[Music] hello i'm sam loveland vice president of customer success at servicenow today we would like you to meet one of our success professionals chad whaley and understand how he works with our customers to help them achieve their desired outcomes with servicenow so welcome chad thanks sam excited to be here so we just heard from northwestern mutual on how they're working with servicenow customer success on their journey it'd be great to hear more about how you work with them to help them drive their success so let's start learning more about you chad tell us a bit about your background and your role here at servicenow sure so i'm a success architect i've been in the role for about two and a half years now prior to that i was with a partner for about seven years and i was a customer for two years prior to that so i've got about 10 years experience in the servicenow ecosystem itself my it experience goes back over 20 years way back to when i was a 16 year old doing tech support for a local dial-up company so a techie die-hard and a knowledgeable uh asset to our servicenow team so how does success architect work with our customers to drive success so i think it all starts with being hyper focused on value right we spend a great deal of time getting to know our customers understanding their business understanding their work streams uh and the roles that that play within the company so we use things called success readiness assessments to engage that conversation those success readiness assessments really give us a good perspective on where our customers are from the maturity standpoint where they are with their initiatives across different lines of business and then how the messaging is flowing top down throughout the organization and we use those assessments to really build out a customer success plan that's tailored for their unique circumstances in their business not all customers you know not success doesn't look the same for all customers so for northwestern mutual they're very early in an itsm transformation implementation for one of my other customers they've been a customer for quite a while now a number of years and they've adopted many many different products so the success plan for those two organizations looks very very different but the value is still there right that's that's the key focus that we have when going through these engagements is making sure that we're pulling out all of the value that's attainable in a schedule that's accommodates their initiatives the other piece is that we like to work across multiple horizontals within the organization so those success plans and those initiatives that we're driving don't span just one work stream they don't focus on just one concept they're they're tailored and they're focused on any initiative that can happen across the enterprise so it's interesting you talked a bit about prescriptive guidance but tailoring it to the customer's needs based on the interviews that you do for the sras or the success readiness assessments so i'd like to hear a little bit more how you work with a customer's team in this new world of remote engagement yeah i i like to use the six ps approach i'll do the 5p version to keep it pg but it's proper planning prevents poor performance i take a lot of additional time to make sure that i understand the context of any engagement or meeting that i'm having with a customer make sure i understand what their roles are what focus areas they want to drill into um so that i can tailor the message and the content in such a way that it's it's relevant for them it's using their terminology it's focused on key challenges and initiatives that they're trying to drive rather than try to make it completely generic right the other thing is obviously we use tools like virtual meeting spaces and the servicenow platform to to manage and track these engagements to make sure that everything is flowing well we're managing the status and getting progress on the work that's being done but i personally like to take the extra step of really driving home that kind of virtual water cooler type type discussion getting to know my customers developing a personal relationship with them so i can have that rapport that really opens up a really productive dialogue regardless of what we happen to be discussing on any given day yeah so it's just as important to build that personal relationship as it is to build the business relationship are there any special skills and knowledge you and other success architects have to help our customers succeed yeah you know it's i work with a lot of really really great peers and one thing that we all have in common is we bring a lot of breadth of experience to the table many of us come from vastly different backgrounds but it's fairly consistent that most of us or many of us have experience from multiple horizontals multiple verticals so we're comfortable in our role going in and having a positive and constructive dialogue with anyone within an organization you know both from a top-down perspective as well as from a horizontal perspective right we we know how to tailor our conversations to be relevant for different work streams and we know how to make sure that the content that we're delivering and the message that we're putting forth is relevant for each individual based on their role within the company yeah i think one other thing i'd also add about the team is they're passionate right they're passionate about service now and making our customers successful so i definitely think that that's another key key to the secret sauce for our team here do you have any advice for the audience on how to drive success with servicenow i think success needs to be a team sport if you look at any engagement there's often a lot of different uh individuals playing a lot of different roles but one thing that that really needs to be consistent across all of them is they need to be bought into success they all need to understand what the goals and desired outcomes are and what the plan is for getting there and that's not just from a success team that's not just for the customer the partners play a critical role in that as well so it's really important that everyone in that engagement whether it's customers partners or servicenow are all interacting with one another all having productive conversations and king off of each other we all have a seat at that table and we all have a role to play and it's really critical that everyone embraces that so that we can do things constructively like challenge the status quo right make train drive change and drive innovation uh within those initiatives that we're driving in an organization yeah i absolutely agree that partners are key part of the team and as bill will say teamwork makes the dream work so chad thank you for sharing your valuable insight on how you work with our customers to drive success it's this close partnership between you the partners and our customers that accelerates time to value and creates better outcomes so thank you chad thank you so much sam you can learn more about servicenow customer success at our customer success center www success