hello everybody who's on already we're going to get started in just a few minutes all right it's just now the top of the hour we're going to wait about another minute or so before we get started james these are the people you know when you're waiting in class right to come up to the front in a couple minutes we'll get the if you were back in my day i'd be running in and then sitting in the back aisle yeah that's one of the things i learned training is there was always somebody that's going to show up birthday 45 minutes early i appreciated the enthusiasm i just had to make sure i was there ahead of them to be able to prepare all right so it looks like we are ready to go um welcome everybody to our webinar the secret to proactive customer service with servicenow csm before we get started too much i do want to go ahead and apologize in advance that my voice is a little shaky today i'm recovering from a bit of a cold which has my uh my voice in rough shape so if you see me lunging from my mute button um please please don't mind me i'll be back momentarily um so with that this webinar we're going to fit uh focus a bit more on process and strategy than we are on the technical aspects of servicenow csm there's a lot of material out there for the technical capabilities and we're happy to meet with somebody one-on-one to talk through those uh so if that's what you came here looking for today i ask that you listen through to this because this is probably as or more important than the technical capabilities is understanding where the true value lies in csm um much in the way that servicenow platform enables a lot of ikea organizations to run more efficiently with processes based somewhat on the itil methodology uh customer service management can similarly enable not just customer support organizations but part of the entire business to run more efficiently and to improve customer satisfaction and loyalty and at the same time greatly reduce support costs and everybody wins uh the service platform can be a force multiplier when it comes to implementing true organizational transformation and we're going to talk a little bit about how it's done on this webinar but before we get too far into it let me tell you what's in this for you aside from the great information um everybody who is registered today is automatically entered in a drawing for a 250 amazon gift card so just for being here we will draw a name from the attendee list so good luck to everybody that's on there i think they said that the presenter was not available so i'm not that eligible so we're going to have to have some word with management about that james i'm going to log off at this point i guess well yeah i think we're gonna go ahead and do it anyway but uh before we get the material uh some introductions on who uh who is presenting to you today um myself james devine i'm the director of the customer service management uh subpractice here at covestick i've been working with the csm product uh since its inception which is about six years ago now which makes me feel a bit old and my passion and i do get passionate when talking about csm you can ask people who listen to me is helping organizations really make significant transformations with with servicenow not just implementing a lift and shift tool replacement that's not what drives my uh my satisfaction from my my work ever i've had the pleasure of working with john guptaio my co-presenter here on many csm implementations and i'll let him introduce himself off to you john thanks james good afternoon everyone john gutow i work with james and the customer service management practice here at covestick and as james mentioned we've been working together on tons of csm projects now for about five years and we really look forward to sharing some of our experience and the best practices if you will for kind of getting the best out of customer service management all right thanks john i'm not going to spend too much time on this but it wouldn't be a good webinar if i didn't at least tell you a little bit about who kovestick is uh if you're not familiar with us already we are an elite services partner with servicenow we were founded in 2001 um more than 200 employees in the clovestick sphere and i'll tell you a bit more about that in a moment um we've wrapped up more than 300 projects with servicenow and as of yesterday our csat was a 4.7 on the five point scale i'm a big fan of the newly revised five point scale versus the old ten because we're usually nine seven ninety um but to me one of the most important stats on this page is the ninety percent return business um when we engage with the customer it's not just to do one-offs typically it's to do a longer-term roadmap and while we don't require that of anybody it's never part of what we require of our customers it is something we see have a lot of benefit for customers and they often choose to come back and continue to implement the uh the changes that are going to make big changes in their organization when people who are outside of the industry ask me who i work for and say you've probably never heard of my company but you've heard the companies we work with just a few of them that you might see here starbucks microsoft t-mobile those are some of our biggest customers we have a pretty wide array of customers that we work with in a few different capacities book managed services and implementations the one thing i forgot to note on the previous page because it's still fairly new is that in december of last year kovestic was acquired by nti milestone mti uh technologies that has a managed services provider worldwide and they are backed by hig capital so it is a very well financed company that has a lot of resources and they work with a lot of the uh the fortune 200 type organization so it's a very great opportunity for us to be able to expand our reach to their customers not for us to also be able to offer some of what their expertise brings which we're still learning what all that entails but it's all very exciting so it's a very uh very big move in the evolution of what domestic is the one thing that has stayed the same is that we are still the same boutique shop that we were before the acquisition there's been no disruption to the way that we operate as far as our ability to drive projects and have delivery assurance so that was one of the things that everybody worries about during an acquisition and we were our owner was very intent on making sure that we were not going to damage our brand anyway all right so enough about that it's time to get to the meat and potatoes of why people came today so pop quiz i didn't tell anybody there's gonna be a quiz today but here's the here's the question do you agree with this statement survey responses we get from post-issue from customers is the best metric we have for measuring the customer support we provide yes or no well the answer is probably no and there's some definition of terms in there customer support if that's all we're doing is customer support that's fine and yes you can measure your customer support capabilities that way but by the time that you have already the customer has already had to engage with you you've already spent money you had to um spend hard dollars on the support cost the infrastructure that handles the customer's query you've also lost some good will from the customer because you've disrupted their life in some unexpected way where the service or product wasn't meeting their expectation so the question that every c level exec should be asking of their teams why are we so complacent about waiting for the impact of our follow-ups to impact our customers and why aren't we doing anything about it well i'm going to show a quote that everybody knows i'm pretty sure everybody on the call can can finish this one ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure so back to the title of this webinar what is the secret to proactive customer service with servicenow you guessed it prevention uh standard customer service is when we have adequate tools to engage with the customers when they need assistance good is when we can take care take what we learned from them and put it to some positive use upstream best is when we can avoid the customer needed support in the first place companies that can do that enjoy higher profits and better customer loyalty when compared to those that provide great customer support that's that's what customers often want and one of the there are two books that i'm going to be pulling some stuff from during this call that i want to make sure that we talk about these are both available on amazon the effortless experience has been one of the core books on customer support for customer service for several years now it's a great research book on what customers truly want versus what companies think they're providing one of the early quotes in the book is uh 80 percent of companies think they provide world-class customer service or above average customer service but only 20 of customers agree with them uh the other one is a more recent book upstream that is focused on the same thing that we've been focused on with customer service management for for several years now and that's the ability to uh get out of the loop of just doing break fix and stop doing the the wrong things faster and we see a lot of tooling a lot of the things that we see in the marketplace are just centered around doing the wrong things faster versus making really significant strides to to prevent issues from happening in the first place okay so a typical customer journey this is a standard slide you see this used all throughout the industry most organizations either say or pretend to say that they want to go from being reactionary to operational to strategic meaning if you are reactionary you're being pulled behind the boat if you're operational you're driving the boat and if you're strategic you're pulling the boat um what we see though is that most organizations really get caught up here and there's a lot of things that prevent them from being able to move past reactionary even into the operational stage and there's a lot of reasons that this can happen but one of the biggest starts right here the challenge of the orchard originally most organizations are set up along these lines this is the natural outcome of growth these are also the biggest impediment to holistic improvement this is what creates systemic tunnel vision the entire team in customer service is charged with offering the best level of support they can at the lowest cost they can control the training the capabilities of the support agents as well as the technology they use to interact with customers what they generally lack is the ability to impact or even see the upstream causes of issues that lead their customers to contact them in the first place here's an example software development team for a sas provider is adding a new feature to the flagship product they build it and test it and release it the infrastructure team deploys it for production across multiple data centers using their siloed project management tools they perform uat they've done everything right according to their guidelines that they're measured on customers start calling customer service right away because they found a glitch in the new software that somehow evaded testing in most organizations the agent is the furthest person away from what the root cause is and they are working out of a crm system that is disconnected from the development team all the customer support agent can do is handle the intake and escalate to people outside of support sometimes with a swivel chair oftentimes through email or sometimes with an integration if they're lucky either way they're still having to go to a different system that they don't have any access to to be able to get the actual resolution that the customer is seeking lost in this example is the ability to measure the true cost of a customer impact on the bug when your people and your systems do not have the visibility to see the full life cycle there is little opportunity to take advantage of this opportunity to affect true improvements that would prevent this the same thing from happening the next time this is at the heart of problem management and continual service improvement which is which are core aspects to the itil methodology that servicenow has been using for a long time okay so let's talk real world use cases here so we can give some examples and hopefully some of these will resonate i'm gonna queue up some some use cases and i'm gonna ask john g to chime in with his thoughts on some of these all right first one reactionary we have a case submitted on the portal customer customer cindy has an issue so they log on to our support portal a submitted case the case is received by agent pat who performs triage attempts to solve it but finally escalates us to level two at level two agent summer receives the re the case provides the solution marks the case resolved customer joe get her cindy who gets the proposed solution and is satisfied so this is a typical break fixed scenario john what are the opportunities that often get missed here yeah thanks james so a lot of times this is where a lot of our initially at least the projects kind of live so this is our carmen scenario it's this reactionary scenario of everyone submitting something through a portal okay it's getting created and then the knowledge article so some of the the initial opportunities we have for improving this is if we can get smarter routing so fortunately servicenow is giving the customer service management application what we call advanced work assignment so we can put better intelligence in place to kind of assess that case when it comes in through the portal and logically route that case based on maybe some of the skills of the agents maybe there's some time zone considerations or language considerations so we can leverage the the automated workflow system to kind of route that case properly the first time to the right agent so that's what's one of the things we can do the other thing we can do is if we've got a rich knowledge base out in the service portal hopefully we can deflect that user from having to actually create the case so they could leverage the knowledge base article and hopefully self-serve themselves and fix their issue without having to interact with with our customer support team yeah john that self-service option is definitely it's half of a win we didn't prevent the customer from being disrupted but we did reduce the cost of support and uh and we were able to get them on their way faster so that's good that's something we can focus on even without having to go down the entire customer journey path all right so let's talk about the second use case our support desk is very good at troubleshooting for the past six months about 30 of their time has been spent on routine fixes most of these couldn't be cured with the knowledge article so each time the customer has had to open a case apply the same resolution the agent has to apply the same resolution and propose a resolution this is fine but we as we all know that these types of cases will sit in the queue longer than their high priority ones plus each one of them no matter how simple it is to resolve constitutes an inconvenience to one of our customers ultimately these low priority easy fix solutions have a disproportionate impact compared to the ones that truly need our agents attention but while these are high in numbers and not in severity they're often overlooked when it comes to finding upstream fixes so yeah yeah that's true james so you know we've always heard we kind of know this on the on the on the front desk this the customer support desk the squeaky wheel often gets the oil right so but a lot of times these are distracting us so uh we they don't you know they're kind of distracting us from the higher priority cases that we should be processing for the team and so when the customer is reporting to this since they're lower priority they might not get actioned as quickly so the customer's perception may be man it's taking them a while to get back to this related to this particular case uh but what the customer may not know from behind the scenes is you know of course our team is uh potentially firefighting and putting out issues in the back end and so this lower priority case which we're able to kind of resolve uh doesn't get as much attention as it should uh but uh the ability for us to kind of get to those higher level cases that's where servicenow kind of shines so we're able to leverage uh the itsm capabilities of problem management for root cause as well as the newer continual service improvement applications within servicenow so we can kind of address the higher issues that are upstream so that hopefully we deflect these cases with the lower priority from the customers having to report to us so that's kind of our strength within service now is we can leverage that itsm to kind of identify those breaks but fix them and but improve them at the same time so hopefully we don't see them again absolutely and this this concept it can't be a one-off it has to be systemic it has to be ingrained in the way that people operate it has to be something that people are are evaluated on um if they are only doing brake fix and they're only swapping cases down as quickly as they can and they're reducing time to resolution they're reducing call hold times they're improving their csat scores that's all great but we're still incurring cost if we are doing things to improve either that's through creating knowledge articles or self self-serve options or if there's some way we can go even further then we are taking a little bit about the lesson learned from that particular case and applying it to future use the biggest challenge that comes into being able to do this type of approve improve goes back to the org chart the people that are seeing these these trends usually don't have the ability to impact what the root cause is and that goes back to making sure that there are cross-functional organizations that can see across product development engineering customer support where they can be focused on upstream root cause that constitutes disruptions to the customer because ultimately what we're trying to get to is we're trying to move from this operational stage into the strategic stage where we are preventing these from happening in the first place let's talk about this scenario every day at noon one of our customers sees performance issues with a sas product that we provide they haven't contacted support yet but the issue is recurring and it could impact their likelihood of renewing their contract if they perceive that our application is not performing well if we are really dedicated to achieving effortless there can be no better way to prevent issues from happening than to prevent issues from happening in the first place and this means the coordination of a lot of different departments customer support operations product development to identify opportunities to prevent and this is a dream scenario that we've actually seen happen a virtual host automatically allocates resources when a monitoring tool recognizes performance issues and that can be outside of service mode now or within servicenow consideration can then be given to the account in the slas for that for the impacted customers now that's where there's no other tool in the market that i'm aware of besides servicenow that can do this this can take your it operations and if that's part of your customer product if your technology is your product then having the ability to tie what's going on in the data center to specific customers can give you visibility into opportunities that have never been seen before so here we can leverage the install base item and we can apply either a an increase of resources or restart a service or whatever the resolution is based off of the orchestration that's behind that and then we can alert the account manager that we've taken proactive steps to prevent disruptions so this in turn instead of this becoming a negative this gives the account manager the opportunity to let the customer know that they've been proactively monitoring and resolving issues even before they reported that uh that's not a way to create some goodwill at customer renewal time i don't know what it is john any thoughts on this one yeah this is this is kind of the heart of it for me at least the the capability of servicenow to do this proactive case management and so i was sometimes some of us will get the notifications from servicenow so they're leveraging this themselves they're saying hey we recognize that uh you're here some of the fords are a little pegged out and so we proactively you know through our monitoring recognize that situation with your instances and we've gone ahead and proactively corrected that for you so that you weren't impacted right so your uptime was still good and uh and you weren't disrupted by this by by your service being disrupted and so this the capabilities of servicenow to again like james mentioned leverage the information that you already have from your itsm side of the house so you know the changes that you may know that are occurring to particular items any sort of problems that might be active within your environment having that communication from your front line uh case uh case agents being able to have that visibility to your back end office in a certain sense to your infrastructure that's really where we get the power of this proactive case management and we're able to provide quicker turnaround uh for for issues and and like james mentioned the upstream factor right so we prevent it before it ever before it ever impacts you that that's kind of the beauty of it yeah this is why i'm so uh such a proponent of using servicenow customer service management both the process and the tooling in the high-tech b2b environments and what constitutes a high-tech b2b company continues to to grow because most organizations now somehow their their operations of their infrastructure has a direct impact on customers so if if you are if what's going on with the network guys could actually impact your your customers this is the only tool that's in the marketplace it can provide that type of seamless end-to-end connection and that's one of the things that i love about this in the high-tech b2b operations centers all right so let's go ahead and talk about immediate actions that you can take today that will start you on that journey it doesn't require hiring kovastic it doesn't require implementing service now but the first thing that you need to do is focus on the org chart realign the metrics and your motivators when somebody has spent their entire career in customer service working in a crm environment and all they've known is break fix it's really hard for them to see the value that they should be contributing to something into fixing something in operations they want to reduce their cost they want to improve their csats they want to do all these things that apply to the customer service board but rarely do they have motivation to to contribute to upstream so that's why we need to institutionalize ways that we can we can inspire people to look for upstream solutions we can also find the hidden correlations and there are lots of them and that's why you need to have the data that can show you that and that's another one of the beautiful things about servicenow and the whole better together story is that when you have it service management and operations management and customer service management and even hr and field service all running on the same platform that means you're able to share tasks across the organization without having to swivel chair or go through integrations where there's always going to be degradation of data you also have the ability to see what are the trends and we start leveraging some of the capabilities of performance analytics and ai you can start to see where those correlations are that you've never seen before and that's what can lead to significant opportunities to uh to make big changes in your customer support and go from just customer support to customer happiness and then focus on prevention uh customer enablement is second yes we want to make that we want to do call deflection but if we're just focusing on call reflection we're trying to pawn them off to knowledge articles or chat bots then we're not really solving the the root cause we're still disrupting the customers so if we really want that goodwill that reduced cost the customer loyalty we have to focus on the upstream the prevention the proactive opportunities to prevent the customer from being disrupted in the first place and that's one of the things that comes from the csm processes as well as the toolset that comes with servicenow okay so with that that's the end of the material that i have for today so let me put out here if there are any questions uh you can go ahead and put them in the chat we'll try to respond to these offline so if you want to put your question in the chat what we see a lot of time when it comes to customer service questions is that it's very industry specific so we don't uh you know we don't want to spend a lot of time on things that are specific to industries that not everybody's listening to listening for um so we'll try to reach out and respond to those individually so give just a minute for that and also i want to thank everybody for taking a little bit of time out of your day to attend uh yet another webinar i know a lot of people are kind of over spending time on on uh zoom calls and webinars these days because we do an awful lot of it but i definitely appreciate you signing in and if anything that i have said today has has triggered um some curiosity and you'd like to talk uh further about the opportunities to get to the operational and strategic parts of your roadmap we'd love to talk about that uh we're definitely not gonna be high pressure skills but we're just gonna talk about opportunities that could exist and you know every every organization has has a lot can be gained from uh breaking down those silos and the barriers and improving uh the interactions across the across the org all right so with that i'm going to say good luck to everybody who is uh currently in for the drawing and i think we will be picking somebody later today and we'll be hearing from from our marketing staff that if you are the lucky winner and i hope to talk to all of you soon you