[Music] [Applause] hi everybody my name is caitlin frank and welcome to this week's friday fast 15 our weekly segment where we spend 15 minutes with a subject matter expert and dive into a single topic of the day this week we're happy to have eric vogensen who's a senior client director on our connected solutions team he's here with us to talk a little bit about business process outsourcing and why more and more customers of servicenow are finding value in bpo uh hi eric glad to have you with us hi caitlin thanks for having me you bet all right well let's dive right in so business process outsourcing um that has traditionally tended to focus on the keeping the lights on so to speak um needs for the clients how are these needs more sophisticated today than they once were a lot of organizations with social media with the internet with the security that is out there today um have sort of evolved like you mentioned they've evolved what bpo can be uh we still of course have those traditional areas like your back office support so for example you know helping with billing and invoicing and accounting and those types of bpo areas but what we're seeing a lot of is that we're starting to see a shift to more of of customer experience like monitoring of social media of organizations um dispatching of you know whether it's it's a cab driver whether it's a um you know a repair person whether it's any of that kind of stuff um that's starting to be more prevalent and then in addition a lot of the technical stuff technical solutions you know help desk i.t operations monitoring of security alerts that type of thing is definitely definitely more prevalent today than than we saw in the past so with all that complexity now on our plates how how are we able to get that done so we have about 400 uh folks in our manila office and they're part of cross-views just like every other employee or office is they've most of them have been there for over about 20 years and they are part of our global bpo services organization and in manila jobs like this are highly sought after and many times require a college education so a lot a lot fewer turnover situations than you would have in the u.s english is a very well-spoken language over there and we do have a us-based account management team that works hand-in-hand with our manila team so with it with our team in manila um you know i know a big concern or priority for a lot of it and business leaders is customer experience so with a team in manila how do we ensure that our customers experience the same high levels of service that they'd be able to provide themselves internally or with a more onshore based provider so that's an interesting question we do have a u.s based service desk and with that us-based service desk we have some quality management and continuous improvement processes and groups that actually manage our quality and so we do the same thing with our manila team we have a customer care process we have procedures and documentation on what each customer requires in a certain situation so overall they are pretty much hand in hand with our u.s based team when it comes to quality um knowing that we have a really strong servicenow background um in fact we're a servicenow elite partner would you say that our experience and relationship with servicenow in particular helps us deliver bpo services at least compared to other bpo providers absolutely you know part of bpo is is finding the most efficient and cost-effective way to carry out tasks within an organization and part of that is servicenow you can build out a lot of different [Music] workflows you can build a lot of different integrations with other applications or systems and and one of the pieces that really stands out in my head is your typical onboarding of an end user from an hr perspective and an it perspective servicenow can be used to pretty much carry out the full process of getting that end user a login id to a computer to access to xyz applications and folders and everything that they would need servicenow can integrate with different hr systems and servicenow can integrate with microsoft active directory and other things to to pretty much do that on its own um so on the flip side of that what does having a high-end bpo capability contribute to the way we serve our servicenow customers well for an example um a one of our customers that's a large global hospitality organization needed some labor arbitrage they needed some extra assistance with a lot of the things that we've already talked about right from that it perspective taking care of of new users terminations taking care of providing access to specific applications for users within their environment we were able to use our bpo group in manila to get that set up we we wrote all the required training and documentation and made sure that things are done in a repeatable manner by using what we call knowledge articles or kvs these are basically the building blocks to bpo it's it's per customer how do we provide the the process and the procedures that this customer is looking for and the answer is we build it out for each and every customer so each customer might have a different process for certain things and we're able to get that built out documented and ensure that we follow that as part of our quality management process and reviewing those to ensure the highest quality possible oh that's great um no it i'm sure there are some hesitations that customers might have about bpo what what are some examples of of hesitations our customers might have had and how did that pan out well you always you always hear about the potential of layoffs or why would i take this away from my internal team or you know those types of hesitations and a lot of times what we find is you know your internal workforce is so busy with so many different things that removing the repeatable uh removing things that can be automated removing things that you know really kind of tacks your your internal workforce actually improves the quality of life balance for your employees and allows them to really focus on how they can help your organization get to the next level right they can they can focus on the really important things that they're there to do and to think about and to brainstorm about so um you know it's always going to breed that that level of of anxiety or or concern from an organization but a lot of the customers that we do bpo4 today have really found that they are able to take steps quicker larger you know so on and so forth once we we take over some of their business processes and help them focus more on their day-to-day business nice um well that's really all i had for you today thank you eric i guess well one last question where can our viewers go to learn more if you'd like to know more you can always go to our website crossfuse.com bpo business process outsourcing or you can reach out to us at um let's talk crossfuse.com all right thanks very much thank you