Welcome to The Innovation Today podcast where we speak with today's technology leaders about how they're innovating to stay ahead of changing industry Dynamics and reaching new levels of productivity and automation brought to you by service now your partner in digital transformation thank you for joining us today for another episode of The Innovation Today podcast I'm your host Julia Martinson Innovation officer at service now today we're excited to welcome we love CEO and founder at servos welcome will thanks thanks for having me I'm I'm honored to be in this the as to uh join you for the podcast today so excited to talk a little bit about some of our experience so happy to have you today we're we're really excited to to jump into the topic of customer experience today but first can you tell us a bit about yourself and your role and what brought you this far yeah so I've been in uh technology Consulting my whole career which is over 30 years now and starting off working in the we call the bigs KPMG Accenture doing it strategy and sap implementations back in the 990s and then internet wave came in and I decided to uh start my own consulting company right after the do com boom bust which was early 2001 and uh and we just did app development so everything was custom build whether it's Java or.net and customer experience was key though um but you could build anything right but it cost a lot of money took a long time um but we built a big consulting company uh over about 10 years and ended up getting acquired by a publicly traded company so I kind of semi-retired and decided I was going to do other things and then I discovered service now so about seven years ago and really just fell in love with the platform because you don't have to custom build everything there's there's truly you know workflow and case management out of the box and it's more of a configuration low code platform so and also noticed the rocket ship that service now was on and wanted to participate in it so I kind of dusted off my cons Consulting chops and decided to go back in and start another company this time focused 100% on a platform where whereas before we were you know build anything on any platform so so we're all in on service now for uh servos and it's been exciting that sounds very exciting and I think in terms of timing it worked out really well as well didn't it you started just before the pandemic yeah yeah so the other thing that's interesting is the way I discovered service now in the beginning was investing in a couple service now partners and one of them in particular is a partner focused called the anti they're focused on uh HR as an implementation area in just service now and just hrsd employee workflows and uh they done great and um so that we came up with the idea of let's start a another consulting firm Focus just on service now but focus on customer workflo so that's kind of the Genesis of servos is a niche focused service now partner oh that's great so when it comes to customer experience and you're out there obviously you're hearing a lot from customers so and then partners as well so what are some of those most frequent questions and requests that you're actually getting from those customers and Prospects yeah it's um well I think what the pandemic took us into state and local government in the public sector which was not really the strategy for seros at the beginning was really again focused on product and we'll work with any Consulting with any um client whatever industry the pandemic hit and we got connected to the state of South Dakota um they were looking for for a way to stop the inundation of unemployment claims that were coming in right after the pandemic hit so you everybody was out of work especially people in the hospitality industry everything was closing down and uh so and the process to apply for unemployment insurance in state of South Dakota and in Most states is an arduous process it's long lots of forms to fill out and they had already purchase service now but wanted to put up a virtual agent just to um sort of handle some of the eligibility process of just determining if people are eligible for benefits or not and then help you know the short staff team on the Department of Labor side be able to handle all these claims so we got a virtual agent uh stood up very quickly and um and that helped and then that evolved into bigger project that we can talk a little more about so it's truly the experience that a citizen has so you know you were starting off with customer experience but then out of a sudden it it hit this broad Broad broad audience which is literally any one of us that's interacting in some sort with the government or public sector you kind of found your niche in that yeah we have and it's and we've sort of just doubled down on public sector and but what's interesting is you know citizens are using Amazon or you know Disney Plus or you know eBay and they're used to a certain customer experience that's high value easy you know intuitive interface easy to interact but with government systems that's not the case you know typically either at the federal level or at the state level it's usually a system that's built 20 years ago the user interface is not great it's uh or it's a paper form or PDF form that you're filling out and a lot of these populations that are accessing or needing services from the government are also under served populations that may have not as good access to the internet or not the you know the technology experience to kind of navigate um these challenging uh processes so so we've really found it a reward to be very rewarding as well because we can simplify that experience using the service not platform and extending the service portal user interface to to be on par with the you know competitors out there like the Amazon and the ebays you know a user experience that citizens are more used to so the consumer experience there right right yeah so you're you're literally making two groups of customers happy you're you're making your customers happy the governments and the state state governments and then you're you're also making their customers happy right right is it like would I go too far if I'd say say you have very um well you said already rewarding customers but it's very very rewarding um work but is it also uh very grateful are you working with very very grateful clients in a way yeah you know I think something else and I've done some work for federal government in the past as a as a consultant and um but not state and local and it's it's been interesting and I thought you know we started working with South Dakota then we started working with Georgia and North Carolina and thought okay these these states these people are passionate about what they're doing they're not getting paid the big bucks like in some of the commercial for-profit companies but they're working hard and they're working long hours and they're understaffed and but they care about the mission and and that's been something that we've samp found in every state and local organization that we work with so there's a lot of bureaucracy and a lot of red tape you got to get through but but it's been very rewarding for myself as the in the role I'm in but also our team members have just you know when we finish a project the client is very happy because they're you know now they can do quicker faster more efficiently and then they know that their citizens are happy to and we're getting the feedback from the citizens that's amazing so so this is a big difference I think to other verticals but I feel like there's another um very distinct difference which is that in this particular bir because sometimes it can really mean life or death you've had a chance to deal with forces of nature right as well do you want to walk us through one of those examples yeah yeah it was really amazing uh and and but I'll try not to go too long on the story but it's it's interesting to hear kind of from the very beginning but it was the state of Florida it was Hurricane Ian had hit the Southwest coast of Florida and uh the CIO at the state at the time had been trying to modernize the Platforms in the state and you know had been working through all the use cases and things that could that could be that service now could be used for they didn't own the platform yet the hurricane hit their 911 Center went down and the CIO called his he person at service now and said you guys can get in here and get an instance stood up from service now so we can you know provide some level of way for citizens to report that they're missing per you know their family members are missing or they you know they can't contact people that are down in the area that were impacted by the hurricane and need help then we'll move forward with service now so first call we got was from uh service now they they called us servos because we already had established ourselves as a you know focused in state local and and can move quickly so we immediately got our team on the line and we worked all night that night getting instense up and it took about 18 hours for us to get the first site live which was missing. fl.gov so so it was really simple on the front end it was really just a form that said you know name address you know where what are the issues you know who what are the names of the people that are missing and it was either people reporting that hey my my mother-in-law lives in uh right in the eye of the hurricane and and uh I can't get in touch with her so you would report that on the form and what that did was kicked off a huge process on the back end to get the right people involved whether it was Coast Guard local uh First Responders at the federal level or thema Representatives but the emergency um Response Center was routing those calls all around and it was amazing so we're able to find people so that was the first the first one that went live and then the next day we put up safe. fl.gov which was basically once you've located somebody or realized you could you could fill that out and then we would match those records on the back end so we would knew we sort of resolve the case of the person that was impacted so oh wow I mean we're always talking about hiding the complexity but in examples like that make it so apparent um you know these people have nothing else on their mind than finding their yeah their loved ones or reporting themselves safe so you're you're taking such a big burden from them that they need to contact all the different levels behind it and at the same time you were serving though this state right yeah yeah there was and then the ability for service now to move that quickly and for us as a partner to move quickly and there was no contracts or you know invoices or or you know rfps we just all started working um so you know it was a trusted relationship with the state with service now and with us as a partner we figured out all the paperwork and all that stuff later but um you know it was all about the mission and getting help people getting there quickly yeah and quick like because time was of the essence for everything and then it kind of proceeded to go on for you know obviously a couple weeks and then months as they you know go through the the rebuilding process but what happened in probably the third day was if you think about it you still have to have the internet access to access service now and missing. fl.gov so people you know either they're cell towers were down or they inter you they were out of their house because it was flooded so they were showing up at shelters and the shelters needed internet access so Elon Musk dropped a bunch of what they call the starlinks starlinks on the state of Florida and so then we needed Asset Management distribution of those starlinks to the facilities and then we also needed to get them back so they would show up at a warehouse and we put up Asset Management very quickly and tracked it all and how it was how the starlinks were deployed out in the field that's incredible what a what a what a great story yeah it was it was great experience and you really felt like we're helping you know people yeah and in that regard helping people I mean you know AI is such a big topic these days and we're really a well we're aiming at enabling human and and getting rid of those mundane tasks in which ways is is AI part of of your value proposition also or maybe also differ framed from the other angle how are governments or public sector customers asking for it also as part of the experience yeah it's been interesting there's two kind of first questions that we get or or or you know the first Contact about Ai and one of them is more of a negative one of like they're worried about it they're scared there's going to be you know uh personally identifiable information that's going to be coming through these large language models and so there's a little bit it's be in the public sector space especially a concern over the risk and the you know what if something happens but I think we're getting people over that hump and now it's more about how can it accelerate what we're doing and how can a lot of it and it's it's out you know coming out in the platform it's already in the platform and getting better um but the ability to assist agents so in the in the example of like the unemployment insurance or even the emergency or rescue portal being able to use the large language models outside of the service now platform but also what we like to call the small language model inside the uh service now platform whether it's cases that are that have been reported and being able to to train that small language model to help the agent you know respond quicker get the answer quicker or um you know satisfy the request yeah let's talk a little more about that actually um you know to to a lot of the listeners small language models are maybe more even more new than than the llms that everybody talks about so right in your specific um industrial vertical or industry vertical is is that is that part of the value proposition as well that you know that security and of course maybe also the risk of attacks Sy be reduced yeah and I think yeah because then you're and and that makes the the customers feel a bit better if if it's the we're drawing the the language model box around our data our information that's in the secure platform and that makes people feel a lot better than thinking oh we're just going out to chat GPT and and I'm sending that information out but I think what's really powerful is when you can combine the large language models with your domain of what we're calling the small language model inside the state say it's a state government so what's interesting in South Dakota case for example so you have a or any state you have a Department of Labor you've got a Department of Health you got a Department of Transportation and you start to think about that small language model across all those different agencies and the information they have about citizens and then being able to use that to help the one the citizen access the that large language model themselves but also the agents to support them so you you're applying AI as part of the virtual agent conversation is that the the use case you see the most out yeah that's what we've been doing a lot early on um in fact I keep talking about South Dakota but they're really Innovative in this space if you go to sd.gov they're main citizen portal that's on service now we've integrated the virtual agent with large language models so when you going but we've trained it around just the domain of South Dakota so it's kind of sort of like I'm talking about with the the small language model but really it's a trained large language model and uh it's great because it brings in all the information that we have from the instance and what's in service now but it also ties in other websites around the state and other things that are South Dakota related so so if I was in a state government um you know and everybody around me is talking and buzzing about applying a AI to to my customer citizen experience where where should I start like do you get this a lot like do they know where to start or so taking on that role as a consultant in that moment right I mean that's the that's the common question yeah where do I start and how do I start small and start to realize the value not try to go all in on it day one because you know there's lots of challenges with that so that's what we try to say is it start small and we what we do is we stay ahead of what's coming in the next release and the next release so we know what's coming but we also know what's available and what works today in the platform so we were having a lot of those conversations here at knowledge the last couple days what is in the platform today and how can I take advantage of it so um we've been through that and we have a we kind of have a cheat sheet of okay here's the things you can do with agent assist here's the things you can do in other parts of the platform with the AI bits that are in there with larg L small language mod that's interesting I'd love to hear your um opinion maybe on this uh I I had a customer conversation today and we talked about the implementation of virtual agent and you know that it can be quite cumbersome but then we realized it kind of unlocked this where we were like well it's pretty phasing out anyways because now assist if you implement now assist and more AI direct capability it might not even need a virtual agent implementation so it actually can save you some time and and money per you as well you go with now right away and then you use the conversation interface of a virtual agent yeah do you see that Trend as well yeah and and that's what we we're seeing it and we've got some interesting statistics in in South Dakota once we launch launched so what we did with the the AI the Gen AI instance is we first ran it inside the call center so they were using that to train you know we trained the model but we weren't sure we we needed to battle test it because you know you got to make sure it's not it's given the right information and because it is a large language model so it could you know hallucinations and things like that can occur so we have the disclaimer for that but we first deployed it for the call center so they were using it and once we kind of felt like it was drained properly then we turned it on for the citizens publicly um but what's interesting is it reduced the amount of live chats with the call center by half you know and within probably the first two weeks so it really um you know we saw the impact right away by half yeah that's that's many well many minutes resing an hour is safe yeah and those were live chats so it's real you know it's not even virtual um so those were you know expensive in terms of you know you're paying an outsourced call center so yeah that was just with this initial release that we put out there so okay and I mean this is called Today podcast so I mean outside of AI which is truly Innovative of course what's what's your your favorite like Innovative example of a of a implementation um I think you've also worked with the state of Nevada or the City of Reno is that correct oh yes is that a good one yeah they we worked with them they've replaced four or five different systems that were doing Point solutions for the city of different services for different departments we all with service now and um and they've you know and it's it's gone well they've launched their site it's a 311 you know Citizen Services site kind of like the Statewide um sites similar so but that's G really well I'd say from from you know kind of innovation and this Probably sounds a little bit boring but if you're in the technology space and you understand the challenges it presents is we uh modernize the Medicaid redetermination or application process for the state of Missouri and you know these systems that support Medicaid these big Healthcare or Insurance uh platforms are huge complex and somewhat Legacy systems and you can't go in and replace all those in 6 months you know it's six years probably so we service now to just put a a engagement layer on the front of these systems so now we were able to get the again back to the customer citizen experience we improved the citizen experience on doing this Medicaid application but we also improve the agent experience the the um state employee who's supporting those applications coming in and uh and it was all just integrating to those Legacy systems that are there now eventually we'll start to modernize those Legacy systems but but you don't have to do that day one you can sort of you know innovate from the outside in that's amazing because replacing well even more replacing them PR modernizing Legacy systems is probably where you start most of the time yeah especially in public sector you know the a lot of these systems have been around for 20 30 years or sometimes it's an access database that's running you know half a Department's work flows and uh so you can't just go in there and place it all at once you've got to kind of figure out the the high value high priority items and start with those and then kind of move on from there that's amazing so I mean customer experience is is all about making the consumer happy and the the nice thing about the sector that you're that you're addressing is it really touches everyone out there even including us so you know thank you for that service actually because you know the citizen experience improving yeah we all live every day no matter what how you're interacting with your government yeah everybody has the has different experience but we're all on the same boat yeah we we all have to do it at some point yeah right okay well um is there anything you would like to add if it comes to uh really cool use cases you know you've seen out there in those past you said five or six years yeah no I I think we're just excited about I mean we really are seeing servers now change the landscape in state and local government and and change the mindset of projects take six years cost $30 million you know they should take one for two years and cost three or four million you know and with a platform like service now that's can become a reality so so we we're that's what we're most excited about and that's the opportunity as a partner of service now we can help these states make these Transitions and um so and it's rewarding every every project we do and they're all hard so I mean this stuff's not easy you know but but we always like to say if it was easy everybody be doing it so yeah and you you've seen it from that cons through that Consulting yeah before so that's amazing yeah thank you very much for these insights great I appreciate it and thank you for having me on the podcast of course well thank you very much to everyone listening and we hope to see you for the next one [Music]