Understanding virtual-agent-based support at Microsoft

Our Global Helpdesk supplies support to these employees throughout more than 120 countries and regions worldwide. Global Helpdesk receives approximately 3,000 requests for support every day, and the ability to efficiently assess what help our users need and how we can provide that help are critical to the effectiveness of Global Helpdesk and our Employee Experience organization at Microsoft.

Improving the agent experience

One of the primary touchpoints for our employees has been agent-driven communication. Connecting to and speaking with a live support-team member has always been an important part of the end-user support experience here at Microsoft. As part of our ongoing digital transformation, we’re working toward a more streamlined support experience for our support team and our users, including improved virtual-agent experiences.

The preexisting virtual-agent interface—one that Microsoft Digital Employee Experience developed and maintains—was initially developed as an experimental solution. While the previous solution had worked well in the past, we were experiencing several challenges in using an internally developed, custom-built tool:

Limited ability to innovate. While we initially developed the previous virtual-agent tool to meet our needs at the time of its implementation, our needs changed over the years. The way our employees work also changed, and industry changes and technology advances affected our platform’s efficiency. It was difficult to keep functionality and feature availability current on a self-developed platform.

Minimal integration and information reuse. The virtual-agent experience wasn’t effectively integrated with many of our other support tools, including our service-management platform knowledge base. Our support team had to copy and paste support information into the agent and manually search for and enter ticket management data for each support request.

Limited virtual-agent support. It was difficult to develop and maintain workflows for virtual-agent functionality and to provide the guidance and support that our live agents required.

Scalability and performance issues. Our previous platform didn’t support the scalability and performance goals that we set for our infrastructure and tools.

Creating a modern virtual-agent experience

Our vision for a modern support experience involves providing our employees with easy-to-use, transparent, and integrated services by transforming how we deliver support capabilities across all digital interactions at Microsoft. As part of this vision, we examined how we could improve the virtual-agent process while enabling our continued digital transformation in this area. We established several goals, including:

• Increase information reuse. Invest in integrated tools that support connected and correlated data and the reuse of information across support processes. We wanted a solution that would integrate directly with our service-management platform and integrate with existing data in our support environment.
• Take advantage of existing partnerships and tool sets. As part of our vision for simplicity and transparency in our infrastructure, we wanted to use existing tools effectively and pursue partners that supply complementary features.
• Adopt commercially available tools with out-of-the-box functionality. We wanted to move to a commercially available product that was already in development for a large customer base. We wanted a solution that enabled agile development and also provided built-in support.
• Identify AI and machine-learning capabilities to streamline and improve support and employee experiences. Virtual-agent functionality was an important consideration for the new solution—whatever we chose needed to integrate AI and machine-learning tools to better inform the support process and better serve our Helpdesk users.

Combining ServiceNow and Teams

To begin the process of selecting a new platform, we used our challenges and goals to evaluate several potential solutions. The ServiceNow suite of capabilities now serves as our primary agent experience for live and virtual-agent support, and we use Teams as one of our most critical agent hosting environments. We’ve used ServiceNow IT Service Management for six years as our primary support-automation tool. Microsoft and ServiceNow have engaged in a strategic partnership to accelerate digital transformation for enterprise customers. As part of the partnership, we’re working together toward a common solution based on ServiceNow and Microsoft platforms, with a goal of building better products and improving customer experience for both companies.

By combining ServiceNow and Teams, we’ve created an agile support platform that easily integrates with our existing support environment and data. We’re using all the ServiceNow out-of-the-box features that fit our needs to ensure that our use-case scenarios are robustly supported. Our current ServiceNow implementation included several important milestones and challenges. Highlights from the implementation process include:

Aligning feature capabilities and requirements. We prioritized features and implementation timelines, noting what was necessary to decommission the previous solution and facilitate a smooth transition.

Establishing a crawl, walk, run approach. Our implementation started small, and we iterated from there. We incorporated quick-win features early, ensuring that we established sound implementation practices before moving on to larger and more important components.

Identifying and resolving Azure AD synchronization issues. Initially, Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) synchronization complexities made it difficult to fully integrate user data. However, through our partnership with ServiceNow and because of ServiceNow’s agility and large product support team, we received an update in the next release that fixed the problem.

Supplying direct agent integration across multiple contexts. While Teams is one of our primary agent interfaces, we’re also incorporating the ServiceNow Virtual Agent across many of our web-portal workspaces, offering in-context agent support to our employees within the application or interface that they’re using.

Integrating with Azure Cognitive Services components for intelligent virtual-agent functionality. We’re using the Azure QnA Maker service to supply natural-language FAQ support to the virtual-agent experience, using existing knowledge-base sources.

Results and benefits

Our new support-management platform has generated several benefits, for our business, our support agents, and our customers. These benefits include:

• Simplified interaction for our end-users. Our virtual agent usage has doubled during the first year using ServiceNow. More of our Global Helpdesk end-users are using the virtual agent to initiate support contact. Almost 50 percent of virtual agent-initiated issues are solved within the virtual agent context, without needing human involvement. The increase in virtual agent adoption decreases support costs and allows our live agents to focus on more complex issues. We expect virtual agent adoption and efficiency to increase as we improve functionality, build the virtual-agent interface into more of our end-user environment, and grow virtual-agent adoption as a replacement for other contact methods, such as email or phone calls.
• Increased future cost savings from the new solution platform. By implementing a software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution like ServiceNow, we benefit from the built-in resiliency, scalability, reusability, and feature set of a SaaS platform. We’ve also deprecated our internally developed tool, saving the associated infrastructure and maintenance costs.
• More effective self-service problem solving for our end-users. The ServiceNow virtual agent enables detailed workflow automation within the agent interface. We’re using that automation to create a better self-service experience that allows our users to resolve issues without live-agent intervention, giving more time back to the live agent.
• Improved live agent handoff. We’ve significantly improved integration between the virtual agent and our other support systems data. When the virtual agent transfers an end-user to one of our live agents, the live agent can access the virtual-agent chat transcript alongside the ServiceNow ticket and end-user information. This capability makes it easier to provide comprehensive support for the end-user in a live chat experience.
• More accurate metrics for end-to-end support processes. Due to integration with ServiceNow and other data platform, we can better understand the end-to-end support experience and identify opportunities for improvement and greater efficiency across the entire support landscape. This enables us to further reduce support costs and decrease support resolution times for our end-users.

We learned several important lessons throughout the implementation of the ServiceNow Virtual Agent with Teams at Global Helpdesk, including:

• Monitor the integration process carefully. Accurate monitoring was crucial to the success of our integration. By identifying issues with data integration, identity synchronization and general functionality, we were able to catch potential problems early in the integration process before they negatively impacted the end-user experience.
• Identify expected failure scenarios and prepare your team to address them. Unanticipated failures take more time and effort to identify and fix. Monitoring helped us understand the likelihood of certain failure scenarios, which we prepared for by using knowledge articles and performance dashboards.
• Identify where the natural-language understanding needs training. We found that effective training for natural-language understanding was critical to virtual-agent success. We tested and refined our training process for these models until we achieved an accurate and effective model that supplied optimal natural-language interactions for our virtual-agent users.

Moving forward

Implementing the ServiceNow Virtual Agent and Teams solution has created several key benefits already. One of the most significant benefits is the ability to quickly iterate and identify new features and improved functionality for the near future. We’re currently performing a post-implementation review to ensure that we incorporate our lessons learned into future platform refinements, and we’re working on several improvements:

• Integrated monitoring. We’re running a proof of concept to integrate monitoring into the virtual-agent experience on Teams and demonstrate how monitoring data integration into the agent experience can create a more proactive support environment.
• Sentiment analysis. We’re refining sentiment-analysis capabilities to determine the overall sentiment of users’ interactions with the agent, whether those sentiments are positive, negative, or somewhere in between. These sentiment scores help us evaluate overall satisfaction and ensure that agent interactions that require immediate attention are flagged immediately.
• 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 involves all recent and historical interactions, a record of the virtual-agent workflows that have been triggered, and any other valid data obtained from the virtual-agent experience.

Integrating ServiceNow Virtual Agent and Teams is moving us toward a single interface in the support experience, a complete tool set, a simpler view into the support environment, and a more streamlined method for executing support tasks. We’re using machine learning and predictive analytics to enable our agents to access all the information that they need to resolve an issue—including information that they might not know they need. We’re using existing ticket data to supply insights into the resolution process so that our agents can supply the quickest resolution possible. We’re implementing intelligent workflows that are automatically presented to the agent based on issue classification to help guide the agent through the troubleshooting process with the user. As a result, our support team is better equipped, our employees are better supported, and our business runs more smoothly.

• Unpack modernizing Microsoft’s internal Help Desk experience with ServiceNow.
• Explore rethinking software licensing at Microsoft with ServiceNow Software Asset Management.
• Discover instrumenting ServiceNow with Microsoft Azure Monitor.
• Discover enabling a modern support experience at Microsoft.
• Unpack how Microsoft’s Helpdesk is propelling the company forward during remote working.
• Explore rethinking Microsoft employee support with Microsoft Azure.

The post Using Microsoft Teams and ServiceNow to enhance end-user support at Microsoft appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

Our Software Licensing Service (SLS) is the Microsoft Digital Employee Experience team responsible for software asset management.

“When you think about software asset management, you want to track a license’s lifecycle from requisition through allocation and deployment,” says Patrick Graff, the senior service engineer leading the SLS team. “Then you need to maintain it until you can reclaim it at the end-of-life stage.”

If individual departments and employees manage their own software licenses, organizations are open to all kinds of inefficiencies and risks—not to mention a subpar experience for employees who need access to third-party software. Manually tracking the number of licenses enterprise-wide, total spend, and overall software entitlements is incredibly labor-intensive.

Under those fragmented circumstances, how can a procurement department know the total entitlements from a particular vendor? How do they ensure their company maintains the proper enterprise licensing position at scale? Do they know how many unallocated licenses are available? And how do they manage reclamation, reallocation, and rightsizing during renewal and true-up cycles?

SLS wanted an enterprise-level platform that would both streamline the employee experience and optimize license management. So they partnered with Microsoft Procurement and Infrastructure Engineering Services (IES) to implement a unified software catalog.

[Learn about streamlining vendor assessment with ServiceNow VRM at Microsoft. See how Microsoft is Modernizing the support experience with ServiceNow. Read about instrumenting ServiceNow with Azure Monitor.]

A strategic partnership drives software licensing excellence

Since 2015, we’ve used ServiceNow to automate our helpdesk support process. When they introduced their Software Asset Management (SAM) module, it was a natural fit for implementing a centralized software catalog.

“The scope of work and the objective resonated with SLS because they understood the pain points of using disconnected tools,” says Sherif Mazhar, principal product manager for the IES team partnered with SLS. “They were interested in consolidating those tools and gaining the ability to track license usage accurately.”

We started seeing better control, better insights, better reporting, and also better visibility into unused licenses and how we could reassign them.

—Sherif Mazhar, principal product manager, Infrastructure Engineering Services

Thanks to collaboration with ServiceNow engineering teams, ServiceNow features well-tuned, out-of-the-box compatibility with Microsoft technologies. They also maintain an enterprise roadmap to streamline large integrations.

The teams started small with a single license portfolio: Adobe Creative Cloud. Tools like Adobe Photoshop and Premiere Pro are essential for creatives, but many groups had purchased their own licenses on an ad-hoc basis.

Once the Adobe licenses were consolidated into ServiceNow SAM, the team saw rapid results. “The value realization was quick with Adobe,” Mazhar says. “We started seeing better control, better insights, better reporting, and also better visibility into unused licenses and how we could reassign them.”

Within 12 months, the team had cut back excess licenses across Microsoft, resulting in significant savings. With such a successful pilot already showing results, SLS decided to move forward with a more universal ServiceNow SAM implementation.

Implementing ServiceNow Software Asset Management across Microsoft

ServiceNow features several out-of-the box enterprise integrations, but the work of developing one process for license management required extensive collaboration between SLS and IES.

Several different technologies needed to come together to facilitate a unified experience:

• Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) connectors provide one-directional imports into ServiceNow, bringing relevant data into the ServiceNow instance from an SQL Server database and mapping it to ServiceNow’s SAM database.
• Microsoft SharePoint grants automatically provisioned access to relevant download files once the software is allocated to the end user.
• Microsoft Azure Active Directory (AAD) handles identity and access management for software acquisition, enabling single-sign-on (SSO) and multi-factor authentication (MFA) capabilities for cloud-based and SaaS tools.
• A Microsoft Teams integration for the ServiceNow Virtual Agent helps employees troubleshoot and seek support via chat within a Teams App.

Once the ServiceNow implementation was complete, the team needed to loop the whole project into the existing employee workflow by connecting it with internal procurement and IT portals. SLS ensured that employees felt at home in the new experience by unifying the catalog’s color coding and UI with the portals employees already know how to navigate.

The result is a streamlined experience for employees and a management environment that delivers optimization and compliance.

A transformative third-party software licensing experience

When one of our employees wants access to third-party software, they log in to the IT or procurement portal of their choice and navigate to the Unified Software Catalog in ServiceNow. From there, they simply find the software tool they need and submit a request.

If a piece of software requires no extra permissions, the employee can simply requisition it. Otherwise, they fill out a request form, which initiates an automated workflow that manages permissions, their device’s operating system, relevant purchase orders and cost centers, and our entitlements within that software portfolio.

The real power of the tool is that we can set up configurable workflows for different types of products.

—Tony Bouker, senior product manager, Infrastructure Engineering Services

When the license allocation is complete, the end user gets an email with installation instructions. They can then proceed to an automatically provisioned SharePoint folder to download and install the software.

For SaaS tools and cloud-based suites like Adobe Creative Cloud, the team has created another way to access their software. The system adds the employee’s alias to an internal identity group, which grants access through SSO powered by AAD.

“The real power of the tool is that we can set up configurable workflows for different types of products,” says Tony Bouker, senior product manager with IES.

Efficiency, optimization, and compliance

Microsoft SLS has integrated the software requisitioning process into the Bing search engine. Now, employees can search software titles through Bing, which then points to the Unified Software Catalog.

Employees no longer have to conduct manual, online searches for third-party software or send emails asking for requisitions. Now they simply search in Bing or head directly into the Unfied Software Catalog and initiate an automated requisition workflow.

For SLS, the outcomes are about data-driven insights and license consolidation. The team can track Microsoft’s overall licensing position across all third-party software without the need for time-consuming detective work or manual uploads. When the time comes for renewals and true-ups, that visibility is essential.

It also mitigates risk through robust governance and policy by reducing vulnerabilities, data breaches, and license compliance violations.

On a more strategic level, the tool helps SLS optimize our software licensing frameworks for individual providers. For example, if one employee uses several tools within a provider’s toolkit, the team has the data it needs to decide whether it’s more efficient to allocate those licenses individually or as part of an “all-apps” subscription.

On the macro level, it gives us the ability to negotiate volume licenses more accurately, at exactly the level that fulfils our organizational needs. Good data drives informed decision making.

As those optimizations scale, Graff estimates that we’re saving an average of 10 percent across all of our enterprise license positions. For an organization the size of Microsoft, that represents cost savings in the millions.

Beyond Microsoft, this implementation is laying the groundwork for a wide-ranging change in how enterprises manage their third-party software. “If you look at the Microsoft presence in the market, every single customer who’s using our technologies leverages our endpoint management tools for asset management and license tracking,” Mazhar says. “So this will open the door for a lot of opportunity for Microsoft, for ServiceNow, and for our customers.”

• Start small with a targeted publisher and gain early wins to build confidence with stakeholders.
• Have a close relationship with your partner teams so you can recognize needs and grab opportunities.
• Build out your key process areas first, and identify workflow patterns you can reuse to scale your software asset management program.
• Establish policies to make sure the changes you put into effect have teeth.
• When working with a third-party partner, make sure you have the right connections to ensure you can provide feedback at the right level.
• Ensure leadership understands your priorities so they can manage those relationships at the highest level.

• Learn about streamlining vendor assessment with ServiceNow VRM at Microsoft.
• See how Microsoft is Modernizing the support experience with ServiceNow.
• Read about instrumenting ServiceNow with Azure Monitor.

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