all right thanks so much everyone for joining today welcome to our webinar five steps to align your teams to optimize customer experience my name is Caitlin Griswold I'm the marketing manager here at Cole beste and I'll also be your moderator for today's session before we start just a few housekeeping items as we go through today's sessions if you have any questions regarding what's being presented just go ahead and feel free to type your questions into the question box located on the GoToWebinar screen and we'll do our best to answer all of those questions at the end of the session but if for some reason we're not able to get to them just insert them into the chat box and we'll follow up with you via email we'll also be recording today's webinar and it'll be emailed out to if you'd like to play it back or share it with some other members of your team who weren't able to attend today so we'll be covering a few different topics in today's webinar let's just take a quick look at the agenda for today so first we'll just do some introductions and we'll give you an overview of who we are here at Kovas tech second we'll review the five steps that we recommend to help align your internal teams and really redefine and optimize your customer service experience customer experience doesn't start and stop or live just within the customer support organization and today we want to really show you how you can reach across those organizational silos to improve your customer experience and then third we'll highlight how the ServiceNow customer service management platform can help you perform these steps and achieve improved customer service and we'll also go ahead and highlight one of our own client success stories and then lastly we'll just have a quick review of the key topics that we covered in the webinar and we'll have some time for Q&A at the end of the presentation so if that let's just get started with a quick overview of Kovas tech so we're a full-service consulting firm and a silver ServiceNow partner headquartered in Kirkland Washington we employ over 200 senior level consultants averaging over 15 years of professional consulting and IT operations experience and we've been delivering service management services and solutions since 2001 our expertise is organized into three practice areas the first is our IT ops services practice that focuses on developing and icing and operating IT operations functions including cloud and enterprise infrastructure security operations applications administration and operations build and run our second practice area is our project delivery services practice and that focuses on providing project leadership to deliver complex IT projects Cova sticks experience and project management ensures compliance quality and timing of projects and deliverables that are aligned with our client's needs and then our last practice area is our service management consulting practice and that focuses on assessing defining and implementing optimized service management solutions with ServiceNow being our only service management solution partnership so with that I'm just gonna hand it over to James to kick off the remainder of the presentation all right Thank You Caitlin hello everyone my name is James Devine and I am a senior solutions architect here at Kovas tech I've been implementing ServiceNow solutions for coming up on eight years now it's quite a long time about three years ago I had the opportunity to lead one of the first major forays into customer service management as it's now called using ServiceNow since then I've really become a CSM evangelist and I'm excited to be presenting this info today because I've really seen what a difference this can make when a company truly looks at the entire customer experience instead of just customer support and has the right tools in place to to really make strides in this area so if you're not already please connect with me on LinkedIn I love keeping in touch with everybody out there as I said I'm a CSM evangelist so you'll actually see me listed as the CSM guy on LinkedIn all right so redefining customer service and a customer experience over the past thirty years companies have become very segmented it comes to customer service and a lot of companies are still treating customer service as something handled primarily from a support standpoint meaning that they all the effort around customer experience is focused on call centers and how to handle the break fix model so today people have access to a lot of information and they get to see ratings by other customers so we really need to look more at experience not just customer support so the overall perception of how easy and effort it is to do business with somebody is really really important to customer success some of the biggest corporations out there today put very little effort into their customer support operations but focus more on a holistic improvement of their products and services so there's results and less of a need for customers to contact the company for support issues example how many of you ever talk to a customer support agent for Apple Amazon or Google you know those are three companies that I do a lot of business with and I don't think I've ever spoken to an agent for any of those companies through any type of channel text tech support voice or otherwise what why is that well these organizations take very proactive approach to the entire customer experience they're they're looking for weak points collecting data and proactively improving the products so that the self-help tools and the product itself really need very little customer support so you know from a customer's 2-pam the stand point doesn't just reduce the cost of running a massive customer support center is also far more appealing and attractive from a business transaction when customers are considering who to buy products from or use services at a little story about that picture that's there on the left I actually took this picture last week when I went into my mobile phone carrier to change my plan first off I had to wait in line for 30 minutes then I had a sales associate using a blank sheet of paper and a calculator you can see that there in the picture in order to do the comparisons of my plans a whole process took nearly two hours you would think that a company is as high-tech as one of the country's leading mobile phone providers would have some system in place that would make this an easier process or better yet allow me to make these changes online but because I was removing lines from my plan I had to drive all the way across town to their store which cost them money to maintain I had to interact with their sales associate who they have to pay and then I wasted an entire evening doing what was a pretty simple change to my my services and I walked out of there a very frustrated customer sadly unless I choose to fill out a survey which I rarely do my carrier will have no idea of the dissatisfaction that I had with their process that wasn't a customer support issue that was a customer experience issue so what we're going to talk about today are the five steps to overall overall customer experience not just a customer support step one we evaluate the measurements first call resolution historically we love seeing the FCR percentage go up because that makes the support agents look good but customers still had to contact support in the first place is there data that we could glean from our FCR that would help us eliminate the issues from ever happening to begin with likewise NPS is great but it will need to tell you which way the wind is blowing it doesn't answer the question of why a customer would or would not promote your business simple answer there's no one-size-fits-all metric that's going to improve customer experience in every business you have to take the lead in your own organization to establish what the most important metrics are across the business a recent customer of ours had a directive from the CEO to decrease customer churn for its software support contracts they spend a lot of time talking their customers to find out why they renewed and more importantly why they didn't and covered a lot of pain points and these proved to be actionable items that could be addressed via business process transformation and was actually enabled by ServiceNow CSM platform which we'll talk about later another customer had been hearing from his customers that the ease of use was far and away the biggest determining factor for when they picked a vendor so we work with them to focus on innovating a new mobile UI for their order fulfillment that set them miles ahead of their competitors just different measurements step to reach across the borders to me this is probably the most important one how could involve evolving other parts of the business help remediate issues faster or better yet prevent them from happening when we contact support for an issue it usually isn't the support or that can fix the issue they act as a toll gate and are typically there just to facilitate the resolution so we as customers know this so we start each interaction with support with a sense of distrust that we all have to battle through several support tiers if our issues complex so what if our systems would integrate tightly with engineering product teams operations billing service and support so it reduces the distance between the support agents and the tools they need for actual resolution I'm pretty sure that I was I would appreciate that from a customer standpoint we probably would as well for an increasing number of businesses the service offering is driven by technology infrastructure so cloud operations data centers software but most support organizations don't have any visibility into the operations of the infrastructure and likewise the people who are managing the infrastructure don't really understand the potential impact that changes to the environment will have on the on the customers and how they might be impacted so with ServiceNow and configuration management also known as CMDB we actually have the tools to overcome the separation of duties and we'll talk a little bit later in the presentation about some of the technology available for that step 3 be proactive I know I'm throwing a lot of ITIL jargon out here today in the presentation so let me just give you a quick overview if you're not familiar with it this framework that we know as I tell the IT infrastructure library was started in the late 70s by a consortium of government and enterprises that sought to create a best practices for running an IT department and what they found was the best approach was to treat end-users as customers and everything in the service management space is built around that notion with the help of service management frameworks like ITIL and ISO 20000 and some others Enterprise IT has largely moved away from traditional break fix model of support were they staff cube farms with agents waiting to take calls or handle chat support when something goes wrong the idea of problem management as we call it is to look for recurring issues and find root cause so that we can ultimately take preventative actions so that users aren't disrupted from doing their jobs for the same reason change management seeks to reduce the risk of unintended disruptions when changes are made to the IT environment net result is far fewer issues experienced by users that would prevent them from going about their daily tasks so that's an IT usage of service management customer service is just starting to see the wisdom in this but it's typically hampered by the fact that the root cause of the issues they're handling are outside their control they're part of product development our accounting or operations you you can't just look at the things that you can control you need to look at the areas that span beyond traditional borders of organizational walls remember we're not talking about we're talking about customer experience here not customer support and that segues into our next topic step 4 maintain a customer experience task force and/or a customer experience organization if you're truly going to improve the customer experience you need to establish a task force or some sort of virtual org or some construct that spans the entire business and involve representatives from any part of the business that impacts the customer experience which is probably all of them this team needs to have the ability to evaluate what's going on make decisions and investigate so they need to define a overall customer experience organization then reports to the CEO or the CEO should be organizationally agnostic shouldn't have any ties to one particular part of the organization and it should consist of leaders from all parts of the organization that are going to be impacting the customer you can't fix what you don't own so you need to be able to establish maintain monitor KPIs and metrics look for new kpi's drive the technology process and roadmap and then you know be able to come up with a plan and then take action on that plan I know this is a very service management concept but it's time to elevate this concept into a more relevant customer experience process as well and then our last step step five is to take that task group and do regular and recurring reviews so at least once per quarter preferably more often that the task force should meet to evaluate the areas of concern with customer service that can be improved you know things like that that example that I showed when I went into my mobile provider if somebody were identifying issues like that where they're spending a lot of not just money but also creating dissatisfaction that's I mean they could take action on so this group should be looking at the metrics proposing new metrics defining action plans you know doing this on a regular basis will continue the momentum and keep everybody focused on improvements to customer experience not just siloed fixes which message don't necessarily improve the customer experience so the chairman of this group the chair person should be issuing a report that shared with senior management and the entire organization that should be publicized so that everybody can contribute to overall success alright so those are our five steps let's talk about how to put these steps into action first off if you're going to span the borders it starts with having its tool that can accommodate cross platform functionality and allow for tasks to be spread across the organization and garnering metrics that you haven't been able to get before because everybody's been operating in silos ServiceNow has been doing that sort of thing for almost a decade now you also need a partner with the experience and know-how to guide you into that journey the tool itself doesn't do it you have to have the processes in place as well Kovac is the premier implementation partner for customer service management on the ServiceNow platform so the service now gives us the platform and the technology to make all this happen you know Quebec has the experience to guide you down the path to success in the coming days you'll probably be receiving an email from us we'd love to set up a time to discuss that with you in more detail but before we do that let's talk about the platform itself so we we have a lot of discuss and discussion around being connected this presentation isn't necessarily about the tools but we do want to show that what enables ServiceNow to provide the basis for the major improvement to your overall customer experience so you know ServiceNow has been a leader in IT Service Management for several years now and with the additions over the past few years of HR and customer service applications we we now have a fully interconnected Indian system that allows for intuitive portals cross or caffeine reporting shared knowledge bases audible request items automated workflows custom business applications and really a ton more all right just that you know that we're not just talking about theoretical improvements here I want to tell you a little about a project that we had the opportunity to work on two years ago kava stick began an effort with epic or software that would prove to be one of the the most successful ServiceNow customer service management implementations to date it involved all the steps that we talked about today and a few more a lot of things that were lessons learned out of that but the net result was a substantial increase in customer satisfaction that led to epic or being recognized by the American Business Awards for their improvement to customers to their customer experience I want to focus everybody's attention on one part of this press release with the companies focused on superior customer service at the core when searching for a state of the art platform beyond traditional customer relationship management and turn to ServiceNow is customer service management offering live since 2016 the solution has not only fundamentally changed the way the epic at the core support organization operates but it has also transformed the company's interactions internally and externally that's some strong praise there but but guess what these changes made to the overall customer experience netted significant cost savings and increased revenue and in the coming days we'll be sending out a copy of the forest or report on this particular project that shows some of the metrics that they used for determining how profitable this turned out to be for them all right so let's review the steps real quick first off reevaluate the measurements let's not just look at what we can do from a customer support standpoint that let's find measurements that can actually tell us what's going on throughout the entire customer experience step to reach across the borders let's make sure that we are not just looking at it from a single single part of the organization but we're integrating product development operations IT customer support all together so that we have the ability to span across the the organization force for enhancing experience number three be proactive if all you're doing is handling break fix that you're really not making any headway you're just taking care of issues and playing ping-pong with the customer you're not really improving their processes even if you do great customer support things are still breaking and that's not really the effortless experience that people are looking for step four maintain a CX task force so identify the people in the in the business who have the ability to to drive change give them the authority and then with step 5 I perform those regular reviews and take action make this an integral part of your operations don't get don't let everybody get comfortable in their silos make sure that you have this task force that is performing and doing a recurring basis of the wash rinse and repeat for continual service improvement all right so with that I'm going to open up the floor to questions and I'm going to hand the microphone back to our moderator Kaitlyn all right thanks so much James if you do have questions just go ahead and submit them using that question box on your screen and we'll have James try to answer as many questions as possible now all right it looks like we did have a couple come in James the first question that we have is is there an ITIL equivalent that is focused just on customer service yeah you know I wish there was so for those of people who are familiar with ServiceNow and IT Service Management we know the ITIL drives a lot of the best practices for processes around the IT side of things but customer service it doesn't really have the same level of best practices and that's largely because every organization is different you know you operate differently if you're B to B versus B to C if you're high tech versus low tech if you are infrastructure driven so there's really not a best practice guide out there I wish there was one and maybe someday if I get motivated I'll contribute to writing one but for now what we can do is take the service management principles from ITIL and apply those in in a very constructive manner to service management ok great we also have this question we're already using service now for ITSM but we have Salesforce for CRM how could these work together oh good question yeah so Salesforce is a CRM tool a customer relationship management tool and it's primarily focused around the sales and marketing side and allows for support and then there's a big silo between that and operations obviously so ServiceNow can certainly integrate with with Salesforce to share data between them but if you're really going to get the full full value of it especially if you already have the ITSM implementation you have your seem to be already employees you already have all those processes running adding the CSM application on top of the CSM and on top of ITSM really does give you the full scale in the same tool so you're having the same groups being able to pass tests back and forth you're seeing the data back and forth you're doing root-cause analysis based off of customer support issues so cases are treated like incidents but then they also give you the ability to evaluate a customer's entitlement or contracts what their purchase history is all that can be maintained within ServiceNow so so oftentimes we see that we are able to give the support organization much greater visibility into the resolution and then we also give the back-office much much more opportunity to see the interaction with the customers if we actually migrate from Salesforce into ServiceNow for customer support ok great thanks James and then our last question is who can show me a demo of the functionality of the platform I'd be happy to do that that are one of my colleagues so you know if that's something you're interested in we can set that up that can actually show you a lot of the actual service style functionality and we can talk in more detail about you know what would actually work for your business like I said every business operates a little bit differently but once I learn a little bit about how you operate we can certainly tailor the demo to to fit your needs all right it looks like those are all of our questions for today so that concludes the end of our session as I mentioned earlier we will be sending out a recording of today's presentation but if you do have any additional questions you can just feel free to reach out to us at ServiceNow at Co Vesta comm and then we're also on LinkedIn and Twitter if you do the social media so thanks so much for attending and make sure to keep an eye out for upcoming webinars from Quebec