Terence Chesire, ServiceNow | ServiceNow Knowledge 23

This is Techstrong tv. Hello and welcome back to ServiceNow Knowledge 2023. We're here with Terrence Chere talking about custom workflows built on the now platform.

Terrence, welcome the show. Thank you so much for having me, Mike ServiceNow and the platform itself has literally been a house that was built on I tsm, but now we're starting to see workflows that get extended outside of I tsm into all kinds of interesting new areas. How well is that going?

Because we've been trying to do that on multiple platforms for decades, so it seems like we're making progress, but where Exactly? Right. So like you've said, we tell the story that, um, we were a platform first and then it was really hard to find a market fit.

Fred tells this story how no one could quite understand the power of the platform. So we have our killer original use case in IT service management. Fast forward a few years, and for me this is a full circle moment, uh, in, uh, knowledge.

2016 we launched customer service management, the first of our customer workflow applications to go after this space. And one of the things I joke about in, um, customer meetings and other sessions is we literally look at what our customers are already doing with the platform and then we say, how can we help them go faster, get faster time to value? And so we saw a lot of customers supporting external customers with the platform and we said, let's turn those workflows into a set of applications.

And it's now it's called customer workflows. Literally We're seeing a lot of customers build their own apps and their own workflows and then you guys build workflows. So where's that line between when you decide to go build something versus where the customer tries to fill in the white space?

And how do you guys decide when to build a workflow? Certainly. So I personally come out of a a CRM realm and so I'd seen this problem attempt to be attacked.

And so I'll take a step back for a second if you will. Many of the challenges of supporting customers have been addressed by others in the industry, crm, customer service and support software through what's called omnichannel or engagement. So how quickly can you integrate to telephony, still the dominant channel or email or web subs, web self-service?

And that's very important, but we think it's only half the challenge. Uh, soon as you get to a slightly more complex issue, like I have a dispute. Um, I want, I have a problem with a payment that my bank issued, or I want to file an insurance claim, or I want to check where the status of my package is.

Now you're going through a number of other systems of record to get an answer. And we found that many of the team members who were not the frontline, even the frontline were doing what I like to call human powered swivel chair middleware. They would go from one app to the other.

And so that was the, the first of our, um, workflows that we built is a robust data model to be able to model your customers, whether it's accounts, contacts, partners or consumers and households. And then second, how do we turn that request into a se series of discrete tasks, orchestrate them from the front, middle, and back office dipping into the systems of record, cuz we know they always exist and then fulfilling. It's always about fulfilling the request.

So you're saying that copying and pasting data between multiple SaaS applications, it doesn't count as a workflow, It doesn't count as a workflow. And in fact, I had a, I had a, uh, customer, um, who's gonna be joining me on stage later on talking about how that much effort on the agent took away from the empathy that they were able to display to the customer. And then the customer ended up being very grouchy.

And and you've probably on that end of the line where they go, hang on a second, my system's not cooperating. What they're doing is they're desperately trying to copy and paste things. He mentioned that, uh, some of the agents were taking 40 minutes to log into all the different screens in the morning before they took the first phone call.

And of course, the agent is being measured on how quickly they can resolve the Exactly right. Exactly right. And so, you know, it starts this doom loop of, you know, frustration by the agent.

The customer's already frustrated, they can't answer or fulfill or everyone wants to be helpful, but when they go, there's another system, there's another team. And I don't know when they're gonna get back to me. That leads to, to, you know, not good results.

How, um, extensible are the workflows that you provide? Cuz a lot of folks will say, well that's great, you got me 80% of the way there and maybe they want to tweak it from there. Exactly.

Right. And so we think of it as providing you those best practices, the starting points. And then, uh, a key element that we say is look at it as configuration and not code.

So eliminate custom code and uh, our applications will get you 80%. And then our app engine, uh, creator workflow capabilities, automation engine for, for, um, pulling into the systems of record, whether it's integration hub or or rpa, uh, or, um, other newer capabilities like document intelligence. Those get you to focus on your company and industry specific business processes.

How big of business has the whole custom workflow side of the house become? Because to your point, I, TSM was the first use case, but Uh, it, it is, um, you know, I was, I was bullish on this, we were bullish. It was a, it was a stretch use case a few years back, but even we've been impressed we're the fastest growing, uh, serum, uh, player at scale focused exclusively on customer service and support.

Uh, we entered the year with 800 million in acv and uh, we expect to be one of the fastest workflows at ServiceNow to cross 1 billion this year in, uh, 2023. Can you talk about some of your customers and what they're doing Exactly? So the power of our workflows, um, and it's, we've got even more expansive than just customer service over time.

We've added to the family of applications, we've got field service management and, uh, announcing it here at Knowledge 23. We now have order management. So think about the end-to-end process and beyond those we've built industry specific applications because we found customers get tremendous value across industry.

So just some, some quick statistics. Seven-eleven in retail reduced their case volume by 93%, um, uh, banking, um, uh, Lloyd's Bank in the uk. So a 91% reduction in payment exceptions because they looked at the root cause and eliminated the, the reason why customers were calling in the first place.

Uh, Rogers a telco in Canada, a 19% reduction in customer call volumes, once again addressing the root cause. And even in, um, technology, Xerox, they're our, one of our premier field service use cases cuz they go out to physically fix things and they saw a 15% reduction in travel time and even get two business services like Capita out of the uk. They saw a 50 point increase in net promoter score.

So across industries, across use cases, you can see the value that we're bringing to these customers. We've been talking about AI all week here. Is that gonna make it easier to create these workflows both for you and for the customer?

For that man? A hundred percent. We are very excited for ai and so obviously the big announcement today was generative ai, but before I get to that, let me address it.

We've been on an AI journey from the beginning of AI at ServiceNow and on the platform. So we've had a virtual agent that seamlessly conversationally captures the customer request. And what we recommend is capture that request and if it's easy using the concept of a service catalog, automatically fulfill it if you're just simply giving a, uh, order status update or a change of your delivery address for an order.

Um, and then on the agent side, we've had capabilities like document intelligence. Document intelligence is really cool. It takes, uh, document optical recognition and AI to quickly learn and it takes all the fields out of a, a document attachment in a case or an email and automatically prepopulates the case.

Um, and this reduces the amount of time that the agent has to do what was previously a hundred percent manual effort. Now with generative ai, we only see an acceleration of this, um, trend of AI being powerful for, uh, the customer facing side. The virtual agent with now assist, it'll summarize the knowledge articles that our customers have created and give you a succinct, succinct answer and even recommend what you can do.

Once again, surfacing that, um, we understood your problem, here's the two choices of what you could do. And then for the agents, it'll also do great things like summarizing. Uh, if it's a long-running case, you'll see a lot of back and forth sometimes, and then the person goes off shift.

How do you quickly get the next agent up to speed? And so it'll summarize everything that's happened so far, it'll recommend what they should probably do next. And there's been some studies out there that saw, you know, dramatic increases in agent proficiency going from, you know, a, a agent who's two months in job performing at a level of being six to nine months in the role.

And one of the key things that I heard from, from, from my customer is reducing the effort for the agent helped them be more empathetic. And when they listened to the customer, the customers were nicer. And so, uh, agent attrition went down, customer satisfaction went up.

And this is through the power of ai. So generative AI will only accelerate the power of the things we do well already There's an old saying there's an app for everything, so is there gonna be a workflow for everything? And how do I find all these workflows?

Certainly. So there is gonna be a workflow for everything and uh, we are on that journey to tailor it to shorten, you know, the time to value in. Once again, we'd like to think of it as, uh, configuration not code.

So we've got products for technology, for media, for telco in financial services. We've got workflows for banking and insurance, we've got workflows for healthcare, uh, and life sciences. Uh, we've got workflows for public sector and we're working on a series more.

So you'll continue to see us bring industry specific workflows that get you closer to what you need so you can focus exclusively on what is your core competency as a company and differentiate yourself. Do you think people really understand what the term platform means? Because everybody throws it around and says that they're a platform, but when you're a platform and you have an integrated data model, this is what makes all the difference for the workforce.

Certainly, and I, I I I, I've watched this many times with many customers who begin that journey with us who start out asking us to do a single challenge that they have, and then as they explore that, they suddenly see how well it applies to that challenge, and then they invite us and say, could it do this, could it do that? And then it expands. And so you've seen that, uh, we've seen that both in customer workflows and even at ServiceNow overall, where it's a strong land, uh, element where there's a key core problem to be solved and then a dramatic expansion usually where customers go, where, where can ServiceNow help us?

And um, that that is the journey of understanding what applied form means, starts with a first element and then being thoughtful and retrospective and saying, okay, how could I apply this more broadly? Mm-hmm. Now the platform itself is open, I can use APIs to connect to things, but it sounds like if I have too many APIs, I basically wind up getting overloaded and the weight of the thing starts to crush us.

So yeah, and this is where we stand on the shoulders of a giant, which is the now platform. And so we are, uh, heavily reliant on all the capabilities that, uh, the now platform offer. So Flow Designer is a visual way, if you can, I tell customers, if you can map your business process on a napkin, you can draw it in our platform.

And then we don't think of integration or APIs as distinct. They're just an extension of that workflow process. So they're pulled into the context of the need.

And that's where Automation Engine fill fills in with, you know, either integration hub or rpa. For those systems that don't have standards based APIs, we know they still exist, um, and seamlessly pulls in the information, or better yet, we offer it up to other systems. So those other systems belong, uh, um, and perform better.

All right, folks. You heard it here. APIs are a good thing, but it is quite possible to have too much of a good thing.

Terrence, thanks for being on the show. Thank You so much. It's been a real pleasure.

Thank you, Mike. And we'll be back in a minute.