In today’s digital landscape, IT operations are no longer confined to back-office functions. For many of Ergo’s clients, efficient operations are integral to delivering seamless customer experiences, rapid business turnaround and have a direct impact on the bottom line. They are increasingly reliant on technology to interact with their customers, deliver services, and maintain their competitive edge.
This reliance necessitates robust and efficient IT operations that can adapt to evolving demands and ensure consistent service delivery. Ergo’s investment in ServiceNow, the leading cloud-based workflow platform, offers a comprehensive suite of tools and applications designed to streamline our client workflows, improve our (and consequently their) service delivery, and enhance their end customers experience.
ServiceNow provides a unified platform that consolidates various IT functions, including IT Service Management (ITSM), IT Operations Management (ITOM), and IT Asset Management (ITAM). This consolidation eliminates silos, promotes collaboration, and provides a single source of truth for all IT-related information.
IT service management (ITSM)
ServiceNow’s ITSM capabilities automate and standardise key IT processes, such as incident, problem, change management, and request fulfilment. By automating these processes, our clients reduce manual effort, minimise errors, and improve service delivery times. As an example, Ergo have deployed and configured automated incident routing to the technical teams on our service desk. This allows us to ensure that issues are quickly assigned to the appropriately skilled resources, which helps us in reducing resolution times and minimising service disruptions for our customers and clients.
Self-service portals are a well-established route to empower end users to resolve common issues independently, improving overall satisfaction. Ergo have spent a considerable amount of time and effort developing a service catalogue that maps to our client needs. From this, we have leveraged the ServiceNow Customer Service Management application portal features to build Ergo Connect, our gateway to our managed services delivery.
The core Service Now platform has a wealth of widgets and functionality that has allowed us to integrate the service catalogue, knowledge management framework and our self-serve interface, without having to build a customised portal application. This modular feature set has allowed Ergo Connect to be enabled quickly, which is always a win, but equally important for us and our clients, the components are developed and supported by ServiceNow.
This provides us with a high degree of comfort that we are using best in class features, and that we have not boxed our clients into a technical debt corner. As ServiceNow improve the portal feature set, our development is maintained alongside, bringing us and our clients the stability of a global platform and the benefits of Ergo’s service design investment.
AI and the Ergo Connect portal
Core to the ServiceNow platform is the investment that has been made into AI, and natural language processing. The aim of our design is to enable our clients end users to land on our portal, fully integrated into their desktop using single sign on, and use natural language to consume our services. The Now platform AI search feature is one way we have designed Ergo Connect to deliver. Our deployment of AI search allows us to focus on our service design and content and uses the platform natural language processing engine to let our clients and customers navigate and interact with our services.
Of course, not all users want to use a portal, so we have developed a virtual agent interface, again using native ServiceNow features and functions, with the express aim of allowing chat-based interactions to provide the same rich feature set. Our research prior to this development indicated that modern digital service consumers expect, and in the case of younger consumers, prefer, to use text-based interfaces. Tim, our portal integrated virtual agent, uses natural language processing to better facilitate this expectation.
Like most of the world, our clients are typically heavily invested in an instant messaging stack and use Teams or Slackware, for example, to enable better communications in their user base. Having built a comprehensive virtual agent, we subsequently integrated Microsoft Teams into the chat bot. This deep integration into the core communication tools our clients deploy presents our services directly to their end users, shortening the path to value that they expect from our service offerings. We can now offer our clients a direct path to our service team (either shared or dedicated), around the clock, backed by AI search and ServiceNow’s natural language processing, without ever having to navigate away from their Teams client. This immediate service delivery reduces the complexity of their digital work and allows them to focus on serving their customer needs.
IT operations management (ITOM)
Deploying a digital technology stack is a complex and multilayered process, which is further compounded by the fact that technology support is not always embedded into the core concept. The mainstream cloud vendors provide tools and services to monitor and see into deployed service stacks, but they are necessarily complex, require configuration, and subsequent ongoing management to realise the value they promise. This issue is magnified where multi cloud solutions are deployed and can be further complicated where private cloud is needed.
ServiceNow’s ITOM solution provides Ergo Connect with real-time visibility into our clients IT infrastructure, enabling proactive monitoring and management of systems and applications. We have used the ServiceNow integration hub facility to build integrations into IT asset stores, including Microsoft’s configuration manager (SCCM), Azure, Ninja One and of course the native ServiceNow discovery engine. Using this rich data landscape, and leveraging ServiceNow’s multisource reconciliation engine, Ergo has a populated, accurate, up to date and relevant CMDB, on which to layer features, functions and services.
Source: Servicenow
Understanding our clients core IT assets, and how they hang together lets Ergo map services up through infrastructure, into technical and business services.
This proactive approach helps identify and resolve potential issues before they impact those business services, which we use to minimize downtime and ensure service availability is maintained. The core ServiceNow platform ITOM capabilities of event management, discovery are used to layer up to orchestration and automation, enabling tasks such as infrastructure provisioning and application deployment. This automation reduces manual intervention, accelerates deployment cycles, and improves operational efficiency.
IT asset management (ITAM)
Built on top of an accurate CMDB base layer, ServiceNow’s ITAM capabilities provide a comprehensive view of IT assets, including deployed hardware, software, and cloud resources. This visibility enables organisations to track asset lifecycles across key events such as stocking, configuration, allocation, destruction, etc, to optimise asset utilisation, and ensure compliance with software licensing agreements and support policies. Effective ITAM allows Ergo Connect to help our clients to avoid unnecessary spending on IT resources and mitigate risks associated with non-compliance.
Source : Servicenow
Improving customer experience
Our investment in the Ergo Connect self-service portal provides our clients and customers with 24/7 access to information, resources, and support. Customers can use these portals to submit requests, track the status of their requests, and access knowledge bases to find answers to frequent questions. This self-service approach empowers customers to resolve issues independently, reducing their reliance on IT support staff and improving their overall experience. Because we built our self-service portal on the Now platform’s core capabilities, we are now able to leverage the unified database that is populated when the portal is used.
Integrated analytics tooling enables us to examine customer journeys, identify disconnection nodes and gives Ergo the assurance that Now Platform performance analytics engine anonymises data in accordance with GDPR requirements. We can focus our efforts on analysing and improving our services and our clients experience.
Example of user journey dashboard
Knowledge management
ServiceNow’s knowledge management capabilities enable our organisation to capture and share knowledge across the service desk, so that learnings are shared across the entire team, and we navigate away from building silos. In parallel, we have the facility to provide customer specific knowledge base services, which can be made available to both client IT staff and their customers, empowering them to find solutions to common problems quickly and easily.
We can use the ServiceNow platform to curate this for our clients or delegate the control to them to manage directly. A well-maintained, accurate and relevant knowledge base is one of the core pillars for our service portal and reduces the need for customers to contact support. We see self-service as empowerment and have seen it improve our customer experience and reduce the time to vale in delivering our support services.
Customer service management (CSM)
ServiceNow’s CSM application extends the platform’s core capabilities to manage customer interactions and resolve their issues effectively. By integrating with ITSM, ITOM and ITAM applications, CSM provides a unified view to our customer and their interactions with our organisation. This enables our support agents to provide personalised and efficient service. Ergo, like all service organisations, have always tried to capture our customer sentiment as we do business. The Now Platform enables us to canvass our end users for immediate feedback on our service delivery and consequently allows us to improve it.
Example of a customer dashboard in ServiceNow
Our experience of surveys in today’s digital landscape is that many users experience feedback fatigue and that it is increasingly more challenging to understand their experience by means of retrospective questionnaires. ServiceNow’s CSM application provides us with a solution to this problem by allowing us to utilise natural language processing of customer sentiment directly. As our customers interact with our delivery teams, we use ServiceNow to understand their sentiment in real time. We can therefore understand, before a ticket is closed and a survey is sent, where extra handling is required. This real time sentiment analysis allows us to turn negative or downward trending scenarios back into a positive experience for our customers.
Example of a sentiment analysis graph
Conclusion
ServiceNow’s comprehensive platform offers a powerful solution for enhancing both our delivered operations and the perceived customer experience. By streamlining processes, providing real-time visibility into the IT infrastructure, and empowering customers with self-service capabilities, Ergo Connect and ServiceNow enables Ergo to deliver consistent, reliable, and personalized services. In today’s competitive landscape, where customer experience is a key differentiator, leveraging a global platform like ServiceNow is a crucial strategic cornerstone that enables our clients to optimize their operations and build strong customer relationships.
By embracing the capabilities of Ergo Connect, it has been our experience that clients can transform their IT from a cost centre to a strategic enabler of business success and customer satisfaction. As a strategic provider, the ServiceNow platform’s continuous evolution and focus on innovation further ensure its relevance in the ever-changing technological landscape, promising continued enhancements for IT operations and the Ergo client and customer experience into the future.
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