EC News DeskServiceNow has announced a customer care plan to support its public and private sector customers in managing the COVID‑19 pandemic. As part of this effort, the company has announced four new community apps to help its customers, including government agencies and enterprises, manage complex emergency response workflows. These apps are now available for customers to access free of charge through September 30, 2020.
Emergency Response Operations app for government agencies
Washington State’s Department of Health, a ServiceNow customer, initially created the Emergency Response Operations app on the Now Platform to manage their own response to COVID‑19. Working with ServiceNow, the Department of Health is making the app available to all government entities at no charge.
“As the epicentre for COVID‑19 in the US, the State of Washington’s agencies, emergency responders and public health professionals had to rapidly assemble an incident management structure to lead outbreak response and mitigate the spread and impact,” said Jennifer McNamara, Chief Information Officer, Washington State Department of Health.
“Leveraging ServiceNow’s Now Platform, we were able to digitise processes that allowed us to quickly resource critical Incident Management Team positions. This automated a manual and labor‑intensive process that was fraught with errors while also providing real‑time visibility into resource allocations. Improved accountability will allow us to secure the maximum federal reimbursement for incident expenditures. We are building on the success of this phase with automation of the other Incident Management Functions such as resource demobilisation, planning, logistics, and finance.”
“Given the complexity and importance of community within this crisis, we believe it’s our duty to share our approach and the application we were able to quickly develop on the Now Platform. That’s why we have worked with ServiceNow to make our application freely available to other governmental entities. By digitising these processes, responding to an emergency does not have to create an emergency to coordinate,” McNamara concluded.
Customer care plan
ServiceNow has launched a customer care plan to support its customers as they focus on maintaining business operations during the COVID‑19 pandemic. This includes a commitment to maintaining virtually 100% uptime for ServiceNow instances; and launching a Now Community forum where customers and partners can interact with other customers, as well as an Apps Suggestions portal, where customers and partners can provide their ideas for COVID‑19 related apps or features.
In addition to the State of Washington’s Emergency Response Operations app, ServiceNow has developed and introduced three, free of charge community apps to benefit all customers. The additional apps include:
- Emergency Outreach: during a crisis, this workflow leverages the Now Platform to help companies connect with employees to assess the impact. Employers can reach out by email to provide information and safety measures and request a response to confirm if employees are safe and where they are located. Employers can also leverage the ServiceNow Now Mobile App to send push notifications to employees via mobile to get response.
- Emergency Self Report: this workflow helps an employee notify their employer that they are self‑quarantined and when the employee will return to work, and provides workflow support for the employer.
- Emergency Exposure Management: when a company becomes aware that its employee is diagnosed with an illness, this workflow helps the employer identify other people who might have been exposed based on the employee’s meetings history and job location.
“In this battle to flatten the COVID‑19 curve, none of us is as smart as all of us,” said Bill McDermott, President and CEO of ServiceNow. “These ServiceNow applications will enable emergency outreach, self‑reporting and exposure management, which are precisely what organisations need to do right now to help people get through this crisis.”
“We are particularly proud to partner with Washington State’s Department of Health to make an emergency operations app, which they developed on the Now Platform, available to all government agencies fighting this pandemic. This is all about sharing best practices, which is why we’ll do everything we can to get the Washington State app in use everywhere,” McDermott continued.
