Tony Colon, ServiceNow | ServiceNow Knowledge 23

This is Techstrong tv. Hello and welcome to ServiceNow Knowledge 2023, and we're here with Tony Colon, who's senior vice President for Customer Success. And we're talking about what defines customer success.

Tony, welcome the show. Thank You, Mike. Thanks for having me.

One of the things that has always kind of perplexed me a little bit is that each customer operates in their own kind of isolated silo. So how do you transfer some of the knowledge from one to the other in a way that they can accept and uh, and and act on because they're every application environment is so unique. Yeah, it's a great question.

I mean, one of the biggest things of why I've been so passionate about customer success that I've been doing this my entire career is really understanding the dynamics at a customer's environment, the culture, how they get work done. Um, and it's a complex ecosystem, as you know. And I joined ServiceNow because I really felt that the capabilities of the platform then just made the concept and the promise of customer success, which really was born around adoption and, you know, support and ensuring your proactive and predictive before used to be all about preventive maintenance or you know, reactive support.

And that to me is some of the biggest things in learnings. And I think with the advent of telemetry data that tells you what products are in use and regardless of the size of the customer, that to me is really the power that takes the digital side of customer success into the human side of how you can actually predict challenges before they happen. Are you seeing any patterns in behaviors among customers or things that you're going, wow, I, this customer did something awesome and I wish they everybody else would do the same?

Yeah, I mean it's great to see that as a customer. You know, typically they're deploying or have a long, longstanding deployment of I tsm sitting in their environment and then they expand to a new product and it's not as easy just to take the principles of the I TSM and what they did well to a new product like HR or supply chain. So what we're seeing is as you expand the portfolio of the product, the complexity, the requirements of integration and collaboration across teams is something that we're, doesn't matter what size you are, obviously the bigger, more enterprise size customers are a little more complex because they do have some of these organizational silos.

But those same best practices that you see at the largest companies in the world, we've been able to take to even some of the smaller, you know, you know, 1,000 person companies as well. A lot of people who do the I TSM kinda worship at the Church of Idle. Um, how hard or easy is it to take those principles and apply them to some other workflow like HR or customer service or whatever it is?

And is that part of where we maybe need a little more flexibility? I believe it is. So idle is, you know, obviously the, the core of the I TSM and, and whatever our customers have been using for, for a while, you go to the CSM space and you know, taking those practices don't always necessarily translate, but the platform knowledge is the same.

So the capability of the I TSM developer or admin, you can translate that over to HR or csm When it comes to the business process, when it comes to some of the technology as well as the workflows, you've got knowledge centered workflows, you've got, you know, case deflection when you're talking csm, those aren't necessarily in the ITO workflow space. So you do have to introduce new concepts and new capabilities. The whole concept of hired to retire in the HR space is another one, which is a different workflow from Mitel.

So we're seeing each one of our workflows and then these package best practices come to life as our customers evolve with us. Mm-hmm. You guys also have a product called Impact, I think and Correct.

That's a product I buy to help me become more successful with the platform. So how does that work and how does that kind of connect back to the rest of the platform? So Impact has four tiers.

We have Impact Base, which every customer, regardless of what they buy from us, if they buy one ITSM license, they get impact base at no charge included in the product or with the product. That includes training, it includes best practices, it includes video content, and also obviously your support capabilities and things to that nature. We then have guided, which is an, like, I think of it as a good, better, best.

So you think of guided, you get more training content, you get more digital capabilities and you get access to individuals. Basically we call them the squad. And then you have Advanced, which is actually a designated team of people that support your environment or your instances.

And then total is typically for our largest customers. And those last three tiers are essentially a percentage of their overall spend on the, uh, licensing of the product. There's a lot of talk about AI at the conference.

What do you think ultimately the impact of AI is gonna be on customer success? Well, I think there's a huge opportunity in customer success. 0 was all about customer success managers and having a customer success manager aligned to an account and helping drive adoption with the advent of AI as well as the telemetry that the data and the products are now telling us, to me that is the future of saying, this customer is stuck, they need help, or we found these 10 issues at similar customers, let's go and actually solve the problem before it becomes an issue or becomes a severity one case.

So these are the things that we're seeing already from leveraging the impact platform to then tell customers, Hey, there's something that's gonna happen to your environment, you need to solve it within the next seven days. And so we're starting to see that predictive nature of AI and leveraging what was announced, you know, today already helping our customers with support issues or adoption issues. So the meantime the intervention is a lot lower.

Yeah, we're actually seeing that right now. We had a very large, uh, system integrator who runs their entire payroll through ServiceNow, go from 40 hours of processing their payroll in their E R P system down to 40 minutes. That to them was phenomenal and there were constantly even the 40 hours that it took, the errors, you know, going and solving, obviously making payrolls a very important thing for a consulting and getting those time sheets processed.

And so what we saw is the system was able to identify those errors before they happened. And that to us is really key to solving and making the promise of customer success. True.

Do you think as we go along, the roles of a lot of people are gonna change and how will that look? I do. I, I feel that, you know, customer success in my view started, you know, or at least when I started in the SaaS space, it was driving that first sale and then ensuring a frictionless renewal.

And you typically had someone aligned to an account very focused on the relationship. I think relationships are very important. At the same time, customers want expertise and they want someone with industry expertise as well as product expertise to then drive what needs to happen at their, their environment.

0 version, is really how the technology and the data, whether it's AI or telemetry, come together to then identify this is the right person to solve the problem. Mm-hmm. Are you seeing customers also consolidate applications cuz you have this integrated platform?

We are, and what's fascinating to me is there's still so many customers out there who say, I didn't know ServiceNow did that. So, you know, HR is a great example. You even see our customer success module is, is just an area where we continue to find and identify opportunities.

And I love what Bill McDermott says is that for us to win doesn't require someone else to lose. And what we're seeing is you can have these siloed applications sitting within your IT landscape, but what we're doing is taking and integrating the two together. I've worked for big tech companies in, in IT departments in my last role and you know, there's a whole landscape of technology and you know, there's not many companies that centralize IT spend.

Sometimes the business is empowered to actually purchase products, and then you have this slew of app applications and what people are looking for is really what is that engagement layer and that experience layer that simplifies all my backend systems. As you think all that through, is there something that you see customers doing that makes you just shake your head a little bit and go, geez, I think we're better than that. And what's that one piece of advice you would have for folks who say, you know, we can up our game.

How I feel, the biggest thing I see from customers is going with it the traditional way of I'm going to buy a software product to solve one specific problem, and I'm gonna go with the same technology partner that I've always leveraged or even the same integration partner. I feel it's a great opportunity for them to connect with peers and really understand what other companies are doing. I love what was said on stage this morning in our keynote, which was the ability to unlock what we really want to do, but we didn't even know what was possible.

So I think that initial step of just really understanding what is it that other people are doing, other companies, and why did you build the product this way? And then leveraging why the product was built and the community of customers that use the product to then drive a better outcome. Because if not, you're sort of limiting yourself within your own four walls as a company and not allowing yourself to look at others and see what they're doing.

Didn't we somehow or other invest in a lot of digital business transformation initiatives that kind of were apart from it, but now we're trying to bring all that back together again because people are realizing that it is at the core of those efforts. So have we gone full circle? Um, yeah, that's a great question.

I feel it has, right? When we think of it versus the business. Um, when I started my career, that was always, you know, IT department sat on a different floor, business, sat on a different floor, we weren't even integrated in where we sat and you know, you send a ticket and then you wait for a response.

Now the integration of business and it, you have a seat at the table in every discussion and the whole concept, I mean, software companies have been talking about platforms for a very long time, but companies have not actually rolled out platforms. They roll out applications. And what we're seeing now is every company says, I want a platform company because the power of the platform, it's going to, it's gonna help me propel my transformation that is truly needed.

And it is really the better together story. And that's why, you know, when we think about all the opportunities that we have in technology, this is why I, I always tell people it's, it's a great time to be in tech. Mm-hmm.

Because this to me is that full circle moment. Some people might be concerned that we're building a stack that's kind of similar to the way we built out packaged applications for e r p, what's fundamentally different from where we are today versus where we were three or four years ago. I mean, for me, the biggest thing was I would never as a business uni user necessarily log into an e r P application, right?

That would again, be a request that would happen. Open a case, someone does something in some back office tool Today, bringing these applications, bringing the experience right to the end user where they're doing their work is to me, what is the beautiful connection between all the different stacks, whether it's a back office system, a mid-off office, or a front office, and having that seamless experience as an employee, as a customer, and then even as a supplier. That to me is the, the really big game changer that I see the difference between, I would say 20, 30 years ago and today.

All right folks, you heard it here. It's all about the workflow and the system and record kind of supports the workflow, right? That's what we're looking for.

Tony, thanks for being on the Show. Thank you, Mike. All Right.

And we'll be back in a minute.