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Serval empowers People teams to automate routine tasks, provide instant employee support, and streamline critical processes like onboarding and offboarding.

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Top Use Cases

Employee Self-Service

Answer employee questions instantly using your knowledge base—PTO policies, benefits info, handbook lookups, and more.

Automated Onboarding

Provision accounts, assign equipment, and send welcome materials automatically when new hires join.

Secure Offboarding

Revoke access across all systems, recover equipment, and complete exit checklists with a single request.

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Quick Start

Get up and running in four steps:
1

Connect your HRIS

Navigate to Applications in Serval and connect your HRIS (BambooHR, Rippling, Workday, or others). This gives Serval access to employee data for automation.
Once connected, you can use Workflows, Knowledge Base, and Guidance to build automations that react to employee changes and requests.
2

Set up your Knowledge Base

Upload or connect your People Ops documents—employee handbook, PTO policies, benefits guides, FAQs. Serval uses these to answer employee questions automatically.Good sources to include:
  • Employee handbook and code of conduct
  • Benefits and 401(k) information
  • PTO and leave policies
  • How-to guides (expenses, time off requests, etc.)
3

Test Knowledge Base search

Ask Serval a few questions employees commonly ask:
  • “What’s our PTO policy?”
  • “How do I submit an expense report?”
  • “When is the next company holiday?”
4

Create your first workflow

Start with a simple, high-value workflow. See Create Your First Workflow for step-by-step instructions. Here are some great first choices:Onboarding:
  • New hire welcome message - Send new employees a Slack message with links to the handbook and onboarding checklist
  • Manager notification - Alert managers when their new direct report starts
  • Add to team channel - Automatically add new hires to their department’s Slack channel
Offboarding:
  • IT notification - Alert IT when an employee’s last day is approaching
  • Equipment return instructions - Send departing employees return instructions automatically

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Setting Up Your Help Desk

Serval can serve as a private help desk for your People team, handling sensitive requests securely while answering general questions in public channels.

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Private Requests (Sensitive Information)

For requests involving compensation, benefits changes, or personal information, employees should submit tickets privately:
  • Slack DM: Enable the DM feature so employees can message Serval directly
  • Web Portal: Employees can submit tickets through Serval’s web interface
Ticket threads in public channels sync between Serval and Slack by default so users can follow along in either thread. For sensitive requests, users can start DMs with Serval or use the web portal to keep conversations private.

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Public Channel (General Questions)

Route general inquiries to a public helpdesk channel like #ask-people-team:
  • Policy and handbook questions
  • PTO and holiday schedule lookups
  • General onboarding questions
A public channel builds a searchable knowledge base and reduces duplicate questions over time.

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Protecting Sensitive Information

People teams handle sensitive employee data. Configure Serval appropriately:
  • Restrict sensitive workflows to private channels or DMs only—never expose salary, SSN, or personal contact information in public channels
  • Add identity verification for high-risk actions using “always used” guidance that requires verification via your IdP
  • Communicate clearly to employees about where to submit sensitive requests
Never configure workflows that return PII, compensation, or personal data to run in public channels.

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Next Steps

Create Your First Workflow

Step-by-step guide to building workflows

Workflow Examples

Detailed examples for onboarding, offboarding, HRIS automation, and more
Need help getting started? Contact [email protected] for assistance.