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Microsoft is transforming the experience of our internal IT helpdesk agents and, using ServiceNow IT Service Management, we\u2019re improving the experience our employees have when they request IT help.<\/p>\nMicrosoft is transforming the experience of our internal IT helpdesk agents and, using ServiceNow IT Service Management, we\u2019re improving the experience our employees have when they request IT help.<\/p>\n
We\u2019ve 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
[Explore how we\u2019re streamlining vendor assessment with ServiceNow VRM at Microsoft<\/a>. | Discover how we\u2019re instrumenting ServiceNow with Microsoft Azure Monitor<\/a>. | Unpack how we\u2019re using Microsoft Teams and ServiceNow to enhance end-user support<\/a>.]<\/em><\/p>\n In the past, when our internal support scale, business processes, or other factors demanded functionality that existing platforms and systems couldn\u2019t 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\u2019 functionality into their platform, which provides a unified IT help-desk experience that is scalable with enhanced productivity and accelerated digital IT transformation.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n In some cases, Microsoft-developed tools are the starting point for new ServiceNow functionality, such as the recent implementation of ServiceNow ITSM Predictive Intelligence.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019ll 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n We\u2019re 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.<\/p>\n We\u2019re 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).<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Microsoft Endpoint Manager supplies mobile-device and application management for our end-user devices, and we\u2019ve 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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:<\/p>\n 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:<\/p>\n 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\u2019s mobile device management platform, can integrate directly with ServiceNow. This integration improves contextual data within ServiceNow and extends ServiceNow\u2019s capabilities by using Intune and Microsoft Endpoint Manager functionality on managed devices.<\/p>\n Our Microsoft Global Helpdesk team has observed significant benefits from the continued ServiceNow ITSM feature implementations, and we\u2019re still working with ServiceNow on an extensive list of features that we want to implement. Some of the best benefits we\u2019ve observed include:<\/p>\n While we\u2019ve successfully migrated many internally developed capabilities into out-of-the-box ServiceNow ITSM features and tools, it is an ongoing process and we\u2019re 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\u2019ve learned and continue to explore include:<\/p>\n We\u2019re 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\u2019re also investigating deeper integration between ServiceNow ITSM and Microsoft products including Microsoft 365, Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Azure.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Microsoft is transforming the experience of our internal IT helpdesk agents and, using ServiceNow IT Service Management, we\u2019re improving the experience our employees have when they request IT help. We\u2019ve 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":133,"featured_media":8878,"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":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[317,407,95],"coauthors":[646],"class_list":["post-8868","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-device-health","tag-enterprise-mobility-and-security","tag-security","program-microsoft-digital-technical-stories","m-blog-post"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\nModernizing the internal support experience<\/h3>\n
![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/insidetrack\/blog\/uploads\/prod\/2022\/11\/10327-figure1.png\")
Collaborating to create rapid innovation<\/h4>\n
Establishing practical goals for modernized support<\/h4>\n
Automation<\/h5>\n
Monitoring<\/h5>\n
Self-help functionality<\/h5>\n
Examining the modern support experience in context<\/h3>\n
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Creating value within the helpdesk support experience<\/h2>\n
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It can be complex to understand the state of ServiceNow with respect to a specific feature and its requirements. We must examine where we\u2019ve 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.<\/div>\n<\/li>\nRather 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\u2019s 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\u2019s effectiveness in daily operations and proved the tool\u2019s capabilities in production use. This built confidence and trust in the tool and helped drive broader adoption across the organization.<\/div>\n<\/li>\nAdditionally, 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.<\/div>\n<\/li>\nStarting with a prototype means we then have a functional example that\u2019s 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.<\/div>\nPredictive 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.<\/div>\n<\/li>\nIntegrating ServiceNow ITSM and Microsoft products<\/h3>\n
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