ServiceNow Reviews

We build out video knowledge bases, how-to knowledge bases for self-service support and agent use. We integrate into a number of different ticketing systems, service management platforms, helpdesk platforms, and call center systems.

We are a ServiceNow partner and we have a ServiceNow instance. We use it for ticketing support, ticketing systems. It has worked really well for what we do.

We have set a standard around the way we build content. We have found that if we build for ServiceNow, it will pretty much import anywhere. The format is very similar. ServiceNow seems to be more of a standard interface and their knowledge import specs are pretty consistent with everything else. We have had a few we have had to tweak but, generally, if we build it for ServiceNow, in a lot of cases we can take a ServiceNow file and import it into any other system and it will work fine. That's the biggest benefit.

The biggest feature is that it is cloud-based, so it's always updated, it's always current. We don't have to worry about patches, revisions. We're always working with the latest version.

The features continue to improve. We get new features and we can choose to turn them on or not, but we're always getting them. That is part of the program.

Some enhancements to the self-service platform would be helpful. That part is still a little barebone. There are some things that they could do better that we have suggested to them.

Also, the mobile app is not bad, but it's limited. They are going to be working on that, I'm sure, over the years.

It seems to be very solid. We have not run into any errors or problems, although we're not a very heavy user. If somebody was processing thousands of tickets a day, maybe they would run into something, but for us, it's solid. There are no issues at all.

It seems to be able to accommodate any number of clients, agents, admins. We're a small company, so we don't stress it very much with the number we have in the platform. But everything that I see there, I think it will go. They have large, global corporations working on it, so I think it's pretty solid. That is what I've seen, but not what I've experienced.

Their technical support is very good. We're in the partner program so we have a different development program. We access a different group within support compared to the support a regular client would access. When we need help, the people we work with are very good. Things get resolved, things don't linger.

First, decide what your processes need to be. Determine what your environment needs, what's important, what your priorities are, what your process methodology is, and find a platform to fit that. If you are trying to find a platform and you don't go through that exercise first, you're just tying yourself up in knots. If you choose the platform first, then you are going to match your processes to the platform. If you haven't been through a process, an internal system environmental analysis, to see how things work and what you need, you'll never be happy and you'll wind up changing platforms every couple of years or every time your CIO changes.

When selecting a vendor the most important criteria for us are that they

• are cloud-based
• have ongoing development
• provide API capability so we can integrate whatever we need.

There has to be the ability to write APIs as you need them, so you can hook in whatever you need to connect to it.

I would rate ServiceNow at eight out of 10. They're good but they can get better. From what we've seen, they are making improvements, they listen to feedback. They're not sitting still, they continuing to evolve, continuing to develop, add features, add capacity.

How configurable ServiceNow is, but at the same time you have to know what you're doing. It's not easy to make mistakes, but at the same time I guess it is. It's kind of difficult to explain.

Right now the way we have our structure is that we use record producers that go to a form, and we use the variable editor to show the record producer. One of the limitations is if you do UI policies and client scripts on the record producer, it doesn't transfer over to the variable editor, so it's kind of like you're doing double the work. If you use the requested item table, you don't have to do double that work, which seems like a limitation that you can't use that functionality on any other table besides the requested item table. That's a big one that bothers me.

I've used it for a little less than a year.

From what I heard we've had contractors who've come in who've worked on other people's incidences, and they say our incidence is the buggiest of all the other incidences they've dealt with. When we promote update sets some of the updates in the update set don't go to the next environment. It's completely random, and it shows up in the update set in the environment you push it to that it was promoted properly, but it doesn't show up. You have to go into that environment and make the changes. Little things like that, but it's always up and running, unless our company has an internet issue.

We're using it in one of our divisions, but cross functionally, so we see it scaling up.

Ninety percent of the time the people that respond to the high tickets that we open are really knowledgeable and solve our questions within a week. In the high ticket when you select a category, there's not enough categories, so sometimes we just have to select one. In that instance, we sometimes get somebody who doesn't really understand what are questions was, because we weren't able to select a great category for them to understood what was going on.

Go for it, but start in a small area, and don't bite off more than you can chew, because it does take time to develop this stuff. It's not as easy as everybody thinks, so I wouldn't make too many promises that you're going to get stuff out there quick.

The most valuable parts of ServiceNow for us is the flexibility that it has, that it's a platform, and that we can develop pretty much anything that we need, not only for IT, but also for HR, our finance department, our register's office, pretty much any organization around campus. ServiceNow provides us with a platform that we can develop the tools that are necessary for just about any function on campus.

It gives us one platform that we can go in and do reporting. Reporting is probably one of the key features, it's getting access to data that we have in ServiceNow and being able to report on that is a key element in how we are analyzing and making decisions. We can quickly pull up reports, graphs, charts, whatever we need to be able to make decisions, where beforehand just to pull the data was a lot harder.

We've developed a number of apps or workflows that literally have taken days or weeks to complete because of the approval process. We've taken that into a workflow where now the approvals are sent via email. A user, or an administrator just needs to simply click on that email, click on approve, send it back. We've seen in some of those cases where, like I said, it's gone from days or weeks to literally hours and minutes. Another scenario is we've taken our employee leave system from a paper base where paper had to be filled out manually, signed, given to a staff assistant to enter into our ERP system to being done on the IT systems.

We've now taken that entire process where an employee fills it out online wherever they may be. They submit it, it routes to their supervisor for an approval. That approval comes back, and then that system is fed into our ERP system. There's no manual process to it, other than entering the leave request, selecting the days, and the number of hours you're taking, and the supervisor approving it. We estimate that university-wide, that's probably saving about 2,000 hours per year just on employees having to enter that data back into our ERP system.

Probably the biggest thing that is frustrating is the changes in their price structure, their price modeling. That's been very frustrating for us. Since we came on four years ago, it's changed quite a bit over time. There's been a lot of uncertainty on what the pricing scheme is going to be. It's worked out well for us, but that uncertainty as the company has grown, not knowing where they're going with it, has been a little frustrating.

The first real latency issue we had was about a month ago. We attributed it to probably some updates that we had run. We backed those off to see if they impacted any of that performance. We were thinking it was something we had done. Come to find out that they had transferred us from their Virginia data site to their San Jose, I believe and they had some issues. Once we recognized that it wasn't on our end, we notified them and they were quick to respond to it. That's the only real latency issue that we've had. It's always a concern. That's something that we're always very aware of is because our users are like, "If ServiceNow continues to grow, what's going to be the impact to performance?"

As we grow as an organization, meaning the number of developers we have in the system, we've had a big concern with how we give access to developers, but don't allow them to hurt the whole environment once they’re in. There again, the changes that they've introduced with Helsinki, and that being able to do more sculpt applications, and narrow the access that admins have is a huge improvement. We keep growing as far as the number of developers we have in the system, but we have major concern over what they can touch, and what they should and shouldn't touch.

Scaling, as far as what we're doing in the system, we haven't have any issue with. Scaling, as far as the number of developers and how to organize that, as far as bringing more and more people into actually develop on it, that's been our concern. The time commitment to get them up and running, speed, get them trained, especially trained in how we do things. The other part is the access that we give them, so the issue is not with the solution itself, it's more organizationally.

We had a multitude of systems. When we talked about a knowledge base, Knowledge Base was a home-grown system that we had outgrown as far as IT and the university. We ran into severe limitations with our Knowledge Base. We had old content out there. ServiceNow allowed us to restructure how we're doing knowledge, and implementing a knowledge base to the entire campus. Incident, we were using Footprints, which was eventually bought out by BMC.

It was sold two or three time in Footprints. We had used Remedy. Remedy proved to be so cumbersome to manage, as far as an incident management tool. We've gone multiple directions. ServiceNow, as far as incident management, allows us to quickly escalate issues to the proper teams. Not only across IT, but we've incorporated it in so we can escalate issues to departmental IT personnel as well, and even outside of IT where necessary.

I'm a big proponent of ServiceNow. While I think it's a great system, it's not a silver bullet. I don't think there is a silver bullet system out there for IT, or for an enterprise. I would say ServiceNow is as close, in the variety of systems that I've come across, it's as close as a system has come to meeting not only an IT need, but an organizational need. That's initially where we started. We started it at with an IT need. I would say in order for it to be successful, you have to have buy-in from the top. If your administration is buying in with it, and can show their level of support for that change, that system, it makes it go a lot easier. We had a mixture of support. Some things went well. Others, we didn't have the support, and so it was an uphill battle.

We use ServiceNow for asset management. I manage the IT contracts that are in ServiceNow with the metadata that we have. I'm the associate director for IT contract assets.

When we can centralize all the contract information, ServiceNow will give us better control over asset management and technical debt.

ServiceNow is not meeting our expectations. The contract module is quite rudimentary. It doesn't support contract line items, which are subdivisions of contracts in VA. The result is that we're not able to track those sorts of assets down to the product level. I'd like to see support for contract line items included in the next release.

I've been using this solution for two years. 

My understanding is that the stability is excellent. 

The initial setup is complex because it's not meeting our needs. We're having to build a scoped app to address the inability to save contract line items and data.

For now, I rate this solution five out of 10. 

We mostly use ServiceNow for incident management. There is a team which interacts with the customers and logs customer issues as incidents. Then those incidents are taken care of by my team. I work on the escalation side of that team.

That is one aspect of ServiceNow. The second thing we use it for are any economic, long-term or repetitive problems. We log problem tickets which are resolved in ServiceNow.

The third use is for changes in the system. All the changes to the system are logged in ServiceNow with their associated tasks. Those are the three major use cases for ServiceNow.

The feature that I have found most valuable from ServiceNow is the ability to assign sub-tasks to different teams, including problem tickets and the regular and chain tasks. For example, if there is a chain which requires different steps of execution validation or execution steps, those task divisions, as well as the assignment and ownership of the tasks, is something that is really useful in ServiceNow.

The major area for improvement for our needs would be monitoring the metrics of the times to acknowledge and resolve issues and escalations. For example, if there is an incident which is not acknowledged within a certain period of time, or the resolution of the incident exceeds a certain period of time, it can be escalated to the next levels. That is one of the things you're looking for which is not available with ServiceNow.

The second feature I would be looking for is integration with different tools, like Bugzilla, Microsoft Informer, and Jira. Jira has integration, in fact. Teams in different organizations use different tools, so integrating those tools would be really helpful.

I have been using ServiceNow for two years.

It is quite a stable solution. In the last couple of years we probably had around one or two outages and only one major outage. So it's very stable.

ServiceNow is quite scalable. 

I would say there are about 400 people using ServiceNow in the organization. That includes administrators, users and those who maintain ServiceNow. Currently, ServiceNow gets daily usage.

I don't usually get in touch with support directly because I am not an end user.

In my previous company we used a custom-built tool which was not available on the market. It was called My Article Support and was built internally specifically for big biotic collection. It was highly customized and it catered to a lot of our needs.

One of the features in that tool was based on the customer engagement level and not on the revenue impact that customer had on the organization or the number of users impacted, etc... It would generate the incident prioritization score, which determined how quickly we were supposed to work on the incident. So the prioritization of incidents was automated, which I do not find in ServiceNow. But that tool was very customized and it was internally built so the development was done in-house. The second thing was the ability to track and close escalations because it was a custom-built tool and there was a process for it. The process was defined and was in the documentation.

I was actually not there when the setup was done so I can't answer that.

You need to find a tool that suits your needs. For example, the ServiceNow tool has certain advantages but at this point, one of the major things I'm looking for is tracking an escalation based on acknowledging the resolution. Meaning, I'm looking for something which is different compared to ServiceNow. It probably depends on your needs but for certain use cases, it does work very well, and maybe you need to do a deep dive or evaluate it before you buy anything.

On a scale of one to ten I would rate ServiceNow a seven.

ServiceNow is such a broad framework that you can basically touch upon any improvement that you want to do in your company. Whether it's financial, healthcare or HR related. I think you can use your imagination to build anything that you want to improve. I think that's the greatest power of ServiceNow - it's basically a generic optimization too.

What I really like is that it's going a bit away from purely IT but it allows you to compose a service catalog or an asset database. That can be the basis of purchasing, request performance or validation. For example for healthcare, you load all the assets of technical healthcare systems into ACNB database which can be used to find out which hospitals have an MRI machine available.

You can go in all kinds of directions and I think that's what is most powerful. They use mechanisms to attract people to the system. I think the user experience is improving so fast, they use the example a system of record and system of engagement. I think it's exactly that. It attracts people that normally wouldn't have so much interest in a system like this but because it communicates a bit like WhatsApp it appeals much more to what they like to do. Then I think the biggest step of implementing such things is not the imagination of knowing what to design, what to develop but how to implement it in an organization. I think that's the biggest step, basically changing your organization to adapt to the new functionality or the new way of working you want to introduce. I think that for companies it's the most difficult aspect.

Architects and solution designers can come up with the greatest things but more complex organizations cannot just be blended into an ideal model. There's always contradicting stakeholders especially in the field of service management. I'm doing an assignment with a large bank and their service management belongs the service management department. The IT company that does the nominal incident resolution for us feel responsible for service management. We have a security and compliance department who feels responsible for service management. We have a functional support department that feels responsible for service management. Everybody has an opinion on service management, everybody has an opinion on CMDB. If you want to change something with a great idea, they have to get all those people on board to get the decision made and then to have it implemented. I think that is the tricky bit and that's what you don't hear all the time.

Well the funny thing is that we develop based on ServiceNow and you see a lot of apps being made. I think whenever you see shortfalls or improvement opportunities for ServiceNow that are being built by third party companies, the next release of ServiceNow includes it all. There must be aspects that are currently not there in ServiceNow and my bet is that it will be there next year. That's difficult for development guys like us but on the other hand it makes the product stronger all the time.

What I'd like to see is the fact that Performance Analytics should be a stand-alone reporting tool, and allow you to drag and drop within the data cubes or the dimensions in the data model. Let's say I want this on the y-axis and I want this on the x or I want this in this in this kind of graph. You can throw around with the fields and immediately you see the graphs being populated. I think from a customer point of view, they should be able to be in the power to have their idea created right there on the spot and not being dependent on an implementer who comes and does this consulting for them. I saw good examples in BMC which I haven't seen on Performance Analytics but they just bought the products, they're just expanding on that. What I see is that companies sometimes use an external tool for presenting dashboards to customers, like Numerify or Grafana or this 3rd-party dashboarding solutions. I think it's a waste if ServiceNow is not able to keep those customers on-board.

I think ServiceNow can improve more towards the customer to allow them to do that themselves. If they implemented some frameworking, set it up for you and then say, "Okay, this is what you can do and this is the freedom you'll get." Then you can throw or you can toss around with the data in any way you would like.

On the platform, on the framework called ServiceNow there's all kinds of interacting systems like SAP and Oracle. I think what you see is that maybe SAP will not be needed that much anymore in five years from now because a lot of functionality that a company needs is offered through the platform called ServiceNow.

I don't know where that's going to end because at some point ServiceNow will become a marlock and people will turn away from a 'one solution fits all' and go more into the niches again. I don't know where it's going to end. Until now I think it looks very promising and yeah, I think very much appealing to most customers.

We have used it only for a couple of months because we're a start-up. Personally, I've used it a little over a year.

One of our partners is the technical guy, he's developing now on the development instance.

The only thing I can come up with is the fact that we ordered an instance with domain separation or activated that wasn't there from the scratch. We had to raise an incidence and to get it resolved and stuff. You know that it takes you one or two weeks and then everything is done and then it's passed to you.

We used a solution from HP.

Out-of-the-box stuff is very easy to deploy but when you have specific demands then maybe of course it is more complex. For us it was quite easy because we had a developer instance already so we developed most of our products in that instance. We couldn't get stuff like the domain separation completely functionally the way we wanted it. We could develop already, so when we purchased our instance I think it took us 2 - 3 weeks to get everything up and running.

I would definitely advise you to transition into ServiceNow because I've seen comparisons with the BMC Projects which is a lot more expensive. I haven't seen any functionality that I would really like except maybe for some Performance Analytics functionality that is more user friendly than what I saw.

We utilize it as a ticketing tool for the customer support team. It helps us manage digital workflow and possible incident alerts.

Many features are valuable. It allows us to filter the data, create graphs, and get detailed reports.

The pricing structure could be more budget-friendly.

I have been using it for two years.

The solution is stable.

It provides scalability.

They provide good support for their customers.

The initial setup was straightforward.

The deployment process was executed quickly and easily, including setup and repair testing. It was done in a few hours by our technical team. We implemented our real-time data analytics application into the system, ran a test and after it created alerts, we passed on the alert reports to the designated team for evaluation.

We have seen a positive return on investment. The solution is worth the value for the pricing.

It is fairly expensive.

I am satisfied with the solution. I would rate it nine out of ten.

We use the solution primarily for IT Operations Management, SLA and ordinary day-to-day operations. We also use it for business dashboards and different groups within the company.

I like the solution very much. The majority of customers use it. It is one of the best, the most apt solution the industry has to offer. It is stable, scalable and easy to use. 

The total ITSM package offers availability, performance and scalability. 

I think the tool has matured sufficiently over the past six years that I do not see room for improvement. It comes with in-built capabilities and it is up to us to use it as we see fit. I would say it meets nearly every use case of ours. 

While we consider the solution to be fine, a weakness of it is that it is not on-premises. 

Security and privacy issues should be addressed in respect of the IT operations data and data storage. They should not be on a shared infrastructure, but on the SaaS in isolated storage. The solution should offer better security when it comes to storing data. 

We have been using ServiceNow for quite some time, perhaps as long as six years. 

The solution is stable. 

The solution is scalable. 

I have encountered no issues with the technical support or its response time. I have found its response time to be prompt. 

The entire installation process is easy and very straightforward, which consists primarily of the installation of the tool and its configuration. We are talking about SaaS, software as a service installation, meaning one which is ready for use. As such, there is no real installation work involved. 

The installation period lasts from two to several weeks. A medium enterprise would have a two week installation period and a large one would have a month. 

Although I am not directly involved in the team staffing purposes relating to the installation, I would estimate that it would not involve more than five or six specialists. 

The license involves a multi-year contract. While the option exists to pay for a monthly license, we are dealing with large enterprises and these typically involve multi-year licenses of ten or five years, at a minimum. 

As systems integrators, we deploy the solution both on-premises and on the cloud, although it is mostly cloud-based. While we handle both on-premises and SaaS deployment, I am only addressing the aspects involving the latter. 

Globally, we manage in excess of 250 customers. We have a shared services model which serves more than one hundred customers. 

I do not feel it would be beneficial to explore other options beyond ServiceNow. 

I rate ServiceNow as an eight out of ten.