Energy Provider Simplifies User Experience with Thirdera and ServiceNow

As one of the largest oil and natural gas producers in North America, this organization needed to create a user-friendly IT service portal that would enable employees to submit critical IT requests—and allow the IT team to target important announcements, such as outages. After purchasing ServiceNow’s IT Service Management (ITSM) solution, the organization wanted to customize the front-end portal to deliver a simplified and streamlined experience for end users.

The organization approached Thirdera Digital (3D) to build a portal experience that met the needs of its diverse and dynamic user base. Thirdera developed an intuitive portal that exceeded these requirements — while still empowering the company’s IT team to maintain the ServiceNow solution themselves moving forward. 

Thirdera branded the portal to flow seamlessly with the organization’s other internal sites and made it mobile-friendly so that users could access it from anywhere. With a branded, custom-built portal for ServiceNow ITSM, the organization could remove friction from the IT service request process, improve IT productivity, and accelerate the adoption of ITSM practices across the organization.

Key Challenges

	Organization-specific branding of the ServiceNow ITSM portal was essential to facilitate user adoption and ensure consistency with all organizational platforms.
	The organization has a broad user base with varying IT needs and different levels of technical ability. To improve the IT service experience, the company needed a single self-service IT portal that was easy to use for employees across departments.
	Users needed a mobile-friendly portal that would be easy to navigate in the office as well as remotely or in the field.

The organization selected ServiceNow ITSM to improve efficiency in distributing important IT information and enable users to escalate critical IT service requests. While the company knew that an intuitive portal could improve employee productivity and deliver a better service experience, it required slight modifications to meet the many needs of its workforce. Since many employees were also wary of new technology and had shown little enthusiasm with past initiatives, the organization’s leadership team emphasized the importance of a successful., end-to-end implementation that generated employee excitement and facilitated adoption. 

A successful implementation meant creating an intuitive, engaging portal with less technical language and easily identifiable action items. Additionally, it was critical to use a brand overlay that was consistent with the aesthetics and experience of existing company sites to accelerate user adoption. Ultimately, the company hoped to rebuild trust with their employees by simplifying the way in which they submitted IT requests and obtained ITSM-related information - all while empowering the internal IT team to manage this new solution.

Our Solution

After searching for a technology partner that could help it design and implement an intuitive self-service portal for ServiceNow ITSM, the company chose Thirdera due to its proven ServiceNow platform expertise. 

“We wanted a team that would come to us with new ideas around the way we were doing things and best practices they could bring forth. We also appreciated their knowledge of designing for ServiceNow and what that means in terms of upgrades and scalability,” adds the company’s IT Advisor.

To achieve a user-centered portal design, the organization engaged Thirdera Digital—Thirdera’s digital business unit. Before portal design discussions, the Thirdera team analyzed user activities across the company to help identify the type of portal experience and underlying workflow automation that would optimize ITSM operations. 

Next, Thirdera built interactive prototypes for the portal that leveraged user-specific behaviors and patterns to enable a persona-based experience. This allowed the organization to test different iterations of persona-based workflows, provide feedback, and identify the portal that best met various user needs. Employees could add and remove portal widgets—the boxes that define the content in any user’s portal display—to create convenient access to only the most relevant tools and information. A heart icon on all catalog items and knowledge articles enables users to favorite or unfavorite a page. This gives employees the power to choose the content most relevant to them with the added feature of direct home page access. Two alerts widgets, targeted at unplanned and planned outages respectively, were also created for the IT team, enabling them to deliver the right level of actionable information to users.

The Result

In the end, Thirdera was able to deliver a bespoke solution that met timeline requirements along with the organization’s unique portal specifications. User adoption concerns were addressed with Thirdera’s organizational change management (OCM) services, combined with custom videos for portal launch, to create a smooth implementation that provided employees with all the necessary information. One of the project team members said, “Important information was highlighted, and our users understood the purpose of the portal and what they could do on it right away.” Another team member added, “Having Thirdera create visuals to support our communication around the project got our employees excited about what was coming and increased the adoption once the portal went live. The videos and graphics had a huge impact!”

With a self-service IT portal that is unique to each user’s needs, operational efficiency and optimization are higher than ever. The portal helped break down communication silos and enable users across departments to access critical IT information. Automation allows users to quickly escalate crucial requests they need and makes sharing company-wide announcements fast and easy. The organization’s IT team can also efficiently manage the portal themselves — with no ongoing external support required.

Thirdera’s ServiceNow ITSM portal implementation enabled the organization to rebuild employee trust in new technology initiatives, driving usage and adoption of the ServiceNow platform. And by rolling out a solution that meets the needs of a wide range of roles within the organization, the platform not only fulfills the company’s current requirements, but it also allows the organization to effortlessly scale its IT processes as the company grows.

About Thirdera

The largest pure-play ServiceNow partner in North America, Thirdera is a trusted Elite ServiceNow partner focused solely on improving and innovating the way our customers leverage the ServiceNow platform. Our experts possess authoritative capabilities and skillsets spanning the entire Now Platform. This extensive platform expertise allows us to understand our customers’ needs and deliver tailored solutions that solve business challenges.

Contact us today to discuss your next project, and enter a new era of ServiceNow partner experience.