Best ServiceNow Alternatives for ITSM

ServiceNow – The Basics

Let’s start out by answering: why do companies choose ServiceNow?

ServiceNow offers service management software under the NOW platform targeting enterprise users across IT, HR, customer and field service. Their product focuses on scaling service and ticketing operations quickly by leveraging AI capabilities to “bridge the gap between traditional IT and modern business needs” through ITSM, business management, asset management, DevOps, and security/compliance.

While offering a robust solution, the feature-laden product may be under-utilized by IT teams for the heavy price tag, with long integration time frames to implement at scale, posing barriers to rapid deployment. A less-than-intuitive UX can also mean a steeper learning curve and longer ramp up time across teams.

Features:

ITSM, business management, asset management, DevOps, security & compliance
Identification and triage
AI-based categorization, routing, prioritization
Integrate “with anything” to import/export data

Pros:

Robust IT feature set native to platform
Incumbent enterprise tool
Strong in AI/ML automation
Highly customizable

Cons:

Long integration time frames
Features sold at a premium may be overkill for IT
Complex UX
High learning curve

Benefits of ServiceNow

Below are some key features that initially attract many customers to ServiceNow.

Everything you need for Customer Service and IT teams

ServiceNow enables digital workflows to drive business growth, increase resilience, and enhance employee productivity across IT, HR, Customer and Field Service teams. The solution is ITIL-certified and can be further customized for an organization’s needs with automations.

NOW platform with AI

The NOW platform is proclaimed “the intelligent and intuitive platform for work” – powerful workflow engine with native AI – single unified platform for service offering three tracks of “workflows” for IT, Employees (HR), and Customers.

IT Workflows: bridge the gap between traditional IT and modern business needs with ITSM, business management, asset management, DevOps, security/compliance.
Employee Workflows: boost productivity with employee service delivery with HR service delivery and ITSM.
Customer Workflows: drive fierce customer loyalty with connected workflows for CSM, FSM, and ITSM.

Automatically identify & resolve issues

ServiceNow identifies and triages critical issues by proactively identifying similarities across open incidents or cases. Users can categorize, route, and prioritize to reduce manual work and errors with supervised ML using historical data to automatically classify tasks, incidents, and cases at scale.

Natively integrate “with anything”

With ServiceNow, companies can import data from their current software into their ServiceNow applications and export information to their software. Users can easily import/export data and quickly connect to existing systems both on premises and in the cloud to easily create end-to-end digital workflows.

Highly customizable

ServiceNow offers integrations for over 50+ SaaS services like CMDB, Incident Management, Problem Management, Change Management, User Administration, and Single Sign-on solutions. If the native plug-ins do not solve your needs, your organization can also create custom plug-ins, integrations and apps using a powerful REST API.

ServiceNow Limitations

ServiceNow has a number of limitations that keep it from being the perfect ticketing and operations solution. The feature-laden product poses up-front costs out of reach for many smaller companies – further burdened by configuration complexities and less-than-intuitive UX adding to training burdens. Below are the top 5 biggest drawbacks.

Implementation and integration is costly and time-consuming

ServiceNow requires extensive complex integrations to deploy at scale and making changes is difficult. Teams are often met with costly setbacks, outsized risks, and disappointing adoption rates due to the customization and additional development required. Be ready to invest time to review the internal process in order to best implement at scale. Organizations often bring in third-party consultants due to the complex nature of deployment which adds additional cost and time to adoption.

UX clouded by complexity

The ServiceNow user interface is highly structured and non-initiative. Complex navigation pane, limited search capabilities, and unappealing UI, frustrate users and poses a high learning curve/training burden. Simple tasks like reviewing old tickets to search for a specific incident are difficult. Generally, the UI is very hard to navigate as a basic user, and the limited access for basic users frustates support teams. The interface features of ServiceNow ITSM make it hard for IT support to understand the problem and communicate with users effectively.

Too many features can be overwhelming

Most IT teams will not need the full functionality that ServiceNow offers. The extra features can feel like overkill to IT teams and overwhelming to end users. This can result in IT teams spending more time onboarding and training in order to ensure processes are completed correctly and successfully.

Too expensive for cost-sensitive organizations

ServiceNow has a large price tag, due to its per-agent tiered pricing model and monthly upcharge for asset management features. Although it has a lot of features, the cost may not be worth it if you don’t need to leverage all of the functionality. The cost can also easily rack up as your team grows. For organizations that are cost-sensitive, ServiceNow may not provide the best value.

Aimed at large enterprises

In addition to its price tag and feature list, ServiceNow is also focused on large enterprises (currently 6000+) who are focused on digital transformation. Their unexpected appointment of Bill McDermott as CEO in November 2019, who departed SAP after leading a long period of growth, sets them up with even further credentials in the enterprise IT space. There is a density of options and workflows, with no option for small teams to create a more tailored UI for their targeted needs.

Best Alternatives for ServiceNow

Best ServiceNow Alternatives for Mid-Market and Enterprise Companies

ServiceNow issues experienced by mid-market and enterprise companies: For enterprise and mid-market companies, ServiceNow poses some significant challenges that fall into two main categories:

UX clouded by complexity and limits efficiencies
Integration is costly and time-consuming

UX clouded by complexity and limits efficiencies

The ServiceNow user interface is highly structured and non-initiative. Users report difficulty finding what they need – requests, incidents, approval for requests. In addition, the lack of customizable views based on user type increases confusion. Complex navigation pane, limited search capabilities, and unappealing UI, frustrate users and poses a high learning curve/training burden. Simple tasks like reviewing old tickets to search for a specific incident are difficult.

Generally, the UI is very hard to navigate as a basic user, and the limited access for basic users frustates support teams. The interface features of ServiceNow ITSM make it hard for IT support to understand the problem and communicate with users effectively.

Implementation and integration is costly and time-consuming

ServiceNow requires extensive complex integrations to deploy at scale and making changes is difficult. Teams are often met with costly setbacks, outsized risks, and disappointing adoption rates due to the customization and additional development required. Be ready to invest time to review the internal process in order to implement at scale. The mobile app has limited capabilities and doesn’t allow enough customization on how the tickets are viewable on your mobile devices to take action.

Organizations often bring in third-party consultants due to the complex nature of deployment and integration with other systems, which adds additional cost and time to adoption.

So where should enterprise and mid-market companies turn for a more robust ticketing alternative? Let’s start out by examining atSpoke.

1. atSpoke

atSpoke is a modern workplace operations platform built to ITIL standards that helps businesses scale by giving every employee what they need to be their most productive. The product is purpose built to work with a company’s existing SaaS toolset, allowing IT teams (as well as HR and Operations) to get more done fluidly right where they work and resolve requests faster within one central command center, backed by intuitive ticketing, a dynamic knowledge base, and end-to-end machine learning.

atSpoke allows for 5x faster ticket resolution and resolves 40% of tickets automatically through AI-driven workflows and conversational interfaces. IT agents are freed up while employees get convenient and immediate self-help in the tools they already use with conversational omnichannel experiences that allow organizations to unlock their workforce’s productivity and move work forward faster.

Why atSpoke Is the better alternative to ServiceNow

atSpoke outpaces other ticketing systems thanks to:

Highly-intuitive UI, along with agent-assist features designed to accelerate agent productivity
Personalized, conversational and accessible ticketing available wherever your employees are
Uniquely-capable AI features with zero out-of-the-box setup and advanced NLU that learns in just two tries
More affordable pricing for today’s enterprise (and those aspiring to get there!)

Highly-intuitive UI designed to accelerate agent productivity by reducing clicks and eliminating manual work.

It’s never been easier for employees to make requests, and it’s never been easier for agents to move quickly through tickets –– giving everyone more time to focus on the highest value work. Thanks to atSpoke’s intuitive, modern, and connected platform, employees have convenient access to the knowledge and services they need –– when they need it. Agents also have a centralized “command center” that empowers them to resolve tickets faster with context from disparate systems (i.e., user profiles, user responses, and assets), access points to trigger events in integrated tools (i.e., SSO), and automated AI-powered answers. Tickets are also synced in real time across email, chat, and web, reducing the need for context switching.

How intuitive is the UI? No training is required for support teams in IT or support teams that are less familiar with traditional ticketing processes like HR, Marketing, Sales Ops, Design and Office Management.

Built from the group up to deliver personalized and accessible conversational help where your employees are 𑁋 Slack, Microsoft Teams, email, SMS –– through AI-powered and personalized conversations

Your organization will move faster when you leverage the power of AI in your ticketing system or help desk. With atSpoke, AI provides automated answers in a personalized way and uses AI to complete repetitive and mundane agent tasks. When an employee reaches out with a question, atSpoke uses natural language understanding (NLU) to auto-answer with a response based on that person’s profile for any routine question already addressed in the Knowledge Base. This deflects routine questions via AI to preserve time and resources without sacrificing a relevant, personalized touch. atSpoke then automatically updates Knowledge Base content as questions are answered, applying machine learning to answers for next time. For complex questions that do require human intervention, AI can help escalate, route and tag the best available expert at that moment, further prioritizing the most efficient service and scaling support across the business.

Robust out-of-the-box capabilities happily adopted by IT and HR, Customer Success, Legal, Finance, and more

Your organization can get up and running with atSpoke in days, instead of months. The familiar, intuitive and polished interface reduces the need to invest technical resources in complex configurations, removes the need for instructions or training, and eliminates barriers to employee adoption. Without a learning curve, your entire organization will be able to jump in and experience the benefits immediately. Even machine learning requires zero out-of-the-box setup, and it gets smarter with every agent conversation. atSpoke’s Slack integration is seamless and leverages the full extent of the features you’re already used to: forms, buttons, threads, notifications, and actions. The robust capabilities do not need to be unlocked by IT staff dedicated to configuring the instance; atSpoke is designed for usability and engineered for speed.

Features:

Workplace operations platform with AI weaved end-to-end
Personalized auto-resolution with AI-driven self-service
Automatic triage, routing, tagging and escalation with load balancing
Intuitive, conversational ticketing through advanced workplace request NLU model
Integrated Knowledge Base with automatic updates
Rich, customizable reporting and analytics
Audit of auto-resolved requests
Central command system to unify disparate systems
Trigger events in other systems
Transfer tickets to another system
Control who has access to what information
Powerful API for further extensions

Pros:

Built to ITIL standards
Personalized, intuitive service
Modern, user-friendly UI speeds work
No training needed
Out-of-the-box AI/ML/NLU
Auto-resolution, issue deflection savings from day 1
Visibility of every workflow
Intelligent routing to the right agent
Get started in days, not months

Cons:

Does not primarily focus as much on external-facing customer service operations
Main use cases enable IT and HR teams with tasks such as managing a service desk, streamline ticketing, employee onboarding and knowledge base management
Chat-first interface with native usability and functionality focused around in Slack and Microsoft Teams
Geared towards IT and HR teams relying on chat as the main interface to manage processes day and streamline workflows

Customer Review Ratings:

G2: 4.5/5 stars
Capterra: 4.7/5

Customer Interviews:

More Information: atspoke.com

2. Zendesk

Zendesk is a customer service/support platform aiming to improve omnichannel customer experience by reducing resolution time of support issues. Primary users are customer service agents, marketing and sales teams as well as IT responsible for fielding numerous requests for support. In addition to the service desk tool, support offerings are divided into three levels: basic Support, Support Suite or Custom-Built. Some of the features available at the higher tiers include tracking and prioritizing requests, knowledge base for “smart” self-service, and live chat/messaging/voice to unify omnichannel operations. The Sales Suite offers the “Sunshine” CRM, analytics and reporting and community forums for external-facing customer operations. Founded in 2007 in Copenhagen, Zendesk has grown into a Silicon Valley success story now publicly-traded and with a customer base of over 150K worldwide.

Features:

Seamless omnichannel integration across web, mobile, email, social
Ability to set up custom routing workflows for your needs
Offers visibility into relevant customer context for agents
Access analytics tools to measure and improve customer service (ie. CSAT, NPS)
Ability to use 500+ apps in marketplace or build custom seamless integrations

Pros:

Omnichannel, customer-centric support
Single interface with full context
Start in less than a day
Automated ticketing & self-service
Consumer-like UI
Highly customizable

Cons:

Lacking asset and change management out-of-the-box
Not built for enterprise IT standards
User-unfriendly experience
Pricing is steep, with hidden costs
Tagging and routing are hard to track
Tickets get easily lost
Future direction seems to be CX, not IT

3. Jira Service Desk

Jira Service Desk is an ITSM help desk ticketing software from Atlassian geared specifically for enterprise IT teams (many of whom already use sister product Jira) and officially ITIL-certified. While highly capable and extremely configurable, the complex UI and manual procedures can be intimidating and frustrating to end users – posing a barrier to usage and high training needs. The cumbersome nature of the tool often requires full-time staff to manage the instance. The ticketing process is still relatively manual, with Atlassian only recently moving to shore up conversational ticketing and AI capabilities through acquisitions. In May 2020, Jira Service Desk acquired the conversational ticketing solution Halp, which allows users to submit requests through Slack.

Features:

Service delivery and collaboration with specific capabilities for ITSM processes of Request, Incident, Change, Problem Management, etc.
Request management, knowledge base, automation rules to escalate/assign tasks
Integrations with Atlassian products (Jira, Confluence, Opsgenie, Statuspage) to unify teams on a common platform
Customizable to start with ITIL best practice templates out of the box and tailor to through app/integration ecosystem

Pros:

Jira is mainstay of agile development teams
ITIL-certified
Super configurable

Cons:

Overly manual process: overly hands-on way to move projects across workflow stages,
Cumbersome UX: cluttered, messy, non-intuitive UI look and feel intimidates new users and poses barrier to usage – adds burden of training and subject matter expertise to operate; even veteran agents need training to navigate it
Lacking 360° Documentation & Visibility: no integrated knowledge base (must be created manually first in Confluence – then linked to Jira Service Desk)
Behind in conversational ticketing/Slack: previous Slack app not fully-integrated – just acquired Halp in 2020 to bolter conversational ticketing;
Lacking AI capabilities weaved throughout
Requires dedicated staff to maintain the instance
Customization difficult with complex behind the scenes work required

More Information: www.atlassian.com/software/jira/service-desk

4. Freshservice

Freshservice is a service desk software aimed at enterprise IT departments under the Freshworks portfolio of CRM and customer service products. (See section on sister product Freshdesk aimed at smaller companies and startups below). The product caters specifically to large IT organizations with complex workflows offering a robust feature set across the full scope of ITSM needs. The density of features however can overload the UI, leaving users confused and often causing more work for IT staff to course correct errors as a result. AI functionality (“Freddy”) is for IT staff usage only for reporting use cases vs enabling self-service for users. Automation features (rules-based) have been reported as prone to breaking, with IT staff often required to “teach” it how to do things which can defeat the time-saving benefits.

Features:

ITSM & IT project management
Incident/SLA/change management
Self-service portal, canned responses, auto-suggested articles
Knowledge base
Asset management
Reporting & advanced analysis
AI software “Freddy” with natural language processing – for reporting
Configurable automation rules (auto-assign tickets, automate approvals)
Gamification-based incentives for IT staff

Pros:

Enterprise tool and feature-rich
Capable of complex IT workflows
Change Management & Asset Management out of of the box

Cons:

Confusing UX causes errors and retraining
Upcharge for Asset Management (over 100 assets)
Automation features prone to breaking and require hands-on staff
AI limited to reporting only

More Information: https://freshservice.com/

5. Spiceworks Help Desk

While you might know Spiceworks as an IT professional industry association, they also offer free software for the IT helpdesk integrated with sister product Inventory for asset management and monitoring infrastructure in the Connectivity Dashboard. The helpdesk product focuses on ticket and task management with self-service, Active Directory integration, configurable roles and team collaboration options all available free with no admin or ticket number limit. But be warned that “free” means dealing with in-product ads that are invasive to the UX, and more sophisticated enterprise users are cautioned to fully vet that all needs are met with this solution –– because migrating off of Spiceworks later basically requires going back to square one.

Features:

Ticketing and task management
Self-service
AI functionality to analyze ticket patterns and flag potential problems and connect users with a relevant vendor to provide a solution
Active Directory integration
Integrated with Spiceworks ecosystem (Inventory asset management, IP Scanner tools)
Knowledge Base
Configurable rules to auto-assign tickets
Multiple roles to limit what IT staff sees
Reporting & metrics
Ticket collaboration
Multi-site support that roll up to master help desk
Online or self-hosted options
No admin or ticket limit

Pros:

Free
Online or self-hosted options

Cons:

Clunky user experience
Reliability issues reported by users
Advertisements in-product detract from UX
Difficult to migrate off of without starting from scratch
Can be difficult to integrate with non-Spiceworks tools

More Information: spiceworks.com

6. BMC Helix (formerly BMC Remedy)

BMC Helix (formerly BMC Remedy) is an ITSM solution for enterprise companies. Aligned with ITIL best practices out of the box, the product offers service management with AI and machine learning to deliver intuitive, consumer-like experiences across channels through integrated Digital Helix workspace for conversational support across Slack, chat, SMS and Skype. The product focuses on predictive service to create and resolve incidents faster through intelligent, context-aware, and proactive incident matching.They also offer lifecycle management features on the Knowledge Base to keep content fresh. However, redundant and mandatory multi-step fields and “click happy” requirements to file and close tickets are known to frustrate users looking for a faster way to progress through tasks with less friction at each step.

Features:

ITSM
AI / ML optimization
Omnichannel conversational ticketing – Slackbot, Chatbot, SMS, and Skype
Predictive service management – auto-classification, assignment, and routing
Change, release, asset, configuration, SLA management
Multi-cloud service management
Knowledge Base with lifecycle management
Embedded multi-cloud capabilities to broker incidents, changes, and releases across cloud providers
Integrations with Jira / DevOps tools
Cognitive email analysis and automated actions
Containerization
Out of the box ITIL best practices
Customizable
Reporting and automated insights

Pros:

Aligned with ITIL
Omnichannel conversational support with AI
Predictive service

Cons:

Clunky UX with redundant status boxes to close a ticket
Excessive mandatory fields / required clicks can slow UX
Confusing error messages
Limited search functionality

More Information: bmc.com/it-solutions/remedy-itsm.html

ServiceNow Desk Alternatives for SMBs and Startups

Issues that SMB’s and startups experience with ServiceNow:

Small-medium size businesses and startups run up against a different set of challenges with ServiceNow in two key areas:

Too many features for small organizations
Too expensive for cost-sensitive teams

Too many features for small organizations

Most IT teams will not need the full functionality that ServiceNow offers. The extra features can feel like overkill to IT teams and overwhelming to end users. Rather than cramming in features that go unused, teams should opt for the features they need most to ensure an intuitive and streamlined experience.

Too expensive for cost-sensitive teams

ServiceNow has a large price tag due to its per-agent tiered pricing model and monthly upcharge for asset management features. Small teams will not find the cost worth it if they don’t need to use all of the features that are available. The cost can also easily rack up as your team grows. For organizations that are cost-sensitive, ServiceNow may not provide the best value.

So what solutions are out there for startups? In addition to the above solutions like atSpoke that cater to startups and enterprises alike in feature and pricing, below are four additional options to consider.

7. Freshdesk

Freshdesk is a service desk solution under the Freshworks family of products, aimed at smaller companies with external-facing customer service oriented use cases vs. its enterprise IT sister product Freshservice (covered above). Freshdesk is focused on omnichannel, bot-based self-service for customers to streamline and automate repetitive inquiries with unique features like a “thank you detector” to help agents quickly skip past lower-priority inbound emails. However the lack of change, asset, and project management features could be a dealbreaker for certain IT teams.

Features:

Track and manage support inquiries from shared inbox
Collision detection to balance agent workload
Basic SLA management
Scenario automation
Canned responses
Ticket field suggestor
Thank you detector
Knowledge Base
Self-service portal
Linked tickets
Parent-child ticketing
Omnichannel – web, email, chat, social, phone

Pros:

Easy to use interface
Small business friendly
Free plan option with limited features

Cons:

Designed for external-facing customer support vs. IT help desk
No change, asset, project management
Reporting lacking flexibility
Certain features (team dashboards, chatbot, social signals) only available at highest pricing tiers
Lacking ITIL-oriented feature set overall

More Information: freshdesk.com

8. Zoho Desk

Zoho Desk offers an IT help desk and service solution catered to small business teams. It offers a relatively thorough IT feature set available at a startup-friendly price point that includes self service, automation, and a “Zia” AI assistant to proactively triage support tickets, analyze customer sentiments, and spot anomalies in ticket traffic, along with VoIP. The system can meet some needs for smaller teams. However the lack of asset, change, and problem management features even in the “enterprise” tier product may rule it out for IT teams intent on building their system around ITIL practices.

Features:

Ticket management UI
Self-service
“Zia” AI contextual assistant
Sentiment analysis
Automate repetitive activities – assignment, notification, escalations, SLA’s, workflows
“Multichannel” support – email, chat, voice
Customized multi-brand help centers within a company
Self-service embeddable plugin
Knowledge Base
Integrations with Zoho products – CRM etc
Voice over IP (VoIP)
Social media integration
Data analysis for managers monitoring customer interactions / SLA’s
“Blueprint” workflow feature (ie restrict status changes on tickets based on a path etc)
Agent collision avoidance
“Peek view” to overlay ticket details over the ticket list

Pros:

Free plan up to 3 agents
AI capabilities with automation

Cons:

Lacking ITIL practices
No problem, change and asset management
Gamification limited to community forums
Some dashboards lack extensibility

More Information: zoho.com/desk/

9. Help Scout

HelpScout provides support software solutions aimed at startups supporting external customer inquiries. Beyond its lack of alignment to ITIL best practices, you won’t hear them use the term “help desk ticketing system” or even ticketing at all except when forced to draw comparisons to explain what their offering actually is. Help Scout instead deliberately positions themselves as “not ticketing” in favor of viewing all interactions as “conversations” that should be personalized and handled collaboratively. The product centers around shared inboxes to deliver personalized experiences informed by user profiles for context. Automation through if/then logic and collaboration features for IT teams include private notes, saved replies, collision detection and tagging to categorize items for automation and reporting. Overall, for startup IT managers that actually need a ticketing solution at the end of the day, this “non-ticketing” outlook may go against the grain a bit too much to get the job done effectively.

Features:

Shared team inbox to manage all chat, email and phone conversations
User profile in sidebar for context
“Beacon” live chat bot
Private notes to @mention colleagues
Saved replies to answer common questions “in only two clicks”
Bulk replies
Automate action via workflows with if/then logic
Collision detection
Tagging to categorize conversations for automation and reporting
Knowledge Base for self-service
CRM integration for user context
Live chat routed to email with agents not available
Reporting
Integrations – Jira, Slack, Salesforce etc
Two-factor authentication, SSO, SAML
Customizable via developer tools and API
Customer satisfaction surveys
Integration with CRM and applications (Salesforce, Twilio and Ringcentral)

Pros:

Startup-friendly pricing
Easy to use interface
HIPAA compliant – for healthcare-related companies

Cons:

No ticketing numbers
Not aligned to ITIL practices
No asset management
“Not ticketing” mentality goes against the grain of many IT teams
Potential issues with integrating with internal tools

More Information: helpscout.com/

10. Kayako

Kayako offers customer service and help desk software aimed at startups. Similar to Help Scout, their concept centers on shared inboxes and conversations vs the IT ticketing paradigm to enable unified customer service. They do embrace the term “ticketing” but emphasize personalization by consolidating all agent-customer conversations across live chat, email and social with context to immediately respond. Like Help Scout and Zendesk, this is another non-ITIL customer service solution retrofit to IT use cases vs designed for them from the ground up. Some IT teams may find this only goes so far to meet their day to day needs.

Features:

Shared agent inboxes
Multichannel support – live chat, email, facebook and twitter
Self-help Knowledge Base
Smart search that understands real language
Auto-assign conversations to the best agents
Live chat software
Canned responses
Collaboration tools
Tag conversations for faster handling
Private notes
Communicate within the interface without switching windows
Customer satisfaction surveys
View customer journeys and actions taken following the call (web page visits etc.)
Analytics and reporting
Customizable

Pros:

Startup-friendly pricing
Cloud and on-premise options
Ecommerce integrations

Cons:

Not aligned to ITIL practices
Organization of help resources
Most integrations require third-party connector application

More Information: kayako.com/

ServiceNow Desk add-on products for the mid-market and enterprise

Because IT traditional ticketing systems lack native AI capabilities and natural language processing, startups like Aisera and Moveworks have created solutions to layer on top of ServiceNow and other ticketing systems to expedite workflows. These tools automate certain repetitive software-based tasks and are purchased in addition to a traditional ticketing system.

Pros:

Adds a layer of natural-language processing to be applied on top of traditional ticketing systems
Helps to identify and route requests in plain English
Automatically deduces systems to engage based on business workflows

Cons:

Resources needed to to implement with other solutions
Limited out-of-the-box integrations
Increased total cost of ownership
Potential inaccurate workflows as the AI training data in support tickets is sparse

11. Aisera

Aisera is an AI-driven service solution for IT, HR, customer service, sales, facilities, and operations teams. Heavily focused on AI, Aisera labels their offering “AISM” or AI Service Management bringing NLP/NLU and conversational RPA to detect intent and automate support through AI consumer-like experiences that plug directly into existing company systems of record and offer predictive service. However, IT teams may be cautioned by reports that the product feature is still playing catch-up to close the gaps in what is offered out of the box, and customers have publicly stated the need to invest in more than Aisera alone for their ticketing needs.

Features:

“AISM” AI-driven service management
Advanced AI and conversational RPA
NLP and semantic NLU to power self-service
Automate multi-step conversations
Understand broader intent/sentiment
Automate repetitive inquiries/workflows in no-code workflow studio
Incident detection, prediction, and probabilistic service maps to predict outages autonomously
Integration with AWS, Atlassian, Salesforce, etc

Pros:

AI automation and intent-based features
Enterprise-level integrations
Predictive service features

Cons:

Limitations in certain out of the box features and configurability
Limitations in casual intent filtering in conversation performance reporting
Restricted roles/features to admin console users
Flagship customers publicly investing in other ticketing tools
Auto-answer feature limitations can prompt additional phone call delaying service
Limitations in administrative roles/controls, intent filtering
Potentially disruptive testing and validation schedules customers required to align to
Clunky reporting limitations (collecting raw data for visualization/automation)

More Information: aisera.com

12. Moveworks

Moveworks offers AI-driven IT service solutions for both startups and large enterprises. Through AI software pre-trained on 75M IT tickets to refine its ML/NLU capabilities, the Moveworks bot aims to completely automate IT service auto-resolving issues without human intervention. Features include understanding conversational requests with no scripting/training required up front, automated routing and predictive service capabilities to proactively contact a user when locked out of an account. However the standard eight-week deployment timeframe may rule Moveworks out for fast-moving startups that can’t wait this long, in addition to enterprise-grade pricing available only on request. And with certain flagship customers publicly providing testimonials for competitive solutions (such as Aisera), some companies may find that Moveworks does not hold as an end-to-end solution for all IT service needs.

Features:

Omnichannel, automated IT service
Automated software/account/group access requests
Conversational AI for self-service
Pre-trained NLU, proprietary ML-based “collective learning” techniques
Semantic search to identify exact paragraph containing answer
Deploy in 8 weeks, provision software in seconds
Proactive event resolver
Integrations with ITSM (ServiceNow, Jira etc), identity/access management, facilities management, Slack, Teams, etc
Automatic triage, account access, auto-answer features
Advanced analytics

Pros:

Pre-trained AI capabilities
Predictive service features

Cons:

8-week deployment timeframe
Requires integrations for identity/access management
May require additional IT service tools
Pricing structures typically geared at enterprise-level budgets (available on request only)

More Information: moveworks.com/

Conclusion

And that completes our whirlwind tour! As you can see, while ServiceNow is a well-known and heavily-utilized tool, it isn’t the solution of choice for all IT ticketing and operations teams. Exploring options that leverage deeper best practices specifically designed for IT teams can unlock net new levels of productivity for agents, and all the people they support.

Find the Best ServiceNow Alternatives for Helpdesks and IT Ticketing Solutions

ServiceNow – The Basics

Benefits of ServiceNow

ServiceNow Limitations

Best Alternatives for ServiceNow

ServiceNow alternatives for the mid-market and enterprise

ServiceNow alternatives for SMB and Startups

ServiceNow add-on products for the mid-market and enterprise: