By Duncan Troup on Friday, September 9th, 2016 in ITSM Tools.

Investing in a large enterprise automation platform such as ServiceNow is a huge undertaking. Picking the right partner and choosing the right approach is paramount. But sometimes there are elements that can be overlooked. The question is how to do you unlock those finer elements: the things that ice the cake, the untouched value the platform offers?

There is a great deal of thought that has gone into a platform like ServiceNow and you don’t need to customise the tool to the Nth degree for it to serve you well. Sometimes it just takes a little lateral thinking, a little lean thinking and a good understanding of customer value to focus your efforts. An interesting space to jump into is the Knowledge Base. There is a huge amount of value to be unlocked for your internal support teams and your customers, but a little thought is required to get it right. Servicenow has some great flexibility in the way in which knowledge bases are organised and searched (quick tip – don’t forget to google index your content if you can!), a well designed one will not only enhance your service teams operations but ultimately deliver a great deal of value to your customers.

To get your solution right though, you need to get inside the customer’s head, too often we apply our view of the world to categorise knowledge and services. We need to start from the outside-in. Customers often don’t understand the inner workings of a service, nor are they interested. You need to take their world view and organise knowledge in their image not yours. For your service teams you do exactly the same, your team has a way of thinking, a particular knowledge of the organisation, so tailor that to them. But how do you do both in the one place? The ServiceNow platform gives you the flexibility to create multiple Knowledge Bases and provides a great deal of flexibility on the access side too. That way you can maintain the right view for your customers and the right view for your service teams.

One of the other challenges in big enterprise organisations is sharing of knowledge. Once you have a good structure how do you best use it? Again those Servicenow guys have added some simple yet really effective tools to lift everyone’s game. In peer-to-peer space there is Social Q&A, which is a feature of the Knowledge module. With a few key enhancements this can be a really effective platform for knowledge sharing across your organisation. For the service side, teams will have a range of ways to discuss tickets for resolution: face to face, one-to-one email, email groups, mobile chat apps, comms platform chat apps, etc. If that is the case it is worth taking a detailed look at Servicenow Connect. This seem like a basic chat functionality but there is a lot of power than that straight out of the box. Teams can chat between each other regarding a ticket, and if there is a collective resolution that conversation can be captured, not only within the ticket for good recording keeping, but you can also drop that into your knowledgebase for any future problems that need a similar resolution. With a well implemented knowledge strategy and a dedicated knowledge manager the combination of these tools will reduce loads on support teams, speed up resolution and capture nascent and undiscovered knowledge for future use.

The ServiceNow Knowledge Base, Social Q&A and Connect are all examples of modules Tingle Tree have expertise in and are well positioned to help. So if you need advice, a review, an implementation or just an informal chat about one of all of these things, reach out.

The Tingle Tree Group – www.TingleTreeGroup.com