you're listening to accelerate a service Now podcast series about achieving your business outcomes where we talk about how to get the most value from the na platform hey everyone this is Crystal Clevenger and this is diod we're your hosts and excited to talk to you about service now value acceleration solutions that include expert Services training and impact today I have the pleasure of Hosting not one but two guests harsh deep gar and Ragu Morty harsh is part of the outbound product management team and Ragu is a platform architect in the impact squad for those of you that haven't heard about it service now impact is our value acceleration Solution that's designed to maximize the value you can get out of service now it not only includes experts like Ragu but also additional capabilities and expertise that can help you increase the adoption of your service Now Products improve your platform health and measure the value you're getting from service now par and Ru welcome to the accelerate podcast hey thanks Crystal happy to be here like guys thank you so much Crystal for hosting us we are very happy to share our experience in this platform so you're both service now employees so let's just start with a round of introductions before we we get into the topic uh at hand here harsh why don't you tell me a little bit about yourself and your experience in customer success sh Crystal I'm a certified Master architect with about 12 years of experience in the service now ecosystem my experience span across service now implementations product management and doing lot of pre-sales during my career I got an opportunity to get uh Global exposure where I worked with customer across different countries different Industries since I joined uh after doing MBA I always had a business Centric mindset and I was very curious about customer success as a theme I was always thinking how does this service now implementation helped the customer in getting more business value that Fascination uh made me start a Initiative for for the partner organization I was working before and and I would like to share that experience as I'm on your platform well thank you for that um Ru what about yourself I'm as well a certified Master architect in service now so myself and hsh we take the try to say that okay we both were certified Master arch in the batch two of this whole CMA program The Pinnacle certific certification and service now so I come with a 20 years of experience in which 8 years uh is completely in service is now transformation programs executing various roles like uh from starting from the business analyst to a solution architect as an advisory for pre-sales as a delivery lead and currently as a principal platform architect in customer success organization of service now my current role is to ensure the customers achieve their uh desired business outcomes while using the service now product and the services so what all it involves is a proactive engagement with the customers building the strong relationship with the C C Level exx and the directors and above U and also providing the support and guidance to the various stakeholders involved in the program in the transformation Journey uh I am currently based out of the Bangalore uh also which is called as a Silicon Valley of India which is located at the southern part of India so if it's not obvious by now we're going to be talking about customer success since you're both from that organization within service now harsh let me start with you and ask you what common challenges businesses face in ensuring customer success the list of challenges is quite big but I'll share few uh I I'll start with one of the biggest one what I have seen in service no implementations is that 90% of the implementations are being done by the partner organization and what I have noticed that partner organizations are sometimes not business focused they focus more on the technical implementation so it becomes more important for the customer to choose the right partner when they are in the evaluation stage that's the first challenge I have seen and I've told you the mitigation plan too uhuh the second one I have commonly seen is on the customer side where customers don't have a mature data model in place they don't have good quality data because of which they don't even know what they current state is we don't have a benchmark from where to start and where to go and the third and the last but not the least is when these engagements start customer don't take the ownership customer don't put their skin in the game and they come up with a total Outsourcing mindset which is why customer is not able to get the value they should ideally get because there has to be an equal skin in the game from the customer side too so they have to work with us meaning as opposed to just hiring us to do the job they really it should be a partnership between uh their implementation partner and themselves right that's is that what you're talking about absolutely there are various phases in the implementation program where without intervention of the customer we cannot be successful MH yeah that makes sense so you talked about customer data not being in good shape and I I'm going to ask this next question to Ragu what specific insights can an implementation team gain from that customer data and and what can you do with these insights to help with customer success strategies my experience of like last eight years and as I said uh working with so many like Global custo customers across us UK as well as on the Asian New Zealand side what I've seen the implementation team can gain uh veral valuable insights from the customer data okay that can uh inform and enhance this the customer success strategy as well so number one is a usage pattern as hsh also mentioned right without the data without knowing where they stand uh it's very difficult to basically strategize the road map from from uh the current state to the Target state so analyzing how customers are using the product and services reveal uh patterns in the in the features ad option the frequency of use or the areas of where there's a low or high usage of the product so these insights definitely help the implementation team to tailor the uh implementation road map the onboarding uh experience of the users and uh the right training materials or the right focus is all can be bundled in the whole journey of the transformation the second thing is uh it's very important for every transformation the moment the product is implemented you definitely have to have some success metrics to measure whether the product that is implemented the adoption is there or not okay the and other critical success metrics are like the time to Value like the value of the investment so what value is being uh retrieved okay from the product that has been implemented is has it uh improved the productivity of the agents or the employees has it reduced the uh volume of tickets or the time to resolve the tickets okay see these are the operational metrics that definitely one has to keep a measure after the capabilities are implemented that is when that is how you basically the continuous Improvement can happen and lastly one more thing which I want to give a key thing okay about uh what what additional thing can happen from the customer data is the feedback okay the customer have we need to continuously take the customer feedback right from the time when during the design phase implement the build phase and testing phase so that their feedback can continuously be incorporated during the build phase itself and when it is been taken uh into the production the customer knows okay what product has been received in the prod in the in the live environment and that is something that he he wants it and then he will feel that it's all personalized to his feedback yeah so these are the key things I would say the implementation team can gain U from the C customer Data Insights that makes a lot of sense and you talked about tickets which um you know service tickets obviously which makes me think a little bit about artificial intelligence because um you know some of the I mean it's it's all over the place artificial intelligence that topic right and and how can it help with with tickets or other things so let's talk about that um for a little bit how do you think and this is a question for Harsh um how has the role of AI evolved in customer success and what benefits do you see it can bring to businesses so the role of AI is becoming bigger with every passing year and and it is touching the lives of the actual end users and businesses in different ways the example look at Alexa we are all surrounded with technology which is powered by Ai and so are the businesses let me share few examples uh or or few benefits which have helped the businesses the first one being AI has helped businesses personalize the customer engagement I'll take a retail example here uh as a customer of Amazon when I go to Amazon Amazon give me very specific recommendation based on my browsing history based on my previous orders likewise Netflix also gives me very specific recommended content I should watch because they track my history and based on that they give me recommendations right the other benefit is uh for the big businesses is it helps you improve efficiency it helps you do the same amount of work with less number of people with the level of automation uh AI brings to the ground and the last but not the least is the proactive issue resolutions I think we have been hearing about chatbots for last few years and chatbots have been very successful for deflecting the ticket volume to the call center by almost 30% and so many organizations have reaped benefits due to that so overall investing in AI make lot of sense for customers and and I think it will it will keep on benefiting them in future too yeah I I agree with you but it's also important to consider the ethical implications right um because um well I mean for obvious reasons and so I'm just wondering what what you think about that uh Ragu and and you know what someone should consider in their strategy around customer success when it comes to Ai and automation yeah absolutely um these considerations the business which U definitely they have to consider is is definitely those ethical uh implications right because of this AI which definitely okay has brought uh drastic changes in the way users are using different Technologies be it uh the Uber or be the Amazon okay how the adoption is increased is AI is the solution now one of the key thing what we always consider is the transparency and Trust right the customers do expect the transparency and how the data is being used how Ai and automations are employed in the customer interactions so this is one key thing which I would uh definitely uh I mean recommend business to consider this first point the second thing is the fairness uh in which uh the AI is using the data and it is not biased with one particular region of data so the data has to I mean because of the diverse nature uh which is there across all the business all the companies so the AI algorithms should not uh mistakenly I mean provide the recommendations or the solutions based on uh one particular uh stream of data so ethical considerations here involve actively identifying and mitigating those biases and ensuring the fair treatment is uh there for all the customers so this is quite important um in customer success where decisions especially are based on AI recommendations which can impact the customer experience and the outcomes there and one last key point I would like to see uh Which business also to have to consider this is a privacy protection so as part of the customer success strategy uh we need to prioritize the protection of customer privacy and and data security whenever the AI and automation is getting into the into the into the technology landscape yeah yeah I mean that that's something that customers expect anyway right um they don't want their private information out there for anyone else to see So speaking of customer expectations um how are they evolving and how can businesses stay ahead and meeting these expectations and harsh if you can talk to this that would be great yeah I think customer expectation at this point in time are at the top they want the best quality of service at minimum cost and at as early as as early as they can get in quickest time okay yeah so what businesses ideally should do is to First emphasize on Omni Channel engagement so customers nowadays expect the multiple ways to connect with the businesses so that Omni channel is of utmost importance be it with chat be it with phone be it with email they want all the possible channels the second recommendation uh I have for businesses is to not hesitate in embracing new technologies so sometimes customers are want to play very safe and they want others to adopt first and then they will adopt later they will have to pay a big price for that so the recommendation is anything new comes up do a due diligence and adopt it the third one which is very important is the game of data data plays an important role in understanding the customer psyche and it also helps in personalizing the content for customers I I gave you the examples of Amazon Netflix Airbnb all of them are building their solid foundation on data so data is of utmost importance and the last but not the least is cust businesses should try to personalize the experience of customers as much as they can the more personalized the experiences the more Revenue they can generate out of it those are some really good points that you made um particularly around personalization right like you want to feel special in a way right you want um if AI is going to be doing making these recommendations for you you in a way you want to forget that it's about AI you want to think that it's a human that's made those recommendations and it's very personalized to you absolutely yeah um so last question for today what um key performance indicators kpis as we call them should businesses track to measure the success of their customer success initiatives Ragu wonderful question uh Crystal so see while business do have lot of kpis to track uh but I would here I would call out the key ones which definitely they should not miss out in tracking okay to effectively measure the of the customer success initiatives or activities which is happening in the program the specific kpis can vary as I said on nature of the business of the department like the HR department to the IT department or to the security department but uh the common ones which stays are uh customer satisfaction score definitely using the survey feedback and uh which translates to the NPS score and uh the second thing is uh increase in the adoption rate of the applications or the capabilities that has been deployed this is the second one which I would definitely uh suggest the third one is a key operational metrics now this is where it will differ between the Departments if you take the it you can definitely track the average time to close an incident or average time to close a request or number of request uh which is created by the different uh channels like phone call versus self service and all those things so you will see uh so this will change based on uh the different departments the fourth one will be definitely the uh Revenue growth or the renewal rate I would say uh both are one and the same uh because if the customer success uh I mean definitely if there's a improved satisfaction rate there's a definitely renewal rate of 100% there and uh the least the last one is uh the automation okay so wherever we introduce this Ai and automation what is the automation rate okay in which we are introducing the new use cases in the Pro in the organization so this definitely gives directly the how much of effort it has been saved by introducing each and every automation use cases so um yeah this with this I summarize Crystal thank you well thank you so much and on that note that'll do it for us today I really appreciate both of you coming to the show thank you so much harsh and R Group yeah thanks Crystal for hosting us take care I'm Crystal Clevenger and I'm dri and this is the service now accelerate podcast series you can find us in other service now podcasts and service now community at community. servicenow.com be sure to follow us in your favorite podcast app so you don't miss our next episode