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Why we adopted Microsoft Teams—and what others can learn from it
Collaboration apps, such as Microsoft Teams, have become critical during the pandemic because they enable employees to stay connected and engaged while they work. Just how critical?Microsoft reported 270 million Teams users in January 2022, up from 75 million in April 2020, a few weeks into the pandemic, according to ZDNet. Teams and similar apps have proven essential to the remote workplace.LIKE.TG is one of the companies benefiting from Teams adoption. Teams isn’t just an app to bridge the pandemic; it’s a valuable part of our strategy to enhance employee engagement and productivity. As we shape the future of work, whether employees are in the office or remote, we want to provide the tools to stay connected.Empowering employeesFrom their first day, employees need to access files and complete tasks from anywhere and from any device. With many different systems and platforms available, employees can benefit from a unified and consistent experience.Microsoft Teams provides a vital link to complement our employee productivity portfolio of tools, improve efficiency, and simplify processes. It natively integrates with software LIKE.TG already uses: Office 365, OneDrive, and CRM Dynamics.
But implementation wasn’t enough. Communication and education were also key to successful adoption. We couldn’t expect employees to wholeheartedly embrace Teams without assistance. We had to determine:
How do we educate employees to use the platform?
What are the benefits for each particular job?
How do we support employees when they have questions?
How do we motivate employees who are hesitant?
4 keys to a smooth rolloutWith these questions in mind, we planned a phased rollout by leadership function. We learned four main lessons during our transition:1. Communicate the how and whySpending time and effort to prepare employees for the change was vital to gaining broad support and buy-in. We didn’t want to catch our employees off guard. That meant developing an employee communications strategy for before, during, and after the rollout.We defined the transition to Teams and emphasized how new features could help save time and reduce frustration. We made sure employees understood the change, why we were doing it, the impact, timelines, and the resources available to help them.2. Tap the expertsWe talked to other organizations that had undergone this process to learn from their mistakes. After listening to the feedback of early adopters, we adjusted our plans to fit our culture.Many employees had used Teams at previous employers; we encouraged them to share their knowledge and champion the switch. Hands-on tips and tricks were invaluable in helping employees transition to the new platform and take advantage of all the new capabilities.3. Amp up the knowledge exchangeTo help bridge any gaps and support a smooth transition, it’s important to encourage employees to get comfortable with Microsoft Teams early. We did this by making information—such as Microsoft Teams searchable content, live user training, and a self-help site—available in all the places employees go for help: our employee portal, Virtual Agent, knowledge base, internal portals, and the mobile app.
Setting up multiple support methods enabled employees to get answers to their questions fast. We used email and internal portal posts to alert employees of upcoming changes, avoiding surprises. This type of knowledge sharing prepared employees for success.4. Get leadership buy-inIf employees don’t use the platform, the organization won’t benefit from it. Adoption needs to be championed from the top down.We made sure our chief information officer understood the rollout strategy and the value the technology would deliver so he could advocate for it with other senior leaders. That included defining expectations: Individual leaders would lead by example, endorse the switch, and discourage shadow IT. During the transition process, IT provided consistent guidance to build trust that Teams would be the preferred solution.Seamless adoptionWithin three months, we achieved 100% adoption on Teams and decommissioned our previous tool for all employees. Today, 97% of employees are active on Teams weekly.“Teams adoption within LIKE.TG has opened up new ways of collaborating across global functions and time zones,” says Mirza Baig, senior director of IT Service Management at ServiceNow. “Because information can be shared easily and quickly, Teams supports our culture of making work better for our employees.”The world of work is changing, and we’re adapting along the way, embracing other features in our employee experience with Teams. It’s just one tool in our tool belt to digitally transform our business by helping employees remain engaged and productive well into the future.Find out more in our Making hybrid work, work for you ebook.Take a deeper dive into how LIKE.TG uses its own products.©2022 LIKE.TG, Inc. All right reserved. LIKE.TG, the LIKE.TG logo, Now, and other LIKE.TG marks are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of LIKE.TG, Inc. in the United State and/or other countries. Other company names, product names, and logos may be trademarks of the respective companies with which they are associated.
Balanced metrics: The key to success in DevSecOps transformation
When measuring the success of large-scale transformations—particularly in the technology space—it’s natural to look at hard metrics, such as cycle time, mean time to recovery (MTTR), and so on. In IT, for example, hard metrics are what we do all day long.But within any organization, change is ultimately personal. In my experience, relying exclusively on hard numbers often leads you to ignore the human side of transformation, and sometimes even action the wrong things. That’s why we use both hard and soft metrics to guide our DevSecOps transformation at ServiceNow.Measuring progress in 2 waysIn our transformation journey, we look at more than 20 data points, with equal weight given to soft numbers and hard numbers:
Hard metrics are quantifiable, such as the number of releases flowing through the pipeline, the frequency of deployment, and the number of teams using the pipelines.
Soft metrics are qualitative, subjective values, including Net Promoter Score (NPS) and Adoption Readiness surveys of our program leads, that assesses the engineering community’s satisfaction with the transformation. We often follow these surveys with retrospectives where engineers can share their thoughts on changes from a people (culture), process, and technology perspective.
To help us transform insight into action, we use a combination of both metric types to consider the human side of a project via satisfaction and feedback surveys. Including soft metrics brings team members into the transformation process, giving them the chance to voice their views and influence change.Teams that show great self-reported metrics, such as satisfaction scores, and hard metrics, such as deployment frequency, are the ones that make steady progress and find new ways to improve week over week.On the flip side, teams that rely only on the rigor of hard metrics and overlook user satisfaction often hit a plateau quite quickly. This results in frustration—pushing hard but not reaping rewards.I must admit that although I love to see high satisfaction scores, I welcome the low ones because they yield a goldmine of feedback that will help us improve how we work.
Gaining insights from divergenceHard and soft metrics often track with one another; good progress against hard metrics often results in high satisfaction. Where it gets interesting is when the two metrics diverge.For example, one of our teams’ high satisfaction scores showed they were very happy with their new process. Yet, they were used to their previous release schedule and saw no great need to increase their deployment frequency. By considering both metrics, I knew we needed to create encouraging conditions for them to deploy more frequently and experience the benefits themselves.At first blush, it may seem like low satisfaction scores are purely a symptom of cultural challenges, but a deeper look can reveal whether it’s the process, technology, or culture that needs fine-tuning.As an example, one of our teams had low satisfaction scores—not because they resisted change, but because their unique setup wasn’t supported by our technology. They listed their complaints, and the DevSecOps tooling team enabled features to accommodate them. As a result, the releases going through the pipeline and satisfaction increased not only for this team, but also for other teams that had this problem but not as severely. (Read more about using metrics to gain visibility and achieve desired outcomes.)Transformation is a journeyTransformation is an ongoing process, from crawl to walk to run to sprint. Because of that, attitudes and metrics are going to change. Be sure to take the pulse of your community periodically—on both hard and soft metrics—to assess your progress and make any necessary course corrections to achieve your goals.Find out more about how LIKE.TG uses its own products.
Q&A: Transforming customer support to elevate the customer experience
When the pandemic hit, the pressure to adapt LIKE.TG training offerings grew exponentially. An increasing number of customers from the Americas, Europe, India, and Australia wanted more virtual classes, more flexibility in scheduling, and more customization.Answering basic project planning questions in a timely manner became more difficult for the LIKE.TG custom training and adoption team. With the rising demand, our team resources—spread across the globe—had to scale.To effectively manage custom training projects from inception through project close and post-implementation review, we needed a standard project management approach. We wanted to be able to answer questions such as:
What projects are in the pipeline?
What is our resource capacity against our future needs?
How do we see a project’s progress, risks, and issues?
Can we see our key business metrics in one dashboard?
A standardized approachWe knew a single system of record could capture the demand and resource pipeline for delivering customer projects across the team’s global portfolio and help us scale using real-time, centralized reporting. It could also help us provide a consistent customer experience.Our team had very little experience in project management. Although unfamiliar with concepts such as project plans, risk registers, and resource plans, we were very familiar with the Now Platform®.We decided to try Project Portfolio Management (PPM), a LIKE.TG solution that provides project, program, portfolio, resource, demand, and timecard management capabilities. It’s part of Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM), which helps organizations drive business outcomes by aligning their strategy with their work across different methodologies and structures. We chose Performance Analytics, another Now Platform solution, to track our progress over time.Adopting a feature-rich package such as PPM could have easily overwhelmed us. But we were able to start with the features we needed straight out of the box.
Project management out of the boxLike many customers, we were keen to avoid a long development cycle. We wanted to reap the benefits of PPM as quickly as possible. So, we started with some basic guidelines for adoption:
Stick rigorously to the concept of a minimum viable product. We wanted to track projects and resources and then continue to iterate after our initial migration and go-live.
Remain true to out-of-the-box features and zero customization. In this way, the solution could be rapidly implemented, easily upgraded with each release, and used by other teams in the future.
Streamline processes to drive adoption and simplify reporting. Templates would give us a way to set up standard reports.
Postpone complex integrations such as Microsoft Dynamics CRM that support the seamless handover of customer data between sales and training delivery teams. We needed to get our bearings with PPM first before taking on complex integrations.
3 areas of positive impactPPM has been a game-changer for our team. It has greatly increased our productivity and efficiency and helped us sharpen our project management skills. Here are three areas where PPM has had a positive impact:1. Project managementWe dramatically improved how we track and manage demands, customer projects, and resource usage. We can now create and manage a wide range of demands and projects, whether they involve a few small tasks or a large portfolio of projects with complex relationships and dependencies.Tracking and managing all work from a single system of record ensures all project activities are captured and underlying financial data is instantly available. Separately, this has improved our processes for learning credit consumption and pricing. Mobile features are next on our wish list for adoption.2. Resource managementWe’re now allocating our staff more effectively by analyzing workloads and distributing tasks appropriately. Little automations, such as resource plans that autoskip scheduling someone during planned holiday time, make life much easier.Timecards ensure we know where resources are spending their time, and we can compare that against our plan. As our program matures, we also plan to adopt a skills matrix.
3. Real-time reportingWe use dashboards to make better informed investment decisions about training initiatives. Leadership dashboards offer visibility into key business metrics such as project financials. With this information, leaders can plan for the future, create roadmaps, and make smart investment decisions.Sales team leads can review customer training portfolios and provide proactive, targeted advice. This improves both our customer experience and sales pipeline. By aggregating customer data, we can make smarter decisions about our market offerings and price points.To make the transition as seamless as possible, we assigned a dedicated change enablement leader to manage communications and stakeholder engagement, and to gather feedback at every step of our implementation.On-demand training on the Now Learning platform allowed team members to familiarize themselves with PPM early in the process. We also ran process user training for different personas that included both instructor-led sessions and demo videos.The best decision we ever madeMore than a year later, our team adoption of PPM has been a greater success than we anticipated. Implementing the base functionality has drastically improved our understanding of our daily operations. We’re easily managing scope through our templated project deliverables, and a project-on-a-page dashboard drives our post-implementation review process with zero effort.LIKE.TG customers are choosing to invest in their people and processes as part of their digital transformation. With our adoption of PPM, we’re doing the same. Armed with it, the custom training and adoption team is ready and able to scale to meet customer demands more efficiently and productively to improve the customer experience.Find out more about our internal adoption of PPM in the case study.
4 easy ways to keep your knowledge base relevant and up to date
Knowledge is king in today’s information-driven business world, as most knowledge managers like me know. Having the right information at customers' fingertips can greatly influence their perception of the customer support experience.In today’s self-service world, a well-populated knowledge base with a reliable group of contributors is not enough to create a great experience. The content must be relevant and timely.Like a car or motorcycle, knowledge base content needs regular maintenance. Over time, your knowledge base can become filled with hundreds or even thousands of stale, irrelevant articles. That’s when customers stop using it and new cases spike.Facing knowledge base maintenance can be overwhelming. If you’re like me, you may have an impulse to bypass this step, delete everything, and start over.Don’t do it. As a member of the team that uses LIKE.TG® Knowledge Management to run our knowledge base, I have some tips to help you get your knowledge base content program on track:1. Empower expertsOur front-line technical service engineers (TSEs) work alongside customers to solve issues every day. They have firsthand access to valuable knowledge. That’s why we have TSEs update and republish knowledge base articles as they work on cases. This way, the content stays relevant, even as an issue evolves over time.Some knowledge managers fear losing control of content or publishing inaccurate information. That can happen. We use Knowledge-Centered Service (KCS®) to mitigate mistakes and ensure team-wide best practices. Having a methodology in place helps us find and correct errors quickly.
2. Choose groups over singlesIn the past, it seemed more productive for one TSE to update articles in their area of expertise. That assured the right answer. We find it’s even easier to have a group of people own a topic.When an author owner leaves the team or company and takes that knowledge with them, delays to KB updates result. Instead, we rely on an owner group of experts, overseen by a manager. Updating articles is part of a routine, with shared accountability across several people, not one.3. Ask for feedbackWe encourage feedback on knowledge base articles from both customers and employees (those outside the article’s ownership). This helps us determine when an article is no longer useful.Negative feedback is especially valuable. If someone selects the thumbs-down icon, we request a comment to help us understand why the article isn’t beneficial. Then we either fix it or retire it. We also use service-level agreements to verify an issue is resolved by the appropriate article owner group.4. Review, update, and repeatTo ensure information is relevant and timely, we also incorporate four standard processes for updating knowledge base content:
Quarterly content reviews — We ask our subject matter experts to refine and improve the top-performing content. They make edits, add images, and insert links to other content to make articles more relevant and searchable.
Automatic retirement — We define usage criteria, such as number of views or attaches, to identify and retire low-performing content. You can always bring retired content back if needed.
External content — We examine how much of our content is internal versus customer-facing. Our goal is to make all relevant content available to customers. Top-performing internal articles can often be made accessible to customers with light edits. For example, a content creator may have forgotten to make the content external-facing or wanted another review before making it public.
Proactive, not reactive — We challenge our TSEs to create content based on trends they see. A usage dashboard is extremely helpful in tracking search terms or cases/incidents without articles attached. It offers great opportunities for proactive knowledge creation on popular topics.
Making relevant, timely articles available can help customers find the answers they need, when they need them. It can also help reduce the number of new cases being created.Find out more about our knowledge management journey in 7 tips for knowledge managers to increase self-service.KCS® is a service mark of the Consortium for Service Innovation™.
Automating the employee offboarding experience
For the past year, the unprecedented movement of workers leaving jobs and switching career paths (aka the Great Reshuffle), has been top of mind for most organizations. Although losing talent is largely inevitable and a natural part of any company’s ongoing evolution, many organizations are recognizing the velocity of employee exits as one of the greatest risks they face today.To assess your organization’s risk, answer these questions:
Does IT deactivate an employee’s user credentials but miss local logins or other sensitive systems, leaving the organization wide open to unauthorized access?
Can an employee exfiltrate company secrets on their way out?
Are final paychecks paid accurately and on time?
Are laptops recovered from exiting employees in a timely manner and restored appropriately?
At LIKE.TG, we identified offboarding as an opportunity for improvement. A patchwork of manual processes involving multiple teams and multiple handoffs exposed us to risk. We saw that the offboarding process could be automated across the enterprise. Taking it a step further, we wanted to deliver an offboarding experience as good as the onboarding one and address the needs of both remote and in-office employees.Simplifying offboardingFor us, the employee journey is a series of moments that matter. We invest heavily in our employee onboarding, ramp-up period, and training and development. But we hadn’t made an employee’s last weeks at the company as constructive and meaningful as their first.Our people team collaborated with our digital technology (DT) team to design the LIKE.TG offboarding experience and automate the entire process for our departing employees, their manager, and supporting team members.
The people team can now centrally track tasks, helping to ensure nothing is missed. DT, finance, security, and workplace services receive the information they need when they need it. The employee, their data, and LIKE.TG all remain secure and protected.We created the process to be as easy and frictionless as possible, whether the employee is on-site or remote. Automation makes a complicated process across functions easy and intuitive, ensuring the right people receive the right offboarding notifications at the right time while keeping the employee’s data secure.For example, an employee confirms their personal details, including their preferred method for returning their computer equipment and receiving their final paycheck. Managers no longer need to collect information and documentation and confirm offboard details via email. The information is automatically updated in the appropriate systems of record.Providing a consistent experience was important to us. We use our HR Service Delivery solution out of the box to deliver a uniform global experience regardless of:
Role – manager or individual contributor
Location – US, Germany, Japan, or elsewhere
Workplace – remote, office, or flexible
Workflows trigger specific tasks, depending on the departing employee’s country of work and worker-specific details. For example, we provide e-signature software for signature validation across the globe but can also share country-specific exit documentation as needed.Employees with mobile numbers can opt to keep or cancel the mobile number; their info is automatically sent to our mobility team. Remote employees may have different tasks than those located on-site, but the experience is the same.Building a positive end-to-end experienceWe centrally measure and track offboarding data. Based on our initial projections, we expect to see a 70% decrease in offboarding time and a 73% drop in cost per offboard. These positive results are primarily due to the reduction and elimination of manual tasks involved in the exit process.All system access is now automatically removed on the employee’s last day of work. Addresses for final paychecks are automatically updated instead of requiring a manual cut and paste. Managers have transparency into all offboarding tasks, avoiding confusion.
One of my favorite stories about the impact of offboarding occurred the day of our internal launch. Before we had even communicated availability of the offboarding experience, six exits had been initiated with no help at all. That’s an intuitive user experience.The hiring landscape is exceptionally competitive. Although no organization wants to lose employees, people switch careers, go back to school, take time for themselves and their families, and retire. We want employees to leave with a positive experience as they transition to what’s next in their lives.With our new offboarding experience, employees, managers, and the people team can take care of basic tasks and focus on what really matters during an employee’s last weeks with us.Learn more at the Knowledge Digital Experience. Registration is free after selecting your time zone. Once logged in, visit the Library and search for:
Now on Now: Using the CHRO Dashboard to make the best decisions for our people (SES1267)
Now on Now: Safe, agile, and convenient: Our new world of work (SES1269)
Building our own employee journey
When you hear the term “employee journey,” you might think of a few HR requests and a stack of onboarding paperwork. You might also conjure up phrases such as “retaining talent” and “increasing productivity”—both valid and worthy pursuits that just skim the surface of the employee journey’s potential.At LIKE.TG, our employee journey reflects a larger cultural movement within the company, bolstered by our own technological innovation. We believe work should be purposeful, enriching, and fun. Toward that goal, we've created digital solutions to support the various aspects of the employee journey, driven by a genuine desire to care for our employees and help them live their best lives and do their best work.[We’re hiring. Explore LIKE.TG careers.]Four employees who worked on various stages of the LIKE.TG employee journey built on the Now Platform® share why it’s really “all about the journey.”An offer too good to refuseWhen Vijai K. joined the LIKE.TG people technology team in 2020, he was struck by the seamless remote employee onboarding process. “During these COVID times, we’re all working virtually and separated. The Now Platform is the first touch point where a new hire interacts with the company...If the experience is good, the employee will gain confidence,” he says.Vijai and his team baked a new element into the pre-hire process: Offer Calculator, which they built on the Now Platform in only three weeks. The solution enables recruiters to quickly assess a prospective candidate’s offer salary with real-time graphical representations of market salary range and anonymized internal comparison of the full package.
When we rolled out Offer Calculator internally, Vijai could see how comfortable and easy it was for our recruiters to use. “It quickly transformed the way they worked,” he recalls.Before then, recruiters had to use Excel spreadsheets to make manual adjustments and jump between various disconnected systems. Now, “it’s all just one interface, and they get all the information they need,” Vijai says. Offer Calculator also enhances our candidate experience by enabling a smoother, faster, and fairer offer calibration process.Seeing the amount of time (and frustration) this saved his colleagues, Vijai felt emotional. He likes the platform’s plug-and-play ease of use and how quickly he could add value. “Our platform is so robust,” he says.The human touchLate one evening, LIKE.TG’s Dublin office brimmed with excitement. There, Ryan O. and his Europe, Middle East, and Africa people care team had developed Live Agent and just received its first chat notifications. “It’s a thrill to solve something in the moment for people,” Ryan says.The new feature in LIKE.TG® Virtual Agent enables in-the-moment messaging between employees and the people care team. After a pilot program in Ireland, Live Agent was released companywide—to glowing reviews.Although we don’t have HR representation in every office, "we don’t want to lose the human touch,” Ryan explains—even at a growing company like ServiceNow. “We don’t call ourselves the care team for no reason. We really want employees to feel that we care, because we do.”For Ryan, Live Agent represents more than process efficiency. Dealing with serious events, such as taking a leave of absence to care for a sick loved one, is already a difficult situation for an employee. It doesn’t need to be made more difficult (or tedious) with logistical frustration.“In people’s moments of need, we should be there to help, easily and immediately,” he says. “It’s about being authentic, transparent, and open-minded.”Ryan feels “an immense sense of pride and belonging” at seeing how his work has enhanced the lives of others. “It’s kind of that sweet spot in a job…when the work that you’re doing [feels] connected to the goals of the company,” he says.Staying accountableWhen Carlos V. joined the digital technology (formerly IT) team at LIKE.TG as a product manager, he could tell something was different. Here, he found his colleagues focused on building both great technology and a great culture. It’s a “place where people feel safe giving feedback, talking about their goals, and seeing the bigger picture,” he says.Part of that picture, he learned, is mutual accountability. In a remote work world, accountability and clear direction are more necessary than ever. “If somebody is half a world away and they don’t do what they’re supposed to do, you’re gonna feel that, big time,” Carlos explains. “You can’t go to their desk and be like, ‘Hey, can you please do this?’”Carlos spearheaded Goal Setting, an internal tool that organizes regular goal-setting conversations between employees and managers. It makes what could be a difficult or awkward conversation a cohesive, organized process. Carlos found himself shocked at how quickly he and his team could do the work.Within six weeks, they ideated, developed, executed, and released the Goal Setting tool. “I was like, ‘This is crazy,’” he remembers. “But as we kept getting closer and closer to our release date, I realized, ‘OK, wow! We’re moving really fast. This is not taking as long as I thought it would based on previous experiences [at other companies].’”
The next chapterAlthough we never like to see people leave our company, it's part of the employee journey. Whether they're retiring, changing careers, or moving to another company, the offboarding process can be strenuous. During the onset of a pandemic, it’s even harder. That’s when Anna Rita H., an HR project manager, was tasked with lightening the load.As a former member of the people care team, Anna Rita knew the pain points of a manual offboarding process, as well as the downstream effects it could have on countless teams within the organization. “It’s a tricky transition for managers, too. It adds a lot of pressure,” she says.“What we really wanted to achieve was a workflow, a system that supports employees with all of their different questions—and supports managers in the same way but also automates a lot of the manual processes that happen behind the scenes.” Anna Rita and her team succeeded.Now, employees, managers, and members of the people care team have specific digital tasks, automations, and data gathering integrations between systems that help guide them through the offboarding transition. When Anna Rita heard how much time the improved process saved her colleagues, it sounded like “music to my ears,” she says. “Helping all of these people, to me, felt really rewarding.”Leading a project on the Now Platform, was “a whole new dimension” for Anna Rita. “One of the things I was most surprised about was just how much our platform can actually do,” she says. “Sometimes you’re like, ‘Could it do this?’ And then you’re like, ‘Yeah, it can do that’…That’s just awesome.”Treating employees like customersAn employee journey filled with manual tasks across multiple systems is more than an inconvenience; it’s a detriment that can inhibit the professional and personal growth of an employee.“The more time we spend working on things that aren’t what we got hired to do, or don’t contribute to the company’s core mission, it’s either time wasted or extra time we have to spend out of our personal lives to make it up,” Carlos says.Providing care to our employees is “dynamic and ever-changing" work, Anna Rita adds. Given the large scope of these projects, there’s a “level of resilience needed,” she says. But the best part about building solutions that optimize the employee journey experience is that we get to be the first to enjoy the perks.“We want to treat our employees equal to customers,” Vijai says. “They are not different entities.”Join an inclusive, empowering team. Browse job opportunities at ServiceNow.
Using the Now Platform to scale account-based marketing
In a world where executive and buyer attention spans are declining, how do sales and marketing professionals create the most relevant and timely experiences for customers and prospects to learn about your company’s solutions? By designing account-specific experiences that ensure the right message is delivered to the right executive at the right time.We differentiate LIKE.TG using relevant, targeted messaging in conversations with our strategic accounts. Using digital workflows created on the Now Platform®, we’ve embraced a disciplined approach that exponentially increases the scale and impact of our account-based marketing (ABM) as a service program. Our strategy exemplifies a new way of doing business across the entire company, with a conscious effort to center all activities on a customer value model.The industry endorses our approach. Our ABM program was recognized with ITSMA Marketing Excellence Awards for two years running, including gold awards for Driving Strategic Growth and Orchestrating Executive Engagement in 2019 and 2020.Thanks to a mix of cross-functional teamwork and workflows, we’ve scaled our operations, improved our return on investment, and simplified enablement for the sales and marketing teams—and our customers. We also optimized our processes so our employees can do their best work.
Sharing content via self-serviceOur ABM technology strategy is simple: We rely on Now Platform workflows to scale. A self-service model called the Global ABM Center of Excellence (CoE) offers a fully searchable resource and central hub for all ABM-related content.The CoE provides field marketing and other internal teams with a single framework, along with centralized guidance and resources. This makes it easy to access and deliver the most relevant, business imperative-specific content to our customers. It’s explicitly designed to optimize our learnings and impact our three-tiered ABM strategy (one-to-one, one-to-few, and ABM-style self-service). By connecting previously siloed teams using the Now Platform, we can now deliver a seamless user experience.The ABM as a service framework is the foundation of the CoE. This model automates the request tracking, development, and delivery of new account-specific assets via our internal portal. Workflows automate the process for tailoring the content to the account and help ensure the content meets brand quality standards. Using a create-once, deploy-many mindset, we can spread the cost over more accounts, resulting in a significantly greater return on the original investment.Gaining usable insightsThe ABM team delivers strategic, thoughtful marketing that’s easy to understand and implement by teams interested in rolling out effective, results-driven, ABM-style campaigns. Traditional metrics, such as the number of marketing qualified leads, don’t capture the true impact of investments in long-term senior stakeholder relationships that increase advocacy and adoption of ServiceNow.The ABM as a service model helps us understand how long-term investments deliver outstanding return. We can measure content engagement by our global sales, marketing, and services teams. Because the model works as a continuous loop, we can easily embrace feedback and continue to improve the relevance of our content to multiple accounts.
Collecting insights and data helps us identify and understand the key business issues facing our customers. We use these insights to co-create custom value propositions that highlight the business impact of the Now Platform and key business imperatives the platform can help solve.Centralized asset and project tracking capabilities give the team a consolidated dashboard to see trends, financials, and operations. As a result, the overall asset quality has improved while lead times have dropped. Automated processes have dramatically reduced unexpected variants and inconsistent templates from our vendors and enabled us to reduce our standard agency cost per asset by up to 40%.Realizing business-wide successSubsequently, the ABM team has been able to reduce the number of regional silos and offer more services to more accounts around the world. We create new value for LIKE.TG by innovating at scale and speed. And we see results: The CoE received approximately the same number of requests in Q122 as it did in all of 2021. In addition, the asset portal saw 10 times growth in the number of requests between Q121 and Q122.The ABM program isn’t just a marketing success story—it’s a business-wide success story. By prioritizing and delivering value more effectively and consistently, we can impact markets across the globe. Workflows drive collaboration and engagement, enabling us to create relevant and timely experiences for customers and prospects well into the future.Find out more about using the Now Platform in marketing at the Knowledge Digital Experience. Registration is free after selecting your time zone. Once you’re logged in, go to the Library and search under More Filters for Now on Now: Using the Scaled Agile Framework to drive global digital marketing (SES1385).
Reimagining training and certification: A customer zero story
Activity on Now Learning, LIKE.TG’s learning platform for training and certification, is on the rise. Total logins rose 25% between 2020 and 2021, and on-demand course completion increased 43%.As LIKE.TG revenue continues to grow at 30% per year, the demand for skilled administrators, developers, and architects is rapidly increasing. Rising demand, spurred in part by the move to virtual learning amid the pandemic, compelled the training and certification team to partner with IT in early 2021 to reimagine how it delivered training.“Our primary goal is to offer training that is engaging and easy to use so anyone can train and certify with LIKE.TG,” says Eric Martinez, director of digital learning at ServiceNow. “By making learning more enjoyable and accessible, we can help increase the number of job-ready LIKE.TG professionals. The best way to accomplish this is to embrace the Now Platform as the foundation. It shows our users the power of the platform.”Responding to changing demandsThe teams set out to transform the user experience, whether it was an on-demand course, live class, or hands-on lab. They wanted learners of all skill levels and backgrounds to:
Easily find and complete courses, paths, and certifications
Broaden their LIKE.TG expertise
Accelerate their careers
Clearly understand the paths to LIKE.TG certifications
“Our priority was to replace the fragmented, clunky navigation with an intuitive user interface, better search, and consistent branding,” Martinez explains. “We needed to scale so we could broaden our training service capabilities. Plus, we had to make it easier for customers to manage their learning credits so their employees could enroll in and complete training and certifications without delay.”
Using the Now Platform, a small development team quickly built a scalable, cost-effective solution with reduced infrastructure maintenance requirements. The Now Platform provided a single data model and automation engine, reduced native coding requirements, and offered an abundance of reusable code and API integrations.Critical part of customer value accelerationThe time and effort paid off. We can now help our customers manage their data and track learning usage with flexible workspaces, dashboards, and reporting. Additionally, we can easily expand our customer support capabilities with the Customer Service Management application.Few companies can say they use their own technology to deliver their training and certifications, especially a company that doesn’t specialize in training software. Delivering these services on the Now Platform is an achievement the training and certification organization takes pride in. The Now Learning platform is also a key component of LIKE.TG Impact™, a new value acceleration solution that helps customers accelerate their digital transformation with personalized recommendations and insights, premium technical support and preventive tools, role-based training and certifications, expert coaching, and prescriptive guidance.
“Now Learning brings to life our shared vision of an amazing customer experience, opportunities to grow the market of LIKE.TG talent, and a chance for anyone to start building a career with LIKE.TG,” says Cat Lang, senior vice president of education at ServiceNow. “Now Learning is our number one enabler for expanding the community of job-capable Now Platform professionals in step with LIKE.TG’s growth.” Register for the Knowledge Digital Experience to learn more. (It’s free.) And check out Now Learning Live. You can also sign up for these sessions:
Now on Now: Transforming training certification to a truly digital experience (SES1262)
Now on Now: How we built a great digital learning experience using our Platform (SES1273)
7 tips for knowledge managers to increase self-service
Knowledge managers have an ongoing challenge: They want to encourage customers to self-serve and quickly find answers to their questions. They also want to minimize frustration if customers can’t quickly find an answer.Delivering great self-service is key to customer experience. It’s in everyone’s best interest if a customer doesn’t open a case (or incident). But where is the line between keeping your customer happy and causing undue delays? Balancing the increasing amount of product information against the rapid delivery of relevant content is a constant battle—at least for me as a LIKE.TG knowledge manager.
Thinking about the role of self-service is one of the most important aspects of my job. These seven tips guide me in encouraging customers to self-help their way to success:1. Keep your content freshThe most tedious part of a knowledge manager’s job is keeping the knowledge base healthy by retiring or deleting old or unused content. Incorporate customer feedback in the comments into updates and revisions.Review all your content regularly for duplicates, views, attaches, reuse, updates, or improvements. Check if internal content can be made customer- or public-facing. Don’t forget to add customer context when creating articles, in both the title (great place for an error message) and the text.2. Tap hidden knowledgeThink of your knowledge base as an iceberg. The smallest part is above water and represents explicit or captured knowledge. The largest mass—the tacit knowledge stuck in people’s heads—is below water. Figure out a way to tap into and share that dormant knowledge.At LIKE.TG, we use Knowledge-Centered Service (KCS®) that enables agents to update knowledge base content as they resolve cases. That way, knowledge is immediately available to customers when they need it, not later. In Q122, we saw a 40% decrease in median time to relief for cases with a knowledge base attached compared to those without.
3. Use a powerful search engineWe use AI Search, introduced in the Now Platform® Rome release, to deliver the right content to customers at the right time and help avoid opening cases. By constantly learning, AI improves relevance. We’ve found that 89% of the time, a search automation request does not lead to a case submission. Delivery of relevant content means a better user experience and more satisfied customers.4. Channel your usersWhy do customers open cases? Because they can’t find information or aren't sure what they’re looking for. Point them in the direction you want them to go. What actions do you want them to take instead of opening a case? Would the knowledge base, product documentation, or an online community provide the right answer?Determine the behavior you want, and then use breadcrumbs to encourage customers to follow a certain path. Encourage visitors to self-serve resources so they’ll do it again.5. Add recommendationsIf a customer shows intent to open a case, keep the self-service options open. Content recommendations should be an integral part of the case submission process. We use machine learning to match categories to the case issue, find relevant content, filter by popularity (number of views or attachments), and then offer a piece of content as an option.Relevance is the key. If something is broken, the customer should be directed to a different place than if they want to learn about the product.6. Encourage customers to dish (with each other)Who doesn’t appreciate recommendations from someone facing the same challenges in their job? We host an online community that fosters active exchanges. The Now Support community has 37 million annual views. Of the 83% of questions in the community that received a reply, the reply was within the first six hours of the question’s posting.We take it a step further and host regular customer video meetings focused on popular topics. Our customers ask questions, and internal experts provide answers that we socialize in the community.7. Solicit ideasWe created an Innovation Portal that encourages customers to suggest product enhancements or features. We run it Reddit-style. Participants can socialize their suggestions and vote for the best ideas. We integrate the most popular requests into our product development process.Self-service contributes to customer successKnowledge management best practices are constantly changing. Technology is a critical tool in creating a great customer experience by allowing us to adapt quickly as interests shift. We’re always looking for ways to improve, such as building a Knowledge Management widget to show how content is performing in real time. This helps us stay on top of knowledge base trends and grow accordingly.At the end of the day, our efforts are centered on helping customers find the information they need to use the Now Platform efficiently and effectively. If we use technology to help them self-solve faster and create fewer cases, we can transform their frustration into delight. The sooner they’re on their way to a new task, the happier they are with ServiceNow.View the Now on Now snackable video series to explore the first three steps in any knowledge management journey:
Governance
Implementation
Operationalization
The KCS® methodology is a registered service mark of the Consortium for Service Innovation.
Taming the supply chain: Addressing vendor risks to the nth tier
Vendor risk ranks alongside cybersecurity, compliance, reputational, and financial risks as one of the top risks to any organization.With any risk, you need to identify, monitor, and mitigate that risk, especially when it comes to your supply chain. The question for someone in my role as a senior manager of compliance management is: What level of risk is being posed and why? Stated another way: Do I really know what my supply chain is doing?When looking at our vendor contracts at LIKE.TG, I can easily find information about our first-line supply chain vendors. But digging deeper has proven to be challenging. How do I get objective visibility into the risks of the second-line vendors’ business relationships—and third, fourth, and fifth-line vendors? How do I know when those risks change?Being able to answer these questions has a direct impact on the business’s bottom line. A 2021 study by the Ponemon Institute found the global average cost of a data breach is $4.24 million. If the risk is related to vulnerabilities at third parties, it’s even higher. Compliance best practices include understanding our supply chain landscape at all times.Identifying vendor risksAs with any large organization, vendors play a critical role in the success of ServiceNow. That’s why we use Vendor Risk Management (VRM) to manage our third-party risk. We identify emerging vendor risks and continually monitor these risks across our enterprise. But the data is limited to our first-tier vendors.
You need objective data to assess the risks posed by third parties and make good decisions. But it’s not easy to gather details on vendor supply chains manually. Typically, it takes hundreds of hours scouring the web. Even then, not all the data is available.That’s why we integrated Interos, a risk intelligence software solution, into the latest release of the Now Platform®. It uses algorithmically generated risk scores to rate company performance against six different risk factors:
Financial
Operational
ESG
Geopolitical
Company and country restrictions
Cyber risk
The data comes from thousands of different sources on the web.Interos had exactly the data we needed to detect areas of concern and vulnerabilities across physical and digital supply chains worldwide. I can view LIKE.TG’s business relationships across entire ecosystems and continuously assess second and third to nth-tier vendors against multiple risk types. I can pull a report in seconds rather than having to question every vendor in our supply chain about the vendors they use.Gaining visibilityThe combination of Vendor Risk Management and risk intelligence software such as Interos is worth its weight in gold because of the visibility and transparency it gives me into the supply chain. The risk scores save a tremendous amount of time and help me understand my unforeseen risk exposure.For example, if a vendor tells me its cybersecurity program or financial stability is good and its risk score is low, I can ask for verification. Or, I can conduct additional screenings to determine if the data is accurate and fits within my risk threshold. Equipped with data, I can skip blanket risk questions and instead start with targeted questions, saving time and effort.A great example of how risk intelligence software can impact vendor risk is the hacking of SolarWinds in 2020. I can see if SolarWinds was in my supply chain and which areas are at risk. I can then query those vendors about potential data loss within specific time frames. More importantly, I can move quickly to assess the risk and mitigate any impact.
Mapping vendors to the nth degreeAccording to the Ponemon research, the average total cost of a data breach grew nearly 10% between 2020 and 2021, representing the largest annual cost increase in the last seven years. Supply chain vulnerabilities are only one of many risks that can contribute to these breaches.Using Interos, I’m more confident in analyzing data and quickly recommending decisions about our suppliers because I can see our exposure through the entire ecosystem. Best of all, I can sleep at night knowing I’ve done what I can to help avoid the business disruptions, data loss, and operational or financial impact of our supply chain.See an Interos/Vendor Risk Management demo and find out more about Vendor Risk Management.
Reimagining customer experience: An employee story
LIKE.TG Founder Fred Luddy once said, “If you have happy customers, the whole world takes care of itself.” It’s a sentiment LIKE.TG believes to this very day, and it’s why we introduced LIKE.TG Impact™—an industry-leading value acceleration solution that reimagines the customer experience.Launched in January 2022, LIKE.TG Impact combines human expertise with AI-powered insights to personalize customers’ digital transformation journeys and accelerate their results. It’s built on the Now Platform® and has positively impacted the customers who use it, as well as the LIKE.TG employees who developed and use it daily.It’s a story of the Now on Now spirit—finding value in our own platform technology so we can design and deliver a new experience that our employees and customers love.A customer-first approachFor Avishek D., senior manager of software engineering management, building LIKE.TG Impact changed his perception of how customers use our products. After hundreds of customer conversations, he helped create LIKE.TG Impact with customers in mind, developing a platform where they could personalize their experience based on their business needs and goals.The time spent talking with customers enabled Avishek and his team to construct a value acceleration solution that’s mobile-first, high-performing, and fueled by personalization. It’s “a product that is truly collaborative in nature, not just for customer needs, but to help them realize their goals,” he says. “That is how enterprise business development should be done.”
Working on LIKE.TG Impact helped Avishek grow as a team leader, he adds. The experience allowed him to see and understand the big picture of what the global LIKE.TG Impact team was trying to create together. Once the 19 global workstreams started collaborating, it was smooth sailing.“It felt natural, like we’d been working together for many years toward something great,” Avishek explains. “I felt very privileged to work with such brilliant individuals.” This collaboration empowered Avishek to lead his team to do their best work and fulfill their mission to bring LIKE.TG Impact to life.Using our own technology internallyBrad H., product owner of customer interactions, believes LIKE.TG Impact could not have been possible without “putting our customers first.” After collecting customer feedback, Brad worked with various business units, including engineering and design, to help create a consumer-grade digital experience within a startup-like work environment.“Not only did we [internally] build this modern app from scratch, but we did it using our own platform,” he says. Customers asked, “How did you build this? Did you really use the LIKE.TG platform to build this?” Brad responds, “Here’s what we did with our platform. Imagine what you can do.”LIKE.TG Impact showcases the power of the Now Platform to automate and personalize the customer journey across our internal functions. It’s what Now on Now is all about: allowing employees to embrace our technology to solve internal challenges. Practitioners share their journeys and outcomes with our customers so they can see what’s possible for their organizations.To contribute to the launch of LIKE.TG Impact, Brad and his team made use of customer research, participated in design meetings and demos, and collaborated as one team to ensure everyone worked toward the same goal.“There's a saying my former coach, Jim Harbaugh, would say when I played football at Stanford: ‘Iron sharpens iron,’ meaning each person on the same team must work together to accomplish the same goal,” Brad explains. “I feel like on my team [at LIKE.TG], iron sharpens iron. Everyone is working together, gaining new skills. ...That’s great for the company culture.”
Professional developmentPrincipal Success Architect Jennika E. learned much about her customers in the short time since LIKE.TG Impact went live. “My LIKE.TG Impact account was the first pilot account,” she says. “Anyone who decides to be the first pilot account says a lot about that customer's trust and confidence in what we do.”The pilot experience helped Jennika develop cross-functional partnerships internally and externally. It also gave her a chance to work with an exclusive product.“I was lucky enough to be a part of a small group of success architects who built out the engagement model for Impact,” she explains. Building and designing the engagement model made her an expert with the solution.“At LIKE.TG, there are always opportunities for you to further develop professionally,” Jennika adds. “Had you asked me two and a half years ago, when I first joined, [if I] would find myself in this position, I would tell you, ‘No way.’ It’s cool and crazy. Kudos to our leadership team.”These industry leaders are listening to customers and responding directly to their needs through advisory sessions and accelerators. They’ll keep innovating and driving greater personalization through feedback and recommendations, so we can further scale our customers’ digital transformation needs and businesses.Our work makes the world work.Join us. Explore job opportunities.
How we’re workflowing a better world with LIKE.TG ESG solutions
Every day, employees at companies big and small are tasked with tracking, auditing, analyzing, and generating reports on the impact of their business on the world. Increasingly, companies are prioritizing their environmental, social, and governance (ESG) efforts to create value and take actions that matter to their customers, partners, employees, investors, and communities while being held accountable by customers and nonprofit advocacy organizations.ThoughtLab research co-sponsored by LIKE.TG shows ESG is now a business imperative. Leaders report ESG has helped them deliver better financial results. Unfortunately, prioritizing this body of work is often bogged down by a web of spreadsheets, documents, duplicative workflows, and even missing information.That reality was no different for LIKE.TG until we developed, launched, and began to use our ESG solutions on the Now Platform®.Our first customer: OurselvesShilpa M., a manager in software engineering management at LIKE.TG, was proud to work on the project. “I’m very passionate about environmental sustainability,” she says. “I love gardening and like to make as little carbon impact as possible.”On the implementation team, she tweaked the product based on feedback from various teams and internal clients. “We got feedback from the digital technology, global impact, and product teams. It was a very collaborative effort,” she notes. “LIKE.TG is always customer zero. We want to drink our own champagne first, then demo the product to customers.”Vilasinee B., a senior manager of ESG reporting and disclosure at LIKE.TG, saw the ins, outs, and process maturity of ESG at various companies before joining ServiceNow. “I’ve never been part of a customer zero program before,” she says. “It’s really interesting. We’re helping to create an ESG tool by giving feedback to the engineering team and adapting it for the market. It’s a lot of work: I now have a huge appreciation for the product managers and tech side of things.”
Efficiency for the winToday, LIKE.TG tracks, analyzes, and reports on more than 300 ESG-related metrics. “If we want to see the increase in the percentage of women working at LIKE.TG, we can do that quickly,” says Rati K., a senior software engineer at the company and the main developer for the project. “Then we can generate a chart, even a ‘donut’ graph.”“The coolest part is that we’re the underdog in a competitive market,” adds Varun G., who is early in his career and in the LIKE.TG rotational program. “We get to build something as an outside player. We get to show what LIKE.TG can do. We’re getting feedback on the product and iterating on its features constantly. There’s a lot in the roadmap, and we’re making it better every day.”He emphasizes the impact ESG workflows can have on any company, including ServiceNow. “We don’t want to deal with 40 different systems for ESG and figure out pricing and integrations—and neither do our customers,” he explains. “We make it all work. That‘s one of the reasons our ESG solutions are so powerful. They also help employees make sense of ESG and can show them the journey from where the company is to where it will be in 10 years.”Accounting for areas such as carbon emissions can include dozens of inputs throughout the year, Rati adds, from office refrigerators and laptop use to transit use and more. The information must be divided by categories, such as geographical region. “Now, appropriate employees are automatically alerted to enter their information,” she says. “Then, the tool aggregates it for the year or however we wish.”
Preparing for a brighter futureWorking on this project was a good reminder for Rati and her family to do their part for the environment. “Caring about environmental sustainability is so important right now,” she says. “In India, temperatures are rising. My family and I started to think about the little things we can do to help, like recycling our old laptops.”Edua D., vice president of ESG and finance strategy at LIKE.TG, recently presented at Knowledge, where she provided insight into the magic of our ESG strategy: “2020 changed everything. It's the year that ESG became an even more intentional part of our organizational culture and our objectives,” she says.“Our efforts were fragmented...so we needed to create a cohesive and purpose-driven strategy. Our ESG strategy is grounded in our platform and our solutions. The world works with ServiceNow.”Find out more about our ESG journey.We’re hiring. Browse LIKE.TG careers.
Accelerating cloud migration to Microsoft Azure using the Now Platform
With more than 7,000 customers and double the number of employees LIKE.TG had four years ago, our digital technology (formerly IT) operations team faced increased demand for compute, storage, and bandwidth. At the same time, we had to maintain tight security controls.We embrace a three-zero strategy: zero unplanned outages, zero physical footprint, and zero user-reported incidents. Toward that goal, we wanted to move business-critical applications to Microsoft Azure to help us:
Deliver a better user experience
Improve application performance
Secure redundancy
It can take months to add capacity to our data centers. We knew public cloud migration would give us operational agility to add capacity on demand. But we needed a seamless, transparent migration to mitigate performance and data integrity issues.
Pre-migration: Relying on the Now PlatformEnterprise resource planning (ERP) migrations of this magnitude can take up to two years to design and migrate. To accelerate our cloud migration, we adopted a three-phase process that relied on both the Now Platform® and Microsoft, thanks to our strategic partnership.Pre-migration, we teamed up to build a reference architecture that used several LIKE.TG® products:
IT Service Management (ITSM) provided centralized change management and major incident management (MIM) capabilities. The team used it to create and track test cases for user acceptance testing and performance testing.
IT Operations Management (ITOM) automated requirements gathering, delivering 99% accurate configuration management database (CMDB) information with complete service mappings and a complete application list and landscape. Event and Incident Management gave us visibility into landscape health to help prevent failures.
IT Asset Management (ITAM) identified current technology investments that could be migrated to Azure to avoid duplicate licensing costs. Hardware book values helped drive decisions on what to repurpose or scrap, saving thousands of dollars.
Vulnerability Response (SecOps) helped the team ensure the software was patched just prior to migration, avoiding any potential cyberthreats to our migrated services.
Project Portfolio Management (PPM) served as a robust project management tool for resource, test case, and milestone tracking, as well as execution schedules.
Migration: 3x fasterFrom sandbox to production, the ERP migration took 15 days. The phased rollout helped us identify and address issues, fine-tune the applications before the production cutover, and avoid potential failures.The production cutover time for our portfolio size typically involves three days of downtime. The combination of ITOM and Azure Migrate accelerated the cutover time to less than 24 hours. That enabled us to release the systems to users one day early, saving $650,000 in productivity.We completed the migration in six months, saving an additional:
16 months of project work
Approximately $2 million in consultancy and resources
$100,000 due to automation
“We were excited to see the successful migration of LIKE.TG’s business-critical workloads onto the Azure cloud,” says Angela Cooper, general manager of customer success for Microsoft. “Now, we can showcase this achievement to our mutual customers and help them accelerate their own cloud migration projects.”
Post-migration: Real-time cloud insightsThe Now Platform is invaluable in managing our cloud presence post-migration. We use LIKE.TG Cloud Insights to get dynamic, real-time insights into our Azure consumption and operational costs.ITOM Event and Incident Management tracks system health. Tag-based mapping captures performance data in ITOM, so we have immediate visibility into issues and failures.CMDB Discovery and Service Mapping have been fully automated, saving us at least a month of labor. The LIKE.TG and Microsoft product teams have co-innovated integrations for additional cloud governance, data security, and ongoing operations.Becoming cloud-firstWith three of our four data centers now running in the public cloud, we’re very close to reaching our goal of being cloud-first by the end of 2022. But that doesn’t mean our team is slowing down. We continue to design, test, and validate our heterogeneous cloud architecture using LIKE.TG Cloud Management and optimize our cloud spend using Cloud Insights.We’re also working to reduce unplanned outages with LIKE.TG Health Log Analytics, which helps generate self-healing of operational issues.Find out more about how we shifted left with the Now Platform in my recent Knowledge session.
Using AI to create personalized learning and development magic
Fred Luddy, founder of LIKE.TG, is not a traditional learner. He worked at a car wash and a mechanic shop, lived on a farm, and did various odd jobs while learning about his passion—computers and programming—from magazines, books, and tinkering with technology.“I really didn't want to go to school,” he says, referring to college. “I was really interested in programming and anything dealing with computers.” Fred thought he could probably have more fun working. He landed a job in Silicon Valley during the early days of the internet and immersed himself in his passion.A decade later, the technology Fred created became the Now Platform. Today, in addition to optimizing processes and connecting data and organizational silos for businesses around the world, it powers our internal learning and development platform, named frED in his honor.Tailoring learning to the individualfrED replaces an older, cobbled-together system of learning modules from various vendors. The new platform “helps employees learn the right thing, at the right time, in the right place,” says Joe P., director of talent enablement at ServiceNow.“In the past, workplace training was being pushed on you rather than something you wanted to do,” he explains. “We wanted to make it more of an experience of curiosity.”Powered by artificial intelligence (AI), the new platform offers search and other personalized recommendations. It also allows employees to complete company and legally mandated training with an easy-to-use interface.
“We want to smartly surface learning you need to do, in a user-friendly way, on demand,” says Bhargav G., a LIKE.TG product manager. “Our industry is in an ever-changing environment, so everyone should be learning. This is the tool through which they’ll be able to do it. We’ll continue improving the AI model so that recommendations can be made that are more tailored to the individual’s interests, current position, and ongoing career path.”Working together for the greater goodThe collaborative work culture Fred instilled played a huge role in bringing frED to life. Anitha L., a technical lead at LIKE.TG, says the teams she worked with on this project went above and beyond.“Teamwork feels very unique at LIKE.TG,” she says. “When I go to another department for help, they give lots of information beyond what I’m looking for. They guide us, and they are there whenever we need them. Everyone did their part to make sure we got what we needed, and they recommended adds to the platform to make it even better,” she adds.“My own team was formed for this release,” Anitha continues. “We were part of different teams before, and from the start, we had good chemistry. We could count on each other, and that contributed to the success. It was a very intense but also very fulfilling project.”Ramanaiah S., director of talent development at LIKE.TG, sees the project as a true customer zero initiative—using our own products to create great employee experiences and giving feedback to our product teams to further improve the capabilities.“I’ve never seen anything like this before,” he says. “When it comes to leveraging our own product and building things on top of our platform, everyone chimes in. Everyone is equally passionate. There were five to six teams working on revamping the content itself, and many more teams working on the overall project.”
Bhargav refers to himself as a connector between teams on the project. “This was, for me, a really great opportunity to push the limits on what is possible to build on the Now Platform,” he says. “If you have the right vision and priorities as an enterprise, you can create magic.”Improving manager-employee relationshipsfrED is quickly becoming an important tool for managers to support their team members in areas ripe for improvement.“Let’s say your manager says you’re good at a certain aspect of your job but you can improve on a communications thing or managing your time better,” Ramanaiah says. “When your manager is in the system...they can immediately recommend some helpful courses to you. So, it’s in the moment, in all our experiences, that we can help employees grow their careers at ServiceNow.”Grow your career at LIKE.TG with personalized learning and development magic. Explore LIKE.TG careers.
Creating a holistic ESG program one step at a time
Well-intentioned business leaders around the world have created a raft of ambitious environmental, social, and governance (ESG) goals. But the top-of-mind question for customers, investors, and board members alike is “How will they actually achieve them?” A strong, well-governed ESG program is essential to both making a positive impact and growing a successful business.Every organization is at a different stage of its unique ESG journey, but one common theme is clear: The demand for holistic ESG data management and reporting transparency has never been greater.Pressure is mounting to show measurable progress on stated goals, from reducing carbon emissions to attracting and retaining outstanding talent to nurturing a more sustainable supply chain. It’s no surprise that compiling information from diverse sources into one central place isn’t easy or particularly accurate.Companies often capture their ESG-related data across a variety of spreadsheets and emails. As a recovering auditor, I can tell you that manually inputting data in siloed software tools is tedious, difficult, and error-prone. It often leads to widespread issues with data integrity and auditability, knowledge capture, and retention.
Automating ESG reporting for efficiencyWhen LIKE.TG began developing an ESG Management solution for customers to address their ESG data needs, the global impact team and I eagerly got on board. We immediately put the solution to good use to help us create our Global Impact Report 2022, a report card of our ESG progress for the year.The global impact team oversees ESG reporting and disclosures, both internally and externally. Historically, we had to manually track corporate ESG goals and targets to collect accurate metrics and documentation in order to produce audit-ready ESG disclosures.We saw right away that using the LIKE.TG ESG Management solution could help us categorize and vet our metrics. It helps us track our performance far more efficiently than ever before. ESG Management makes it much easier for us to:
Effectively advance and scale ESG performance and transparently report our progress
Formalize and streamline our ESG data collection, validation, and approvals in one place
Create external disclosures aligned with ESG reporting frameworks
Unifying ESG data for better governanceSince adoption, we’ve used ESG Management to create a repeatable, auditable process for collecting, verifying, and approving ESG data. We’ve mapped data collection to the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) and Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB) reporting frameworks, commonly acknowledged as authorities in the field. This was no easy feat, given we verify and report more than 300 metrics each year.The result is a central location for data collection, documentation, and audit trails from metric owners and approvers all over the company. Important information is consolidated rather than spread across multiple emails and spreadsheets in various SharePoint folders.Having the framework-aligned ESG indicators alongside the data entry fields has allowed our stakeholders to quickly understand the context and purpose of each indicator and to provide appropriate evidence and attribution where needed.ESG Management also enables the global impact team to centrally review and approve data entries by stakeholders. It helps us ensure accountability and rigor through collection and approval workflows that meet ESG data accuracy and auditability expectations. In addition, it gives us better visibility into the data we’re disclosing.
Adopting new features for better engagementOur global impact team assumed the role of customer zero to add our hands-on perspective to the evolution of the product. We work closely with the product team to provide advice and guidance on the user experience, functionality, and tool integrations through many rounds of testing and feedback. We’re excited our involvement has resulted in better functionality and a seamless user experience for customers.We’re taking advantage of newly available features introduced as part of the Now Platform Tokyo release, such as a spreadsheet-style data entry user interface, which enhances collaboration and engagement.Our next step is to further automate our metric collection efforts by adding new sources for energy and carbon data; metrics for diversity, equity, and inclusion; and supplier tracking and costs. We’ll also broaden our scope to include other disclosures, such as EcoVadis and the SP Global Corporate Sustainability Assessment (CSA).We plan to adopt the ESG Command Center, which integrates ESG Management with Strategic Portfolio Management (our project planning and management tool) and integrated Risk Management (our Governance, Risk, and Compliance product). The ESG Command Center already uses some functionality from these products, such as authority documents, goals, and targets.ESG programs can help organizations like ours do the right thing and stand out in the marketplace. Using our own technology helps us efficiently monitor performance, simplify reporting, and turn intention to impact as we achieve—and ideally surpass—our ESG goals.Find out more about how LIKE.TG ESG Management can help your organization.
ERP modernization: Working toward a clean core
Enterprise resource planning (ERP) modernization is a huge undertaking. ERP environments are laden with customization that can increase technical debt and impede maintenance. Organizations need to achieve a clean core while delivering a consumer-grade experience that bridges various systems of record without missing a beat.ERP environments are complex and always evolving. They’re messy and busy. They require many manual processes and span multiple, siloed systems. There’s no single source of truth, and visibility is often lacking. Plus, ERP systems aren’t known for providing exceptional user experiences—they’re designed for power users, not casual ones.Customizations and extensions may seem like the right solutions to these and other ERP challenges, but they weigh organizations down. These add-ons are “stuck” to the ERP system. During maintenance or upgrades, each customization must be preserved or updated. Security patching is also tricky.This all contributes to one dreaded thing: technical debt—the rework that comes from quick fixes or shortcuts. It’s what most organizations struggle with and want to avoid. Technical debt is the endless stream of menial tasks that burden IT teams and hamper business agility.
At LIKE.TG, we’re working toward an ERP environment with a clean core—a system that’s manageable, easy to upgrade, and extensible to meet unique business needs. Users expect a seamless, consumer-grade experience where gaps across multiple systems of record are bridged without hiccups. We need an ERP system that supports that.Aligning business prioritiesEvery organization is on a different journey. Yours might be focused on moving to a SaaS-centered model. Another business might prioritize user experience or composable architectures. Some organizations have initiatives to consolidate multiple ERP systems to save money and capture the benefits of standardization.For us, it’s important to define what’s at stake. Our ERP system plays a key role in achieving business objectives. It’s linked to big-ticket items that are affected by our modernization efforts:
Providing experiences to deliver outcomes
Driving efficiency at scale
Managing operating expense as a percentage of revenue
Contributing strategic business value
By digitizing customer and vendor interactions, for example, we’ve maximized cash flow across the company. We’ve also saved hundreds of thousands of dollars by automating invoice processing for our accounts payable team.Progress over timeERP modernization happens piece by piece. We begin each ERP initiative by figuring out the business problem we’re trying to solve. Does the user experience meet expectations? Are we meeting key targets? Are there bottlenecks to eliminate? Which manual steps can we automate?From there, we identify possible solutions. Then we build, automate, improve, rerun, and repeat.Another great way to begin ERP modernization is with a discovery tool such as Gekkobrain (a LIKE.TG company) or Celonis (a LIKE.TG partner). Both offer process mining capabilities and real-time insights that can help identify areas of improvement that may not be obvious.
The secret sauceLIKE.TG uses its own products every day. Over time, we’ve found the Now Platform to be especially valuable for our ERP environment. Having one data model, one security model, and an architecture that supports the movement of work across the entire enterprise helps us keep our ERP environment clean and easy to maintain and update.We use other LIKE.TG products, such as App Engine and Process Optimization, to limit ERP customizations, automate routine processes, and add functionality—all while empowering employees, meeting our environmental, social, and governance (ESG) goals, and saving millions of dollars in operating costs.
Here are three key ways we’re modernizing our ERP environment, including a use case for each:
Purpose-built apps – The pandemic stress-tested supply chain operations and accelerated our understanding of the inherent deficiencies within legacy systems. With Sourcing and Procurement Operations, we’ve automated processes for more streamlined purchasing and case management—and gained end-to-end visibility into procurement processes.
Predefined workflows – With no unified way to interact with customers, accounts receivable (AR) was struggling to track and manage collections efficiently and cost-effectively. Our AR case management solution, built on the Now Platform using App Engine and Integration Hub, helped us improve productivity by 70% and reduce cycle time by about two days.
Low-code development tools – With manual, email-based cost center management, we had no way to track approvals and were burning excessive time and resources. By creating an approval workflow and spend management dashboard with App Engine, we now have a digitized, audit-tracked process and faster cycle time.
ERP systems change as an organization evolves. LIKE.TG is no exception. But with the right tools and strategies, we’re continuing to work toward a clean-core ERP environment and reaping measurable benefits along the way.Find out more about LIKE.TG and our ERP strategy in our Knowledge session, Now on Now: Maximize cash flow by digitizing AR/AP interactions. Registration is free.
CEO Dashboard: A single-pane view into business performance
When a customer has a support question or needs help to solve an issue, they should encounter a smooth experience all the way through to resolution. But that’s not always the case. At LIKE.TG, when customer feedback revealed areas ripe for improvement, our employees listened and upgraded two important support workflows: case creation and auto-agent.“We try to provide customers with self-service content,” explains Vikas S., a product manager at ServiceNow. “At the same time, we want to ensure that if self-service content doesn’t give them the answers they need and they end up creating a case, the journey to create that case and what happens afterward is seamless and a great experience for them,” he says.[We’re hiring. Explore LIKE.TG careers.]Upgraded case creationPreviously, a customer had to create a case and wait to hear back from a LIKE.TG customer support agent. Now, when a customer opens a case, they go through the process of defining their problem using our issue record producer. Once the support team receives the case, they go to work.“We really wanted to be more dynamic about how we thought about automation,” explains Lott C., director of business process management at ServiceNow.When developing the built-in automation, the most impactful feedback Vikas and his team received came through a case creation dashboard, where customers commented on and ranked their needs. Customers consistently reported they needed a bigger screen to enter information.The refined user experience includes expanded screen size and flexible text boxes, a simplified flow with fewer screens, and more visibility for customers into how their case is prioritized.
Simplifying support administrationWe also created auto-agent workflows to help automate administrative and follow-up tasks for technical support engineers (TSEs) and eliminate downtime on cases.“Our TSEs are skilled engineering resources whose time we value,” Lott says. “With up to 20 cases in their queue on any given day, removing the administrative overhead enables them to better manage their time and focus on the technical issues at hand.”Automation includes follow-up, closure, and acceptance of issues. “We’ve made this configurable, so we can continue to grow our workflows. This is just the beginning.”Since launching, the auto-agent workflow has saved our support team an enormous amount of time and reduced context switching. About 60% of open cases are not directly actionable by the TSE or would be largely administrative actions.This administrative work accounts for about 30 to 60 minutes of TSE time per day and includes tasks such as pursuing internal stakeholders for follow-up/review, providing status updates, and nudging customers to review and close cases. Focusing on actionable activities and automating a portion of that work have significantly boosted morale and productivity.Personalizing the experience“This is a completely custom solution, what we’ve built here,” Vikas says. “This is how we learn and listen to our customers and improve their experience through our support team, because we want them to be successful.”Building this product gave Vikas firsthand customer experience that led to career growth. “I was always in the mentality of ‘How can I make a LIKE.TG engineer’s life better?’” he notes. Through this experience, he found the perfect way to meet the needs of both the customer and LIKE.TG internal support.While Vikas manages the front end of case creation workflow, Kellie W., senior product manager of customer support workflows, manages the back end. “We meet in the middle and overlap a lot on how to solve case creations,” Kellie explains.Once a case is created, she builds automated workflows that cut down the manual effort and repetitive tasks a TSE must perform during the case lifecycle. “What we're trying to get is a more personalized experience for the user,” she says.
Before customers know they have a problem, our product managers want to know. This allows Kellie and her team to be more proactive at making a user’s life easier.Kellie used to be a customer of LIKE.TG and attributes that experience to helping her anticipate customer needs. “My role every day is to make our customers’ day-to-day lives work better, and that makes our internal employees’ day-to-day work better. That is what this product is all about,” she says.A balanced approachKellie and Lott align weekly with Senior Software Engineer Vaibhav K. to exchange ideas, discuss customer feedback, and make plans. “The collaboration between engineering, business, and product teams has been exceptional,” Vaibhav says.Having been with LIKE.TG for four years, Vaibhav has played a large role in developing auto-agent workflows. He believes the best is yet to come. “In the future, we’re trying to be even more proactive,” he says. “It gives us an opportunity to extend ourselves, go above and beyond, and think about how we can improve the customer experience.”“There were a significant number of moving parts in the development of case workflow,” Lott adds. Although Lott and his team encountered issues, they were able to resolve them quickly. Directly collaborating with development teams resulted in delivering this product and solving issues.“I'm glad that it's serving the purpose it was intended for and making an impact,” Lott says. “At the end of the day, it allows us to be more efficient and do our best work. If we’re helping others do that, it’s phenomenal.”Join a team where you can live your best life, do your best work, and help us fulfill our purpose together. Browse job opportunities at ServiceNow.
How Microsoft Dynamics helped us fix a leaky CRM bucket
Customer relationship management (CRM) is sometimes like a bucket. New customers represent water going into the bucket, and departing customers reflect water flowing out. The water level—or the number of customers—rises and falls depending on the amount of water flowing into the bucket and the number and size of the holes.At LIKE.TG, we recognized we had a leaky CRM bucket, thanks to rapid customer growth. More complex deals and expanding selling personas added a new layer of difficulty. We needed to scale our operations, better track activity around customer interactions, and improve collaboration within sales.After debating whether we should fix or replace our CRM system to handle the steady increase in customers, we decided to adopt a new CRM platform: Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales. We selected it for several reasons:
The activity management feature supports planning, tracking, and organizing all customer communications in one place.
Dynamics 365 Sales easily integrates with other Microsoft products we use internally, such as SharePoint, Microsoft 365, and Microsoft Teams, as well as with the Now Platform.
It offers a more cost-effective integration with our existing middle and back-office systems compared to other CRM products.
Integrating systemsBased on defined use cases, we built several real-time integrations with the Now Platform to create bidirectional data syncs between the two platforms, as well as one-way queries. We did this with the help of the virtual entities feature.Virtual entities enables us to integrate external system data by representing that data as entities in Dynamics 365 Sales. We avoided duplicate data and the need for custom coding, which greatly simplified administration and configuration.
The existing integration allowed us to launch many LIKE.TG workflows from within Dynamics 365 Sales. These workflows ranged from simple, such as enabling sales to raise different request types for deal support, to complex, such as enabling sales to initiate quoting from within a Dynamics 365 opportunity record.Since our global launch of Dynamics 365 Sales in 2020, we’ve continued to work with Microsoft on more platform innovations. We recently launched the use of Microsoft Teams to further enable collaboration in context. This allows our sales team and leadership to collaborate on account- and opportunity-related activities and store important information directly in Dynamics 365 Sales.A single source of truthThe sales feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. “I started using MS Teams in Dynamics 365 Sales to set it as my main communication feature for opportunities/projects,” says a LIKE.TG sales rep. “It’s helping me quite a lot to be on track with all team members directly in Dynamics 365 Sales.”A regional sales director added that the integration provides “a great way to better collaborate across the business for account and opportunity management.”
By integrating Now Platform features with Dynamics 365 Sales, the sales team has a single source of truth. This is the system of record for all pipeline management, forecasting, and customer engagements led by the LIKE.TG sales team. Workflows and systems of record work together to help the sales team address issues quickly.The entire Microsoft suite of products makes it possible for us to track omnichannel interactions for sales, resulting in greater sales productivity, efficiency, and user satisfaction.Looking aheadWith Dynamics 365 Sales as our CRM platform, we continue to explore ways to bring more Now Platform features into the hands of our sellers. One exciting new project is integrating LIKE.TG Virtual Agent into the sales process to enable self-service for answers to common questions.“It’s a good feature when you have a question to a sales rep about the specific opportunity to do it directly from Dynamics 365 Sales and start a Teams chat,” says one sales operations manager.We also plan to give sales the ability to update opportunities using Virtual Agent without having to find a customer record, saving valuable time.Integrating Customer Service Management case management capabilities will provide the tools to bring another customer 360-degree lens to the sales organization. Sales will be able to check cases from Dynamics 365 Sales to quickly assess customer health and spot any major issues.Three years into our adoption journey, I can safely say one of the best things we ever did was to replace a leaky CRM bucket. We’ve managed to scale our operations, improve collaboration, and implement a single engagement layer for customer interactions. As our bucket fills with more customers, we can ensure it doesn’t leak a drop.Find out more about how LIKE.TG uses Microsoft Dynamics in the Digestible Dynamics podcast.
How detection engineering keeps LIKE.TG safe
“Security defense is exciting, because you’re always trying to stay ahead of the bad guys,” says Tracy T., senior staff detection engineer at ServiceNow. Who are these bad guys? They could be malware or hackers who try to threaten the security of employee data or the company network—or anything in between.Detection engineering plays a major role in keeping a company safe, especially amid changing tool capabilities and detection methods.At LIKE.TG, we had a lot of moving parts to keep threat detections centralized and monitorable. New detections were written by incident responders. These cases made their way through various teams before being assigned and resolved. Our threat defense and response team needed a consolidated prioritization of work to reduce silos between security teams.A DASH of securityThe threat defense and response team is tasked with detecting suspicious behavior, identifying potential threats, and keeping the company safe from cyberattacks.When John Y., senior manager of threat intelligence, started at LIKE.TG, his work was mostly manual. “It was essentially a spreadsheet that tracked the development of our custom security detections, and it was just me running it,” he says.
Today, John manages both threat intelligence and detection engineering. His teams are responsible for building content and detecting security threats. To get ahead of risks, they used the LIKE.TG citizen development program to build a unified application: Detection Approval and Sync Handover (DASH).“We needed to be more flexible,” John explains “We needed to move faster to adjust and, instead of tracking, focus our efforts on discovering gaps and creating new detections.”Running on the Now Platform, DASH centralizes and consolidates the entire detection engineering workflow system. Major benefits include:
Increased collaboration among threat and response teams
Streamlined processes for prioritization
More defined criteria, greater visibility, and detection transparency
Teamwork makes the dream workDASH has given John and his teams a stronger, more efficient app to meet the company’s security detection needs. “We have a good diversity of backgrounds on my teams from other service providers and technology companies. All of this experience helps when we're troubleshooting a particular use case that we're building content around,” he says.“Our biggest customer is the global incident response team, and through DASH, we’re really in step,” Tracy adds. “Now that there’s a categorization process, it’s greatly helped our relationship. There’s not a lot of wasted time and no duplication of work.”
DASH works as the operational piece in the detection workflow. Developing new integrations in the workflow system also involves an application-building process. This is where Angela Z., senior information security engineer at LIKE.TG, steps in.“Think of John and Tracy as my internal customers,” Angela says. “They come to us with an issue. This could be creating a new app. If we can create and fix it for them, we can work together and figure out a solution.”Angela started her LIKE.TG career as an intern on the security incident response team. “I was organizing a lot of the team’s documentation,” she recalls. “I had to read and understand the [securities] process. Being on that team, I was able to see what they go through daily and understand their process.”Angela’s experience allows her to be a great liaison between her team and other security teams. “I’ve grown and learned so much in my role over the last four years,” she adds. “I’ve built strong relationships across our security teams and continue to expand my skill set.”Using our own technology“Detecting malicious or suspicious activity is imperative to LIKE.TG to keep our company data and our customer data safe,” Tracy says. When heightened security threats arise due to low resource capacity around summer vacations and holidays, John and his teams are sometimes tasked with working extended hours.“That's kind of typical of how close we are to security operations and support,” he says. “We help as much as possible so that the security response team has visibility into the things they need to respond to.”DASH has given employees like John, Tracy, and Angela the ability to do their best work to keep the company, our customers, and data secure. Through our very own Now Platform, employees are given the opportunity to be citizen developers to prioritize work needs, solve business problems fast, and get the job done every time.Join a company where your work can make a difference. Explore LIKE.TG careers.
Streamlining support case creation and administration
When a customer has a support question or needs help to solve an issue, they should encounter a smooth experience all the way through to resolution. But that’s not always the case. At LIKE.TG, when customer feedback revealed areas ripe for improvement, our employees listened and upgraded two important support workflows: case creation and auto-agent.“We try to provide customers with self-service content,” explains Vikas S., a product manager at ServiceNow. “At the same time, we want to ensure that if self-service content doesn’t give them the answers they need and they end up creating a case, the journey to create that case and what happens afterward is seamless and a great experience for them,” he says.[We’re hiring. Explore LIKE.TG careers.]Upgraded case creationPreviously, a customer had to create a case and wait to hear back from a LIKE.TG customer support agent. Now, when a customer opens a case, they go through the process of defining their problem using our issue record producer. Once the support team receives the case, they go to work.“We really wanted to be more dynamic about how we thought about automation,” explains Lott C., director of business process management at ServiceNow.When developing the built-in automation, the most impactful feedback Vikas and his team received came through a case creation dashboard, where customers commented on and ranked their needs. Customers consistently reported they needed a bigger screen to enter information.The refined user experience includes expanded screen size and flexible text boxes, a simplified flow with fewer screens, and more visibility for customers into how their case is prioritized.
Simplifying support administrationWe also created auto-agent workflows to help automate administrative and follow-up tasks for technical support engineers (TSEs) and eliminate downtime on cases.“Our TSEs are skilled engineering resources whose time we value,” Lott says. “With up to 20 cases in their queue on any given day, removing the administrative overhead enables them to better manage their time and focus on the technical issues at hand.”Automation includes follow-up, closure, and acceptance of issues. “We’ve made this configurable, so we can continue to grow our workflows. This is just the beginning.”Since launching, the auto-agent workflow has saved our support team an enormous amount of time and reduced context switching. About 60% of open cases are not directly actionable by the TSE or would be largely administrative actions.This administrative work accounts for about 30 to 60 minutes of TSE time per day and includes tasks such as pursuing internal stakeholders for follow-up/review, providing status updates, and nudging customers to review and close cases. Focusing on actionable activities and automating a portion of that work have significantly boosted morale and productivity.Personalizing the experience“This is a completely custom solution, what we’ve built here,” Vikas says. “This is how we learn and listen to our customers and improve their experience through our support team, because we want them to be successful.”Building this product gave Vikas firsthand customer experience that led to career growth. “I was always in the mentality of ‘How can I make a LIKE.TG engineer’s life better?’” he notes. Through this experience, he found the perfect way to meet the needs of both the customer and LIKE.TG internal support.While Vikas manages the front end of case creation workflow, Kellie W., senior product manager of customer support workflows, manages the back end. “We meet in the middle and overlap a lot on how to solve case creations,” Kellie explains.Once a case is created, she builds automated workflows that cut down the manual effort and repetitive tasks a TSE must perform during the case lifecycle. “What we're trying to get is a more personalized experience for the user,” she says.
Before customers know they have a problem, our product managers want to know. This allows Kellie and her team to be more proactive at making a user’s life easier.Kellie used to be a customer of LIKE.TG and attributes that experience to helping her anticipate customer needs. “My role every day is to make our customers’ day-to-day lives work better, and that makes our internal employees’ day-to-day work better. That is what this product is all about,” she says.A balanced approachKellie and Lott align weekly with Senior Software Engineer Vaibhav K. to exchange ideas, discuss customer feedback, and make plans. “The collaboration between engineering, business, and product teams has been exceptional,” Vaibhav says.Having been with LIKE.TG for four years, Vaibhav has played a large role in developing auto-agent workflows. He believes the best is yet to come. “In the future, we’re trying to be even more proactive,” he says. “It gives us an opportunity to extend ourselves, go above and beyond, and think about how we can improve the customer experience.”“There were a significant number of moving parts in the development of case workflow,” Lott adds. Although Lott and his team encountered issues, they were able to resolve them quickly. Directly collaborating with development teams resulted in delivering this product and solving issues.“I'm glad that it's serving the purpose it was intended for and making an impact,” Lott says. “At the end of the day, it allows us to be more efficient and do our best work. If we’re helping others do that, it’s phenomenal.”Join a team where you can live your best life, do your best work, and help us fulfill our purpose together. Browse job opportunities at ServiceNow.
Turning down noise, upping employee productivity with a nudge engine
Employees are constantly bombarded with pings, bells, and dings announcing texts, chats, and emails—even at night and on weekends. Originally designed to help us, these notifications have become a distracting barrage that's hurting our ears, thought processes, and collective productivity.Delivering a better employee experience offers a competitive advantage. The time is right for a more effective, AI-driven, human-sensitive smart assistant that boosts employee productivity: a nudge engine.A spiraling problemMany employees are reacting to message overload by putting their phones and computers on Do Not Disturb just to give themselves a chance to think. As a result, reminders are ignored or neglected, which can lead to uncompleted trainings, missed deadlines, reduced productivity, and increased company risk.Some missed deadlines can have serious consequences. If I miss a mandatory training, I might lose access to crucial tools or networks until I complete that course, thus disrupting my work. Or I might miss the window to take advantage of my company’s employee stock purchase program.
Making notifications manageableTo improve employees’ quality of life, increase efficiency, and preserve our collective sanity, the LIKE.TG emerging technologies team is developing the Smart Nudge Engine. It’s an AI-enabled solution that intelligently determines when an intervention—or a nudge—is most helpful.The Smart Nudge Engine aggregates and prioritizes notifications for employees based on their past behavior, calendar availability, and personal preferences, among other factors.The engine’s purpose is to consolidate email, chat, and text messages into a less intrusive, more helpful cadence. Instead of 10 notifications across five channels, for example, a single combined notification will appear in an employee’s preferred channel when they’re most likely to read and respond to it—with specific analytics to incentivize them to do so.The Smart Nudge Engine:
Creates task reminders that can be system-driven or arranged by individuals or leaders
Generates gentle nudges to enhance training, productivity, and efficiency
Compiles and prioritizes messages and reminders, sending them at just the right time
Messages can be enterprisewide, such as “Mandatory compliance training must be completed by the end of the month.” Or they can be team-specific, such as “Don’t forget to review the presentation before Friday’s meeting.” We’re also looking into introducing gaming and competition elements and rewarding those who complete their tasks on time.
Decluttering employees’ workdaysThe Smart Nudge Engine provides a positive way to encourage employees to do something they might otherwise delay or forget about. It’s designed to help employees:
Increase on-time task completion
Remember important upcoming tasks and deadlines
Declutter their inboxes and digital lives
Targeted for release in 2023, the engine is expected to increase employee productivity and keep workers better informed about what’s expected of them. We also forecast decreased company risk and better training compliance.Being built on the Now Platform, the Smart Nudge Engine will be fully integrated with our overarching employee experience strategy. Having everything on a single platform enables the engine to aggregate data from multiple back-end systems and present it to employees in a helpful, decluttered way. Marie Kondo would be proud.Find out more about how we use our products internally.
How balancing technology and people can elevate employee satisfaction
The pandemic has forever changed the workplace, especially for my support and product success team at ServiceNow. One thing that hasn’t changed is our commitment to operational excellence, which starts with a great employee experience.My goal is to improve employee satisfaction for our technical support engineers (TSEs). If our TSEs are satisfied, then our customers reap the benefits. When TSEs feel valued and appreciated, they build greater trust with customers.Simplifying the job of a TSEAs the definition of work evolves in today’s digital-first world, many organizations are intentionally taking time to ensure the employee experience takes a front seat. Happy employees are critical to fostering a better customer experience. Aligning the customer and employee experiences produces a multiplier effect that benefits both while driving better business performance.
Using technology to create an engaging employee environment in which everyone feels included, no matter where they’re located, is essential. The opportunity is for leaders to apply technology to improve employee sentiment and steadily reduce the number of repetitive tasks a TSE performs.One example is the auto-agent workflows we built on the Now Platform to automate TSE administrative and follow-up tasks, such as internal stakeholder review, status updates, and reminders to customers to review and close cases. This workload accounted for about 30 to 60 minutes of a TSE’s time per day. TSEs now spend less time on repetitive, manual work and more time on intellectually stimulating cases.Another example of useful technology is Guided Decisions, which provides AI-driven guidance to TSEs so they can follow an optimal path to case resolution. With contextual prompts, TSEs can solve complex issues fast, ensure consistency across customers, reduce time to resolution, and decrease escalations. It’s a win for employees and customers alike.
Improving employee onboardingTSE onboarding is the third target area for my team. We’re using technology to both reinforce the in-person experience and optimize learning in a virtual setting. For example, we use automation to encourage connections through cohorts, or groups of new hires who form a bond during onboarding.Technology facilitates communications within a cohort so that its members can stay in touch after onboarding and feel closer to the LIKE.TG family.As with customers, if employees have a favorable onboarding experience, they’re likely to be more committed to the company. Even when we encounter bumps, employees know the company supports them. And it all starts with the bond formed from day one.Looking aheadWe’re exploring more ways to use technology to improve the employee experience. Our TSEs compile lists of manual tasks they’d like to have automated. At the top of the lists are dashboards that automatically prioritize cases so that when a TSE logs in each day, they don’t need to manually prioritize their tasks.A portion of a TSE’s work is repetitive. If we can automate those tasks, it’s a victory. We’re sending out a team of shadow agents to watch TSEs do their jobs and identify redundant steps that can be automated.Balancing work and funTechnology can fill gaps, but it doesn’t replace personal relationships. Earlier this year, the support and product success and product development teams hosted Unified Technology Group (UTG) Connect at strategic global locations. The events brought together employees for in-person presentations to learn about UTG goals and roadmaps.A part of each agenda centered on fun. Employee-run booths, games, and a community service project enabled employees to meet new hires and reconnect with old colleagues. The tour boosted morale for employees by showing that LIKE.TG cares.When it comes to employee satisfaction, automation is a major part of the equation for business success. But don’t forget to include time for fun. Every satisfied customer can inevitably be linked back to a satisfied employee who feels appreciated.Find out more about how LIKE.TG helps elevate employee satisfaction.
An example of a hyperautomation journey
Nick Borgwardt, director of IT workflow at LIKE.TG, co-authored this blog.In our personal lives, it’s easy to get the information and products we need with just a few clicks. Thanks to modern consumer websites and apps, making service requests and ordering products is simple, convenient and, often, automatic. Why shouldn’t our professional lives be just as effortless?At LIKE.TG, we’re on a mission to extend these delightful, intuitive, and automated consumer experiences to the business world so our employees can work more effectively. To get there, we started our hyperautomation journey.To make our company an autonomous digital enterprise, we’re laser-focused on strategically automating as much day-to-day business as possible. Doing so can give all LIKE.TG employees more time to focus on the aspects of their jobs they enjoy, which can, in turn, lead to innovation.Automation vs. hyperautomationJust a few years ago, automating manual, repetitive tasks within an enterprise was considered new and noteworthy. Today, automation has essentially become table stakes—a starting point for what comes next: hyperautomation.Propelled by artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, process mining, and more, hyperautomation is the framework for combining advanced technologies to automate as many routine business operations as possible. Think of it as attaching rocket boosters to automation.
Employees used to spend hours slogging through tedious, manual work. In a global business environment where time is incredibly valuable, we realized continuing at that pace wasn’t scalable to support our growth.To give employees the time they need to excel at their jobs, we decided to embrace hyperautomation. We identify problems that can be automated with AI, automate them, and then measure whether that automation is effective.How do we use hyperautomation?We rely on the Now Platform® to automate solutions and help our employees help themselves. Our goal is to use our own technology to incrementally improve our processes through each iteration. We think about it like a racetrack, where each lap teaches us something new and makes us more efficient.At first, we were driving slowly and erratically. As we completed each lap, we got better at honing our methods and processes, adding structure and improvements along the way.
Using tools such as robotic process automation (RPA), process mining, AI, and machine learning, we can take the menial and repetitive tasks out of loan processing or hardware allocation, for example, and automate all but the most complicated tasks.To encourage higher employee self-service rates at LIKE.TG, we follow the hyperautomation framework step by step using Now Platform features. We:
Define our business objectives using Continual Improvement Management
Analyze and optimize processes using Process Optimization
Discover automation opportunities using Process Optimization, Intent Discovery, and Automation Discovery
Design no-code/low-code apps using Virtual Agent and Flow Designer
Deploy RPA, Virtual Agent, Integration Hub, and AI using DevOps and Automation Engine
Monitor/measure against expectations using Project Portfolio Management
Govern and scale by creating LIKE.TG Centers of Excellence
Continually optimize using Continual Improvement
Realize value using Performance Analytics
And we always make sure to celebrate success.Achieving hyperautomationHyperautomation frees our employees to do bigger, bolder, and more interesting work. It makes work easier, more relevant, and more efficient for all of us.In fact, hyperautomation is one of the reasons we have an 81% self-service success rate across the enterprise, which translates to employees solving their own issues four out of every five times. That means only one out of five issues isn’t currently being solved by knowledge base articles or automation.Hyperautomation helps us save time and maximize productivity in our workdays. The best part? Every time we apply it to improve another process, we enable a better employee experience using our own technology.Get a hyperautomation tutorial in our on-demand Knowledge presentation, Now On Now: Hyperautomation, how we're becoming an autonomous digital enterprise.
How to optimize cloud operations in Microsoft Azure
LIKE.TG has embraced a three-zero strategy for its digital technology operations: zero unplanned outages, zero physical footprints, and zero user-reported incidents. We adopted a cloud-first policy as part of our zero-physical-footprint strategy. This approach delivers the operational agility we need as a growing company—we can add capacity on demand. With a data-center approach, that would take weeks or months.By moving our business-critical applications to Microsoft Azure, we’ve improved the user experience, increased application performance, and added redundancy to help avoid unplanned outages. But the migration story doesn’t end there. Just as crucial is how we optimize cloud operations after the migration is complete.The Now Platform has been invaluable in managing our cloud presence post migration. We use LIKE.TG Cloud Insights for dynamic, real-time insights into our Azure consumption and operational costs and LIKE.TG Security Operations for cyber resilience and vulnerability management.Post-migration considerationsThe migration of our enterprise resource planning (ERP), database, and analytics workloads to Azure was seamless, with no performance or data integrity issues. We completed the final cutover within 24 hours, saving $650,000 and 16 months of project work.One of the significant benefits of moving to the cloud is its scalability. Traffic spikes are handled with ease. However, moving to the cloud can be expensive, especially as our operations grow. We need to be smart about how we manage our operations to avoid spiraling costs. Post migration, we undertook a new phase: optimization. This is critical to any public cloud migration, especially during the first three months.We had three goals for our cloud optimization: increase performance/availability, reduce costs, and ensure security. We began by asking simple questions:
Were our virtual machines (VMs) operating efficiently?
Was there excess capacity, or were the VMs “right-sized”?
Could we reduce CPU and memory costs?
We monitored our high-cost, solid-state storage to ensure we weren’t paying for anything we didn’t need. By moving data from premium to cheaper storage, we were able to reduce our costs. Because of our cloud-first approach, we also implemented a zero-trust network that helped us shrink our firewall fleet by 90%.To make decisions, we rely on Microsoft Power BI, which feeds data to LIKE.TG Cloud Insights. That gives us dynamic, real-time insights into our Azure consumption and operational costs. With Microsoft Power BI, managing our cloud presence efficiently is much easier.
Intelligent dashboardOnce our business-critical applications were running in the cloud, we created our own Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE), a central governance dashboard running on the Now Platform. We use it to identify, track, and manage all our cloud assets and weigh workload performance against costs.The dashboard also provides a central hub for developer automation tools. Developers can order a VM from our service catalog, selecting the cloud provider and the proper VM spec. The fulfillment process is automated from request through provisioning. Integrations with Terraform and Ansible enable us to automate processes, saving valuable time. What used to take days or weeks now takes minutes.The dashboard delivers many benefits: self-service VM provisioning, automated chargeback costs and approvals, and standard processing. This in turn reduces friction between IT and the business regarding resourcing and scheduling.Security at the coreAutomating security was another major consideration in our optimization strategy. We use the CCoE portal to manage our vulnerability remediation. From the dashboard, employees can initiate action on vulnerable workloads, including automated patching.We use micro-segmentation on production workloads to protect dataflows and policy deployment across our environment. We also use LIKE.TG Vulnerability Response to manage our integration of LIKE.TG Incident Management with Microsoft Teams to improve cross-team collaboration.We rely on LIKE.TG Security Operations to secure our infrastructure by automatically deploying security patches to our VMs and monitoring for emerging security threats. To date, we’ve decreased our security risk. To reduce unplanned outages, we use LIKE.TG Agent Client Collector and LIKE.TG Health Log Analytics, which help predict service issues before they occur and automatically remediate them when possible.We also use Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) and Azure API Gateway to easily integrate the Now Platform with third-party security products to achieve scalability in our daily cloud operationsA unified approach to post-migrationThe three months following an Azure migration are just as important as the migration itself. Cloud optimization is vital to maximizing performance, controlling costs, and having a strong security posture. We’re confident knowing that we pay for what we use and can quickly eliminate excess capacity as we grow.We mitigate security threats and unexpected outages by protecting our infrastructure from bad actors. Fine-tuning these areas immediately after the migration was crucial in our journey to modernize our cloud footprint.Find out more about our partnership with Microsoft and how we run our business on LIKE.TG.
Meet Ash: Preventing customer outages head-on
At LIKE.TG, our work makes the world work. Our customers have high expectations, and we never want them to experience performance issues or system outages. Our customers’ success is our success, which is why it’s imperative their Now Platform instances run 24/7 with optimal performance.Our customer escalations team is responsible to “run to the fire,” says Ash U., director of account escalation engineering. Historically, the team was called in to put out fires. Working reactively, they manually determined the most pressing issues for their engineers to prioritize to get the situations under control.In regular analysis of customer escalations, the team noticed performance issues were increasing. This was due in part to the expanding number and size of customer instances and more complex customizations, some of which didn’t align with best practices.Wanting to be proactive, not reactive, in responding to escalating issues, the team needed to identify trends and root causes—“smoke”—in order to prevent fires.
