Now Platform Utah – Amy Lokey, ServiceNow

This is texturing TV. Hey everyone, welcome back here to techstrong TV. Our next guest is from our friends at service there.

You know, there's always something going on at service now, it seems new releases new programs new features. Just all kinds of great goodness going on there. I want to introduce you to though to someone who's not been on our show before from service now.

I thought we had I thought we interviewed everyone in the company. We have it Amy lowkey. Amy is SVP of product experience at service now Amy, welcome to tech struct TV.

Oh, thank you so much. I'm excited to be here our pleasure to have you on Amy. We want to talk about Utah not the state.

But before we do, Being at your first time on why don't we if you don't mind sharing with the audience a little bit of the Amy story. absolutely, so I joined servicenow about three years ago and I leave our essentially our user experience team, but I'm responsible for our product experience across everything that we do everything in the platform and then everything in our products and my team is comprised of user experience designers researchers who study what the needs are of our users and our customers also our content writers who provide all of our technical documentation and help people to be successful with the product and I'm also responsible for the product design of impact as well too. So really everything that helps our customers be successful and accelerate value with service now Falls in my world and I have the privilege of working with our GMS and product leaders in CJ designs or keys are our CEO.

So it's yeah, it's a privilege to work on these products and I'm really really excited how we modernize in advance the experience and make sure that they're easy and delightful to use I love it. And that's a big. You got big shoulders because that's a big plate of responsibility.

So that's fantastic, and thank you graduations. Thank you. Look our audience.

I don't think service now needs an introduction to our audience, but maybe maybe there is some people who I've heard it, but they're not sure how Would you scribe service now to our to our audience? Yeah, that's a great question. So service now is essentially in my mind a platform that can solve any business need and the way that we're scaling to meet those needs is really exciting.

You know, our core is in technology products. So, you know, we started in itsm and Service delivery helping employees and Technology teams, make sure that you know employees could be productive and effective Services. We're running really well developer operations running really well, but we built that all in a platform first approach meaning that all one platform for our data our architecture even things like our components and our front end interfaces are all built in that form Centric approach which means we've been able to scale really quickly and provide that same type of Service delivery, but also workflow products meaning enabling businesses to conduct the work that they need to do the teams can connect the work that they To do on this platform.

And so now we've scaled across Customer Service Solutions HR Solutions workplace Solutions and many more that portfolio keeps expanding we've now got Financial Services Solutions procurement. So really anything that we see in Enterprise needs to run digitally for their business to provide great employee experience and great customer service can be done on service now, Love it. I was great by the way, and you know, I don't know if you've ever practiced it before but that was a really great service now, sir is now is a company that like, you know, your parents haven't necessarily heard of so, I've gotten really good at explaining it to my family and my parents.

I do for a living and explain it to your influence and your family and everything. Right exactly. Yeah, you know experience there's still like what is that again?

Well, we'll have yours or drinks over that someday we can absolutely talk on it. So one of the things about service now though that make service now who they are is, you know like the postman. They deliver rain sleet snow, you know doesn't stop them new releases.

Is it I think it's twice a year, isn't it here? That's right. It's a major platform.

Yeah, that's right there twice a year. We name him after cities. They go in alphabetical order this this time.

There's an anomaly we named it after a state instead of a city. I don't know if you caught that and then we also do quarterly store releases as well too. And and those are typically for customers that are really eager to adopt a new capability and you know often they're kind of code designing it with us along the way as well.

Absolutely. So yeah, I mentioned it before Utah which for the geographically or challenge that there is not a city it is a state but Utah is this is this most current release and you know what I love about these releases is a lot of times, you know, you get companies that are releasing 10x today a hundred extra day, but you know, they're changing a font there. They're changing around the corner to a square corner and that's a release.

When service now puts out a release, there's a laundry list usually of a whole bunch of improvements and new stuff. so, I don't know if we'll have time to go through it all today, but why don't you if you don't mind, let's jump into Utah and talk about usually this kind of a theme of what we tried to do and then we jump into you know specifics but go ahead Amy. I'm gonna yeah, you don't mind good.

I'd be happy to yeah, and I agree. One of the exciting things about being at service now is just the share pace of the Innovation and you know, we're caught we look at it in terms of we're innovating across our platform. Those are the capabilities that every product can leverage and then we're innovating in those product domains in terms of making sure that we're delivering continued value for those customers those personas who are in that type of vertical so that's why you see such a share volume with every releases.

We're just always so excited to innovate the platform level and across all of our workflow products as we call them. So so I might frame it in that way as well too. And first I'll talk about what we've done at the platform level and then some of the kind of specific areas where we created new product or new value for our customers.

So one of those themes like you mentioned is always automation. We want to make sure that we're alleviating for our customers the kind of repetitive mundane type of processes requests workflows that we know we can solve for and kind of reduce your volume so that the teams behind the scenes can really focus on the the work that matters most that more strategic work. So one of those Investments is AI search we've made a big investment in AI search over the over the years.

We launched that in our portal products, I think about a year ago. We've now brought that capability into the platform the platform is where Those fulfillers those projectivity workers are doing their work. And so having AI search there is a big productivity Boom for them uses Ai and natural language obviously to help people find the information that they need help find a case that they're working on and do things like autocomplete suggestions typo handling all of that.

So it just helps people work faster and better and that really couples up nicely with the big launch that we did in our San Diego release called Next experience. You'll hear us keep building into that next experience, which was a new front end technology beautiful new visual design. I will say we it wasn't just a visual design but that was a nice part of the experience for sure and it was a much more productive navigation theme.

So we're we've done some retro usability studies with our customers who adopted next experience and we're seeing 30% productivity games just from the navigation. Design alone and so that AI search really just continues to build into that productivity saving experience helps people get through their work and find what they need. Let's just that a second.

So look, you can't throw a stick without hitting an AI in the head right now and right. So what you say AI search though, is it sort of like iterative AI like a chat GPT that's built in here, or is it something else if you know, I I mean it's based on an nlu model. So a lot of it, you know generative AI is built on a large language model modeled on everybody that's out there on the internet.

This is a little bit more of a specific natural language model that works well for our customers and for the types of searches that are happening within our system. So I would say this point it's not bringing in the chat TV type of functionality that that's certainly Something That We're deeply considering right now. Who is it?

Alright. Anyway, I'm sorry to derail you there. Let's give that on the big question.

And I I love your I love that phrase. So I'm gonna probably borrow that at some point too. I don't think there's a single conversation.

I'm having that's not around Ai and in some way or another. So secondly, another thing that we've built into the platform that's native to our platform is process optimization and we're going to see us keep expanding this so process optimization, you know, once you've digitized all of these experiences all of these processes within your business process optimizations, like you can zoom out and see how things are running in your business and it's a beautiful visualization that shows the different processes that you've created and the logic behind them and then you can visually see where those bottlenecks are and where maybe you can optimize something and this is something that we use internally at service now too we've seen huge improvements in some of our internal processes and I can tell you a little bit more about that but we've now expanded process optimization to support workflows Beyond itsm which is where we started and now includes other workflows in the now platform such as field service management and more and so we've also of course built AI into that and it helps illuminate hidden. Efficiencies so we can act on the recommendations that it provides to help cut costs and improve customer satisfactions.

So just to like put that into the real world in terms of how we're using it. So we applied process optimization across 900 or more business processes internally at service now and through the AI power and out analysis. We found 70 inefficiencies one example of that is it identified that 74% of these HR cases that we're getting submitted had to be re-categorized.

And so this is causing a delay and and so it can illuminate an inefficiency like that kind of a flaw in the process. You've created helps shed a light on that so you can fix it. So when we fix that kind of an inefficiency the resolution when you know as we started seeing it happen 40% faster and a 30% productivity game, so that's just an example of how we've used it internally and we're really excited to see our customers using it in that way as well to you because Is once you digitized every process in your business, you can run that kind of optimization and see where those things maybe those glitches are right that you can fix.

And so one last thing I'll just mention in terms of our platform Innovation and these experiences that every product can leverage Doc and tell is an incredible capability within our platform. We launched it and we keep building into it. This is this helps any kind of case any kind of workflow that involves a standardized document doc until can scan that information and pre-populated into a form so you can imagine if you were working at an issue or a case if there is a really long long form you had to go through and read that manually pull out the relevant information and enter it into a case that takes a lot of time.

It's super tedious we can now do that we can extract the data populated into the form. We're really transparent when we do that. So we make sure that we highlight what's been proposed by the AI and then we can even give you your percentage of accuracy.

Like our how correct we think it is and then the user can then go through and verify it validate it edit it. We can retrain the model at that and then commit it to the case. So it's a huge advancement and we continue to expand what Doc and tell can do in terms of indexing more doctypes for different kinds of use cases and industries and so on.

So that's good the platform level any questions before I kind of keep going through not so much a question, but I just you feel obligated to do for the audience. Look when these like a Utah or you know major release comes out all all servicenow platform uses. This isn't like an extra charge it comes this is the next version of the platform.

So everyone out here who's on service now can immediately Get on to Utah it's available for everybody. Yeah, so Doc and tell for example, you know, there's certain products that we think it's great for if you identify a new use case for it. You can use flow designer and insert a doc and tell type of process at any point in a flow that you're designing.

Excellent. Oh, yeah, let's move I guess from the platform to use cases here. Yeah, yeah.

So so again like we keep building into the next experience which is our new platform experience and there's a few new workspaces in advancements in our workspaces that help address what we see customers need more and more. So one that I'm really excited about is health and safety management. This helps with workplace safety issues.

You can imagine any kind of workplace situation. You can have an injury you can have something that might need to be reported as a wrist to employees or a safety issue. So this helps both the end user report an issue and get the help that they need and then it helps the business track these at scale.

So if there's something that's repetitive if there's something that keeps coming up as an issue they can solve for that. So that's called our health and safety Incident Management workspace really great new products experience. Secondly, you can imagine there's a lot happening around work places right not just health and safety but also around efficient.

Use of workspaces many companies are navigating returning their employees into a corporate space looking at how space might be used differently. And of course in these Economic Times making sure that they're really efficient with how they're using their space. So couple things in that place.

We've got a product called workplace Space Management that helps those workplace leaders those facilities managers really see how their workspaces getting utilized and also really helps them in a very elegant way really assign spaces. So I don't know if you've ever been a situation where you have to move your desk or in order to fit people within a building you have to move one team from here in another team to there. We just did a design review on this product and it's really elegant in terms of how you can use beautiful visualizations of your workspace.

So map views of the floors and then you can do these really interesting pivots in terms of you could organize by say function. You could organize by say a cost center like a working group and decide where people need to In the best utilization of that space and we'll continue to add a lot more to that over the next few releases because that's a hot space for our customers and then we've also got oh, sorry, go ahead. No, I was gonna say, you know what there was a time before I started text drunk another company.

I helped co-found out in Colorado. We started in an incubator the Mobius Venture Capital incubator, and so it was an open floor plan. And we can I tell you the the late night spent trying to figure that problem out.

Hey how close should customer support be to engineering? Because if we got to go from level one. Oh this one people worked in offices, but we've got to go from level one to level two wouldn't it be great if that person was right there, but what happens when sales has a question you but you no one wants to sit next to the sales people because they're on the phone all the time.

It was yeah man, that would have been a great tool to have great and employee case inside of it. So as someone who manages a team Frequently request that I have for my team, right? Like hey, we need XYZ type of monitors.

Like we've got a design team they have high standards with their monitor. So this is also an employee experience side of it where you can make those requests you can detail out what kind of space you need. What kind of physical potentially like desks or phone boobs or what have you that you need for your team and and have that kind of process kick off with the facilities team and it used to all be an email or tracked and spreadsheets.

Now, we've got a great product for that. So yeah, really good idea. Yeah.

Yeah and then kind of in a different vein, you know security incident response workspace. This is another new workspace that we've launched within the next experience. It allows security analysts to look at incidents within a central repository.

So again, it's just really seeing those those things come through scale identifying Trends seeing if there's risks and then building assessments and reports within that workspace as well too for reporting. Back on what types of security incidents you might be facing so excited about that one too. And well security is really become front and center.

So I I think that one is probably would have liked to have seen it a year or two ago. I'm glad it's here now because I think it's needed right in yeah. Security absolutely response is is just huge good.

Yeah, because these are urgent situations, right? So this really helps people respond with urgency and identify issues immediately and it helps with the analysis of like large volumes of data. So, yeah, it's it's a really important product for our customers.

I'll go back to another one. That's kind of I would say on the fun side. We launched a new theme Builder.

So one of the things our customers love about our product is they can you know, they provide white label branding it's called which means you know, we enable our customers to add their logo and choose their brand colors and theme the product experience within platform. It used to be a pretty code heavy experience. We needed developers to go in there and you know change CSS Styles and so on now, we've got a beautiful tool for it.

It makes it super super easy. I'm sure we'll be demoing it likely at knowledge because it's just a great simple user experience where you can add your logo. You can pick a couple colors.

You can choose things like do I want a corner on my modules or around in corner? And you can do those little subtle changes to fit with your brand so that your employees feel like this is something that you are delivering to them that you're providing this awesome tool for them. So that being Builders great experience as well, too.

Cool. Hey Amy, I think well, we're at the almost the top of the hour here. I told you the 15 minutes goes really quick.

We probably are over 20. But yeah, figured I'd like to go for a while you had more stuff to put in for people who want to find out more or maybe go out deeper dive into some of this where on service now can they go together? com and you can find all this in our blog and our press release there.

It has a great overview of everything that we're launching in this release and then I'd also like to mention we've re-rent revamped our community site as well too. So our community is a great place to go if you have questions about you know, what's the latest and greatest with our products how do people feel about them? The community is really vibrant right now and great place to get more information.

Fantastic Amy. Thank you so much. You you knocked it out of the park on your first time here on Tech stroke TV.

I hope we'll see you again. Thank you. We're actually quick plug check the service now event is May 15th in Vegas.

Correct, and I'll be there. If people are interested where can they is there? It's been a particular domain or anything.

We could send him to there. Oh sure. com and the Is called knowledge 2023 so do a search for knowledge or knowledge service now or just you know, go to our website you'll see more information, but we'd love to see there.

Fantastic Amy Loki SVP product experience at servicenow here on Tech strong TV. We're going to take a break. We'll be right back.