Share the Wealth: ServiceNow Communities

In this week’s Share the Wealth video, Matt Dumont of GlideFast Consulting gives an overview and demonstration on the ServiceNow Communities application.

What is Communities?

ServiceNow Communities is designed to complement ServiceNow’s already extensive suite of collaborative tools with the power of crowd-sourced incident and request deflection through Customer Service Management.

“With the ServiceNow Communities application, connect, engage, and collaborate with your employees, customers, partners, and prospects. Your users get quick responses to their issues by posting questions, reviewing blogs or videos, and searching for previous discussions. It is an essential component of your self-service strategy along with the Knowledge Base and Service Catalog.” - ServiceNow

Content

Forums/Topics

Moderators can create forums that serve to direct content to the right community of users and support personnel. Forums can be nested, each with its own set of permissions. Topics are used to help tag content to further filter it for interested parties.

Content Types

• Q&A

• Blog

• Comment

• Document

• Event

• Video

Communication

Announcements

The Communities Portal takes advantage of Global Portal announcements. It introduces a new forum-based announcement feature that populated the “Announcements” widget in the relevant forums. It can also populate the same widget on other Portals at the same time.

Subscriptions

With subscriptions, users can specify which forums or topics should result in notifications and what kind of notifications are relevant to them.

Gamification

Points System

Through a series of pre-configured triggers, a points system can be established and customized to encourage interaction in the forums via milestones and badges.

Integrations

Knowledge Harvesting

Each forum can have a Knowledge Base (KB) designated for harvesting.

Case Generation

Support professionals can convert existing questions into a CSM case with the click of a button for quick resolution.

Social Q&A vs. Communities

Social Q&A

The standard Service Portal has a widget called Community that leads to a simple Q&A page that, by default, writes and reads from a Knowledge Base called Social Q&A. Out-of-the-box, it has no relation to the Community Portal.

Communities

A default KB for must be designated for the Communities Portal. Questions and Answers will be visible in the Knowledge module similar to the Social Q&A KB. By default, they are all written to an inactive SN_Community KB.

Do they work together?

The default KB for Communities can be set to Social Q&A. Both features will interact with the separate portals independently, but questions from both will be written to the KB.

Alternatively, to avoid confusion, the Out-of-the-Box Community widget in the Service Portal can be replaced with a link to the Communities Portal.

Interested in working with experts like Matt? Reach out to our team. We would love to learn more about your ServiceNow challenges and how we can help your organization build better solutions.