Showing Value of ServiceNow Usage with Employee Experience

Pasi Nikkanen:              Welcome to Happy Today podcast. This is a podcast for those who want to improve service experience of internal services. If you use ServiceNow or other enterprise service management system, then this is for you.

Pasi Nikkanen:              So, welcome to Happy Today podcast. It's going to be episode 20. Yay! Me and Sami, we are both I think suffering a bit on the flu season, so if the audio quality is bad it's because of our little bit of flu.

Pasi Nikkanen:              Our topic for today is around ServiceNow. So ServiceNow is the enterprise service management tool that most of our customers work with. And the slogan of make work, work better is what ServiceNow is saying and it really ties in nicely with our messaging, which is about employee experience. So, making employees more productive and happy with their work. But Sami, why do, why do you say that measuring employees' experience helps you with your ServiceNow? Thanks.

Sami Kallio:                   I think there were some big changes in ServiceNow two years back and they started to talk very, very much about employee experience. And for us, I felt really, really good because that really show that at that point they started to understand also with that the service management is there for how we help employees to use the service and get support.

Sami Kallio:                   So there's no other reason why this whole tool exists or why we exist or ServiceNow people, or their partners exist, we help common customers to really work more efficiently, but also to make the end users more happy for the services. I think that's the other word that they're using very much nowadays, which it's outcomes.

Sami Kallio:                   So whatever you do, do you do that for some outcome. And that's also very, very important thing what we are supporting them to do and the whole ecosystem to do, that they really focus on, if you implement something, something to change for the end user, and really do [inaudible 00:02:04] on that change.

Pasi Nikkanen:              Yeah. I think there's four things that we usually talk about and I think the fourth one is the outcomes. But I think if we start the whole thing, like how our customers use the employee experience. So, what about the first three? Where do we start?

Sami Kallio:                   We have to start from the transparency, so a complicated word, yeah. What it means is that when you are measuring end user satisfaction and user experience, nobody should own that. Meaning that only in the sense that you don't share it. That should be shared to everybody that is involved in there or being the experienced, because that would be a common target. So, sharing that to your ServiceNow partner, share that to ServiceNow, your Service Desk team, to be able to get their support for you. And the next word is trust.

Pasi Nikkanen:              True.

Sami Kallio:                   When you share it with everybody and they start to understand that you trust them to help you, it start to change the whole thing because then, next, the third word, is focus. Because when you're together, now we have recognized those areas that are not working perfectly in your Service Desk or service management. Then, you have a common issue with all the stakeholders from your partner services, whoever, they focus on that one issue that you are now solving. It might be that it is a functionality available in ServiceNow that would help you. It might be this framing to somebody in your ecosystem. But you need to recognize those areas where you are not at your best.

Pasi Nikkanen:              Yeah. And I think what our solutions, together with ServiceNow does, is that ServiceNow has all the operational data, and then we combine it with our experience data. So then you actually start to identify that, "Hey, their experience and that lost productivity, based on their operational data, it's when people are using certain channels, are they using certain service, or they are located in a certain office." So then you have [crosstalk 00:04:11]-

Sami Kallio:                   Because something happened too in the process. It was reassigned too many times or whatever is the kind of thing, what happens in Service Desk. So combining those two things is crucial to really be able to do the right changes to your service management.

Pasi Nikkanen:              All right. So, I get it that then when you have a focus and you have understand that problem, so and then we are talking about outcomes. So, then you coming out, you call that the Knowledge Expo, or something. And he says, "Oh no, there's this nice feature called virtual agent. I love to have that feature as a techie." Then, I could actually start to formulate, hey, that the outcome of taking virtual agent into use is that we want to reduce from the productivity loss of the employees in these certain services.

Pasi Nikkanen:              So, for example, the chat bot should be utilized on these places where people are maybe already using the chat channel, and they are always talking about this certain services that could be self-services through the virtual agent, or something like that.

Sami Kallio:                   Yeah, exactly. So, know 30 use functionalities because of the functionalities, it still is quite often the thing you have to figure out what you really want to do, what you really want to change. Okay, you might have a technical proof of concept of something, but don't think that is something that you can deliver to the end customers if you don't really think about it, how you will change their collaboration with you.

Pasi Nikkanen:              Yeah. And then, I think part of the outcomes also that how do you show that you actually made the outcome that you promised to do? Because we have heard these stories talking with ServiceNow people and our customers that, "So how do you know that it was successful that you rolled out some new feature?" Well, nobody complained. Well, now actually, with the productivity data and they've got experience data, you could show that, "Hey, we were able to reduce the productivity loss so much, so much."

Sami Kallio:                   Yeah, yeah. I would even say the most used thing, what we measure from the end customers when thinking about doing a business case, why to invest to something like virtual agent or changing channels, or something like that? It's about getting rid of reassignment columns. And when we measure a customer for, let's say, a few months, we start to know how much does it cost that the ticket is reassigned again and again.

Sami Kallio:                   Typically, it is about one hour per for each who has an account. So when you are thinking of virtual agents, you are thinking about some other functionalities that you have, AI functionalities in the tool nowadays. If you are able to show to business that this is the thing what you're trying to aim, you are trying to get rid of these 10,000 reassignment counts in these and these services, that's the base of business case. And always getting rid out... You said they have rid off reassignment counts, will also make the end user more happy.

Pasi Nikkanen:              Yeah, yeah.

Sami Kallio:                   So it is the both things, the actions you have end users, but also how happy they are with your services.

Pasi Nikkanen:              Yeah. And I think nowadays they're also talking about this workflows with ServiceNow, so they have the Workflow Designer. So, which workflow would you automate with the designer is also a good way. I would personally automate that workflow that the employees are saying that they're losing the most time because that is the most business critical. Like we said that people are keeping their feeling of, "How much time I lost." Well, the feeling is quite accurate in places that are really business critical, so don't book it from IT side. You can do inside out, that part we want to automate in IT.

Pasi Nikkanen:              But look, what the employees are reporting, where are they losing the most of their time, and automate that. Then you actually make really happy employees and you get a justification to do the next organization, and next organization. But more people in the organization see the value of your efforts.

Sami Kallio:                   Yeah. That kind of thing, assessment to repair these forwards because I [inaudible 00:08:15] is the biggest thing what we do together with the whole ecosystem of ServiceNow, helping customers to really utilize their ecosystem of ServiceNow in the best possible way.

Sami Kallio:                   The transparency, then you have the trust between the partners. Then you have the focus, ability to identify together what you must be doing differently. And then, you will get outcomes and proven outcomes from the end user perspective. So that's pretty simple when I say it like this. I know that it's not as simple as it sounds, but that's the culture, what we try to help the industry to change to. So, data [inaudible 00:08:52] employee-centric way of working, and that's I think the reason why quite a lot of ServiceNow people I know very, very willing to work with us because we are able to help really.

Pasi Nikkanen:              Yeah, yeah. And something that we try to avoid in this podcast is talking about our solution, but I think this situation I want to highlight maybe the couple of things. So, we really do provide a solution from ServiceNow. It's available from the ServiceNow Store and it's already made solution, so with fast deployment.

Pasi Nikkanen:              Because I think if you divide it into three things, what do you need to do to actually manage the employee experience is first measure, get the data. Then, you need to able to share it and then you need to be able to identify. So, measuring is of course this surveying part that people asking, "Well, we already doing it with out-of-the-box feature." Well, that's fine but I think we have it ready-made, you don't have to spend any time on it, and we get really high response rate, so we get a lot of data. And getting a lot of data is really important. Otherwise, it's individual opinions that you're working with.

Sami Kallio:                   Yeah. And then you get benchmark which-

Pasi Nikkanen:              Yeah, yeah. But I think that's the easy part. Then comes the sharing. So, using our live in first screens, using our instant feedback loop, so for the agents you're able to get the feedback instantly in real-time for all the stakeholders. And this is I think where most people fail. So they got a lot of feedback but then they don't share it and they don't do anything with it. So I think our solution, the strong point is definitely on the sharing part.

Pasi Nikkanen:              And then, the last thing is identifying. So having a real-time live report, like some people in ServiceNow saying like a live business value assessment all the time up and running, so of course you could do it. With some reporting tools you do it monthly or you use the performance analytics in certain ways, but that also requires a lot of work and our thing is out-of-the-box. And also, like you said, it provides the benchmark. So, we gather the data from all of our customers so we're even able to say that, "What is the channel division with our customers usually? How many are actually now moving away from EML who are taking Portal into use?" So you can also use that to justify things that you want to do with your ServiceNow.

Pasi Nikkanen:              So I think that's the product plot that we have never done before. And definitely if you want to learn more on that you can just go to a website and book a demo session.

Sami Kallio:                   Yeah. And I said I think that was a long answer to the question that, "What are the differences between our tool and ServiceNow?"

Pasi Nikkanen:              Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Sami Kallio:                   We don't see any conflict there on-

Pasi Nikkanen:              No?

Sami Kallio:                   ServiceNow survey tool can be used for many purposes and those things that [inaudible 00:11:35] will never do. Because in our product it's always ready-made surveys for certain purposes, and it's not everything you want to measure.

Pasi Nikkanen:              It's about the continuous thing, so then if you want to make ad hoc things, then I think the ServiceNow tool is really good like other external survey tools, they're really good on that.

Sami Kallio:                   Yeah. And hen we are setting all day the old ways back to ServiceNow when you want to do processes behind or use that data to accelerate the things you do in service management tool in your ServiceNow, the data is there so you can do whatever with that immediately creating new tickets, or whatever is [crosstalk 00:12:11].

Pasi Nikkanen:              Yeah, yeah. Nowadays with the Workflow Designer in ServiceNow, when the data comes back from [inaudible 00:12:15], you can actually launch something. Like it was a really poor score, you can make a workflow and make people follow up from that for that employee, or do actions. So, make them known that, "Hey, this thing just happened."

Sami Kallio:                   Yeah.

Pasi Nikkanen:              Any last words on people maybe joining the Now At Work events now around Europe last week?

Sami Kallio:                   Yeah, [crosstalk 00:12:37] will be in at least three locations, still one location open for us. They'll be in London, in Amsterdam, and in Frankfurt. Happy to talk about this with ServiceNow people, ServiceNow partners, and new customers. This is of course something we... is very, very dear to our heart.

Pasi Nikkanen:              Yeah. And those are actually three events.

Sami Kallio:                   Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Pasi Nikkanen:              So you'd be interested in this ServiceNow go ahead and join the events, it's usually a nice atmosphere there. All right, thanks Sami. I think that was a wrap. You're can find it on the show notes and links we have on the website. But anyway, I'd say he's very happy and until next time.

Sami Kallio:                   And don't get the flu from us.

Pasi Nikkanen:              Exactly.

Sami Kallio:                   Yeah.