You may have heard of service portals but, what are the benefits of having service portals? Service portals are an important tool in business. They help companies manage their services better and give employees as well as customers more information about their products or services available to them. ServiceNow Service Portals provide a platform to build something with low or no code depending on your team’s skill set.
Why Do You Need a Service Portal?
There are a few reasons why you need a service portal:
- It will give you a chance to improve customer satisfaction by providing more information about the products and services available.
- Create a captivating experience for your users.
- It will help you build trust with your customers by providing speed of response and accuracy.
- Helps maximize your current investment in ServiceNow.
What Features Does a Good Service Portal Have?
Portals are becoming more useful as they are expanding the business units they benefit. For example, service portals traditionally live in the IT Service arena however, there have been recent advances where business units like HR, Legal, and Customer Service can utilize a centralized service portal. Here are some features you should look to implement in a service portal.
- Intuitive modular design
- Unified service center for multiple departments to capitalize on
- AI-powered search
- Support for multiple devices
- Customization with no or low code
Examples of Service Portals
This portal is an example of an IT Service Portal. Employees can report IT issues, Read Knowledge Articles, Request IT Services, and review services previously requested.
Below is an example of the AI Search capabilities within a ServiceNow Service Portal Knowledge Base.
Employee Center Portal
Here is an example of an Employee Center portal that includes other services employees can benefit from including IT, HR, and Legal.
How to Start Your Own ServiceNow Service Portals:
You can try Service Portals out yourself in a couple of ways within the ServiceNow environment. First, if you have not done this already, go get yourself a Dev Instance of ServiceNow so you can try this out with Demo Data already in place to make this a little more fun to start.
Service Portal Configuration Tool
01.
Navigate in your newly acquired Dev Instance to Service Portal > Service Portal Configuration.
02.
Now that you are at the Service Portal Configuration, you can edit the existing default Service Portal or simply create a new portal.
03.
Play around and get comfortable with the different areas you can modify in the tool.
App Engine
For the developers or more adventurous, you can create a portal in App Engine. ServiceNow’s App Engine Studio (AES) is a development tool for creators of varying skill levels to build applications that meet the immediate needs of your organization.
You can see in the screenshot above that there are a couple of ways to start building your Custom Portal. You can browse for Templates to start with, or you can simply start by clicking “Add an experience”. With App Engine Studio, you have the power at your fingertips to build virtually anything.
If you are not familiar with Development in ServiceNow, there are a lot of great resources to help guide you. On the App Engine Home Page, there is a Quick Start Item called “Learn the tools”. That is a great place to start. There are several great tutorials and guides to get you started there.
Things to consider when building a custom portal or even when utilizing the Service Portal Configuration tool:
- Who are you building your site for and why?
- What information do you want to include on your site?
- How do you want the mobile experience for users to work?
What to Do if Your Team Does Not Have the Time or Skills to Implement a Portal?
We can help. ServiceNow portals can be simple but simple does not fit every business. Veracity has a rich full-stack understanding of ServiceNow from the front end to back end. Veracity’s UI/UX team has the ability to help build out your customer experience or journey. If you bring us a design, we can build it.
We can build anything you can think up, we also prefer to stick to out of the box as much as possible. Our development team has ways to get custom results however, it is important for us to always ensure upgrade compatibility for our customer’s instances.
In conclusion, service portals are a great way to improve customer satisfaction and increase sales. Service portals are an essential part of any company’s website. They allow employees to find resources and services to stay productive and happy. It also gives companies visibility on how well their services are performing.
