I am still working in ServiceNow implementation. I was previously a solution architect, and now I work as a business process consultant.
I currently work with the Human Resources Service Delivery product, but I do consult on the other products whenever required.
I know the concepts, but I have not worked on the security operations or the cloud. I have conceptual knowledge of all these things, but I did not have a chance to work on these modules.
To give you a quick summary, ITAM covers HAM, SAM, and Enterprise Asset Management. I also work on Human Resources, ITSM, and in ITOM, I have Discovery, Service Mapping, Event Management and AI Ops. Apart from that, I work on the portal side, which is basically the service portals. Lately, I have been working quite a lot on the AI aspects. ServiceNow recently launched Build Agent, and Now Assist is available. I work on anything related to the generative AI of ServiceNow.
ServiceNow Virtual Agent is focused on the employees where it reduces time. In the traditional world, if you have a laptop and something is not working with it, or if you are looking for some documentation or a KB article, you have to rely on someone to reach out to them on MS Teams or some other chatting mobility app and then they would raise a ticket and go through their internal process. This does take time. With ServiceNow Virtual Agent, if you are looking for a KB article, you would go to your service portal and switch on the bot, which is normally available on the bottom right corner, and then you can start chatting with it. Based on the conversations that have been configured, ServiceNow Virtual Agent would save time. In this way, you are saving minutes to even sometimes hours.
Two years ago, it was more manual in nature where if someone was configuring ServiceNow Virtual Agent, they had to configure their topics and the learning for the virtual agent was quite limited. Now ServiceNow has come up with Now Assist and other features that are helping to shape ServiceNow Virtual Agent. The response time has increased. The number of conversations has increased. There were some close-ended conversations where if ServiceNow Virtual Agent was not able to detect something, it would immediately tell the employee that it cannot find this. But now it does a deeper search, does a recursive search, and tries many possibilities before it finally gives up. That is an added advantage with ServiceNow Virtual Agent and it has improved.
The only concern about ServiceNow Virtual Agent is that it helps in the notification, but in most companies, employees do not always work on ServiceNow. There are administrators and end users. What happens with end users is that if your screen is open with the service portal and ServiceNow Virtual Agent on your screen, you do get your notifications. But if you accidentally close the window or the browser and start to work on something else, even if ServiceNow Virtual Agent responds, the notification is not sent to that person. ServiceNow has changed the game by bringing Now Assist and other AI related aspects where they have leveled up on the virtual agent capability. I would say that ServiceNow Virtual Agent as an individual entity can be improved in certain aspects.
The biggest improvement needed for ServiceNow Virtual Agent is that it is currently only available on the service portal. If a person logs into ServiceNow and they are a fulfiller, in order to access ServiceNow Virtual Agent, they will have to open their service portal and keep it open until they receive the notifications. If ServiceNow Virtual Agent is available on the classic UI itself, the moment any fulfiller logs into ServiceNow, they do not have to additionally go on to the portal. That would be more helpful and would save some time. ServiceNow in general is doing a good thing across all the modules. I do not have any negative feedback to provide. The whole AI thing that has come after the Xanadu upgrade and then the Zurich upgrade, things are slowly improving and the way ServiceNow is building the build agent and other aspects, I do expect some really interesting and innovative features in the next year from the Australia release.
I have been working with ServiceNow implementation since 2016, which was the Eureka version. It has been almost nine to ten years working with the ServiceNow domain with different modules.
ServiceNow is a bit expensive compared to other products. However, I appreciate the offerings that ServiceNow has for the price. The biggest thing that I feel as a winner is that I have interacted with many customers on the same point and they have given me feedback that there is a tool which charges $10 and ServiceNow charges $100. Obviously there is a margin of $90, but with those $100, you are able to build something of your own on the platform through customizations and many out-of-the-box features. ServiceNow is expensive compared to other tools, but the scalability of ServiceNow is so tremendous that spending that money does not actually hurt the pocket of customers.
Sometimes customer service is not satisfactory. Customers want an immediate solution the moment they log a ticket. That does not happen because if I am a technical support person coming on a call with the customer to understand the product, most of the cases require an SME like a developer or a solution architect to understand the product because the skill sets are limited with the technical support, especially the L1 and L2s on the site. Sometimes for certain cases which are tricky, it does take a while. However, this is not a complaint or negative feedback. It is just the nature of work.
ServiceNow does have a list of templates that people use, and ServiceNow does not recommend customization. However, customization opens the world to many possibilities. For example, if a company is called ABC, it has certain processes that might not be the same as the processes other companies follow. There is a lot of customization that happens based on your employees and the nature of your work. In the banking domain, things are different. In a service industry, things are different. In manufacturing and healthcare firms, things are different. ServiceNow is able to support those customizations and cater to their employees.
I have some customers in Japan and China and also some people in some part of Europe like France and Spain. Not many people understand English. The natural language processing of translation provides things such as Mandarin, Japanese, French and Spanish. These translators can be integrated with ServiceNow Virtual Agent. This gives an additional advantage. If I am an employee who does not understand English, I do not have to be worried because I have the ability to translate and understand what ServiceNow is saying. In this way, ServiceNow is able to attract more customers.
A lot of automation is involved. I currently work in the service-based industry, and there is a concept of timesheet where I need to fill the number of hours I have worked on a daily basis. What I have noticed is that two years ago, if a person used to spend about ten minutes to seek particular information, such as reading a knowledge base article, earlier they had to reach out to someone, share the details, that person would read them, do their analysis and get back. ServiceNow Virtual Agent has reduced the time from ten minutes to a maximum of two to three minutes. That is seven minutes saved. The biggest factor that has changed is the whole turnaround time has come down from nearly five to six to seven minutes, which is a lot in the IT industry when you save time. The platform analytics that ServiceNow has enabled in the last one year is another improvement. Earlier people used to use regular reporting and then switch to performance analytics. Performance analytics is much more data-driven and a little tedious to configure. It is not as straightforward as reporting. With platform analytics, ServiceNow has taken all the abilities of performance analytics and put them in basic reporting. People only have to get versed with the new UI of platform analytics and they can create reports in the same way they used to create them. There is no additional learning involved.
Bots in general, whatever bots are available in the market, show ServiceNow Virtual Agent has changed the game in the process where it has understood what exactly the customer is requesting. Because it is inside ServiceNow, it is able to connect to all the modules such as knowledge base and finding incident tickets.
ServiceNow has a guided setup. Even for my customers for whom I do greenfield implementation projects, I recommend guided setup because it gives you a series of steps. If you miss something, such as if someone is configuring ServiceNow Virtual Agent for the first time, there is a guided setup in ServiceNow that would tell the customer exactly what is needed as a prerequisite. Once the prerequisites are satisfied, the installation happens and you can see it live. It also gives an option of loading demo data just in case someone is installing ServiceNow Virtual Agent on a lower environment and they can afford demo data. The setup and configuration is quite straightforward.
For my purchases, I have an account manager with ServiceNow. I send an email or have a conversation over a phone call and tell them my requirements. It is directly related to ServiceNow, and in my experience, I have not come across any third party involvement.
I have not come across any integration issues unless someone has told me they are all related to the internal networks and other connections. Nothing is related to ServiceNow.
