ServiceNow extends Microsoft partnership with new Teams functionality
ServiceNow has extended its partnership with Microsoft to enhance the integration with Teams and improve employee experiences.
At Microsoft Ignite 2020, ServiceNow introduced new workflows embedded in Microsoft Teams to improve employee productivity with self-service and improved case resolution.
Powered by ServiceNow's digital workflow platform, the Now Platform, the new capabilities are also said to 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, and now as of April 29, Microsoft Teams has had 75 million daily active users, up 70% from just six weeks prior.
In April, Microsoft saw more than 200 million meeting participants in a single day, generating more than 4.1 billion meeting minutes, according to the company.
The new capabilities announced today include employee experiences and agent functionality.
Employee experiences in Microsoft Teams enables companies 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.
In addition, 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.
ServiceNow chief product officer Chirantan CJ Desai says, "We're helping customers solve for once-in-a-generation challenges as they capitalise on the promise of digital transformation.
"We are doubling down on Teams to find innovative ways for workflows to elevate engagement, culture, collaboration, and productivity no matter where people are.
ServiceNow executive vice president of Experiences and Devices Rajesh Jha says, "Now more than ever, people need to stay connected and organised together from anywhere.
"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.
These updates follow the ServiceNow Now Platform Paris release, which features several high-demand Microsoft integrations to help enterprises accelerate their digital transformation journeys.
According to the company, 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.
