{"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":"
Our 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
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
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 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 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\u2019ve 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\u2019re 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.<\/p>\n By combining ServiceNow and Teams, we\u2019ve created an agile support platform that easily integrates with our existing support environment and data. We\u2019re 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:<\/p>\n Aligning feature capabilities and requirements.<\/strong>\u00a0We prioritized features and implementation timelines, noting what was necessary to decommission the previous solution and facilitate a smooth transition.<\/p>\n Establishing a crawl, walk, run approach.<\/strong>\u00a0Our 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.<\/p>\n Identifying and resolving Azure AD synchronization issues.<\/strong>\u00a0Initially, 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\u2019s agility and large product support team, we received an update in the next release that fixed the problem.<\/p>\n Supplying direct agent integration across multiple contexts.<\/strong>\u00a0While Teams is one of our primary agent interfaces, we\u2019re 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\u2019re using.<\/p>\n Integrating with Azure Cognitive Services components for intelligent virtual-agent functionality.<\/strong>\u00a0We\u2019re using the Azure QnA Maker service to supply natural-language FAQ support to the virtual-agent experience, using existing knowledge-base sources.<\/p>\n Our new support-management platform has generated several benefits, for our business, our support agents, and our customers. These benefits include:<\/p>\n 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\u2019re currently performing a post-implementation review to ensure that we incorporate our lessons learned into future platform refinements, and we\u2019re working on several improvements:<\/p>\n 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\u2014including 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\u2019re 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.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Our 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, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":133,"featured_media":10085,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"_hide_featured_on_single":false,"_show_featured_caption_on_single":true,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[114,649],"coauthors":[646],"class_list":["post-10081","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-microsoft-teams","tag-servicenow","program-microsoft-digital-technical-stories","m-blog-post"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\nCreating a modern virtual-agent experience<\/h2>\n
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Combining ServiceNow and Teams<\/h2>\n
Results and benefits<\/h2>\n
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\nWe learned several important lessons throughout the implementation of the ServiceNow Virtual Agent with Teams at Global Helpdesk, including:<\/p>\n\n
Moving forward<\/strong><\/h2>\n
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