ServiceNow HR Service Delivery (HRSD) has helped many top organizations improve employee satisfaction and overall processes. Whether you’re planning for or already have implemented HRSD, read on for best practices straight from the experts.

 

1. Strategic Planning is Vital

For HRSD implementations or enhancements, strategic planning is vital to a successful engagement. Infocenter RADIUS™ is your roadmap to success for HRSD. By partnering with Certified ServiceNow HR domain experts, you’ll set your organization up for success. It’s essential to keep the following HRSD best practice solutions at the forefront of discussions and planning during these HRSD workshops:

  • Create a ServiceNow HRSD roadmap that identifies the priorities of the organization and how they can leverage best practices to support their priorities and foundational needs, as well as making the solution scalable for the future.
  • Leverage best practice solutions when defining the transformation journey for the organization by integrating their ServiceNow vision and desired business outcomes.
  • Incorporate the necessary stakeholders from across the organization into the HRSD planning discussions
  • As a valued partner, Infocenter will provide technical governance on Out-of-Box functionality vs. customization incorporating an HRSD best practices overview and lessons learned.

 

2. The #1 Goal for HRSD is to Focus on Your Employee Experience

  • Make your system easy to use and maintain for your users; don’t over customize.
  • Design the Employee Service Center (ESC) with your employees in mind.
  • Choose catalog items your employees will use.
  • Provide simple workflows and approvals; do not over-automate.
  • Use language and acronyms everyone understands.
  • Continually analyze and improve content.
  • Use meta tags effectively, but avoid overusing.

 

3. Implement ServiceNow in Phases

  • Trying to do too much at one time can be overwhelming and time-consuming; a phased approach is recommended.
  • Minimize integrations and excessive automation where possible in Phase I.
  • Use ServiceNow pre-built implementations and pre-defined workflows.

 

4. Tips for Case Management – HR Services

  • Create HR services that your employees will want/need to use and provide your HR agent relevant case information. This will allow the HR case to be routed to the correct team and for faster resolution, which will improve user satisfaction.
  • Separate HR services to ensure you are collecting all of the relevant information needed to route and fulfill the service. Do not combine HR services together only to limit the overall number of HR services.
  • When defining and configuring HR services, collaborate with those responsible for delivering the services. This will ensure you are accounting for the way the service is currently delivered and will help prevent any surprises at your go-live.
  • SME’s should be a part of User Acceptance Training (UAT).

 

5. Knowledge Management – Creation and Navigation 

  • Provide a sufficient number of articles available to your employees.
  • Add enough pertinent content in the Knowledge Base to support your overall consumer-like experience.
  • Always review articles within the ESC before publishing.
  • Adopt a process to continuously review articles to keep content current and relevant; this increases adoption and ability to deflect case creation.

 

6. Linking Knowledge to the HR Catalog

  • Link related Knowledge Articles to Catalog Items and vice versa.
  • Embedding Knowledge Articles in the Catalog Item easily connects employees with the necessary information on a process, policy, or how-to guide with the goal of answering the employee’s question before they create a case.
  • Cases are often raised by employees when they are unable to find the answer on their own; case deflection will reduce the workload of HR agents.

 

7. Designing the Employee Service Center (ESC)

  • Keeping the design clean and easy to navigate encourages more use.
  • Use the out-of-box design and applications for Content Delivery and Content Automation.
  • Keep the search bar in the heading, so it appears on every page (having the ability to search from anywhere and find what you need, when you need it will increase adoption and satisfaction).
  • Use terminology and meta that all employees may use.
  • Use ESC for all organizational needs, so employees have one place for everything.
  • Keep content fresh and relevant.

 

8. Configuring Lifecycle Events

  • Involve all department/stakeholders from the beginning of the requirements and process mapping.
  • Test and test again for all the different personas and locations.
  • Understand at what point the process should begin in ServiceNow, if an integration is included.

 

9. Utilizing the Mobile Apps

  • If you do not offer use of the NOW Mobile app, it may not be best to offer the Mobile onboarding app. You want to provide a consistent and smooth employee experience and may not want to provide app use for onboarding and take away that ability afterwards.
  • If using both NOW and Onboarding apps, include content in the Onboarding app to download the NOW Mobile app for use after the onboarding completes.
  • Keep push notifications to a minimum – action items only:
    • If users receive too many notifications, they will disable completely or ignore.
  • Clearly define use cases to determine what employees should be able to access.

 

10. Using Virtual Agent

  • Consider if your organization is mature enough for it.
  • Recommend using ServiceNow for at least 6 months prior to implementing so that you can clearly define the use cases.
  • Analyze existing cases to see what is a good fit for Virtual Agent.
  • Clearly define the conversation workflow to get your employees from the question/problem to the correct answer.

 

11. Configure vs. Customize

  • Configure ServiceNow rather than customizing whenever possible.
  • Make yourself knowledgeable of what’s in the latest release or what may be coming to prevent customizing what may be available in a few months.
  • When making changes, use native ServiceNow capabilities and features in the platform.
  • Customization can be costly and complicate future upgrades; avoid when able to do so.

 

Start Planning Today

As a ServiceNow Elite Partner, Infocenter can help you plan, build, and manage your ServiceNow HRSD. It’s important to engage with a ServiceNow partner that is not only knowledgeable about ServiceNow, but also has the HR domain experience needed to help bring digital transformation to your organization.