[Music] [Applause] [Music] all right hi everybody welcome to this week's friday fast 15. my name is caitlin frank i'm with crossfuse and this is our weekly segment where we take 15 minutes with a subject matter expert and do a deep dive into one specific topic this week we are talking about how to build an effortless service desk experience on servicenow and to join us today we have zach brand who is the director of our managed services practice here at cross views and part of his role is overseeing the service desk one thing that's unique about our service desk is not only do they serve our own internal employees they're actually a managed service provider as well delivering service desk support for many of our customers 24 7. hi zach welcome hi um so first question for you um in what ways do you think being an msp or a managed service provider helps us use servicenow here at crossviews yeah that's a good question you know i think being an msp and serving multiple different customers across multiple different verticals industries geographies you know we just see a lot of different scenarios and i think that helps us use service now to to um align their workflows in a way that that that just makes it easier to get the information that they need get the access that they need and from uh you know just from an i guess from a it perspective helps us support our customers in the best and easiest way possible so i think that's what really helps us use servicenow to serve our customers needs okay um so do you have an example of something we've learned from a customer um or have you created a solution for a customer that then we started doing either internally for ourselves or for other customers yeah i think that's a great question and to be honest that's that that's really how we build our value is that by by learning all these uh different situations best practices by uh you know we have a lot of experience with service desk and by understanding what what kind of issues we've had and doing analysis based on the data that we get from servicenow we can implement better continuous improvement processes and you know although you know i think the best way to describe that is maybe a story that is a collective improvement not maybe just kind of one particular item but we had a customer uh in the southeast uh leading into our you know new covid work from home situation that desperately needed additional support for the influx of volume for their end users and we had set up service desk in a migration support function so as they were migrating users for a particular technology our service desk was helping uh take that influx of calls to alleviate volume to their team but we didn't have anything configured for their normal day-to-day service desk operations and um you know they waved the flag for help and we were happy to answer and we've built a lot of knowledge base article templates and best practices from all of our different customers whether it would be microsoft 365 windows um office 365 different applications within that um and even just um kind of specific uh process best practices on you know security password resets um you know vpn etc and we were able to you know in a matter of a couple hours plug in kind of mad lib style these different knowledge-based articles and get a go from migration support to service desk support in just a matter of you know literally hours it was an evening call that we had with the customer um so maybe that story uh can really kind of help maybe um you know rationalize what the value of that is and i think the results of that were you know quite astounding where we were resolving you know a majority of incidents and even some of their teams actually called out some of the detail that we had in knowledge saying like you know hey you know that's a really smart thing to have in this knowledge base article you know i've been in it support for a decade and you know we continue to see that missed from time to time and you know hear you guys have it in your standard process so i think those are really good stories to talk about and really kind of highlight that value yeah absolutely and that's something that we then um can take and repeat some of those processes for other customers right yes yes very cool um let's talk about data for a minute so what are some some ways that we use the data that we can capture in servicenow yeah that's a great question so you know we use um the data in servicenow to identify uh multiple different things we use that to use a survey for customer satisfaction and customer effort we use data to identify what types of issues are being reported and how they're being resolved we use that data to identify um if the service desk is you know i guess is um actually resolving the tickets or are they having to escalate to other teams and how many times does that ticket you know ping-pong around other groups so you know we can use data in a vast majority of ways to help um kind of put into picture what that customer experience can look like obviously you know we want to get you know good data from surveys to understand what our customers are telling us but we can also infer some of that customer experience by the data that we see on if the service desk is able to resolve those issues or if they're able to escalate them and are they going to the right groups and you know is there confusion amongst other support groups as to you know who owns what and what the process is for resolving certain issues sure so it's not just kind of the service level kpis you're looking at it's it's um you're more like experiential type metrics right yeah yeah and you know it's really important to have kind of the hard metrics that you might be looking at every month to give your self kind of a pulse of you know what's happening at a high level but yeah the devil is always in the details and it's very important to um you know get uh you know quantitative data and qualitative data um so both of those components are very important and it's just having that mindset of looking for areas where the end user experience could be strained and some of that could be you know actually interacting you know with those end users and asking questions and you know kind of going on a you know customer experience workflow uh value map on i guess how they're interacting with the tool and where they're finding frustration where they have questions and try to identify sources of pain and you know um work to leave i guess work to alleviate those why is it important that we look beyond those surface level kpis yeah that's a very good question i think um we've kind of come up with a you know i guess a phrase to describe uh you know some of those surface level kpis which you know don't get me wrong are very important and you want to track and you want to manage that area of the business quite closely but um you know like i said the devil's in the details a little bit where um you know what and we kind of have a phrase calling it a watermelon metric meaning that it might be green on the outside but red on the inside and you know say your you know first call resolution could be 70 um but maybe your end users are contacting you for just really simple things that are easy for the service test to resolve that could be mitigated by you know implementing a different tool or a different workflow so you know that could be allowing the end users to reset their own passwords that could be maybe building out different service catalog items within servicenow so that the end users can self-serve more and maybe the results of that is that instead of having a 70 fcr maybe you're sitting at a you know a 50 or 55 fcr and you know at first you're like well you know that's bad and it's like well if you've dropped your contact volume from you know 2 000 contacts a month to 1200 contacts a month that's good and you can kind of look for more ways to allow your service desk to resolve more issues um so it's kind of shifting left of you know can we take things that the service desk is doing that's very repeatable and that you know our end users would actually benefit from and you know what repeatable things are your you know level two technicians and engineers doing that the service desk could potentially handle yeah so it sounds like what you're talking about is really around customer effort um why why is customer effort an important factor for service organizations to consider especially you know contrasting with you know you hear a lot about the importance of delighting customers so how do you weight those well you know we've seen some really interesting studies that indicate that you know being um you know bubbly and trying to you know really accentuate customer service for end users isn't necessarily what customers want they're really looking for you know and i guess we've said it here it's just an effortless experience they're looking for an experience where they can um you know get the help that they need as quickly as possible so that they can get back to you know whatever that they were doing and and and really be more efficient and um we've taken that and embraced that and we're using that as one of our kpis and one of our measurements internally and you know we've we've seen that um that that metric improve and you know obviously using quantitative and qualitative data to help help understand and measure that and you know it's really a journey i mean we'll never be done so we'll always be we'll always be improving and we'll also be making changes for the customer's uh improvement um but we see that studies show that there's stronger loyalty with that effortless experience rather than you know kind of having that you know i want to say maybe overly polite and yeah don't get me wrong it's very important to you be polite professional and courteous um with end users but that's not the definition of success anymore there's there's another bar on top of that that that we need to be striving for yeah um so you mentioned that we are tracking that metric how exactly do you do that i mean is it is it a database of surveys is it what is how do you do that yeah so we are using uh servicenow to capture surveys from our end users one of our questions is the customer effort score question uh which is you know it made it easy to handle my issue and then it's a seven point like scale um uh survey so that just that means you know there's a neutral somewhat agree agree very much agree and then obviously the inverse for for disagree um so it's based on that that that likert scale uh for that question and we're trying to capture you know what percentage of contacts or surveys did someone give us a positive survey score so in this case who gave us a somewhat agree agree or very much agree score so anything that's neutral or below would be i guess counted against anything that's above is counted for in this case so that's how we are measuring that okay great um do you have any examples you can share of ways a service organization either one that's you know serving external customers like we are or um maybe an internal i.t organization where they're serving their own end users um how can a service organization like that reduce customer effort so reducing customer effort i think you have to look at it holistically and it's easy to um get focused on a technology that you can implement and turn on and enable and what what we've seen success with is really looking at the holistic view of how does technology and people and process work together to to um to an outcome of success so we we partner closely with our servicenow organization to understand what some of those best practices and what the latest and greatest is on the technology front but then we also understand our customers and we also understand our you know our people in our process and we need to understand and align the technology with with the people and the process so that everything is working together coherently and everyone's on the same page and we've really seen those types of situations or how we we achieve success in that customer effort i guess journey okay um so last question for you i service now obviously we use servicenow they they really like to talk about making workflows effortless um obviously there's some hyperbole to that statement but how close do you think it organizations can actually get to providing a truly effortless experience yeah i think you can get really close um and you know it is a journey so it's not going to happen overnight you know in fact i think if you treat it as a destination i think you're kind of setting yourself up for failure so it's it's going to be a continuous effort and it's going to be leveraging the technology and empowering and training your end users and your support team to understand what you know how that technology is supposed to work and what the implementation and the you know what the uh i guess it's taking the technology and making it operational and making it uh fluid and successful is is what's going to uh kind of make or break it and a lot of that could be you know end user adoption it could be training it could be documentation there's a lot of components in a lot of areas that that you know can be you know that you can trip up on so i think that's i think that's why you know crossfuse is in a great position is because we have we have experts that can dive deep in these areas and really help understand and create kind of a valuable consumable way of of of getting from you know where you are now and kind of on your journey of reducing um you know customer effort as much as possible great um so what what resources do we have available to help our viewers improve their own service delivery on servicenow yeah that's a good question i think one of the first ones is probably we offer a great service desk assessment where we can come in and understand what your benchmarks are do a gap analysis and evaluate your processes look at future state recommendations and any other metrics or you know criteria that's important to your end users in your business to to um you know provide uh something that you can kind of bite off in chewable phases and you know as i said before kind of work your way in the direction of that effortless experience wonderful well great well that's everything i had for you today thank you so much for your time um to everybody who's watching if you want to learn more about our service desk or how we use servicenow to provide that you know to get closer and closer to providing that effortless experience um reach out to us at any time you can get us at uh let'stalkcrossviews.com all right thanks so much thanks [Music] you