of enhancements and then also just generally what are you just saying about service portal comment's always great you always learn a lot from them and reach out to them you know the people who write out an essay saying I just like ABC about your service photo bring them in for usability study because they actually yeah so actually sitting down one on one with them to see what they're doing within your portal and understanding you know getting that feedback from them is always a really great method of understanding where to go next okay service hold on and now the future of service photo I think everyone's been waiting for the question is a service Builder being deprecated no the short answer is no you might ask so okay but angularjs that's deprecated and the answer is we know um however we do maintain our own Fork of angularjs which we actually continuously maintain we've got the team that goes ahead and patches it make sure that it's up to date with the latest and security um and we plan to keep this up to date for the foreseeable future now if you're wondering about the particular version that we're on we will be saying on that particular version we don't have any kind of plans in the foreseeable future to actually update the library to the most late to the latest library of angularjs either so um I'd say basically like what you see is what you get for the next kind of interim but Safe Harbor on that you might also be wondering about UI Builder if you've played with that it's the new um it's a new interface where you can drag and drop and create new workspaces and little miniature portals you might have seen in there as well however even though it can be used to build portals it lacks a lot of features that we provide within the service model today and it's not at parity with what we currently offer within service photo so we really do not recommend using UI builder for an Enterprise level portal just because there's so many gaps today in that so a small departmental portal perhaps um and if you're interested in learning more if you search on servicenow community for UI Builder versus service portal I think is the name of the article it's written by Brad Tilton um he does some really really amazing job of breaking down when you should use each particular type so the UI Builder or the angular service folder I've been talking about today I know some of you might just want a newer experience so we are investigating options about what's coming next and we will be communicating news as it becomes available so keep an eye on the community hub um but the thing is whatever we release we have a lot of customers on service a lot of people are very dependent on the current technical only G stag and what they built out so we won't be leaving you in the lurch um so when it is something comes out you know we'll let you know and but you don't have to worry about um having to migrate we won't we won't be leaving you behind on that Journey when and if it arrives so looking for it in terms of what's actually next for a service portal so employee Center and the CSM CSP portals that I showed at the beginning of the session this we're going to receive major updates we're still investing heavily in building out these experiences um and they're both built upon our current version of service portal so the service Builder framework itself will also be receiving updates but they're more get towards quality of life enhancements so if you want to see an update on as I mentioned the angularjs library version what technology stack we use or the design tools themselves we won't be making any major updates there so if you are wanting a service portal that uses all react components we won't be making anything um any changes there however there's a caveat on that point because I get asked about a lot you can bring in react components there's a few blogs out there that you can do that you can search for and they will provide slightly different methods of bringing in that but it's not something we officially support so you have options but we don't officially support them I wanted to have that in there and in terms of what I mean by Ollie of Life enhancements for service oil you can see on the right here some potential new features we're kind of looking at is you know support for right to left languages um and enabling different methods of attaching various files to requests or catalog items anything like that and also updating you know how you can brand your AI search so we also working on features we are still building out new things but they're just not going to be anything too dramatic um so yeah and now we have to find more information please go to the servicenow community Hub um and look for service photo there's a wealth of material out there but um we also have now learning courses which are really really great provides you information on as a brand how to create a widget all that good stuff is in there I also have some documents on community relating to design guidelines development guidelines so if you just sign out with your service folder Journey or if you're doing anything extra any enhancements take a look you might find something that you know really helps in there yeah regardless I'll now hand over four questions thank you yeah we don't I don't see any uh further questions so far we've answered some as we went please try out or check in on the other academies that I hinted at especially the ones about next experience if you want to learn more about UI Builder our colleagues are also doing a live stream I think every other week on the servicenow dev program Channel called uni Builder live with Brett Tilton and Maria Gabriela and then Maria Gabrielle is also running the next experience Academy there's a huge fountain of of Articles out on the community in the next experience Center of Excellence written by Brett Tilton and Ashley Snyder thank you so much for joining us today I hope this session was helpful thank you so much Elizabeth for preparing this content and I hope that everybody has learned something about service portal today thank you so much have a wonderful day thank you everyone bye