{"id":10081,"date":"2024-04-24T08:44:03","date_gmt":"2024-04-24T15:44:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/insidetrack\/blog\/?p=10081"},"modified":"2024-04-24T09:11:33","modified_gmt":"2024-04-24T16:11:33","slug":"using-microsoft-teams-and-servicenow-to-enhance-end-user-support-at-microsoft","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/insidetrack\/blog\/using-microsoft-teams-and-servicenow-to-enhance-end-user-support-at-microsoft\/","title":{"rendered":"Using Microsoft Teams and ServiceNow to enhance end-user support at Microsoft"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"MicrosoftOur Microsoft Digital Employee Experience team is improving our support experience by partnering with ServiceNow to incorporate modern support-agent functionality into our environment by using ServiceNow Virtual Agent and Microsoft Teams. As a result, our support team and the employees they assist have a more complete tool set, a simpler view into the support environment, and a more streamlined method for executing tasks and solving issues quickly.<\/p>\n

Understanding virtual-agent-based support at Microsoft<\/h2>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Improving the agent experience<\/h2>\n

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\u2019re working toward a more streamlined support experience for our support team and our users, including improved virtual-agent experiences.<\/p>\n

The preexisting virtual-agent interface\u2014one that Microsoft Digital Employee Experience developed and maintains\u2014was 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:<\/p>\n

Limited ability to innovate.<\/strong>\u00a0While 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\u2019s efficiency. It was difficult to keep functionality and feature availability current on a self-developed platform.<\/p>\n

Minimal integration and information reuse.<\/strong>\u00a0The virtual-agent experience wasn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

Limited virtual-agent support.<\/strong>\u00a0It was difficult to develop and maintain workflows for virtual-agent functionality and to provide the guidance and support that our live agents required.<\/p>\n

Scalability and performance issues.\u00a0<\/strong>Our previous platform didn\u2019t support the scalability and performance goals that we set for our infrastructure and tools.<\/p>\n

Creating a modern virtual-agent experience<\/h2>\n

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:<\/p>\n