In the last couple of months, IT professionals and tech enthusiasts have spotted a rather uncommon brand name all over the industry blogs – Levi’s. Moreover, even Microsoft itself talked about it on its official website.

Microsoft is not going to launch its winter collection in cooperation with Levi’s. At least, not this time. But on the contrary Levi’s, known as Levi Strauss co., implemented the integrated its app ServiceNow into Microsoft Teams. It led to a better employee experience, which resulted in pushing their internal customer service rate CSAT to 100% for the first time. 

What is this new ServiceNow app that everyone has been talking about? And what is this Levi Strauss experience that Microsoft is so proud of? This is what we’ll be discussing in our article today. 

Microsoft Teams, a collaborative platform on its own, expanded its user experience with the integration capabilities brought by ServiceNow. When the latter released its new collaborative app for its Employee Center. The new Employee Center can be embedded into Microsoft Teams to provide a single information hub across company departments.

What is ServiceNow?

ServiceNow is no longer exclusive to IT services. The company started expanding its workflows to cover more departments. This was corresponding to today’s business world needs. Also, its strong infrastructure made such expansion possible.  The ServiceNow Employee Center app organizes the information transmission between legal, procurement, facilities, human resources, and IT departments. This raises the productivity of team members working in the same company while interacting with each other and external stakeholders.

With this integration, ServiceNow makes addressing and solving problems by the management team more efficient. Chatting and communication channels now have the chat-to-call feature allowing dynamic invitations into Microsoft Teams calls from chats. Notifications, chatbots, integrated meetings, and much more are all features that you can find in the new collaborative app.

“Employees simply aren’t going back to old ways of working, which is why employers must provide the digital workflows and collaboration tools to make them productive in any workplace environment — whether that’s fully remote or in an office,” said Blake McConnell, senior vice president of employee workflow products at ServiceNow. 

Back to Levi’s. The company applied the ServiceNow virtual Agent in Teams to fasten the workflow of handling requests for their employees worldwide.

Now that you have read this far, you might be questioning yourself about the possibility, efficiency, and feasibility of embedding this new app into your organization. So, let’s walk you through more details about it. 

What does ServiceNow do?

ServiceNow in general is a cloud-based customizable system. It allows managing workflows and brings everyday processes online by turning assets and services into small processes and operations that can be controlled and managed by users. It’s more like a development environment where users can create and implement applications to automate workflows across multiple departments. It forms an information hub that connects individuals and organizes their interactions towards processing incidents, solving problems, and adapting changes.

For example, employees can use ServiceNow for these purposes and much more:

• Create a request to order a service/product
• Arrange job interviews with potential candidates
• Request document approvals from other departments
• Organize the onboarding process for new employees
• Process the steps of a shared project between departments

Different departments of any company need to exchange information and interact with each other to successfully execute shared projects and tasks. ServiceNow provides a unified location for all the information of these departments. It organizes the ticketing requests between them to ensure smooth delivery of results. Advanced solutions like the AI engine and machine learning take the user experience to a new level. It increases efficiency and reliability.

Driving a successful workflow is the cornerstone of driving a successful business. It helps enhance the employee and customer experiences at the same time. Workflows are the key focus points of ServiceNow.

The added value of ServiceNow

Following up with daily activities could be resource-consuming. Employees have to file requests and wait for approvals and edits. And the bigger the enterprise, the more workloads get associated with every task. For instance, hiring new employees becomes an exhausting process when you have to migrate them with their tasks and working platforms. ServiceNow provided the perfect solution by turning all these requests and steps into predefined workflows that can be customized by system users themselves.

Each workflow is presented as an application that can engage multiple departments, reach required information, allow tracking, and communications. Users can create these workflows easily with a code-free development model. The user-friendly interfaces made ServiceNow scalable to large enterprises and also suitable for smaller ones. Back to the employees onboarding example. The HR department can create an onboarding application that summarizes the steps required from each new employee and connects it with other departments.

Tasks you can do:

• Ask the employee to upload personal documents. Then it’ll send them to the legal department, store them in drive, and notify the specialist.
• Ask the employee to provide a payroll bank account. Ten it’ll send it to the financial department, update the payroll pipeline, and notify the accountants. It might even integrate with the payment method and place the account there directly.
• Request creating an email account, and other access credentials from the IT department, then inform the employee back about everything. Might even track the access to make sure everything went fine.
• Ask the employee to upload a personal photo. Then it’ll send it to facility security representatives and might identify the face in security systems for future access.
• Everything above combined with the ability to ask questions, search in knowledge bases, benefit from others’ experiences, and communicate with others.

These should’ve been done by the HR department before and organized between departments in a time-consuming way. But with ServiceNow, the workflow can be created, automated, and controlled to ensure a better quality of work for everyone. Can you imagine how many other workflows you can automate in your company?

The benefits of the ServiceNow app

The new collaborative app with Teams is the result of over a decade of partnership between Microsoft and ServiceNow. The newly introduced app benefits from the efficiency of both platforms to bring users together. 

The app will facilitate the use of ServiceNow’s built-in workflows for HR, legal, and IT departments, as well as offering a virtual agent experience integrated with these workflows and combined with Teams translating features. Moreover, the new notification system will be functional from inside the Teams platform to avoid missing any important updates. ServiceNow app will also support migrating incident processing details into Teams communication channels to benefit from its collaborative environment and fasten solving tickets and problems.

The app will offer the employee center, an all-in-one control room to search for information and manage user requests across various company departments. This will cut the time employees spend solving problems and getting help. It will also provide the employee journey management, which guides employees through the workflows connecting multiple departments at the same time.

“By embedding ServiceNow Employee Center within Microsoft Teams, we are improving the employee experience no matter where they’re working. Employees can act on the right information at the right time within the tools they’re already using. It is imperative to help employees find better balance and keep them creative, productive, and engaged.” said Blake McConnell, senior vice president of employee workflow products at ServiceNow.

How can you use the ServiceNow app?

Implementing ServiceNow Virtual Agent is very simple. Log in to Teams, go to the tab bar and click on the + icon to add tabs, search for ServiceNow, and simply add it with one click. Activate the ServiceNow account in Teams before you proceed to the next step.

This unique innovation between Teams and ServiceNow will take support functionalities to a new level. It will enable a smarter, more in-depth support experience. This is not just a ticketing tool implemented in a collaborative environment, but a complete solution based on the latest technologies of machine learning. It will help users find the information they need, not the information they want. 

Scaling ServiceNow with Collaboration templates

As you can see, ServiceNow covers a wide range of realms from IT to legal and HR. It can be used across different departments, so you may need to add the app to a number of your teams and channels. You can either add it to each one of the relevant teams manually or use Collaboration Templates by SalesTim and scale the process. SalesTim allows you to templatize the whole process, so you do the work once and all the teams that need ServiceNow will have it. 

For example, templates can come to your rescue when planning onboarding. To make the whole process fast, smooth, and of course, efficient, you create a structured workspace for it with Collaboration Templates and then duplicate it for each new hire. The workplace will include all the relevant channels, tasks, document templates, and tabs such as ServiceNow. The templates provide not only structure but also reduce the workload of your HR and IT teams and make the onboarding experience much more organized and pleasant for your new hires. Read more about onboarding new employees via templates here.

Contact our team today to learn more.