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How Useful Is The Servicenow Integration With Microsoft Teams For Business?
Businesses require seamless workflows to connect people, systems and functions across their organization. ServiceNow's digital workflow management solution is ideal for managing all processes and workflows across your company - unleashing IT's full power while improving employee satisfaction and increasing customer loyalty.
ServiceNow is an outstanding IT service management platform, but your employees cannot collaborate on it effectively.
Productivity could suffer greatly should they switch over to another platform as an alternative form of collaboration; is there a viable solution available?
Microsoft Teams, the premier collaboration software, makes a perfect complement for ServiceNow. When combined together, ServiceNow and Microsoft Teams allow businesses to enhance automation processes, streamline workflows and increase overall business productivity.
Benefits For Businesses Of Servicenow And Microsoft Teams Integration
These are some of the benefits businesses can enjoy with this integration.
- Workflow management and collaboration can be done on the same platform.
- Increase visibility of tickets/requests and communication effectively.
- Automate the recording of activities and the maintenance of the ticket description, including its history.
- Prioritise complex tasks.
- Close tickets and resolve them faster.
- Enhance employee satisfaction and productivity by enhancing the service desk's productivity.
Servicenow Teams Integration - A Game Changer!
Allowing users to open tickets within Teams makes life simpler for all involved parties, enabling agents to communicate directly with employees, make requests or update existing requests while closing tickets with history attached for future reference.
This tool empowers agents to manage complex incidents by notifying all relevant parties about them, providing updates as appropriate and communicating directly with employees involved.
Agents may chat directly with those directly affected or involved without needing to switch platforms - making for smooth meetings, chat sessions and collaboration sessions without disruptions!
ServiceNow and Microsoft Teams integration is designed to speed up resolution times and collaboration, helping teams better collaborate.
Through automated conversations, you can retrieve information about tickets quickly. Incidents can also be addressed quickly by notifying everyone immediately of what has transpired and communicating the event immediately.
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This Is How Servicenow And Teams Integrate!
Integrating ServiceNow predefined API and MS Teams's Graph API has allowed us to display ticket descriptions in Teams when new tickets are created, create teams with all members involved to collaborate on each ticket, convert chat sessions into HTML files for PDF creation and save as attachments on incidents; once closed tickets will be archived for future reference.
Create individual channels for every incident or, use shared ones between IT and Development teams, or form private group channels and only add members pertinent to it (if that's what suits).
If privacy is key for you, then create private group channels by inviting only relevant members.
If your company utilizes both ServiceNow and Microsoft Teams, integration could increase productivity significantly and enhance ROI and efficiency of both entities.
Automating redundant tasks and increasing transparency are surefire ways to boost employee experience; make the investment worth your while today!
Why Should Servicenow Be Integrated Into Microsoft Teams?
ServiceNow is an industry-leading digital workflow management platform helps organizations deliver exceptional experiences to employees and customers.
Microsoft Teams is an online hub designed for teamwork, collaboration, communication and productivity regardless of device or location - connecting both systems allows organizations to take full advantage of both systems' best features to optimize workflows in harmony with one another.
Microsoft has integrated ServiceNow and Teams so our employees are more productive. On our blog, we discuss how this integration improves end-user support.
This article will outline some of the advantages associated with pairing ServiceNow and Microsoft Teams together, along with an easy integration method and where more information may be found.
Benefits Of Using Servicenow With Microsoft Teams
ServiceNow is a great tool for Microsoft Teams.
- Increase employee satisfaction and productivity. Employees gain access to ServiceNow's leading workflows across HR, IT and law without switching apps or having to sign in multiple times from Teams without switching applications or signing multiple times themselves. Employees can submit requests, get updates and respond to notifications all from within Teams without switching apps - increasing efficiency while decreasing friction and frustration levels for agents. This improves efficiency as well as employee satisfaction!
- Improve collaboration and communication. Teams can more efficiently process service requests and incident reports with ServiceNow's meeting integration for Teams. Teams can directly incorporate incident information and communication tasks into meetings for easier sharing, rapid resolution, and chatbot assistance (if necessary). Chatbots allow team members to contact virtual agents if assistance is required or escalate easily.
- Increase agent performance and efficiency by using ServiceNow's Personal App in Teams. Agents can effectively manage their workload, track performance and access relevant data using ServiceNow actionable notifications for incidents or service requests and using Microsoft Graph integration for scheduling meetings between customers and colleagues within ServiceNow itself.
- Take advantage of collaborative apps. ServiceNow Employee Center was one of the initial apps released to customers as part of Teams' collaborative apps category, featuring rich collaboration experiences such as chats and channel meetings, allowing seamless data and process integration and creating a consistent service experience across apps.
Integrate Servicenow And Microsoft Teams
It is quick and easy to integrate servicenow it automation with Microsoft Teams.
These are the steps that you must follow:
- Download the ServiceNow app for Teams. You'll need your ServiceNow credentials to access and grant permissions for your data. When purchasing, go into your Teams App store.
- Customise app settings. Customize the settings of the app according to your individual needs and preferences, such as activating or disabling features like meeting integration, chatbots and personal apps; actionable notifications may also be turned on or off as desired.
- Open the app. Access the app through Teams' left-sidebar or its dedicated app bar at the bottom right corner of any chat or channel, and type @ServiceNow in your message box to gain access. You may also type out commands directly within it!
Why Servicenow And Microsoft Teams Integration Is A Gamechanger
Microsoft Teams and ServiceNow work effectively to solve issues by embedding workflows into this collaborative environment.
IT and HR departments, for example, can continue using ServiceNow while simultaneously working directly within Microsoft Teams on solving any related problems that may arise. Customers of ServiceNow Paris or later can benefit from using Now Virtual Agent with Teams to streamline automated conversations and quickly gain information from ServiceNow tickets.
Generally, incident management only has limited possibilities for instantaneous communication with those involved. Creating and follow-through on tickets can require significant time and effort from users, with ticketing systems either hosted internally or accessed via existing VPN locations requiring login credentials for use; raising tickets when on the move or meeting can be particularly daunting.
Microsoft Teams makes ticket creation significantly simpler for its users as many corporate devices, such as laptops and smartphones, already feature communication and collaboration software installed.
Microsoft Teams allows a user to fill out a form with details, and an automatic ticket will be created in ServiceNow with all fields automatically filled out based on what was entered in Microsoft Teams' form. An efficient ticket creation process should not involve users having to log on to an internal site and, access pages through a VPN, then create tickets once they provide all their details.
Once a request has been created with the ServiceNow-Microsoft integrated solution, a communication channel in Microsoft Teams will be set up between user and agent, allowing the sharing of screenshots or details that help reduce the resolution times of an incident.
Using Teams Chat-to-Call integration, agents can communicate more seamlessly with employees by engaging them in chat sessions within Microsoft Teams, making requests for changes and attaching transcripts of conversations directly from Teams to tickets.
They are always equipped with up-to-date information thanks to screenshots and comments attached directly to tickets; using the Chat-to-Call feature, they can invite employees directly from chat for Microsoft Conference Call conference calls with features like video calling and screen sharing to quickly resolve their issues.
Microsoft Teams becomes an effortless frontend platform to open, update and close tickets when integrated with ServiceNow's ticket management capabilities.
Users don't need to switch platforms or learn new tools to report incidents; ServiceNow provides an improved user experience in incident reporting.
Enhancing End-User Support With Microsoft Teams And Servicenow At Microsoft
Microsoft Digital Employee Experience Team works closely with ServiceNow and modern support-agent capabilities such as ServiceNow Virtual Agent to enhance our employees' support experience.
Through this partnership, they now benefit from accessing more comprehensive toolsets with easier views into support environments for more streamlined execution of tasks and resolution of issues.
Understanding Virtual Agent-Based Support At Microsoft
Global Helpdesk supports employees across more than 120 countries around the globe. It receives approximately 3,000 support requests daily from employees around the globe.
Assessing what our users require quickly and offering solutions is paramount in both the Global Helpdesk's effectiveness and our Employee Experience Organization at Microsoft.
Improving agent experience
Agent-based communication has always been one of the primary points of interaction for Microsoft employees and users, placing great value in quickly connecting and speaking directly with one of our live support team members.
As part of Microsoft's ongoing digital transformation initiative, we strive for an enhanced virtual agent experience as part of this streamlined support service model for teams and users.
Microsoft Digital Employee Experience designed a virtual agent interface as an experiment. While our previous solution worked successfully, using an internal, custom-made tool presented several challenges.
Limited Innovation Ability.
Although we initially designed and implemented our previous virtual agent tool to meet our requirements, our needs changed considerably over time as employees' work habits changed as industry and technological changes impacted its efficiency; maintaining functionality and features was difficult on a platform we developed internally.
Limited Integration And Reuse Of Information.
Virtual-agent experiences were not seamlessly integrated with our other support tools, such as the knowledge-base platform; therefore, the support team had to manually enter ticket management information for every support request they handled.
Limited Support For Virtual Agents.
Maintaining workflows and offering guidance and assistance to our live agents can be challenging.
Performance and Scalability Issues. Our previous platform needed to meet our scalability and performance goals for infrastructure and tools.
Create A Modern Virtual-Agent Experience.
Microsoft envisions modern customer experiences by providing employees with integrated, easy-to-use services that are transparent.
We do this through the digital transformation of all support interactions across digital interactions. To realize our vision of modern customer experiences, Microsoft investigated ways it could optimize virtual agent processes while supporting digital transformation across these areas and setting goals that included:
- Increase the reuse of information. Investment in software that supports connected and correlated information and reuse of data across support processes was imperative to meeting our support processes efficiently and client demands for services. Our Service-Management platform was integral in connecting to existing data in our Support environment seamlessly, but an integrative software solution would allow for even further data reuse across support processes.
- Use existing toolsets and partnerships. As part of our vision, we wanted to leverage existing tools and partners to add complementary features supporting it.
- Adopt commercially available tools and have out-of-the-box functionality. We aimed to use products already being developed for large client bases, thus requiring agile development with built-in support mechanisms for customer support services.
- Find AI and machine learning capabilities to improve employee and customer experiences. Virtual-agent capabilities were an integral element in selecting the ideal new solution. AI and machine learning tools should enhance our support process and better meet our Helpdesk customers' needs.
Using Servicenow Teams
As part of our selection process, we evaluated multiple possible solutions based on our goals and challenges to select our preferred one.
Currently, Teams serves as our agent hosting environment while ServiceNow IT Service Management is our main automation platform; over six years, this tool has provided support automation. Microsoft and ServiceNow have partnered to accelerate digital transformation for enterprise customers; part of that partnership involves co-developing an approach using servicenow service management suite platforms alongside those provided by Microsoft to create better products while improving customer experiences.
At our support platform, we designed something agile and seamless with our support environment, using only features provided by ServiceNow that fit with our specific use cases to meet robust support.
This deployment included several milestones and challenges, notable highlights of which include:
Aligning features, capabilities, and requirements. Considerations were given to how best to decommission and transition away from our previous solution, with features prioritized and timelines established accordingly.
Starting small and iterating as we went along was crucial in creating an efficient process and solid implementation before embarking on larger components.
We focused on quick wins as an indicator of successful implementation before expanding.
Resolving Azure AD sync issues. At first, Azure Active Directory's (Azure AD) complex synchronization issues made it challenging for users to integrate their data.
Thanks to our partnership with ServiceNow and their large product support team, this issue was fixed with the next software version.
Providing direct agent integration in multiple contexts. Teams are our primary agent interface, but we increasingly use ServiceNow's Virtual Agent in many of our workspaces on web portals for employee support within specific applications or interfaces they may be using.
This enables us to deliver agent assistance directly into their experience using them.
Integrating Azure Cognitive Services components to provide intelligent virtual-agent functionality. Azure QnA Maker uses existing knowledge base sources to provide natural language FAQ support for virtual-agent experiences.
Benefits And Results
The new platform we implemented to manage our support has brought many benefits for us, our agents and our customers.
These benefits include:
- Our end users will benefit from a simplified interaction. ServiceNow doubled our virtual agent usage within its first year. More and more Global Helpdesk users were turning to virtual agents as a method to contact support; initiated issues are resolved without human interaction, and costs are reduced significantly, giving live agents more time for dealing with complex matters. Adoption and efficiency will increase as we improve functionality and integrate virtual-agent features more deeply into end-user environments.
- The new platform will increase future cost savings. Implementing a software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution like ServiceNow enabled us to reap the advantages of its built-in resilience, scalability, reusability and feature set; deprecating our internal tool also saved on infrastructure maintenance costs and costs associated with depreciating it.
- Self-service solution that is more effective for our users. ServiceNow virtual agents enable detailed workflow automation within the agent interface, creating an enhanced user experience while freeing up time for our live agents to focus on other areas. This enables ServiceNow virtual agents to give a much greater degree of assistance without needing a live agent at every turn; we can devote this extra time and attention to more pressing matters that might need attention immediately.
- Handoff between live agents improved. Integration between our virtual agent data and other support systems has been significantly strengthened. For instance, using ServiceNow to transfer users to live agents allows the virtual agents to view transcripts of chat sessions between themselves and end-users, making comprehensive customer support in an online chat environment simple and hassle-free.
- Accurate metrics for the end-to-end process of support. Now, we can better comprehend end-to-end customer support and identify improvement areas while simultaneously decreasing our support costs and response time for end users' issues.
During the implementation of ServiceNow Virtual Agent at Global Helpdesk, we learned several important lessons, including:
- Be sure to monitor the integration process. Integrating successfully was dependent upon precise monitoring. We could ensure its successful completion by identifying issues related to data integration, identity sync, and general functionality.
- Prepare your team for failure scenarios that you expect. It takes more time and energy to fix unanticipated problems. Monitoring enabled us to understand the likelihood that certain failure scenarios would occur, and we prepared by using performance dashboards and knowledge articles.
- Determine where training is needed for natural-language comprehension. Effective training in natural-language understanding is critical for virtual agent success. Our training process was refined and tested until we had a model that provided optimal natural-language interaction for our virtual agent users.
Moving Forward
Implementation of ServiceNow Virtual Agent and Teams has already produced multiple key benefits. One major perk has been being able to iterate new features or enhance functionality within short cycles quickly, and we are conducting post-implementation review processes so we can incorporate any lessons learned into future platform refinements.
- Monitoring integrated. We are running a proof-of-concept to integrate monitoring in the virtual agent experience on Teams. This will demonstrate how monitoring data can be integrated into an agent's experience and create a proactive support environment.
- Sentiment Analysis We are improving our sentiment analysis capability to determine whether the users' interactions with agents were positive or negative. These scores allow us to evaluate satisfaction levels and flag interactions with agents that need immediate attention.
- Bot-to-bot integration. We're improving the virtual-agent-to-live agent handoff process that will seamlessly transfer a support user to a live agent if the user's issue isn't resolved in the virtual-agent experience. This handoff includes all recent and historical interactions, a recording of the triggered virtual agent workflows, and any other valid information obtained from the virtual agent experience.
ServiceNow Virtual Agent provides teams with a single support interface and comprehensive tools, simplifying views into their environments and expediting support tasks more efficiently.
Machine learning and predictive analysis allow our agents to access information they may not know they need thanks to existing ticket data for analysis purposes; our agents use these insights into resolution processes to provide swift resolution services. Intelligent workflows will be provided automatically to our agents based on issue classification. This will assist them during troubleshooting with users and keep our support staff properly educated; our employees now enjoy increased support, and business runs more smoothly overall.
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Conclusion
Integrating Microsoft Teams and ServiceNow into one seamless system can increase productivity while streamlining workflow.
powered by AI, connects these apps seamlessly to automate repetitive tasks and reduce manual effort, ultimately leading to enhanced team collaboration. Microsoft Teams and servicenow teams integration can bring numerous advantages for small and large enterprises.
