Top 10 Best New Features From The ServiceNow Quebec Release

Analytics, Intelligence & Reporting

Analytics Q&A and Natural Language Querying
Brand-new in the ServiceNow Quebec release is the Analytics Q&A. You can generate a report by entering a query instead of going through the full Report Designer menu. Analytics Q&A is powered by the Natural Language Query (NLQ) application, now supporting multiple languages.

Bonus!
There’s no need to understand the full ServiceNow data model and how tables relate to each other, as you can easily extract and visualize the information from the system!

IT Service Management

Workforce Optimization
Use Workforce Optimization for ITSM to manage and maintain agent productivity from a single location. The ServiceNow Quebec release makes the planning flow much more efficient for team managers.

It’s now possible to:

• Forecast team demands based on historical data
• Manage events, shifts and agent schedules from the team calendar

Key benefits
Provide support coverage with planning and managing of shifts, schedules and holiday requests for your team from a single location. For managers, this is a one-start-shop for planning resources and ensuring your support targets are covered.

IT Operations Management (ITOM)

Predictive AIOps
Predict, prevent and automate IT issues before they impact users. Combine Event Management with log analytics and anomaly detection to predict issues and proactively prevent them from happening.

Key benefits
Everyone in your enterprise will benefit from AIOps, including customers relying on IT services you deliver. This is due to its powerful capability of data analysis, prioritization and correlation to issues that require immediate attention and proactive triggering of workflows to remediate or mitigate problems.

IT Business Management (ITBM)

Project & Portfolio Management collaboration
Collaborate with your project team on your dedicated Slack channel or Microsoft Teams environment.  This ensures active and timely project communication among the project members and no one misses critical project discussions thanks to real-time project status updates.

Key benefits
Using collaboration tools like Slack or Microsoft Teams for projects in ServiceNow reduces the time the project manager and team members spend on emails and other offline communication. Collaborate more efficiently in projects and boost efficiency using this new Quebec functionality.

Field Service Management

Dispatcher Workspace
The dispatcher center-of-work has been overhauled with a workspace experience. Dispatchers now have a modern user interface with an integrated and intuitive user experience.

Features include:

• Dispatcher dashboard providing visibility on the dispatch queue list
• Calendar view list with all agents showing their availability, task lists and maps
• Full dispatching functionality support available in the legacy overview, including auto-assignment, agent suggestions and manual planning

Key benefits
The improvements make the workflow for dispatchers much more efficient thanks to a single customizable view that clusters all important data. The smart assist functions like Agent Recommendations, SLA information and all task details allow dispatchers to easily manage their queues.

Customer Service Management

Guided Decisions and next best actions
Guided Decisions empower agents to solve complex cases faster by guiding customer service agents through a troubleshooting process using decision trees. Based on the context and outcomes, the system suggests what the next best actions are in the resolution process.

Key benefits
Help your customer service agents to improve first contact resolution. Guided decisions and next best actions help your agents to resolve complex cases faster, improving agent satisfaction and productivity whilst at the same time improving the Customer Experience by shortening issue resolution time.

Flow Designer

Flow Variables
The ServiceNow Quebec release has added flow variables to help solve the need to store some data in the flow that isn’t directly linked to a record. The concept is similar to the scratchpad in the legacy workflow editor, meaning a large improvement for complex logic in flows.

Key benefits
Flow variables allow for the creation of complex logic or rollups. These variables can be re-used, incremented or in other ways utilized in flows, allowing you to create flows that completely match your business logic without writing custom actions.

Now Mobile Apps

The Now Mobile Apps have received several interesting enhancements and updates that make the lives of both end-users and administrators of the mobile apps easier.

Noteworthy improvements are:

• Advanced (AI-powered) search to auto-correct typos, auto-complete search queries and make searching more efficient
• Customized card view presents all data in a graphical UI and makes cards actionable, enabling users to perform actions directly in the card to accept or reject suggestions, call listed contacts, and add items to the card

Key benefits
Easily edit card layouts and the data shown in the mobile apps to tailor them for enterprise use.

Now Platform

Instance Scan
The Instance Scan capability has been in the works for some time now. Instance Scans are used to indicate platform health issues and identify opportunities to implement best practices. During the scan, your existing configurations are checked and any future configuration issues are remediated. Its options allow you to use specified checks to scan applications, update sets or specific records. The results of the scan are shown in a neatly organized dashboard.

Key benefits
If you combine Instance Scan with the Plat4mation QA4U service, you can keep your instance instance perfectly healthy, super upgradeable and on par with best practices. QA4U ensures easier upgrading and patching, less issues and an easier and shorter release upgrade trajectory.

Now Experience UI Builder

The new Now Experience UI builder is totally different from the UI builder in the Orlando release (now called the “legacy UI builder”). The new version does not only allow you to create landing pages, but it is a full web user interface builder that shows you the final interface while you create new workspaces or portal experiences.

Key benefits
The new Now Experience UI builder allows admins to create user experiences that meet your business requirements and improves the way the platform is used. Engage customers, increase customer satisfaction and reduce time spent by employees in inefficient workspaces.