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 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 capitalize 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 organized 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 include:
The new capabilities are available for select customers as part of the Beta program. “Organizations 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.
The 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:
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.
The 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.