Ten years ago, when the iPhone was launched, mobile technology revolutionized consumers’ lives by taking what used to be complex and making it simple, easy and intuitive. Today in our personal lives we need only speak or swipe to order dinner, hail a ride or find romantic partners. At work, we still struggle with confusing, needlessly complex technology that makes it hard to get work done.

Enter ServiceNow. The Now Platform™® enables the delivery of ready-made applications that simplify routine workflows across the enterprise, from IT to HR, security and customer service.

Our latest software release, which we call “London,” takes this philosophy to a new level, with features that resolve problems even more quickly and easily. London uses cloud-based AI to deliver elegant, intuitive experiences for employees and customers. It features powerful intelligence, designed into the Now Platform, that allows customers to quickly deploy ready-made chatbots, and even build their own custom chatbots, using a drag-and-drop interface and little or no code.

For example, our new Virtual Agent technology provides powerful chatbot functionality for the enterprise. By handling requests that used to slow people down, Virtual Agent helps people help themselves, getting service faster while allowing agents to take on higher value work.

Companies must provide great human experiences at work if they want to boost revenue and increase productivity, raise employee satisfaction and increase the bottom line. Our London release helps make that happen with features that deliver intelligence for everyday work and better experiences. Let’s walk through some of the new innovations in London.

Virtual Agent

Gartner predicts that “in 2021, AI augmentation will generate $2.9 trillion in business value and recover 6.2 billion hours of worker productivity.”[i] In addition, “while there are more than 500 companies providing platforms for their development, a much smaller number is pushing the technology into new directions,” according to a recent Gartner research note.[ii]

Enter Virtual Agent, a unique chatbot application that takes chat from conversation to resolution. With Virtual Agent, customers and employees ask questions in human language. Employees can also tap the full power of the Now Platform by opening tickets, viewing their options and solving problems directly in chat.

Virtual Agent chatbots provide personalized responses in context. When an employee asks for a new phone, for example, the Virtual Agent already knows the relevant mobile plan and carrier. This yields more personal experiences and faster resolutions.

We estimate that Virtual Agent has the potential to handle 15-20% of all routine or everyday interactions across HR, customer service and IT service management. This use of the Now Platform intelligence frees up employees and customer service agents to focus on more strategic and personally meaningful work.

With Virtual Agent Designer, anyone can build their own conversation to meet specific business needs. We also provide pre‑built conversations for IT, HR and Customer Service. Finally, Virtual Agent meets employees where they work via integrations with Microsoft Teams, Slack and ServiceNow chat clients.

Major Issue Management

This capability allows customer service agents to proactively manage critical customer issues affecting large numbers of customers. Agents create a single major case and relate it to each affected customer. This simplifies and automates the communications and issue resolution.

Walk-up Experience

What’s worse than waiting on hold for the IT helpdesk to tell you why your computer isn’t working?  Not much. Companies increasingly need to meet the expectations of younger, more tech-savvy employees. According to our data, walk-up service experiences yield 50 % greater satisfaction than other methods.

Enter Walk-up Experience, a new IT Service Management application that enables in-person IT support. Employees sign up remotely and walk-up to the IT help desk in time for their turn based on live queue updates. Result: Less downtime, higher productivity and less frustration.

Insights Explorer

We’re also bringing intelligence to everyday work via Insights Explorer for our IT Operations Management product. Insights Explorer enables IT to create ad-hoc queries to reveal patterns in performance that aren’t normally detected. Customers benefit from gaining insight into potential outages, so they can act to prevent them from happening.

Security Incident Response

We’re providing better experiences for security analysts via a new user interface for our Security Incident Response application. The configurable interface provides quick access to actionable security data that’s been prioritized based on business criticality. It includes playbooks with all the steps needed to quickly guide analysts through the response process.

Employee Document Management

Paper-based document management has historically been anything but a great experience for HR teams. With our new Employee Document Management application, employee documents can be managed electronically, boosting efficiency and supporting security and compliance. By going paperless, HR can now easily set document retention rules based on corporate and legal regulations, set document permissions, and define metadata tags on documents for easy search and retrieval.

These are only some of the new innovations in London. Check out our London fact sheet to review all the highlights in the new release.

[1] Gartner, Inc., “Forecast: The Business Value of Artificial Intelligence, Worldwide, 2017-2025,” by John-David Lovelock, Susan Tan, Jim Hare, Alys Woodward, Alan Priestley, 12 March 2018.

[1] Gartner, Inc., “Market Insight: Chatbot and Virtual Assistant Adoption Will Only Progress by Delivering Value and Trust,” by Ranjit Atwal, Anthony Mullen, 13 August 2018.

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