Now Mobile App
Case Study | Now on Now: Reimagining the employee experience with the Now Mobile App
Now on Now: Reimagining the employee experience with the Now Mobile App Using the Now Mobile Platform to create a truly consumer mobile experience for the enterprise
Now on Now: Now Mobile App Table of Contents Table of Contents ....................................................................................................................................... 2 Creating a consumer-grade mobile experience for employees ......................................................... 2 Challenges ................................................................................................................................................... 2 Faster development and deployment .................................................................................................... 3 An engaging mobile experience ............................................................................................................. 3 Our mobile-first strategy ............................................................................................................................. 5 Benefits ......................................................................................................................................................... 6 Now Mobile app by the numbers ............................................................................................................. 7 ServiceNow .................................................................................................................................................. 7 Creating a consumer-grade mobile experience for employees Creating a great mobile experience is a major milestone for ServiceNow. New generations like Gen-Z expect work mobile apps to be as easy to use as the apps they use in their personal lives. Employees want simple, intuitive apps on their mobile devices to access critical business tools and data anytime, anywhere. As a result, mobile is emerging as a critical part of any IT strategy. ServiceNow recognizes that mobile delivers a digital advantage to our employees and customers. It can enhance communication and collaboration and improve productivity. Our strategy is to make it easy for our employees to get work done across departments, where and when they want to, and while meeting the digital demands of our evolving business. We are executing on that strategy by bringing the personal, contextual features of the consumer experience into our workplace to drive engagement and reduce friction. Together with our Service Portal and Virtual Agent, a chatbot enabled with natural language understanding (NLU) technology, mobile helps us deliver a holistic employee experience. In this case study, we share our mobile strategy, including the capabilities and features our employees use in the latest mobile app we’ve deployed internally, which we call the Now Mobile App. Challenges In the past, ServiceNow used a classic web-based mobile experience, which scaled our portal down to a mobile form factor. The user experience was acceptable but didn’t provide the seamless capabilities of a native mobile application. Given the company’s rapid growth and need to scale, we recognized that we had to take our mobile employee experience to a whole new level of productivity and efficiency. The challenge was to make sure the experience was: • Personal and contextual. Employees could see information tailored to their needs. • Human. Employees could be productive from wherever they were located and use familiar mobile behaviors such as taps and swipes. 2 © 2019 ServiceNow, Inc. All rights reserved. ServiceNow, the ServiceNow logo, Now, Now Platform, and other ServiceNow marks are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of ServiceNow, Inc. in the United States and/or other countries. Other company and product names may be trademarks of the respective companies with which they are associated.
Now on Now: Now Mobile App • Easily discoverable. Required information would surface as needed. • Simple. No training was required to use the basic applications and services. We first considered developing custom native applications on Android and iOS. This had a couple of major drawbacks. We would need an army of mobile app developers to deliver a simple app. We would also need to invest in managing the code, technology, a delivery mechanism, security, and design fundamentals. A true consumer-grade experience requires simple, clear, and contextual interactions supported by complex back-end workflows. At that time, ServiceNow was developing Mobile Studio, a ® mobile app integrated development environment (IDE), on the Now Platform . We could exploit the features of the Now Platform without hiring an army of developers. Faster development and deployment Once we deployed Mobile Platform featuring Mobile Studio in our production environment, we were able to finalize our use cases within a month and began development the following month. Because Mobile Studio is a codeless/low code platform, we required only two primary resources—a platform developer and a business systems analyst for requirements. Many of our mobile use cases such as incident management were already supported by out-of-the-box apps in ServiceNow’s Madrid release. These pre-built templates and components cut down on our development time and incorporated native device capabilities, such as maps, camera, and swipe. All we had to do was enable, test, and release the app. We developed, tested, and deployed our first mobile app companywide within six months. We went live with 14 native apps in our first release. Today, we design, develop, and deploy new apps in days rather than months. With the New York release, we’ve adopted new capabilities like smart buttons to initiate phone calls and emails, a search-by- voice feature that helps users easily find people and information, and more out-of-the-box templates and components. An engaging mobile experience The Now Mobile App provides an engaging mobile experience by enabling our employees to find answers, get help, and make requests with simple gestures like a tap or a swipe. The app also takes advantage of native mobile capabilities like the camera, voice-to-text, and location services to answer queries. The experience is optimized for the persona’s specific workflows and actions and uses a chatbot to provide AI-enabled search. The foundation of the Now Mobile App is the home screen that features a variety of micro-apps used by employees across our enterprise: 3 © 2019 ServiceNow, Inc. All rights reserved. ServiceNow, the ServiceNow logo, Now, Now Platform, and other ServiceNow marks are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of ServiceNow, Inc. in the United States and/or other countries. Other company and product names may be trademarks of the respective companies with which they are associated.
Now on Now: Now Mobile App • My Approvals provides a consolidated view of all pending approvals across all ServiceNow departments using systems of record. Users no longer need to login to multiple backend applications. Employees can review requests, view their details, then approve or reject them. We are using out-of-the-box templates for summary information for both internal apps (PO, timesheet) and APIs for external apps (SAP, Concur, etc.) • Conference Room Booking enables ServiceNow employees to find and book the nearest available meeting room starting at the top or bottom of the hour or at a future time. Our employees use this when they are trying to find rooms in buildings or floors away from their desk. Because of the flexibility of the development platform, we were able to build this as custom functionality within the app. • Report an Issue gives users the ability to report an issue or if something is broken in under a minute. Name and location are auto-populated; users enter a description of the issue and press submit. • Get Help is a simple way to request help or submit issues to IT, HR, and Workplace Services. Users can point and shoot with their phone’s camera to report an issue or make a request, such as request a laptop accessory or report broken gym equipment. Users can also scan QR codes in conference rooms, on printers/scanners, or other hardware assets to report issues. • Customer Insight gives Sales personalized access to their accounts, commits, and opportunities. This is only available to specific teams and executives. Apps can also be built by anyone with Now Platform experience without IT involvement. For example, we were able to build an Innovation Engagement app. Team members can create and track customer engagements, display them in a calendar, check in using geolocation, view engagements on a map, take meeting notes, and see customer dashboards. 4 © 2019 ServiceNow, Inc. All rights reserved. ServiceNow, the ServiceNow logo, Now, Now Platform, and other ServiceNow marks are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of ServiceNow, Inc. in the United States and/or other countries. Other company and product names may be trademarks of the respective companies with which they are associated.
Now on Now: Now Mobile App We have also introduced a Mobile Employee Onboarding app for new hires. Available in the Apple or Google Play stores, the app enables new hires to complete various tasks before their first day. The app uses IT and Employee workflows involving various applications (e.g. ITSM, HR Service Delivery) running on the Now Platform. We are also using a Mobile Agent app to enable our technical service engineers to fulfill tasks across the enterprise. Technical Support uses this for incident and event management, including allowing managers to view and assign incidents; technical support engineers can manage alerts and events from their mobile phones. As part of the Mobile Agent app, we also implemented push notifications to alert both the engineer (in the agent app) and user (in the internal mobile app) when there is a P1 or P2 issue. Mobile Agent use cases include: • View and take quick actions on assigned incidents and tasks • Exploit native capabilities like camera and barcode scanning • Approve or reject items, requests, and changes • Collaborate with their group to manage work All apps are built on the same codebase, so we can always combine multiple use cases into fewer apps if we need to in the future. Our mobile-first strategy Because mobile development is so rapid, we adopted a four-phase mobile development strategy to guide our journey: • Design. We identify mobile-first use cases by prioritizing the feature and app development. We do this by analyzing the data across our platform, identifying the highest volume and most frequent actions by users, and finding the apps that would be most appropriate for mobile. We identify target personas (employees, managers, VIPs), then use out-of-the-box templates for development. 5 © 2019 ServiceNow, Inc. All rights reserved. ServiceNow, the ServiceNow logo, Now, Now Platform, and other ServiceNow marks are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of ServiceNow, Inc. in the United States and/or other countries. Other company and product names may be trademarks of the respective companies with which they are associated.
Now on Now: Now Mobile App • Develop. By using out-of-the-box screens and applets wherever possible across apps, we initiate a simple user experience that mimics consumer apps. We develop and configure apps using native standard patterns, such as the swipe gesture. By developing the native experiences using templates, we minimize the amount of design work involved. • Deploy. We created a standard process for deploying apps and communicating the new capabilities, including developing a What’s New app that details the new features. We envision a rich, omni-channel • Measure. Using ServiceNow Mobile Platform employee experience that combines use Analytics dashboards, we begin to track of a chatbot, portal, and mobile to increase engagement, reduce friction, adoption and usage. Our KPIs include and drive self-service. average weekly unique users, average time spent, daily use of applets, and daily use of apps, among others. We analyze the data to measure and help drive adoption and prioritize future feature and app development. By introducing a mobile app at the enterprise level, we make it easy for employees to get work done where and when they want to. Because it’s integrated with the Now Platform, it makes it easier for employees to complete tasks from multiple functions and systems in just one place. Benefits Although we’ve only been using the Now Mobile App since Spring 2019, we have already seen numerous benefits. For the first time, employees can find answers, make requests, and get help across departments, all from a single, native, mobile app. This includes accessing data from multiple systems of record, whether HR for benefits, employee contact information in Workday, travel expenses in Concur, and computer equipment in IT. Another major benefit has been its user-friendly interface and out-of-the-box templates that make mobile app design and development fast and easy. We can configure lists, forms, and 6 © 2019 ServiceNow, Inc. All rights reserved. ServiceNow, the ServiceNow logo, Now, Now Platform, and other ServiceNow marks are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of ServiceNow, Inc. in the United States and/or other countries. Other company and product names may be trademarks of the respective companies with which they are associated.
Now on Now: Now Mobile App phases within the traditional platform UI and embed media, such as videos. App questions help guide decisions on app design and functionality. By delivering a personalized, contextual experience, employees now have the freedom to work where and when they need to. The simple, easy-to-use, and intuitive interface makes daily tasks faster and easier, improving productivity and efficiency. Adding mobile to our employee experience is also a vital component of our digital transformation journey. Now Mobile app by the numbers When Now Mobile app was first released, adoption was slow but steady. The metrics below our most recent results: • 26,000 hours saved annually for both employees and IT support reps • 72,000 approvals annually • 5X reduction in the time to report an issue • 88% employee satisfaction with tools and technology (as rated in our annual employee survey) • 28 countries with employees using the app ServiceNow ServiceNow is changing the way people work. By digitizing and automating work, we are creating a modern service experience for everyone in the enterprise. Our customers have demonstrated that service management isn’t just for IT — it is a discipline for every service domain. It’s possible now. Now on Now is about how we use our own ServiceNow solutions to work faster, smarter, and better. With Now on Now, we’re achieving true end-to-end digital transformation. To learn more, go to: http://www.servicenow.com/nowonnow. 7 © 2019 ServiceNow, Inc. All rights reserved. ServiceNow, the ServiceNow logo, Now, Now Platform, and other ServiceNow marks are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of ServiceNow, Inc. in the United States and/or other countries. Other company and product names may be trademarks of the respective companies with which they are associated.