Microsoft is transforming the experience of our internal IT helpdesk agents and, using ServiceNow IT Service Management, we’re improving the experience our employees have when they request IT help.
We’ve transitioned the traditional and custom IT tools and features in Microsoft service-desk into ServiceNow ITSM. This has led to innovation in many areas of our IT help-desk management, including improving accessibility, incident management, IT workflows and processes, service level agreements (SLAs), use of AI/ML, virtual agents, automation, and knowledge across the IT help-desk organization data visualization, monitoring and reporting.
In short, our strategic partnership with ServiceNow is helping us improve the efficacy of our internal IT help-desk environment and for our mutual customers.
Working together to accelerate digital transformation
Our Microsoft Global Helpdesk team supports more than 170,000 employees and partners in more than 150 countries and regions. We deploy this new ITSM environment at enterprise scale, supporting more than 3,000 incoming user requests each day.
We collaborate with ServiceNow as a partner to accelerate our digital IT transformation and continually increase the effectiveness of our IT service management. Our Global IT Helpdesk recognizes potential improvements, provides feedback to ServiceNow, and tests new features. We receive accelerated responses to our ITSM solution requirements while ServiceNow gets valuable, large-scale feedback mechanism to continuously improve their platform.
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Modernizing the internal support experience
In the past, when our internal support scale, business processes, or other factors demanded functionality that existing platforms and systems couldn’t support, our engineers would develop tools and applications to supply the required functionality. Many ITSM features at Microsoft were developed in this manner. With ServiceNow now providing the core ITSM functionality we need, we are working together to integrate our tools’ functionality into their platform, which provides a unified IT help-desk experience that is scalable with enhanced productivity and accelerated digital IT transformation.
ServiceNow enables Microsoft to integrate its digital environment with ServiceNow ITSM functionality and Microsoft uses out-of-the-box ServiceNow functionality whenever suitable. ServiceNow adds and improves functionality, often based on Microsoft feedback and development, and then Microsoft uses the resulting improved capabilities to replace internally developed tools and processes. This collaborative relationship on ITSM benefits both organizations and our mutual customers.
Collaborating to create rapid innovation
In some cases, Microsoft-developed tools are the starting point for new ServiceNow functionality, such as the recent implementation of ServiceNow ITSM Predictive Intelligence.
We initially built an experimental machine learning-based solution in our environment that automatically routed a limited number of helpdesk incidents in ServiceNow by using machine learning and AI. This reduced the amount of manual triage that our support agents had to perform and helped us learn about incident routing with predictive intelligence and identify innovation opportunities.
We then took those learnings and shared them with ServiceNow to help them make improvements to the ServiceNow ITSM Predictive Intelligence out-of-the-box platform tool. By progressing from our experimental solution to ServiceNow ITSM Predictive Intelligence, we benefitted from the out-of-the-box flexibility and scalability we needed to drive adoption of predictive intelligence within our helpdesk services landscape. We’ll use our work with ServiceNow ITSM Predictive Intelligence throughout this case study to highlight the core steps in our journey toward an improved internal support experience.
Establishing practical goals for modernized support
Predictive intelligence is one example among dozens of ITSM modernization efforts that are ongoing between ServiceNow and Microsoft. Other examples include virtual-agent integration, sentiment analysis of user interaction, anomaly detection, troubleshooting workflows, playbooks, and integrated natural-language processing. Enhancing our helpdesk support agent experience by using ServiceNow ITSM involves three key areas of focus: automation, monitoring, and self-help.
Automation
We’re automating processes, including mundane and time-consuming tasks, such as triaging incidents. Automation gives time back to our helpdesk agents and helps them focus on tasks that are best suited to their skill sets. Feature implementation examples include orchestration, virtual agents, and machine learning.
We’re using ServiceNow Playbooks for step-by-step guidance to resolve service incidents. Playbooks allow our agents to follow guided workflows for common support problems. Many playbooks, such as the password-reset process, include automated steps that reduce the likelihood of human error and decrease mean time to resolution (MTTR).
Monitoring
We use monitoring to derive better context and provide proactive responses to ServiceNow activity. Enhanced monitoring capabilities increase service-desk responsiveness and helpdesk agent productivity. Feature implementation examples include trigger-automated proactive remediation, improved knowledge cataloging, and trend identification.
Microsoft Endpoint Manager supplies mobile-device and application management for our end-user devices, and we’ve worked with ServiceNow to connect Endpoint Manager data and functionality into the ITSM environment. This data and functionality supplies device context, alerts, and performance data to ServiceNow, giving device-related details to support agents directly within a ServiceNow incident.
Self-help functionality
Self-service capabilities help our support incident requestors help themselves, by supplying simplified access to resources that guide them toward remediation. It frees up IT helpdesk agents from performing tasks that end users can do and lowers the total cost of ownership, as support-team resources can focus on more impactful initiatives. Feature implementation examples include natural language understanding, context-based interaction, bot-to-bot interactions, and incident deflection.
For example, the ServiceNow Virtual Agent integrates with Microsoft Teams for bot-to-bot interactions. Bot integration and bot-to-bot handoff enable us to continue using the considerable number of bots already in use across the organization, presenting self-help options for our users that best meet their needs. We have also collaborated with ServiceNow to create integration with knowledge and AI capabilities from Microsoft 365 support. Microsoft 365 service-health information, recommended solutions for Microsoft 365 issues, and incident-related data are available in ServiceNow to both end users and agents.
Examining the modern support experience in context
We have a holistic approach to unifying its internal service-desk platform under ServiceNow. The functionality and health of our Global Helpdesk organization drives the experience for our support agents and the people they assist. To Identify opportunities for improvement, we examined all aspects of our support environment, making observations about tool usage, overall experience of support agents, and potential gaps in the toolset that our support agents use. When thinking about new capabilities, such as AI and automation, we needed to understand how our people work. Why and how we perform certain tasks or processes can lose relevance over time, and a deviation from the original way in which we do something can potentially lead to inefficiencies that we must regularly evaluate and address. We placed these observations into the following categories:
- Comprehensive best practices. We’re encouraging our Global Helpdesk team to be a strategic partner in business, design, and transition of support at Microsoft, rather than simply focusing on tactical ticketing and related metrics. Our internal support experience improvements in ServiceNow ITSM go beyond ticketing processes and require a holistic view of all aspects of the support-agent environment. Additionally, implementing new technologies is only one part of the bigger solution in which it’s critical to verify and keep people accountable for adhering to best practices. We’re transforming our Global Helpdesk operations to provide strategic value and achieve business goals alongside the more tactical elements of service-desk operation, such as incident management and resolution.
- Interaction management. Examining how our helpdesk agents and the people they support use ServiceNow ITSM and its associated functionality to drive interface improvements. It also helps identify new modalities to connect our support agents to the issues that our users are experiencing. Our goals include increasing virtual-agent usage and reducing use of less efficient interaction modalities, such as fielding IT support requests over the phone.
- Incident management. Incident management is the core of ServiceNow ITSM functionality and forms the basis for our largest set of considerations and observations. We examine how we create and manage support incidents, triage and distribute them, and then move them toward the final goal of resolution. In all of this, we assess how Global Helpdesk performs incident management and where it can improve. It’s important to understand the use of data to aid incident resolution, and how to better automate and streamline incident processes and consolidate other elements of service-desk functionality into the incident-management workflow. There are many incident-management factors that we evaluate including identifying incident origin, integrating virtual-agent interactions, increasing contextual data in incidents, automating incident routing, deflection and resolution, and improving incident search functionality.
- Knowledge management. We’re improving how our helpdesk agents and users access knowledge for IT support. Consolidating external knowledge sources into ServiceNow centralizes our knowledge management effort and makes the knowledge they contain available across other service-desk processes, such as incident management. Among the factors we’re focusing on are standardizing knowledge article content, supporting proactive knowledge creation, improving knowledge self-service capabilities, and including related knowledge content for incidents.
- Governance and platform management. The overall management of the ServiceNow ITSM platform and how it interacts with our environment and integrates into outside data sources and tools helps Microsoft use ServiceNow data to improve other business processes. We’re focusing on improving formal business processes and integrating with other processes and technology while aligning with Microsoft’s broader business strategies and standards.
Creating value within the helpdesk support experience
Microsoft and ServiceNow are intentionally and thoughtfully continuing to improve the ServiceNow environment, both from the organizational perspective here at Microsoft and from the product perspective at ServiceNow. For each feature and business need that we evaluate, we examine the feature from all applicable perspectives. Our general feature evaluation and migration process includes:
- Evaluating business needs for applications and features. For each identified feature, we assess the associated business need. This helps us prioritize feature implementation and understand what we could accomplish based on available resources. ServiceNow Predictive Intelligence, our example in this case study, reduced mean time to resolution (MTTR) for incidents and freed up support-agent resources. These factors both positively influenced support agent efficiency and satisfaction. We’d already been using machine learning-based functionality, so the business need was clear.
- Determining product roadmaps, organizational goals, and support requirements. In this step, we examine a feature’s practical implementation. Understanding how we need to address a feature or feature gap often depends on product roadmaps and feature development in-flight within ServiceNow. Early access to ServiceNow roadmaps and the ServiceNow Design Partnership Program helps guide our decision making as we determine the evolution of features and how they align with our future vision for digital transformation. If ServiceNow is already developing a specific feature in ITSM space, we don’t worry about integrating or recommending our internally developed tools or functionality. However, we often contribute to the improvement of ServiceNow features based on our internally developed tools, as we did with ServiceNow Predictive Intelligence.
It can be complex to understand the state of ServiceNow with respect to a specific feature and its requirements. We must examine where we’ve customized ServiceNow ITSM to accommodate an internally developed solution and how we can roll back those changes when we retire the internally developed solution in favor of out-of-the-box functionality.
- Identifying risks, benefits, and effects of migration. Establishing required resource allocation and determining necessary skill sets for the migration process is critical to understanding how each feature migration might affect our service-desk environment and overall ServiceNow functionality. Specific factors we consider include licensing requirements and quality control checks, both of which greatly influence the speed and order of feature migration. We also assess the effects of retiring legacy/custom tools on the Global Helpdesk and other Microsoft teams. Many tools we use were widely adopted and instrumental to daily operations, so we must consider training and transition processes on a feature-by-feature basis. In some cases, a feature or tool’s addition or removal could cause a shift in business processes, so it’s critical that we understand the potential impact. We do this by examining feature migration in the context of organizational goals, standards, and best practices.
- Obtaining organizational support. One of the most crucial steps is to garner organizational buy-in. Although Microsoft and ServiceNow are strategic partners, it’s critical to get support from key stakeholders here at Microsoft, including our Global Helpdesk and Microsoft Digital process owners. Communication is critical. When we involve all stakeholders, we ensure that we account for all business and technical considerations.
Rather than getting approval at a high level for the entire ServiceNow support-improvement project, we instead obtain approval for small pilots that focus on fast delivery and high value. This demonstrates the potential for a feature’s broader adoption at the Global Helpdesk. In our predictive-intelligence example, we started by engaging the Global Helpdesk team that was using the experimental machine learning-based incident-routing tool. The existing experimental tool was only routing some incidents, so we proposed a pilot to route the remaining tickets using ServiceNow ITSM Predictive Intelligence. We worked very closely with our internal support team to ensure that the solution met their needs. The pilot demonstrated the tool’s effectiveness in daily operations and proved the tool’s capabilities in production use. This built confidence and trust in the tool and helped drive broader adoption across the organization.
- Establishing plans for transition, deallocation, and retirement of legacy tools and systems. We had critical decisions to make about retirement and deallocation of existing tools. Many feature transitions involved identifying how we would move or transform data. Addressing data access and security is a common challenge.
Additionally, with Predictive Intelligence, our team needs real incidents to train the Predictive Intelligence algorithms. This involves moving production data into a development environment, which has security implications. The feature team must proactively engage our Microsoft security team to provide appropriate information. ServiceNow supplies detailed platform-security documentation, which helps us obtain security-related approval. Also, transition often requires retraining. We must arrange training for users of legacy systems so they can use the new features in ServiceNow and understand how the transition might affect their daily activities and overall service-desk operations.
- Engaging in feature implementation. We implemented features following specific plans, processes, and best practices that we established. Implementation scope and effort varies depending on the feature, and in the case of Predictive Intelligence, the Microsoft development team began by creating a pilot. This enables the team to confirm that ServiceNow ITSM Predictive Intelligence can achieve the required level of routing accuracy. It also provided a proof of concept that enabled us to quickly find gaps in functionality.
Starting with a prototype means we then have a functional example that’s up and running quickly so we get early feedback on the out-of-the-box capabilities. We were able to start fast, iterate, and deliver a better solution more quickly. However, we also had to examine and account for scalability within the ServiceNow platform to ensure that the solution would work well when widely adopted.Predictive Intelligence went live with a small number of incident-routing destinations, which helped build the confidence of the service-desk team. We then expanded the number of assignment groups as we received positive feedback. The rollout required minimal organizational change management because Predictive Intelligence was automating an existing process and the service-desk team was already using an experimental AI tool for automated routing.
- Measure progress and review results. We measure all aspects of the feature-implementation progress. Identifying and enabling key metrics and reports helps build confidence and trust in each feature’s effectiveness. As we iterate changes and work through a pilot process for any given feature, we keep stakeholders involved and use our results to contribute to the broader digital transformation. It’s also critical for adoption and is an effective way to illustrate benefits and bring other teams onboard.
Integrating ServiceNow ITSM and Microsoft products
In addition to feature enhancement and growth of ServiceNow functionality, Microsoft and ServiceNow are working together to integrate our products with ServiceNow. This enables us to capitalize on their capabilities and make it easier for our customers at Microsoft to integrate ServiceNow into their environment. For example, device-management capability and reporting data from Microsoft Intune, Microsoft’s mobile device management platform, can integrate directly with ServiceNow. This integration improves contextual data within ServiceNow and extends ServiceNow’s capabilities by using Intune and Microsoft Endpoint Manager functionality on managed devices.
Our Microsoft Global Helpdesk team has observed significant benefits from the continued ServiceNow ITSM feature implementations, and we’re still working with ServiceNow on an extensive list of features that we want to implement. Some of the best benefits we’ve observed include:
- Increased business value. We’ve been able to retire custom solutions and the infrastructure that supports them, reducing total cost of ownership and management effort for legacy solutions. Consolidating our service-desk functionality in ServiceNow ITSM makes licensing and maintenance much more simple and more cost-effective.
- Reduced service-desk management effort. The various automation features we’ve implemented have reduced the effort our IT helpdesk agents exert, particularly with respect to mundane or repetitive tasks. AI and machine-learning capabilities have improved built-in decision making, reduced the potential for human error, and given time back to our helpdesk agents so they can focus on the work that demands their expertise. For example, ServiceNow ITSM Predictive Intelligence is routing incidents with 80 percent accuracy, saving considerable time and effort.
- Improved helpdesk agent experience. Unifying our tools and features within ServiceNow ITSM enabled us to create a more simple, easier-to-navigate toolset for our support agents. They can move between tasks and tools more effectively, which increases overall support responsiveness and makes our service desk more efficient.
- Reduced mean time to resolution. We’re experiencing a continual reduction in incident resolution as we integrate features and modernize the agent support experience. For example, ServiceNow ITSM Predictive Intelligence reduced MTTR by more than 10 percent, on average in our pilot project. Based on these numbers, we’re deploying Predictive Intelligence at a broader scale for Global Helpdesk.
While we’ve successfully migrated many internally developed capabilities into out-of-the-box ServiceNow ITSM features and tools, it is an ongoing process and we’re continuing to learn lessons about the migration process and successfully transforming the IT help-desk environment for greater efficiency and a more productive IT-agent experience. Some key lessons we’ve learned and continue to explore include:
- Start small and expand scope as a feature matures. We typically start feature implementation small with a single team or use-case scenario. We use pilot projects to validate a solution, prove feature completeness, and gather proof of concept to gain support from stakeholders. Each pilot project contributes to a broader improvement to ServiceNow functionality.
- Get buy-in from stakeholders early. Establishing organizational support is critical to the overall success of every feature implementation. We work hard to understand who our stakeholders are within Microsoft and make them aware of how a feature implementation might affect them—and ultimately improve our organization.
- Test scalability and establish monitoring early. Starting small results in many quick wins and rapid feature implementation. However, we must ensure that any capabilities we implement can scale to meet enterprise-level requirements, both in functionality and usability. Tracking metrics and maintaining accurate reporting using ServiceNow’s reporting capabilities provides concrete assessment of feature effectiveness as it increases in usage and scale.
- Don’t accept feature requirements at face value. Specific features are easy to quantify and qualify, but we always consider the bigger picture. We ask what business questions or challenges the requirements are addressing and then ensure our perspective always includes holistic business goals. We don’t simply want a granular implementation of a specific feature.
We’re working on a thorough list of feature integrations that include extensive use of AI and machine learning. This will simplify and strengthen predictive and automation capabilities in ServiceNow. We’re also investigating deeper integration between ServiceNow ITSM and Microsoft products including Microsoft 365, Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Azure.
We are excited that our joint efforts have introduced a rapid iteration of feature capability into the ServiceNow platform and the impact this brings to the ITSM industry.
