ServiceNow launches New AI tool To Enhance Employee Experience

ServiceNow has launched a major expansion of its digital employee experience platform. Today’s Quebec release includes brand new workflow innovations for listening, productivity, and single service requests.

Further cementing the notion that the world of work is accelerating at record-pace into a new digital future, employee experience has become a key competitive differentiator, extending the realms of HR into legal, workplace services, and more.

The new Quebec launch updates ServiceNow’s popular existing Now Platform to include automated enhancements for employee experience, notably a real-time listening tool to collect data on employee sentiment, happiness, and productivity.

The updates that enhance the employee experience include:

• Universal Request: This provides employees with a single service experience across departments and enables cross-departmental collaboration to speed up resolution times for employees.
• Listening Posts: These are already fast becoming the new eye and ears of office life. They enable organizations to capture survey feedback immediately in the flow of work, identifying points of improvement to generate better employee experiences.
• Journey Accelerator: It helps managers create personalized and consistent plans for their employees, enabling them to be more productive at every stage of their journey, including onboarding, transfers, and promotions.

Despite plans around the world for lockdown easing and office re-openings this summer, the ‘in-the-moment’ offering for listening posts is a sure sign that ServiceNow believes remote, or hybrid, working is here to stay.

But can you automate sentiment?

To survive in this new era, businesses are finding that they need the capability to identify early indicators ahead of risk events and to act proactively to mitigate those risks before they become disruptions.

Couple with the increased focus on remote workforce productivity, enabling these capabilities suddenly requires a program that blends data science, automation, and artificial intelligence.

Organizations recognize the need to track and understand how employees feel about their work, the services they’re receiving, and the tools they’re using.

Machine learning and artificial intelligence can already perform sentiment and impact analysis to determine whether the data is good or bad — and if an issue requires low, medium, or immediate attention.

But far too often employee survey and listening tools collect feedback after the fact, disconnected from the service experience. This results in low participation rates and feedback without meaningful context.

By incorporating ‘in the moment’ automation, HR leaders and technologists are freed from spending countless hours gathering and validating just a tiny fraction of the data that the AI can handle.

Accelerating digital transformation

The cloud-based platform release also features new Creator Workflows and an App Engine Studio which ServiceNow claim will accelerate the pace of digital transformation, enabling fast low-code app development across the enterprise to easily workflow everyday business challenges.

“In today’s challenging environment, organizations worldwide are pivoting fast, adopting new, distributed models of working and creating new workflow-enabled ways of operating with more agile, resilient, digital enterprise value chains,” said Chirantan “CJ” Desai, chief product officer at ServiceNow. “This newest version of the Now Platform further enhances the must-have enterprise digital tools customers need today.”

As organizations plan for supporting distributed workforces long-term, cross-functional workflows that create great experiences for customers and employees have become a critical part of the 2021 roadmap. As such digital investments are at an all-time high. According to IDC, worldwide digital transformation investments will total more than $7.8 trillion by 2024.

“As businesses shift from emergency response to long-term recovery and distributed work becomes the norm, organizations are accelerating digital transformation efforts and investing in new technologies that promote continuity and agility,”

Philip Carter, group vice president, European chief analyst and WW C-Suite Tech Research lead, at IDC.

“The ability to deliver end-to-end digital experiences for employees and customers alike will be a crucial competitive differentiator. There is significant customer traction, accelerated by the pandemic, for unified technology platforms that connect systems, silos and processes to enable these connected, digital-first enterprise models.”

Now Platform Quebec also presents new Workplace Service Delivery tools for new offices including workplace space mapping and workplace visitor management.

Employee productivity, experience, and engagement has never been a hotter topic and yet again, AI is leading the way.

The launch comes a few months after ServiceNow made headlines with its Vaccine Administration Management app — providing a lifeline for many HR departments and leadership teams reconfiguring an eventual return to the workplace for employees and employers.