ServiceNow has announced the expansion of its partnership with Microsoft to deliver elevated digital experiences that meet employees where they are.
At Microsoft Ignite 2020, ServiceNow introduced new workflows embedded in Microsoft Teams to improve employee productivity with seamless self-service and faster case resolution. Powered by ServiceNow’s leading digital workflow platform, the Now Platform, the new capabilities also improve agent productivity by enabling them to more effectively collaborate and complete key tasks in Microsoft Teams.
Teams is Microsoft’s fastest-growing business app to date. This was true in 2018, long before lockdowns started driving up numbers for remote work and learning. As of April 29, Microsoft Teams had 75 million daily active users, up 70% from just six weeks prior. That month, Microsoft saw more than 200 million meeting participants in a single day, generating more than 4.1 billion meeting minutes.
“We’re helping customers solve for once-in-a-generation challenges as they capitalise on the promise of digital transformation,” said Chirantan “CJ” Desai, chief product officer at ServiceNow. “We are doubling down on Teams to find innovative ways for workflows to elevate engagement, culture, collaboration, and productivity – no matter where people are.”
“Now more than ever, people need to stay connected and organised together from anywhere,” said Rajesh Jha, executive vice president, Experiences and Devices, Microsoft. “ServiceNow is delivering end-to-end Teams experiences for the new normal. For example, meeting extensibility lets service agents more easily interact with the ServiceNow platform, collaborate in group chats, channels, and conferences, and respond to incidents.”
The new capabilities announced today include:
- Employee experiences in Microsoft Teams: Companies want to provide employees with support for whatever tools and devices they choose to use. By embedding ServiceNow natively within Teams, employees can submit requests, receive updates on in-progress requests, take action on notifications, chat with virtual agents for automated assistance, and connect with live agents when virtual agents cannot assist – all without ever leaving Microsoft Teams.
- Agent capabilities in Microsoft Teams: Agents spend most of their time in ServiceNow IT Service Management but want to more easily leverage the collaboration functionality in Teams to communicate with employees and collaborate with other agents. Now, agents can use Notify to launch the Teams client to engage with peers directly, push major incident updates to business stakeholders, and open direct chats with employees from an incident or request. When used with the new Teams Meeting Extensibility feature, ServiceNow workflows enable agents to be more productive by resolving major incidents directly from within a Microsoft Teams meeting.
The new capabilities are available for select customers as part of the Beta program today.
“Organisations are relying on collaboration platforms more than ever before. Companies like ServiceNow are creating tools that complement and enhance the Microsoft Teams experience. Accenture is eager to test and deploy this new offering,” said Thomas Bruss, Director of Enterprise Services at Accenture.
Today’s updates come on the heels of the ServiceNow Now Platform Paris release, which features several high-demand Microsoft integrations to help enterprises accelerate their digital transformation journeys. Customers can use these integrations to:
- Optimise hybrid cloud spending and usage with Microsoft Azure support for ServiceNow Cloud Insights,
- Streamline new hire onboarding with ServiceNow employee experiences and Microsoft Azure Active Directory, and
- Gain greater control and visibility into organisational assets with ServiceNow Software Asset Management and Microsoft Azure Active Directory.
Additionally, the ServiceNow Virtual Agent Lite plugin for Microsoft Teams, also released in Paris, offers a limited version of Virtual Agent for IT Service Management standard customers. It launched with three prebuilt conversations for common IT support requests. These keyword-based conversations run in the web chat client and in a virtual agent messaging integration with Microsoft Teams.
Today’s announcement furthers the companies’ partnership announcement from 2019 to accelerate digital transformation for joint customers. Customers are accessing the value of this partnership with more than 25 joint solutions available between Microsoft and ServiceNow today. The companies have committed to continued ServiceNow-Teams innovation to enable richer employee experiences from anywhere, at scale.
