ServiceNow offers no-charge apps for COVID-19 emergency response

As a part of its efforts to better help customers better navigate the COVID-19 pandemic, ServiceNow has released four new community apps to help manage complex emergency response workflows across the globe. The four apps are a part of its customer care plan and are available with no charges until September 30.

The customer care plan aims to support customers to maintain business operations during the COVID-19 pandemic. This includes a commitment to maintaining 100 per cent 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.

President and CEO of ServiceNow, Bill McDermott, said in the battle to flatten the COVID-19 curve across the globe, no single person is as smart as a community coming together.

“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,” he said.

Emergency Response Operations app for government agencies

Washington State’s Department of Health initially created the Emergency Response Operations app on the Now Platform to manage its response to COVID-19. As the epicenter for COVID-19 in the U.S., 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 its Chief Information Officer, Jennifer McNamara.

“Leveraging the 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 fraught with errors, while also providing real-time visibility into resource allocations.” she explained.

“Given the complexity and importance of community within this crisis, we believe it’s our duty to share our approach and the application we developed. That’s why we have worked with ServiceNow to make the application freely available to other governmental entities globally. By digitising these processes, responding to an emergency does not have to create an emergency to coordinate.”

Customer care plan

In addition to the State of Washington’s Emergency Response Operations app, ServiceNow has developed and introduced three more no-charge community apps across globe, which include:

• Emergency Outreach: During a crisis, this workflow leverages the Now Platform to help companies connect with employees. Employers can reach out by email to provide information and safety measures to team members 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 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 an 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.

Customer support

ServiceNow has critical business functions, including technical support and cloud operations, distributed in regions around the world to help ensure consistent, world-class customer support and service levels for its customers.

Along with aiming to maintain 100 per cent uptime, ServiceNow also offers high availability architecture with the ability to run a customer’s production application from a pair of data centers located in various global regions.

Its business continuity plan ensures the ability for cloud operations and technical support teams to work remotely in a safe and secure manner, to ensure uninterrupted service to customers using secure connections and multi-factor authentication.

ServiceNow’s Knowledge 2020 customer event goes digital

In order to protect the health and safety of its customers, partners and extended community, ServiceNow’s Knowledge 2020 event will now become a digital community experience on May 5, and showcase all the ways to unlock productivity through modern digital workflows, highlight the latest customer and platform innovations, and inspire the ServiceNow community to continue to create great experiences, and unlock productivity for businesses.

For access to the apps or for more information, go to: servicenow.com/crisisresponse.