ServiceNow is widely used to boost efficiency and make cost savings, achieving an ROI of 195% within 3 years. To get the best from this platform, you must use an implementation expert who can offer an objective view of your customisation requirements to ensure that you prioritise the right functionality.

A modern digital adoption platform, such as Apty, lets you get up and running fast, bypassing common onboarding and implementation challenges.

First, let’s look at what ServiceNow is designed to achieve.

What is ServiceNow?  

As a powerful cloud platform, ServiceNow enables the simplification of processes for your IT, HR and Finance departments. It emerged initially as an ITSM application, then developed into a solution deployed to improve customer service, IT processes, security, business applications and HR services.

Your company can use workflows and automated tasks to engineer a whole employee lifecycle using this single platform, eradicating the need for manual work. This sounds ideal for any company looking to improve their efficiency - and it is -, but while it is perfect for automating routine tasks and freeing your employees' time for more detailed work, there are big challenges in the onboarding phase with ServiceNow.

How a digital adoption platform like Apty makes your ServiceNow implementation easier and more robust

Onboarding with any new solution can be challenging, and ServiceNow is no exception. A digital onboarding platform lets your users learn how to execute their tasks in real-time, cutting training time and ensuring they have the support to ask questions and gain a complete understanding right from the first day of using ServiceNow.

There isn’t just one way to onboard with ServiceNow, but many of them, such as certification, online training and using a third party for training, need a lot of time and resources and will only deliver results in the long term. A digital adoption platform like Apty provides a comprehensive, on-demand onboarding process that thoroughly embeds ServiceNow but can also be completed quickly.

How does Apty work to ensure your ServiceNow onboarding is a success?

1. Step-by-step guidance

ServiceNow is a complex application - that’s why it can achieve so many things. Your company will reduce manual work, create efficiency and speed up onboarding processes. To get to this stage, you need to accept that when you first start to use ServiceNow, there will be a learning curve as you get to understand all its features and how to use them.

Without a digital adoption platform, your employees will need to locate the relevant guidance for each of their roles by reading the generic documentation. This clearly isn’t ideal for an onboarding process and will lengthen the period of implementation drastically.

Apty allows you to produce customised in-app guidance for all job roles, regions and departments. This eliminates confusion for new hires, who are naturally absorbing a huge amount of other information.  New users are welcomed by the system and assigned a walkthrough relevant to their role, then supported at every step. Support teams and colleagues receive fewer support requests, saving a considerable amount of time and resources usually needed during an induction period.

The guidance is split into two tabs - Help and Onboarding. To assimilate into the application, all new starters must complete all of the workflows in the Onboarding tab to begin using the application. It typically requires between a few hours and a few days to reach full familiarisation.

The Help tab can be used by new and existing employees to improve their knowledge after completing their exercises within the Onboarding tab. This is where your company can add videos, additional documentation and workflows that will help your employees to embed their learning.

ServiceNow is an investment that has been proven to deliver high ROI, and to gain proof of this it is necessary to adopt the platform quickly. Apty is designed to support this by tracking knowledge acquisition and enabling your employees to strengthen their learning by turning it into real-time task completion.

2. In-app assistance = fast onboarding

The forgetting curve is the enemy of training. It’s possible to perfectly align a traditional onboarding experience with your organisation’s goals and user needs, then see your plans destroyed by a human’s natural tendency to forget.

This doesn't happen with digital adoption platforms. On-demand learning bypasses the problem, with a knowledge base that is accessible to your users 24/7. The full range of ServiceNow documentation and walkthrough videos are available at any time your employees decide to complete their learning. The pitfalls around generic documentation are absent as the help content stays configured to each user’s exact needs.

3. Use powerful insights to reduce your turnover rate   

Employee retention is more critical than ever before. In today’s market, 40% of employees leave within the first year, according to INC. The loss of knowledge, continuity and cost of replacement can hit businesses hard. Commonly, employees depart when they struggle with daily tasks, and feel unmotivated or undervalued. Digital transformation is vital, but employees need to feel supported.

Your company can safeguard against these issues with great employee training and onboarding, to increase their confidence.  Apty helps you to understand your employees and how they utilise the ServiceNow application before you design a training and onboarding program for new starters. Apty analytics tools demonstrate how your employees are using the application, including where they hit a brick wall, the workflows they abandon and how much time they spend completing tasks.

Identifying pain points through Apty’s data enables you to design your new starter programme to overcome these issues right from the start. Your onboarding with ServiceNow can pay special attention to workflows that others have found problematic, ensuring that they no longer become an issue.  

You can follow this up by utilising Apty’s analytics tool again to view how employees are performing with ServiceNow once the improvements have been put in place and pain points eliminated. If employees are still experiencing problems, you can create customisation to create new, improved workflows to support them in streamlining their daily work.

We know that onboarding a complex application like ServiceNow is a big task, but we think it's worth it. Once your employees have mastered basic usage and their specific workflows, the value and impact really kick in. You can create new workflows, automate repetitive tasks and create links between departments that lead to better overall performance.  

One simple step you can take upfront: use a digital adoption platform such as Apty. A DAP will like Apty to ensure that your onboarding process is straightforward, responsive to individual needs and comprehensive to ensure you can take advantage of the full range of features that an application such as ServiceNow offers.

Call to action:

If you’re considering making a huge investment in an application like ServiceNow, Apty can ensure that your adoption process is smooth, accessible to all and configured to the exact needs of your organisation. If you’ve already made the leap but are struggling with implementation, we can step in. Contact us now to ensure that your employee onboarding process is a complete success.

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