While the need for speed certainly isn’t new, it has never been more urgent or important. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, companies in every industry have had to learn how to rapidly adapt to ever-changing business conditions in order to stay competitive. To achieve the level of agility required, being able to deliver new digital workflows at scale is critical.

Released in March 2021, ServiceNow Quebec includes a number of exciting new products, applications, and feature enhancements designed to further drive agility and productivity. 

To help you understand the changes and the benefits of upgrading to this release, our team of ServiceNow experts has compiled some of our favourite features.

Here are the five features we’re most excited about:

1. Machine Learning and Native AI Solutions

Over the past year, the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the future of work and dramatically changed many aspects of everyday life, including how and where we work. With many employees now working remotely—and the number of organisations increasingly shifting to permanent WFH arrangements—we’re particularly excited about Quebec’s new machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities that empower employees to work smarter and simpler from anywhere. 

Resulting from ServiceNow’s acquisitions of  Loom Systems and Attivio, these AI capabilities—which include ITOM Predictive AIOps, AI Search, and a Virtual Agent—can help amplify productivity and improve the employee experience for organisations with distributed workforces.

The Virtual Agent, for example, allows remote employees to easily get automated support anywhere in the world using their smartphone or laptop, increasing employee self-service. And with the number of demo templates provided, getting up to speed is quick and easy. With conversational custom chat integrations, your end users can also now engage with the ServiceNow Virtual Agent and live agents through other third-party chat channels outside of ServiceNow. 

Added bonus: AI Search even auto-corrects typos and misspellings. Yes, please.

Interested to learn more about the most intelligent IT and HR virtual agent by PeopleReign? Schedule your complimentary AI briefing today! 

2. Now Experience UI Builder

With Quebec’s Now Experience UI Builder—a web user interface builder—you can now preview the final interface as you’re building new pages or customising existing pages for web-based workspace and portal experiences. 

Coming with a full library of design components to build your pages, you can quickly and easily add components to your page, configure them any way you want, and then connect your company data to them. With the new UI Builder, it’s easier than ever to design and personalise workspaces and portals to improve the overall user experience. And by reusing the same components across multiple interfaces, you can design pages more efficiently while, at the same time, creating a more cohesive user experience.

3. App Engine Studio

One of ServiceNow’s best low-code developer tools, App Engine Studio—with its templates, visual workflows, and configurable workspaces—enables creators of varying skill levels to build applications fast. Offering an intuitive and guided low-code visual development environment, even people with no coding experience can collaborate on and build applications quickly.

The App Engine Studio is a big deal because it opens organisations to more possibilities with ServiceNow—without having to commit developer resources. Using App Engine, for example, the City of Los Angeles was able to design, build, and launch a custom COVID-19 testing app in a mere 72 hours. 

4. Analytics Q&A and Natural Language Querying

With Analytics Q&A in the new Quebec release, reports can now be created by entering a query instead of going through the full Report Designer menu. This is also supported by the Natural Language Query (NLQ) application, now available in multiple languages, including French, Spanish, German, and Japanese. 

Why is this great? Instead of having to understand the complexities of the ServiceNow data model, you can easily extract records-related information from your ServiceNow instance using plain language. Ask questions like “How many incidents of each priority level are there?” or “How many open cases are assigned to me?” and get immediate, accurate answers to your queries. 

Analytics Q&A will even suggest which visualisation (list, trend, pie, etc.) best tells the story of the data you are reviewing or presenting. And with NLQ, you can use synonyms for common words—such as "open" for “active” or "my department" for "my group”—to make your searches more robust and efficient.

5. Process Optimisation

A new application in the Quebec release, Process Optimisation helps analysts and process owners understand the effectiveness of their business processes by using automated business process flows. Essentially, it allows users to see the connection between effective, efficient, and economical processes—and the tools that support them.

This is a new way to look at what records do between open and close—such as what steps they go through and how many times they change hands. Process owners can see how many tickets take the “happy path” as opposed to another way of getting from open to close. It does this by looking at the audit logs of records, which otherwise really can't be examined in bulk at all.

The Process Optimisation application enables:

• Push-button discovery: One click in the platform executes an end-to-end analysis of the process in question. You can then filter the analysis by specific transitions or breakdown filters.
• Process model visualisation and comparison: Graphical models illustrating workflows and filters allow you to inspect workflow transitions and steps with greater granularity.
• Linked process analysis: Analyse related processes and sub-processes, as well as their impacts on the primary process.
• Integration with Performance Analytics: KPIs can be linked to continuous improvement initiatives and display metrics in real-time.

By examining underlying business workflows, IT and customer service organisations can proactively identify bottlenecks, accelerate issue resolution, and ensure they’re not building on top of inefficient workflows.

Upgrading To ServiceNow Quebec Is Easier Than You Think

Upgrading your ServiceNow instance can seem daunting, but the new features in Quebec make the upgrade more than worth it. And you don’t have to do it alone! If you’ve been putting off upgrading to Quebec because of time or resource constraints, Thirdera can help. As the largest and most experienced pure-play ServiceNow partner, we are here to show you how to get more out of your ServiceNow investment.

Ready to upgrade?

Get expert tips on how to guide your team down the path to a successful upgrade in our ServiceNow Upgrade Guide!

Need help? Get help from a ServiceNow expert.