hi everybody this is blenda from covestick we will be getting started here in about one minute so just hang on and we'll be with you shortly thanks foreign so okay this is glenda it is 12 o'clock on the dot so i think we'll go ahead and get started um i want to thank everybody for joining this webinar today we're really excited to talk to you about streamlining your retail operations i do want to start with saying we understand this is a hard time for everyone and this is not a salesy program today we just want to give you guys some information that we think will help you now or whenever you're ready because i know that everybody's business is doing different things right now so once again i'm glenda i'm an account executive with covestick based here in the dallas fort worth area and i would like to introduce you to my cohorts for our call today gary and james james do you want to introduce yourself real quick yeah sure uh hello everyone i'm james devine i'm the csm director for cavastic i've been in the it world for about 28 years kind of showing my age there i've been working with servicenow from a partner capacity for the last 11 and i've been focused on csm customer service management for about the last five years uh so quite a bit of experience all across the platform uh and now i get to really focus on customer service management the customer workflows that we're going to be talking about today gary might go next yeah sure thanks uh gary tucker i recently joined servicenow i spent the last 10 years at oracle with a real focus on customer experience and i'm looking forward to leveraging that experience here at servicenow and it's just a great opportunity to to see the platform and stuff so i'll get more into that later all right so a couple of uh intro sections here before we get into the actual uh content uh just a quick intro about covastic i i often tell people who ask me what it is that i do and who i work for or i say that you haven't heard of us but you've heard of the companies that we work for and i'll show a few of those here in just a moment but we are a a consulting firm based out of kirkland washington so we are based in the pacific northwest but our team is spread all across the united states we've been working as a i.t service management consulting process at devops consulting and managed services since 2001 we've been working with servicenow as a partner for i believe nine years actually uh i'm going to check my dates on that but it was before i started i've been there seven years uh we have over 180 servicenow implementations with an average csat of 9.5 that's something that we take a lot of pride in but i think the thing that we take the most pride in is that that stat you see there on the right where we have a 90 customer return rate so not only are we having satisfied customers when they finish their first implementation with us but they uh far more often than not want to continue building out their roadmap so we we think that's a sign of uh of the quality that we deliver so that's a little bit about who we are like i said you've heard of the company that we work with uh obviously being pacific northwest we do have a lot of companies that are based there but we also have quite a few logos that are spread all across this great nation and beyond um the the two that i'm really focused on today here are in the retail operations space and everything that i'm going to be talking about from the streamlining uh your operations comes from actual real world use cases that we've seen with these two companies and and others that we've been working with in similar situations so hopefully it's going to be good useful information that you can borrow from the experiences of others before we get into that though i do want to turn it over to gary to talk a little bit about servicenow for those of you who aren't familiar with it sure thanks so you know forbes um awarded servicenow top 100 innovator the number one spot actually servicenow for the last 10 years has really owned the itsm market they built an i.t platform that supports internal users like nobody else can and now um we're you're seeing innovations into other areas specifically customer service management as we're going to focus on so what what we're doing is we're taking that great technology from supporting internal users and making it customer facing so all the great things like um you know a self-service portal and the ability to chat and service internal customers we're making it more customer friendly and making it where external facing so james if you go to the next slide so what we know about organizations today is we work in a very unstructured environment there's no single source of data you can see across the bottom there we all have these applications that um you know run our business what's lacking is there's no um there's no flow between those those applications in the outside world so the back office there's no flow between the back office and the front office and that's exactly where the service now the now platform resides and bridges that gap between the back office and the front office so they're in the green areas you see the platform um and it it's we're every day innovating and bringing in better technologies like ai and analytics and the knowledge base and mobile and and then on top of that the platform is where our workflows lie and these are out of the box with canned integrations to everything and they um you know i mentioned the it workflow and the employee workflow and our biggest growth you know i hear numbers as high as 80 percent of growth coming from in within the customer workflow and just as an example of a workflow when i onboarded um you know i come in and i they gave me a link to a portal and i logged in and it had you know a handful of action items i needed to do i had to go take a drug test i had to provide w9 information i had to provide um income tax information and and every one of those had a process so it went i filled out my my drug test it went to an approver i filled out my w9 and went to another approver and once i had all those completed then it gave me another set of tasks and all the way until it's kept i kept getting new tasks all the way to the point of getting an offer letter and so that's truly how a workflow you know works and like i said we were investing we servicenow believes 80 of the growth is going to come from that last area of workflow so we're taking what we've already been doing and making it customer-facing so you're going to see and we're going to talk a lot today about how the customer workflows work and one more two more slides for me james please sir um and this is a great customer example that it's one of my accounts here in dallas and these guys deployed the customer service tool into their contact center and immediately saw an increase in resolution rate and immediately saw reduction in case volumes just simply by being able to understand their cases and only opening cases that warranted um that warranted a a follow-up so with a self-service portal and and being able to understand what types of cases they have they were able to to see that type of performance increases and soon they'll be using leveraging what you know the field service tool so when a a a cus someone calls in if it warrants an engineer they'll be able to dispatch an engineer um and and create a ticket uh and it flows right through the csm workflow so do i have one more james yeah so this this really is you know when i first read this i thought it was just a bit gimmicky marketing but truly it is what servicenow does we make the world of work work better for people we take all of those spreadsheets that companies um send from the back office to the front office and all the emails and all the slack and all the other tools that are used to to bring information that creates frustration for both employees and customers and we've put them into a workflow and we allow you to design these workflows where when the business needs a change it doesn't take you know eight months for a business to have a change a business wants a change and it can be accomplished by creating a workflow without it involvement you know probably within a few hours in a lot of cases i think that's it for me james so back to you yeah thanks gary i'm actually going to tell a story here in just a couple of minutes about uh how servicenow really did uh make a tremendous impact on people uh but before that um i do want to talk about the the fact that when we started planning this webinar and the content that was going to be in it uh was before the world turned upside down and everything that we thought we knew was wrong uh we we were talking about streamlining retail operations and all of the really uh awesome functionality that you can get from the servicenow platform in addition to the traditional customer service management being the call center case handling uh there's a lot more that you can do from a retail operations standpoint if you're managing a large amount of locations across wide geographic areas um you know we we recognize then that having uh the ability to be agile uh with your processes and your tools was very important and i think what we've seen over the past couple of months i'm sure everybody will agree is that that need uh has just really been underscored uh just being able to uh to be flexible to adapt to the changing markets has become uh crucial so you know with with that in mind um i do want to talk about some situations that we've seen and some things that servicenow can help you do if you have have the system leverage and you have the right processes in place for it um so you know i teased up a story that i was going to tell i actually heard heard of this from a friend of mine who's not in the i.t world actually happens to to work for a bank many of you are familiar with the the recent legislation that passed the sba ppp loans the emergency payroll protection loans for small businesses and if you if you were paying attention when all that transpired the the legislation leveraged the existing relationship with banks to handle the processing of loan applications for for the sba rather the sba doing it centrally so very quickly every bank that does business with the sba had to adapt to handling a huge influx of of loans and loan requests and they had to do all the uh the processing and underwriting for it um and there were several banks several large banks that really uh uh struggled to adapt and there there's all kinds of bad press for a few that uh that had a lot of trouble handling the load a lot of the smaller banks community banks really struggled to be able to handle it because they didn't have the systems or processes but there is one that i actually happen to be a customer of that is also a servicenow customer and they were able to repurpose an existing workflow over over a weekend and use that then to deputize every one of their branch managers to become underwriters and with that combination of the the technology supporting their their agility and their processes allowed them to process 64 000 small business loan applications in 48 hours so while a lot of other banks were struggling with this they were actually able to take care of their customers very very quickly and you know this is a situation where the the outcome of this is is huge because for a lot of these small businesses that were applying for this it was a it was a question of survival if they didn't get these they weren't they weren't going to be able to make it and as we saw uh that fund the initial fund ran out of the money pretty quickly so they've actually had to uh to restock that so i just think that that just shows a lot of capability from not just the uh the bank standpoint but what service now can do to help people be very uh responsive to changing situations it's a perfect example of what i mentioned earlier about business being able to make a change very rapidly for a business need and that's a perfect example of that in fact that was something we then took further and offered it as a free app to to other financial institutions but just a perfect example a business comes to a need and how quickly the workflow the tool allows you to to fit that knee feel that need all right good deal so you know i'm gonna go go ahead and queue up the uh the five areas that we want to talk about today um specifically this is specific to uh utilizing not not just the customer service management uh suite of tools but other parts of the platform to enhance retail operations so some of the things that we're going to talk about here are specific to customer service and some of these things are actually outside of that suite but all of them are centered around being able to leverage the customer workflows to to unify a lot of your systems and processes uh again customer service uh being one small part of the servicenow offering i guess maybe not a small part it's definitely a growing part and i've been on it for five or six years now so you really can't say that it's even a new part but it is definitely growing in capabilities it is where anytime that you are leveraging servicenow to provide functionality to people who work outside of your organization meets the the standard for being a customer service management application so uh in the retail space if you happen to have uh franchises if you are managing franchise locations the franchise owners or owner companies aren't necessarily employees of your organization they are external um so they're going to have their own uh identity management they're probably not going to be on your on your network they're probably not going to be in your ad so you need to be able to provide service to them and the customer service management module was actually set up to do that very well and that's part of one of the use cases that we'll talk about but even even so you know this uh this is a bit of an eye chart but this shows all of the different areas that servicenow offers capabilities all of which are centered around some really amazing technologies and you saw the slide that uh servicenow is ranked the number one most innovative company by forbes when i saw that i was actually a little taken aback even though i've been working with servicenow for 11 years and i've been amazed at the uh the growth and the uh trajectory that has been on that in that time my first thought was wow that means that the service now was considered to be more innovative than tesla and apple and google and you know the more i thought about it the more i thought yeah it's actually legitimate because when you look at what servicenow is investing in and what they're adding to what was already a great task management tool and a great it service management tool things like the artificial intelligence and the business business intelligence uh the new flow designer integration hub where you can do codeless integrations very very quickly things that back in my programmer days would take weeks to accomplish you can do now in minutes um just a lot of these things that are taking what was already a great tool and adding quite a bit more capability to it so all of that supports not just the customer service management and the intelligent apps but also everything else that you see around here so i t service management which was traditionally the sweet spot for service now the asset management it operations security all of these things can now be on on one platform in addition to the ability to be able to create your own intelligent apps for specific use cases all right so now i'm going to talk about these uh these five areas that we've promised um again all of these are real world scenarios uh these are things that are either already implemented with our clients or are in the process of being implemented so these aren't uh pie in the sky uh unapproachable ideas these are things that are really happening on the servicenow platform today that we think a lot of you that are watching today would be able to make use of so we're going to start with store operations gary mentioned the employee onboarding and anybody who's been working in servicenow for a while and has done an onboarding workflow for either the it onboarding or the hr employee onboarding knows that there's a lot of steps to go along with that um you know obviously if you are onboarding a new franchise or a new location there are a lot of things that have to happen there's things like uh securing the the furniture and the training and the uh marketing and everything that goes along with that so having a a rigid workflow that will make sure that happens that the same way at the same time every time is definitely a value add yes this can be done in other tools there are a lot of people who use a microsoft project or even excel to manage these types of things and well yes that works not having the visibility across the infrastructure to see what's being worked on not being able to tie that back to cases not being able to tie that back to expenses now all of that is a big silo that servicenow really helps to overcome uh another one asset management at the store level so being able to keep track of what does the the store have as far as point of sale what do they have as far as appliances what are the warranties associated with that uh being able to leverage the asset management functionality that's been part of servicenow for years for the external store asset management is a another huge win for for the organizations that are doing this and that actually ties into uh something else we'll talk about in just a minute and then shared knowledge i think we're starting to see a lot of organizations getting away from um static uh knowledge articles to more of a kcs kcs centric knowledge where it's more uh wiki style crowdsourced and malleable so that you can be real-time up to date with your shared knowledge and being able to make sure that operations are being followed and if they need to be updated that that's being done in a very quick and responsive manner customer relations can't can't talk enough about customer relations i think we've all seen how a negative experience for a customer can very quickly uh turn into a big issue if somebody takes their grievance to social media that can have some serious damage and a serious impact to the brand and real loss of revenue so it's important to be very proactive about how you handle your customer service and there are some very creative ways that our people are leveraging servicenow to do that obviously we have the case management process which is the the b2c model here so it is the consumer who we are able to handle an issue for so obviously they can do that through phone we can leverage the the portal functionality to give people the ability to submit a an issue or complaints through that we can use request management we have the virtual agent that can actually do a lot of case deflection uh support chat can extend the capabilities of your of your support team a lot of things like that can really do that but we're also starting to see that there's opportunities to do things like in-store kiosk integrations to uh to handle your survey data so if you want to uh keep track of what your customer satisfaction rate is and you want to do that with a a simple three button screen on a kiosk on the way out the door we can actually do that and tie that directly back to uh your operations within service now uh using the survey engine so a lot of really good and creative things are being done in the b2c area and then i do want to touch briefly on the ccpa and gdpr compliance i think this is probably a bit more top of mind a couple of months ago before all the craziness started but uh obviously gdpr has been in effect for europe for a couple of years now california passed the ccpa requirement so this is the requirement that allow that makes businesses be responsive to customers requests to uh either produce what is known about them or to make them forget about their data so these privacy requests are are uh becoming the law and companies have to be able to respond to that so we've actually been leveraging the service now as the not just the intake for handling the requests but also driving the workflow in fact we have one customer that has over 300 steps involved with them complying with a a ccpa request if they didn't have a workflow engine like servicenow to be able to track that the amount of manual labor to to accomplish this would be crippling for them or they would be out of compliance so you know just having that as an add-on in addition to all the other customer service functions that we have for the the b2c model is definitely a value to uh to the customers hey james before you move off of that i i want to be clear that this customers we've talked a lot about a platform i want to be clear that this customer service management and in our other workflows are in a lot of cases use standalone so they do all these things that you mentioned an agent desktop a virtual agent a support chat uh all within the standalone customer service management tool uh the platform is is simply becomes icing on the cake when it's when it's in conjunction with the platform it really does like i said earlier bridge that gap between the back office but very much a standalone product and the value convestic brings is obviously you know we talked about uh the product being a great product these guys bring not only product expertise but industry knowledge and industry expertise james talked about things like retail kiosk so marrying things outside of uh within the industry using their experience with all the other retail companies that they've seen and marrying that to the to the uh to the the things that the product can do is a really positive thing absolutely thank you gary and yeah you know this is where things like having a roadmap uh is essential and i do see a lot of organizations whether they're leveraging servicenow or another platform to do case management uh they get there and then they stop and they don't start building on to that and i think those those organizations are really missing out on a lot of the on the the major return on investment that you can get if you start to leverage the the additional features that you have beyond just the the base uh case management capabilities all right so i want to get into our store support so this is the the b2b side of the house so we talked about handling customer concerns at the at the store level but you know also managing uh work for the the the managers the stores the employees the stores that's traditionally been problematic because organizations haven't had a good way to keep track of who's coming and going especially if they are independent and franchise locations then you know obviously the turnover rate's pretty significant so just having access to giving them access to a community portal or a service portal is tricky but fortunately certs now actually has a lot of capabilities out of the box that will will push that management back onto the store so that it doesn't become a burden on the home office to try and maintain that information so that actually uh gets rid of that hurdles that you can actually get people into the portal where they can make use of communities and within communities if you haven't seen the communities functions and servicenow the uh gamification is outstanding there are lots of ways that you can actually get real value not just sharing the ideas which has a lot of value on its own but also if people have good enhancements or suggestions to operations or processes using the ideation tools and pushing that into the the project management suite and servicenow is actually a game changer for a lot of organizations because i think all too often we we let the people at the corporate level uh make the planning and and they're the ones calling the shots but it's the people who are at the customer level and and in the trenches that actually have the great ideas and oftentimes there's not a great way to capture and analyze those um requesting a service call i'm going to talk about field service and how that fits into this here on the next slide but that's a a great thing to be able to allow the managers or employees to be able to do uh directly through the uh the portal and not have to have people manning the phone or handling that through inboxes uh on the corporate side targeted communications uh one of the organizations we deal with has a lot of food safety alerts they need to make sure that if there's a supplier that's sending um let's just say a head of lettuce to uh to a store and there's a safety recall we need to make sure that that gets targeted directly to those stores with confirmation so being able to make use of targeted communications on top of the the case management there is also huge and again at the root of this is still handling case management so if we have unstructured cases that we need to do resolution for we still have that capability and we get to make use of all the uh the functions that come along with the agent workspace to do the predictive intelligence and and agent assist so um you know massive opportunity here to improve the store support model so that improves not not just making the stores happier and more effective it also reduces cost at the at the corporate level as well i was just going to say sorry a few a huge uh way to deflect calls answer some of the easy the top five questions typically can be handled by a self-service portal so the deflection becomes you know as high as 70 at that we use of that absolutely and you know deflection gets a bad rap because people think we just don't want to provide service we don't want to have somebody talk to an agent but all the all the evidence shows that customers don't really want to talk to an agent they don't want to submit a case and wait two days for a response if they can get immediate satisfaction they're much happier we're happier because we didn't have to have the expense of that that support call so there's a lot of a lot of value to be gained by doing good positive call to collection all right so imagine this scenario a store manager having a critical issue with the point of sale they're not able to process credit cards uh if they are able to either pick up the phone and call the support desk or get on the portal and submit a priority one case it gets routed immediately to the appropriate team uh if they need to involve the it section they they can do that uh if the ultimate determination is that there needs to be a field agent sent out to replace a part whether that's a a corporate employee or a third party vendor having the the field management system uh field service management be able to route all of that as far as the work order and the routing and the dispatch that's that's a beautiful thing because that slows that speeds up the the time to get somebody on site to fix that and if you are not able to process credit cards because of a an outage you want to get that resolved as quickly as possible so having uh the field service tied to ite type two customer support is a another another one of these game changer opportunities where you can see significant dollars being recouped on these situations where we immediately need to get somebody dispatched we also have always had vendor management in the system the ability to be able to track vendor performance vendor compliance that sort of thing we have great dashboards that show how well vendors are performing so whether or not the vendors are being managed at the corporate level if they're being handled managed at the store level you can still have the metrics in there to see if there's opportunities to uh to consolidate or to put out for bid there's a lot of things that buyers can use as a result of leveraging vendor management on top of the the other parts of the suite we've been talking to and then the the last one here this is a custom app that we have one of our clients has built they are actually leveraging the contract management core to have a custom app for property and real estate management so for every one of their locations they are tracking the uh the the real estate whether it's a lease for a purchase they're tracking the taxes they're tracking the the stipulations they're making sure everything is being adhered to and all that is bubbled right back up to the account level which is the store so that they can actually do a full 360 view to see what's going on in the store and that's uh not having the uh the real estate management team working in a silo having that information as part of the the account can actually give everybody visibility to see if there are things are going to be cost impacting okay so i would certainly be remiss if i didn't talk about uh the automation and when i was uh showing the uh the big oval tool that had all of the uh the technology in the middle of the platform that supports all the functionality uh we talked about the automation now this is where we really start to remove manual labor does not value ad from the process if we can take some basic decisioning out of the hands of triage teams if we can route better so that we don't have to have cases rerouted if we can get tasks to the right people quickly obviously everybody wins in that situation you get the the resolution the customer gets the resolution faster the uh the company isn't spending time on uh on manual labor and obviously in this this day and age we have to be able to make use of of uh resources very very um streamlined because we have obviously there's a lot a lot of organizations that are being overwhelmed with uh with customer requests right now and a lot of them that are struggling with that so making sure we have ways to be intelligent about it is definitely a huge part of that the value of the task assignment alone and then with the predictive intelligence this is one of my favorite uh newer features of servicenow being able to leverage the entirety of your record history to be able to tell your agents here is how you solve this issue or better yet here's an issue that is likely to happen let's prevent it before it happens being able to make use of the data that you already have using ai and machine learning is a is it's in an enormous benefit so you know that's one of those things that a lot of organizations keep on the aspirational part of their roadmap and i think that's something that more more and more organizations are trying to recognize the the value of leveraging those uh those those ai tools and every every business is only as good as its uh decision making which is completely based off of the data so having performance analytics there to to support your business intelligence is is a another key feature that's uh this is one of the reasons that i love having the entire platform leveraged is because somebody sitting at the sea level can actually see information that is across the organization we're not we're not stuck in silos so we don't have um you know bricks between the the engineering and the customer support teams anymore we're all in the same system and we can see what what the sla performance is where things are getting tied down where is there opportunity for us to to find uh process improvements and that's something we can could really only get from a good business intelligence tool when performance analytics certainly certainly meets that mark all right so i am going to start to wrap things up here um given the the short time frame that we have in today's session we're not going to do q a but what we are going to do is have um our our lovely hostess glinda is going to be reaching out to people who have questions or concerns for follow-ups uh everything that i've talked about here today i would love to do a demo for you i couldn't do demos for all of this today's session and make it anything less than about eight hours so if there's anything that you've seen here that you're interested in let's uh let's set up your time and i can actually take a deep dive into any any one or more of these topics so linda turning it over to you thank you james um thank you gary i really appreciate y'all spending some time with us this afternoon and as james said we will be reaching out or i will be reaching out to everyone to make sure you get a copy of the recording um as well as see if you have any questions and then maybe we can set up some time for an assessment um but if you have any questions uh feel free to give me a call or shoot me an email and i think that's it everybody thanks for joining today really appreciate it did you yeah so we've we talked about communities it's important to know that we've got this knowledge product uh uh seminar coming up that i am in the past it's always been on site this year it's gonna be virtual so if you haven't signed up it's a great way to there's no cost this year no travel this year it's going to go over a six week period so you can follow that link in register again no charge no travel and and and pick and choose what sessions you want to attend so it's really always a great event unfortunately this year i guess or fortunately it will be virtual a great way though to meet your peers hear the direction of servicenow hear all of our executives talk and literally today just came out the session picker so you can create an agenda and everything just by signing up that's it thank you thank you sorry about that all right thanks everybody have a good afternoon bye