ServiceNow is a fast-growing service management provider that went public in 2012. Built on the ServiceNow Now Platform, the IT Service Management bundle provides an agent workspace with knowledge management, and modules supporting issue tracking and problem resolution, change, release and configuration management, and (on the higher tier ITSM Professional plan) ITAM and software asset management.
$10,000
per year
Verint Knowledge Management
Score 9.1 out of 10
N/A
Verint Knowledge Management aim to help agents find and share the information needed to answer both customer inquiries and questions they may have themselves. The solution helps ensure the answers agents access are consistent, up to date, and easily accessible.
In our organization, we are using ServiceNow extensively. Change Management, Incident Management, Problem Management, Time tracking are few modules which we use extensively. This sort of model will work for any product or service based companies as the product is built on ITIL framework. So this product will be suited for small or large scale companies to better organize and add controls and track SLA's for technology or business process.
Verint KMS is great for organizing content by categories for different teams and by different topics. It is easy to search and the Related Content makes moving from one piece of content to the next relevant piece quite easy. On the authoring side, the ability to schedule publishing or expiration is very handy. It is also really easy to make edits and have content ready and published for readers quickly. Verint's KMS isn't well suited if your users wish to be able to organize their favourited content or if you need a wide-range of options on the authoring end of things.
When I have a number of requests to make, for example a request to add a dozen or so user accounts to more than one group account in Active Directory , I can put all the needed information into the initial form, add it to my "shopping cart" and all of that information remains on the screen for the next item for which I only need to edit a few items (like the AD group name in this example), and keep adding them to the shopping cart until I have them all. When I "Check Out" each of those items is generated as a separate task under the one request. It simplifies and expedites the creation and tracking of these kinds of requests.
I can easily and quickly see what tickets are currently assigned to me in order to prioritize them and remain aware of my workload.
Numerous fields for CIs can be used when trying to find the entry for a particular item. For example, IP Address, server name, raw text, classification, and so on.
To help with making sense out of related tasks, when a task is assigned to me and I need to open another task for a different team to work in order to complete my task, I can open a sub-task from my ticket so that the relationship between the two can be pulled up later into reports. For example, I may have a task to build a new vm, and need to open tasks for networking, security accounts, software installation and so on. By opening sub-tasks from my assignment, the time spent by all parties concerned is tied together for more meaningful cost accounting.
The tools to submit and manage user feedback are very effective - they help us respond quickly and interconnect the feedback to the applicable content.
The end user experience is clean and feels familiar, making it optimal to support a group of people who generally have never experienced a KM application before.
Our audience responds well to our ability to insert images, GIFs, videos, PDFs, and more into our content.
It is hard to find areas for improvement, the tool is very powerful. That said, building the CMDB still involves some manual interaction which was not how it was presented in demos.
The CMDB data is almost too deep and detailed. When you build the relationship map it can be so large that it is overwhelming. You can limit this, but the default maps are massive if you are discovering lots of device classes.
The product is expensive. Since they are the leader in the industry and the product has tons of features, they definitely charge for it!
The authoring side could be improved with additional options for fonts and easier formatting for table content. I have issues with trying to add colour to one portion of a table and not the other, so I have to resort to creating in Word first and then copying over to Verint. There is also no option to create steps in one row and the next step in the next row. I end up just adding 1., 2., etc. manually.
Many users would like to be able to organize their bookmarks into folders and the system doesn't allow this. Many have taken to creating bookmark folders in Microsoft Edge instead.
There were a few bugs that went on for a few months that made the initial launch of the KMS more difficult for the users and on the authoring side. The issues were with how the search results came up and what displayed for related content. It wasn't the best first impression for our agents using the system while on calls and made it more difficult. The issues were fixed after a few months of use.
To be completely honest setting up a new ticketing system can be a pain in the ass. Once you have it setup and customized the way you want it, you don't want to switch unless you're unhappy with the product. Unless future releases and updates really muck the system up, I wouldn't change.
The dashboard is so confusing, [there are] many clicks to open a task and search by a ticket. The Enterprise customisation [we did] has finished to kill the software and creates a really bad experience on a daily basis. [It is] So slow, and so many clicks to process a ticket. Works only on IE so, that [should] make you realize that [it] is a bad idea.
I would give it this rating because we have had no major issues with the support for ServiceNow after we implemented it at our organization. They seem to respond promptly and efficiently if we ever do need to open a support case with them about an issue we are having.
The support and development teams for Knowledge are exceptional. They are attentive and truly care about the experience of their customers and their goals
To type in what should be a text box, you have to click an empty cell, a tiny text box pop up opens with a check box and an X. You the. Type in the text box and have to click the check mark. If you have a bunch of fields to fill out, doing this is very annoying. Absolutely know thought went in to this. I'm sure somebody in marketing thought it was a good idea. It wasn't.
Without exception, every client I have worked with has been very happy with their resulting product. While this is partly due to my work, I must point out that the platform is the winning decision, not the implementer.
We used to use Jira to handle service tickets but it's way too robust for something this straightforward. Due to the nature of Jira, you needed to already have a lot of documentation and knowledge about who should be assigned the ticket, so the lift of creating a ticket was time consuming.
All of these tools were very useful and practical. For our decision, it came down to understanding our core audience - we determined our average associate was largely unfamiliar with call center and office work in their prior work experience, and as such they would not have previously worked in a KM application before. To help adoption, we sought the solution with the simplest and most familiar interface, and based on internal focus group feedback, that was Verint KM Pro.
Overall ServiceNow has a positive impact on getting the SLA of tickets down in supporting our customers.
One negative impact has been the amount of time to get the product to produce an ROI, it's almost too big to fail and too big to replace. You almost become committed to the product. Good or bad.
Another negative impact would be if you track metrics of employees and time tracking, there is a lot of scenarios where engineers will track time on tickets but not get credit for closing them as the assignee function of tickets can only be tied to one user and credits only the engineer who closes the ticket.
Another positive impact would be the level of security for permissions and scaling the workloads is robust and you will get out of the system what your team is willing to put in.
Content is easier to keep up to date and publish on an urgent basis.
Some users love the system, while others still find it difficult to find the information they need and miss the former guides we used. I think this is a result of the system issues that persisted for a few months after launch and will hopefully improve with time.
Users love being able to submit feedback and it makes it easier for errors, missing information and out of date information to be caught and fixed.
