– by Aleksandar Rusev, Senior Solution Consultant at BRIGHT

Images: ServiceNow

ServiceNow announces a new release twice a year, with the previous one being Paris at the end of 2020. Every new release comes with feature updates focused on driving innovation, agility, and productivity.

At the beginning of this year, ServiceNow introduced the Quebec release within its community. Having the time needed to dive deep into the new possibilities and enhancements, we highlight the top features that will change the way you build, deploy and use the ServiceNow platform.

Although we couldn’t fit all the exciting new features in this article, we have listed our Quebec favourites. Our team will be happy to discuss more with you, sharing our knowledge and experience. So don’t be a stranger and let’s connect.

IT Business Management

Roadmap Planning

Roadmap planning is a practical, lightweight tool for high-level planning. It allows the management and business owners to sequence the work on a timeline (a roadmap). It can visualize projects, epics, demands, and tasks in a single location. Moreover, it is editable by a simple drag and drop.

Based on our experience, this tool can be handy for companies with:

• Highly project-based work;
• Siloed project teams with independent scopes;
• Final product/service formed by all business units.

Example: Engineering company doing maintenance work around few civil areas in a big European city. The project includes different teams such as Logistics, Maintenance, Build, Bid-Team, etc. Each of them has its project lifecycle, and it is hard for the management to have a structured overview of them all.

This tool will allow that. It will empower organizations to create and visualize their roadmap and facilitate strategic conversations with internal stakeholders and end customers.

IT Service Management

Catalog Builder

The Catalog Builder is a new, helpful tool, including a visual guided experience for building Catalogue Items. It lowers the barrier for the knowledge needed to govern this critical aspect of ITSM, requiring no to limited coding skills. It releases the bottlenecked IT departments from the constant catalog changes by allowing a more comprehensive range of employees to manage them.

The Catalog Builder comes with controlled guardrails. This allows admins to set up a frame and expected results. According to ServiceNow data, the Catalogue is growing with almost 12% YoY, putting pressure on the ServiceNow development staff. They are currently the only ones that can make the changes.

This new feature can fit straightaway into several of our Banking clients, which we know are experiencing issues with maintaining the Catalogs.

Customer Service Management

Engagement Center for Customers

The Engagement Center for customers is a no/low code solution allowing customers to extend their ServiceNow experience across all web and mobile pages (third-party websites). That includes ServiceNow Chat, Virtual Agent, Knowledge Articles, Search, Rise a Case.

The new feature is an intelligent move from ServiceNow, proving their flexibility in favor of the clients. The Engagement Center for Customers:

• Can be implemented faster and at low cost;
• Will decrease additional costs to maintain separate portals with complex customizations to embed ServiceNow Virtual Agent and chat capabilities;
• Will increase self-service adoption and improve customer experience self-service adoption.

Which, after all, is the primary goal of every customer-facing organization.

Field Service Management

Dispatcher Workplace

The Dispatcher Workspace is a single, unified view for dispatchers. It allows them to make sound decisions without clicking around between different views, tabs, inventories, maps, or calendars. You can manage the color-coded tasks with a simple drag and drop.

Behind the scenes, rules handle the “heavy lifting” – listing the best-fit field engineer/technician based on skills, location, availability, etc.

If the case is a simple task dispatching this feature won’t make much of a difference. But in most cases, the dispatchers have advanced responsibilities combining several tasks at once to be executed quickly under heavy SLA requirements.

Instead of jumping around in one or more systems to access data, dispatchers now have a single pane of glass to make better decisions. Thus, reduce scheduling errors.

ServiceNow Translations

ServiceNow translation is a huge topic in our practice and a common challenge across our global customers. The extended Localization Framework is now supporting Service Catalog items and Virtual Agent. In addition, ServiceNow is trying to improve the tool by automating some of the manual tasks in the translation process. Still, there is a lot to be done in this direction.

If you are interested in automated ServiceNow localization, you can learn more about the BRIGHT ServiceNow translation application. The Locawise App translates any of the ServiceNow Portal content in any language without unnecessary additional actions.

ServiceNow supports both the current release and the one prior. We advise our customers to stay up-to-date with the latest release to benefit from all innovations and enhancements. As a ServiceNow Premier Partner, we provide customer-tailored Upgrade-as-a-Service services.

Connect with our experts to learn more – our team will be glad to help you make the most of this new ServiceNow update.