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Communication service providers in the time of COVID-19
Think about it. Without the efforts of communication service providers (CSPs) who handled a massive surge in traffic patterns, it would be much more difficult to work from home, learn online, or binge Tiger King. However, while they rose to the challenge, it also exposed the need for more agility in communications operations, sparking a renewed focus on the need for service transformation.Going forward, CSPs need to find a way to be more flexible, while simultaneously reducing costs in reaction to a slowing economy. And they will have to do it in a way that delivers an improved experience for agents, operations teams, and customers.Connecting the customer, the care, and the NOCThe challenge today is to create proactive service experiences that connect the customer, the care organization, and the network operations center (NOC).Imagine you’re an enterprise CIO during a major outage. The last thing you want is to be in the dark, unsure of what’s going on and when the outage will be resolved.Now imagine that the moment an outage occurs you immediately receive a text message with information on when it will be restored and any workarounds you can put in place. If you do contact customer care, you get quick answers and an estimated time for a fix. Meanwhile, within the operator, the NOC team can manage the affected services and track the SLA burn as they resolve the outage.This is a perfect example of a proactive service experience, and it is quickly becoming the gold standard for successful telecommunications companies. It can only be done when the NOC, with its context from network monitoring and network inventory data, can provide the relevant outage information to customer care, who can then use it it to alert the customer in real time.
New products make it possibleAt LIKE.TG it is our mission to create these amazing, proactive, and connected service experiences. Which is why I’m so excited to introduce two new telecommunications products, Telecommunications Service Management and Telecommunications Network Performance Management, which will be generally available later this year.Built on the Now Platform®, the products will extend LIKE.TG’s capabilities in customer service and network operations with new telecommunications-specific apps for Proactive Customer Care and Automated Service Assurance. Product highlights include:
End-to-end telecommunications service workflows will enable service providers to manage network and customer-initiated changes and troubles across services, automate issue resolution, and keep customers informed in their channel of choice.
TMForum Open API-based OSS integrations and event correlation capabilities will help service providers quickly identify network issues and the associated service and customer impacts for faster resolution.
eBonding will enable service providers to offer a direct connection for their enterprise customers, delivering a superior experience at a significantly reduced cost.
Together, these products can help pivot the experience from reactive to proactive and connected. The result? Significantly reduced costs in terms of call avoidance, and flexibility for the future as customers migrate to SDN and 5G-based services.It’s a win for everyone—the customer, the agent, and the CSP. Welcome to the future of digital workflows for the communications industry.Use of Forward–Looking StatementsThis blog contains “forward–looking statements” regarding our expectations, future plans and performance. Forward–looking statements are subject to known and unknown risks and uncertainties and are based on potentially inaccurate assumptions that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expected or implied by the forward–looking statements. If any such risks or uncertainties materialize or if any of the assumptions prove incorrect, our results could differ materially from the results expressed or implied by the forward–looking statements we make. Factors that may cause actual results to differ materially from those in any forward–looking statements include: (i) delays and unexpected difficulties and expenses in making generally available the telecommunications products, (ii) uncertainty whether sales of such products will justify these investments and (iii) changes in the regulatory landscape relevant to enterprises operating in the telecommunications industry. We undertake no obligation, and do not intend, to update these forward–looking statements
The Keys to Unlocking Growth in Telecom
The telecom industry is seeing major growth but also big shakeups. Communication Service Providers (CSPs) are transforming from only being providers of communication and data services into essential business partners, co-innovating with their customers while providing an increasing number of value-added services such as multi-cloud, the Internet of Things (IoT), 5G, mission-critical applications and cybersecurity. For both mobile and fixed operators, the complexity of service delivery on their networks continues to increase and customers are demanding more than ever before.CSPs are responding by revamping and rebuilding their portfolios and offerings to enable fluid, digital experiences. Leading operators are taking this further not just to survive but thrive in this new landscape. While laying this digital foundation, they are also focusing on strategic areas to unlock competitive differentiation and growth, starting with transforming their customer experiences.Here are some of the keys to help CSPs unlock growth.Connecting the organization and channelsOne of the most significant problems in current CSP customer experiences is that disconnected departments and systems prevent the delivery of exceptional customer service. Without a complete picture of a customer’s product and service usage, operational performance, service interactions, and related information, issue resolution slows, and customer satisfaction remains low.No customer wants to be in the dark, and no operator wants to find itself in the cross-hairs of regulators with impacted services magnified by a poor response. Take, for example, a network outage that affects a coverage area. With centralized visibility and operational insights:
The Network Operations Center (NOC) and dispatched field service team can update the issue and the estimated time to resolution (TTR)
Using this information customer teams can pro-actively notify their impacted subscribers across multiple channels based on established escalation processes
Customers are able to prepare and plan appropriately
Customer service benefits from reducing inbound calls
A connected organization improves the overall issue resolution experience for customers, ensuring better preparedness and the ability to reduce the impact of operational issues.Operators are in a 24x7 business and staff must be ready around the clock to support their users. Best in class operators are connecting workflows across departments, systems, and processes allow for a unified view of customer issues and drives accountability throughout the organization. This unlocks the ability to resolve customer issues more efficiently and effectively, creating significant business value.Increase agent productivity, drive efficiencyBusiness customers often have complex solutions in place, and an increasing number of connected applications, so accurate and knowledgeable professionals need to be able to support these extensive integrations adequately. Telecom services for clients often change with contract renewals causing a ripple effect across pricing, core services, service level agreements (SLAs), capacity levels and customer support levels. During these transitions, it is critical to have solid customer insight to properly address customer issues and concerns.The linchpin in keeping customers happy and the wheels of an organization rolling smoothly is knowledge. Knowledge needs to be captured, centralized and made accessible to get the latest information into the hands of the agent that needs it.Analytics, automation, and machine learning capabilities all provide agents with superpowers that help them increase their call resolution efficiency and ultimately leads to higher agent and customer satisfaction. Many contact centers are exploring artificial intelligence technologies to differentiate their service, such as classifying content, routing cases based on agent skills, or providing smarter chat bots.Leading CSP customer organizations are using advanced technology to unlock differentiated customer experiences and build smarter operations. Negative customer experience can impact a CSP’s reputation and overall brand. Routing customers and agents to the next best action, improving self-service, or speeding case classification all help free agent time to focus on the complex issues that require human intervention and ingenuity.Create value from what you knowService providers continue to improve their ability to diagnose and resolve issues and as a result, are gathering an exponential amount of data that can further advance service assurance and performance management. This data is a gold mine of information for creating an engine that drives improved customer loyalty, reducing churn and fueling growth.The industry is becoming more data-driven, encouraging increased integration of customer service platforms with operations and business support systems (OSS/BSS). This combination supports better service solutions, improved operational agility and breaks down organizational silos by connecting network infrastructure, business applications, and customer visibility.Consolidated systems allow for the optimization of operations and customer data, giving providers a more comprehensive view of the customer. Understanding all dimensions of a customer’s product and services helps providers proactively resolve issues and better understand their overall performance metrics such as response time and churn. The data can also provide actionable insights to increase the efficiency of time to market and agile operations.Craft a culture of experienceFinally, and perhaps most importantly, every operator needs to focus on crafting a culture of customer experience. Increasingly, solutions are software-defined and increase the pressure on providers to provide immediate and high-quality customer interactions. Customer experience leaders start with their differentiating purpose in mind and then focus on improving their most essential customer journeys first.Analyzing and mapping the customer journey can also reveal where proactive and transparent support opportunities will get the customer to their purpose faster and with less effort. By engaging the entire organization, the customer’s experience can be transformed into one that achieves the customer’s mission but also engenders customer satisfaction and even delight.From your service representatives – both customer service and field service – to engineering and finance, providing full visibility into the issue can more effectively focus the organization on root cause issue resolution. Removing organizational silos enables operators to focus on achieving the customer’s purpose thereby improving both the customer experience and service delivery.The takeawayCompetition and change are a given in today’s digital world. Competitors are just a click away, and loyalty is increasingly determined by experience, not product, service or length of a business relationship. CSP leaders are adopting a customer engagement mentality to drive market differentiation. In fact of CSPs, 68% view customer experience as their number one strategic priority.Communication Service Providers play a vital role in helping their business customers accelerate growth. Businesses are demanding better experiences and operators must deliver sophisticated products, better data and analytics, and organizational experience. Industry leaders must unlock this unprecedented opportunity and rework their customer experience to establish themselves as a valued partner, helping their customers expand and capture new digital opportunities while driving business growth.
New research shows the transformative power of AI
The more I talk with LIKE.TG customers, the more excited I get about the transformative power of AI. Early adopters are reaping the benefits of AI-powered self-service, increased agent efficiency, enhanced developer productivity, and more.That’s why I’m excited to share the findings of LIKE.TG’s inaugural Enterprise AI Maturity Index study, conducted in partnership with Oxford Economics. The responses of 4,500 global business leaders confirm the revolutionary potential of AI, with 81% of the C-suite actively engaged in AI efforts.Last year, organizations allotted 15% of their technology budgets to AI. A decisive majority plan to increase AI spending next year.Those leading the charge, which we refer to as AI pacesetters, are doing so with the recognition that AI is not a point solution. They’re using it to integrate existing workflows and invent new ones to make their businesses run faster, smarter, and more efficiently.
AI in actionI get inspired when I think about how British Telecom (BT) Group, with operations in 180 countries, embraced AI to reimagine its customer service processes, which formerly ran on 56 different legacy service management systems and involved 15,000 people.We were able to help BT Group get on a path to consolidating those service management systems on the LIKE.TG platform, automating processes, and saving nearly $32 million. That’s the power of AI.Food manufacturer Mondelez International is another example. AI-powered HR Service Delivery helped the company increase its overall employee self-service rate by 76%, while the AI Search functionality in Employee Center helped improve deflection rates to between 30% and 60%, depending on the region. Those are significant improvements.AI for the winMost organizations we surveyed are early in their journey toward AI maturity. But the pacesetters are supercharging their AI efforts, scaling AI with groundbreaking cross-functional workflows, and building the right skills across their organizations.The numbers speak for themselves: 74% of AI pacesetters are already seeing a positive return on investment, and one in three is hitting returns of 15% or more.The reality is AI offers organizations an attainable way to connect people, processes, and technologies across the enterprise with cross-functional workflows. That integrated approach can create a competitive advantage. Laying the groundwork today to be an AI-connected enterprise tomorrow is imperative.Get more insights about the transformative power of AI in the complimentary Enterprise AI Maturity Index 2024.
Best practices for digital transformation in the telecom sector
As a former ‘customer side’ telecom professional, I’m in the fortunate position of having regular and open discussions with CEOs and CIOs across the industry.We talk about the issues and challenges facing the telecom industry and the exciting opportunities for change and growth.Not surprisingly, a major topic among us in recent months has been the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and the lessons learned from this period. While the lifting of lockdowns brings a shift in focus, it is still unchartered territory, and how the industry can best move forward remains an open questionTo gauge sector opinion on this issue, we recently held a roundtable (virtual, of course) with five major telecom players across EMEA. It was a fantastic opportunity to hear about the experiences of digital transformation and the major role it’s playing in shaping post-COVID strategies.I’ve outlined the key takeaways from the session and our conclusions about what is really needed to achieve resilient and effective digital transformation in telecom organizations.People powerWe all agreed that creating the best possible customer experiences required starting with the experiences of our own employees. A happy and fulfilled workforce is more productive, collaborative, and more likely to embrace change. Employee satisfaction remains one of the most important goals for any telecom business.We also agreed that simply introducing a technology platform is never enough to effect change. The tools themselves do not make a transformation project successful -- people do. We discussed how getting people to buy into change had to happen on two levels:1. Executive level: To ensure transformation is successful within a business, you have to get buy-in from the very top — and not just fleeting support or approval. It must be a passion project that they can throw themselves behind.Pressures and challenges will always come in the form of questions around budget, timing and ROI, but if the project is actively sponsored by a C-level exec, then the workforce is much more likely to engage.2. Senior management level: One step down from the C-level ‘sponsor’ of a digital transformation programme is the senior management decision makers. This group must establish common and achievable goals that can be filtered down to teams. Without this clarity, a project can spin out of control. Managers must have a clear vision of their desired outcome and a realistic idea of how the business will get there.Sending a clear messageAfter that project roadmap has been established, the next step, is execution – how teams are mobilised to get the job done. And this must always start with communication.A common theme in the roundtable was how challenging but vital it is to set out a clear mission to teams and employees about why the project is being done and why digital transformation is important. Everyone in the business must understand the objectives, benefits, and processes before they can be expected to engage.At this point, too, senior managers and executives will need to step in to remove any resistance to the project.Genuine concerns must be addressed, and any apprehensions should be weeded out as soon as possible so, they don’t fester within teams. Barriers should be raised publicly and discussed collaboratively, with clear messages given about how they will be tackled and overcome.Enabling acceptanceAnother unanimous agreement within the group was that it’s vital to invest time and resources into the longer-term business change process. It’s not realistic or fair to introduce new processes or platforms and expect everyone to be comfortable and confident with them right away.Training, early involvement and transparency are all key in making sure people know what’s coming, how to navigate change, and who to ask if they have a question or concern.In terms of the telecom sector specifically, we talked about the importance of engaging agents in the digital transformation process. B2B relationships in this industry are reliant on agents, so whenever a change is implemented, they must be empowered to feel like part of the transformation.You need to become the agent’s agent, giving them the support they need to navigate new processes.Restoring orderOne thing that emerged from the roundtable that was new (and fascinating) to me, was the concept of order management for B2B customers. Just as many of us during lockdown have become accustomed to ordering items and eagerly awaiting their arrival, it can be an anxious wait for business customers who have placed a large order with a telecom firm.For example, if a bank orders a batch of phones for employees, it needs to know when they are arriving, what set-up they require and what support is available. So, the concept of order management, where smart systems are used to catalogue and communicate the progress of an order to customers, is becoming increasingly welcome.A simple automated message that updates the customer on their order status is both reassuring and practical, allowing them to make the necessary arrangements to receive and process the delivery, thus giving the customer a great experience.The consumerisation of B2BIt was this last point that led us to discuss another topic that is close to my heart and becoming increasingly debated among telecom professionals. Personalisation and automation have, for a while, played a major part in consumer customer service–. They should in the B2B world, too.Taking the order management example mentioned above, as consumers we know we can expect similar order updates from retailers and delivery drivers. Food delivery services have become extremely creative in this regard; for example, offering an animated diagram depicting whether your order is being prepared or cooked or is already out for delivery. This level of personalisation and innovation brings a sense of joy and anticipation to the ordering process.It’s now time for businesses to embrace the benefits of this creativity in their B2B operations. We are, after all, people, whether we are operating in a personal or professional capacity.I strongly believe that telecom and other professional industries must take a page from the consumer book and implement personalised, digitally driven innovations to transform the customer experience.Telecom is a fast moving and highly competitive industry, and now more than ever we have to adapt and learn in order to grow and succeed.It was a privilege to host and participate in this roundtable, and I look forward to facilitating further discussion across the telecom sector so we can learn, develop, and succeed in our digital transformation efforts.
Unlocking the Telco Tangle
Simplifying the SpaghettiWhen I listen to our telecommunications customers describe their biggest frustrations, a consistent theme is the need to seamlessly connect across silos, systems, and processes. Work should be intuitive.But as work-from-home directives have transformed living rooms into makeshift offices, classrooms, and gyms, telcommunications providers – the backbone of the new normal – must transform operations and remove friction points to deliver seamless work experiences as transmission loads and reliance on networks skyrocket.As companies prepare to restart in the second half of 2020, telco executives must ensure that COVID-era digital transformation projects fit this new framework properly.Among all the changes for telcos this year, one thing has remained the same: the need to seek competitive advantage through greater agility and scale. Digitizing to become more customer-centric is non-negotiable, regardless of a company’s size or market position.Telcos require increasingly smart and flexible combinations of technology infrastructure, as they simplify the process of meeting the communication needs of consumer and enterprise customers.The customer journey, however, could hardly be more complex.Take the home broadband installation process: internet service providers must navigate numerous touchpoints in the provisioning process – including wholesale backhaul and transit providers, peering partners, physical installation, delivery and set up of routers, activation – before billing the customer.While most enterprises have four to five core platforms in their ecosystem that employees need to manage, for telcos that number is often greater.Digital transformation of the telco enterprise, therefore, two major goals: Unlocking productivity through automation and orchestration of workloads across every department, and creating great experiences for customers and employees – by focusing on what people encounter, observe, or feel when they interact with a service. Employees, for instance, shouldn’t have to spend a lot of time looking for things; to the contrary, things should come looking for them.It is this industry-wide challenge to simplify spaghetti-like internal systems and processes that led LIKE.TG to develop a solution specifically for telecommunications providers.Delivered in partnership with Accenture, our suite of workflows will change how telcos operate and support their delivery of reimagined customer experiences.We’ve created intelligent workflows that align customer care and service assurance by proactively anticipating customer-facing issues and addressing them quickly. Our solution uses machine learning to help remove back-office bottlenecks and orchestrate workflows between departments.By applying intelligence to everyday processes within the telco – prioritizing, categorizing, routing workflows, predicting anomalies – employees get more work more easily. Data can be quickly and accurately correlated to identify common errors. Remediations can be predicted, freeing up employees to personalize the customer experience.Francesco Venturini, Accenture’s senior managing director and communications media industry lead, said this new set of integrated solutions will improve automation, efficiency, and effectiveness in customer service management, service assurance, and intelligent network operations through a combination of technology, analytics, and operation solutions.Complexity demands simplicityAs organizations prepare for the next wave of challenges, investment in digital transformation will help reshape business and boost productivity. With the transition to 5G underway, and as utilities move into broadband and telcos eyeing new opportunities in the energy industry, customer experience will become the next competitive battleground.LIKE.TG’s telecommunications solution accelerates digital transformation, breathing new life into legacy platforms and putting people at the heart of every workflow. The onus is on senior executives to ensure that native digital experiences go well beyond front-of-house teams to embrace the enterprise.
Industry-focused solutions break ground at LIKE.TG
LIKE.TG customers everywhere really appreciate how our digital workflow solutions make work, work better for people. Now we’re taking an exciting step forward with new industry-focused solutions. These solutions will deliver workflows to help companies in specific industries address their unique digital transformation challenges and create value at scale. One of our first is targeted at the telecommunications industry.Our telecommunications industry-focused solution breaks new ground by aligning customer care and service assurance. Our goal is to help communications service providers (CSPs) transform the delivery of great customer experiences by proactively anticipating issues and addressing them quickly while maximizing availability and quality of service.Why an industry-specific telecom solution?If you are a CSP, you’re probably experiencing first-hand the intense digital disruption, causing companies like yours to move fast to embrace new technologies. According to Forbes, some of the biggest technologies revolutionizing telecoms today are:
5G: Supports a hundredfold increase in connected devices per unit area
AI: Used behind the scenes with virtual assistants and chatbots to improve customer service
Big Data: Telecoms need to be able to move huge amounts of data on their networks and address new security challenges
At the same time, CSPs know there’s a huge need to adapt to changing customer expectations due new competitors and the popularity of smart phones and mobile technologies. Telecom companies are also grappling with the need to rollout new products faster to grow revenues while reducing operational costs. LIKE.TG recognizes that the business sector represents the biggest opportunity for telecom providers in the coming years. But legacy systems, complex processes, and long handling times are just some of the barriers CSPs are grappling with in an effort to provide the digital-first engagements and personalized experiences companies in the business sector expect.
Pave the way for a more profitable futureLIKE.TG already works with some of the top CSPs in the industry—Vodafone, Tata Communications, and Proximus, just to name a few—to pave a path to a more profitable future.Find out more about how LIKE.TG telecom solutions can give you greater agility and scale in today’s cloud-first world.
4 ways AI-first organizations can become industry leaders
Generative AI (GenAI) can be divisive. While its potential to revolutionize industries is undeniable, ethical concerns, job displacement fears, and privacy concerns may make leaders hesitant to implement it. However, amid these debates, one thing has become increasingly clear: AI-first organizations are spearheading success in their industries.To prosper as an AI-first organization, AI needs to permeate daily work across the business. GenAI has the ability to help people work better, smarter, and faster. Let’s take a look at how industries can put AI to work for people.1. Take an AI-first approachWith the push to provide better care for more people at less cost, healthcare providers are struggling to meet expectations. GenAI can assist with and augment routine tasks such as documentation, transcription, and patient handoffs to give overworked staff more time for patient care.To gain insights into how GenAI can improve employee and patient experiences, Brian Solis, head of global innovation at LIKE.TG, led a panel discussion with leaders from Accenture, Babson College, and ServiceNow.2. Be future-readyFrom optimizing the supply chain to predicting customer needs, GenAI can help manufacturers improve operational processes. Many manufacturing companies have already begun experimenting with the technology.In Be the future-ready manufacturer, experts from Deloitte and the MIT Sloan School of Management explore the importance of a targeted and open-minded GenAI approach in gaining a competitive edge.
3. Focus on customersAs the financial sector continues to evolve, banks are increasingly turning to GenAI to enhance operations, improve customer experience, and drive innovation. Although some may believe GenAI is too unpredictable to be used in high-risk organizations, it can actually help banks increase transparency and mitigate risk.Taking a customer-centric approach to implementing GenAI can help banks improve both customer satisfaction and employee productivity. Find out how banks can deliver compliant and efficient experiences with GenAI in Customer-centric experiences in banking with AI.4. Deliver exceptional serviceAs the pioneers of the AI era, technology companies are at the forefront of using GenAI to improve their products and services. Now is the time for tech professionals to do what they do best: be innovative, experimental, and adaptable.GenAI has immense potential for technology companies. The key is to start small and build slowly. Join Adam Cheyer, co-creator of Siri, and other tech leaders as they discuss how to Deliver better experiences in the tech industry with AI.We’re on the cusp of an exciting time with GenAI. Put AI to work for your industry to unlock the exponential power of an AI-first enterprise.
LIKE.TG and Box Together Power Future of Work, Drive Digital Transformation
People today expect great digital experiences, regardless of where they’re working, and to keep pace, companies are embracing technology that makes the work experience better, faster and more productive. By finding solutions that allow seamless transitions between technology, the digital experience is improved.As LIKE.TG continues its mission to be the company that makes work easier, we’re thrilled to announce today integrations between LIKE.TG and Box, Inc. The platform integration provides customers with an enhanced content management experience for their most important business processes, making the world of work, work better for people.
No longer will employees need to toggle between both platforms to get work done but instead, they can securely access the Box files they need where they’re already working – from within the Now Platform®. This is especially important considering the ongoing war for talent. Our recent research found that investment in technology is directly connected to success in attracting and retaining top talent.Driving the Future of WorkBuilt on LIKE.TG’s IntegrationHub – with codeless workflows in an intuitive, natural language user interface that allows anyone to update – the new integration allows companies and employees to:
Boost Productivity: With the LIKE.TG and Box integration, workers can perform common Box actions – such as the ability to search for and preview files, create groups or share content – directly from the Now Platform.
Enhance and streamline onboarding: Companies can provide a new Box account to employees on day one through LIKE.TG’s Enterprise Onboarding and Transitions, allowing new employees on-demand access to the tools needed to be successful in their new role. Companies can manage employees’ accounts simply as their role changes, while maintaining the security and governance capabilities of files stored in Box.
Customize at scale: No matter the business need, companies can efficiently build workflows and customize the Box integration with LIKE.TG Flow Designer and LIKE.TG IntegrationHub.
Securely Collaborate: With Box’s enterprise-grade capabilities that stick to the highest security and compliance standards, employees can safely access, preview and share files.
Driving Digital Transformation Across the EnterpriseWorking together, we’ll continue our mission to drive digital transformation across the enterprise to deliver great employee experiences. As part of that, Box will also build a set of native integrations that provide customers with easy-to-use content management solutions, including:
Secure access to Box content directly from within LIKE.TG records
Link specific Box folders to LIKE.TG records automatically
Save files directly to Box from the Now Platform, ensuring safety of a company’s most valuable content through Box’s leading security and governance capabilities – Box Governance, Key Safe and Box Zones.
The integration is scheduled to be available on the LIKE.TG Store this year, and we can’t wait to provide our customers with a seamless, best-of-breed application that allows secure collaboration of content wherever and whenever.
Applying generative AI in telecom
Generative AI (GenAI) tools produce original text, audio, code, image, 3-D asset, or video by learning from existing data. Using large language models (LLMs) trained on enormous amounts of input, GenAI can make sense of patterns on a massive scale and create new content based on those inputs. When such patterns are identified, so are opportunities for building better processes.Applying generative AI in telecom can improve business processes, customer experiences, and network operations. GenAI is well positioned to help telecom companies move past the industry’s present challenges.Leading the way togetherMany telecom companies have been early GenAI adopters. “Telecom as an industry has a low margin and a high IT spend,” says Rohit Batra, general manager and vice president for telecom, media, and tech at ServiceNow. “GenAI can transform the telecom industry. It’s becoming a topic in pretty much every board meeting and strategy meeting.” Moving GenAI from board agenda item to solutions that a telecom company can actually use requires both an early-adopter mindset and the right combination of technology. In collaboration with NVIDIA, LIKE.TG is integrating GenAI capabilities on the Now Platform specifically for the telecom industry.“As a telecom business unit leader, I don’t need to worry about building or customizing a generative AI model that has telecom domain knowledge of order management or customer service,” explains Lilac Ilan, global head of business development and telco operations for NVIDIA. Instead, it’s done natively on the LIKE.TG platform.That means LIKE.TG platform users don’t have to become experts in GenAI learning. The pairing of the Now Platform with NVIDIA AI software and accelerated infrastructure enables telecom providers to harness the power of GenAI effectively, quickly, and safely.
Solving industry challengesSince 2019, the average revenues for the world’s top 10 telecom operators have grown by only 2.7% per year, according to Roland Berger. At the same time, rolling out 5G and fiber networks has meant massive capital spending.Amid rising competition, the need for effective solutions has never been more acute. Adopting GenAI can help telecom companies create two key opportunities for themselves, according to Batra: higher employee productivity and increased efficiency. This leaves telecom leaders asking: What industry-specific use cases will help accomplish that?Three major areas have been identified where GenAI can have the greatest impact in telecom:
Network management
Contact center
Service support
Many early-adopter LIKE.TG customers are starting with customer experience. This includes using GenAI for incident summarization, case summarization, knowledge creation, and order management use cases.Putting customers firstMeeting customer expectations quickly and efficiently is one of telecom’s biggest challenges. Customer-facing agents must constantly maintain expertise in a diverse range of services—all while managing manual processes and legacy systems to provide customers with accurate, dependable support.“We spoke to multiple telecom customers, and the problem was very similar for all [of them],” says Shubham Mittal, a telecom product engineer at LIKE.TG who specializes in GenAI. “They are spending a significant amount of time on service desk tasks and understanding customer issues, which greatly delays the overall service assurance process.”That’s why customer experience has quickly surfaced as a top priority for telecom. Mittal identifies this as an area where telecom companies can start seeing immediate benefits.“In today's digital age, we're always striving to improve the customer experience continuously,” he says. “With these rapid advancements coming up in the technology, it’s paving the way for the adoption of generative AI.”
Streamlining processesIn telecom, improving customer experience is inextricable from improving the workflow processes of both front-office and back-office teams. With GenAI, network and service operations teams can significantly enhance incident response, improve customer satisfaction, and contribute to the overall effectiveness of incident management processes.For example, GenAI can bring faster resolution and better overall customer experience to fiber cuts, an all-too-familiar occurrence in telecom.A fiber cut incident triggers a multitude of events, leaving incident management teams dealing with a range of challenges. Teams are inundated with complex, technical data generated by monitoring tools and systems, including logs, alerts, event details, and diagnostic information. This flood of data can quickly become unmanageable and make it difficult to distinguish critical information from noise.“For the first time ever, LIKE.TG has shown how generative AI can deliver incident management teams a clear, streamlined account of the event, free of technical jargon,” NVIDIA’s Ilan says. The notes accompanying an incident can provide essential context, including the exact location the fiber cut occurred.But the story doesn’t end there. As an incident evolves into a case and customers get notified as part of the case creation, LIKE.TG ensures the message is not only concise and free of technical jargon, but is also tailored to contain only relevant information for the affected customer.The road aheadThe introduction of GenAI’s problem-solving skills marks a paradigm shift in the telecom industry. “The reason we’re seeing it, and the reason telecom companies are stepping in to invest in that technology, is because they’re seeing the business impact of it,” Ilan says.She notes that telecom companies need a four-ingredient recipe to engage fully in this shift: data, accelerated computing capabilities, training tools, and skills. LIKE.TG is collaborating with NVIDIA to create a winning GenAI recipe for telecom companies.LIKE.TG brings the data and skills. NVIDIA brings the power to compute and the LLM training tools. And telecom companies bring their skilled teams.Find out more about how LIKE.TG helps bring intelligent workflow automation to life with GenAI.
Moving communications service providers beyond traditional telecom
Communications service providers (CSPs) have been at the forefront of the pandemic, helping customers and entire industries make critical transformations almost overnight. When education, healthcare delivery methods, and supply chains were interrupted, CSPs stepped up and provided digital work environments and automations that became lifelines.Now, CSPs are laying the foundation for even more. Multi-access computing (MEC), 5G, and reducing the cost and complexity of managing networks are only the beginning of what’s to come.“Our strategy for telecommunications is simple,” says Rohit Batra, head of product for telecommunications and media at ServiceNow. It’s “to be the system of action for CSPs to deliver frictionless workflows across the entire customer journey.”Simplicity is at the core of LIKE.TG: the delivery of products, the ecosystem to enable next-gen services, and the customer experience itself. Whether CSPs are launching new services or transforming an existing business, LIKE.TG helps them drive, innovate, and execute transformation strategies by connecting ordering and assurance workflows.Streamlining order managementToday’s order management approach doesn’t scale to the needs of modern CSPs. It generally requires stitching together multiple disconnected systems and labor-intensive processes.Deutsche Telekom, one of the world’s leading information and communications technology providers, worked with LIKE.TG to streamline its order management process so it could bring solutions to market faster, increase productivity, and reduce the complexity of its web of legacy systems.With LIKE.TG, the company has improved order capture and gained needed billing updates, order orchestration workflows, inventory updates in real time, and the ability to use TM Forum open APIs—all within a single platform.
Proactively addressing customer careAnother challenge for CSPs is the ongoing pressure to reduce cost to serve. For example, a tier 1 telecom provider may have tens of thousands of customer care agents who use multiple, disparate legacy systems with complex processes. This can lead to excessive handling times, rising costs to serve customers, and service-level agreement breaches for enterprise customers.BT Group, which serves B2B and B2C customers in 180 countries, worked with LIKE.TG to transform its BT Meetings division. The different groups making up BT Meetings each used their own processes and tools, many of them customized and at the end of life. Each group also had different service desks that relied on manual processes centered on email and phone.LIKE.TG Telecommunications Service Management helped with automation and self-service capabilities—particularly Virtual Agent, Service Catalog, and Predictive Intelligence. As a result, BT moved 70,000 customers and 1 million services to LIKE.TG, retired two legacy systems, and achieved a staggering 85% agent satisfaction.Automating service assuranceDelivering reliable, predictable, and transparent services makes for strong customer relationships, allowing CSPs to protect existing revenue and cross-sell new or expanded services and products.Lumen turned to the Now Platform to transform the delivery and assurance of its next-generation connectivity services, specifically integrated workflows across Day 1 and Day 2 operations.“Today’s customer is looking for the package, which means you need to orchestrate across multiple control domains to be able to deliver that capability. We see that as really being one of the strong suits of the LIKE.TG platform—to be able to take a larger role within our Lumen ecosystem,” says Shawn Draper, Lumen vice president of enterprise platform engineering.Learn more about how your communications company can transform the customer and employee experience and better manage network and technology investments. Download our Telecommunications Book of Knowledge.
3 ways telecommunications companies can improve the customer experience
The COVID-19 pandemic brought connectivity to the forefront, as companies quickly shifted to remote working. As the new world of hybrid work emerges, connectivity continues to be at the center of conversations, putting pressure on telecommunications companies to deliver.At the same time, customers are demanding a better user experience with more consistent, high-quality service, shorter wait times, and personalized interactions. For telecom companies to meet these demands and continue to thrive, they must change their ways of thinking to put customers at the center of the business while also finding ways to cut costs.LIKE.TG can help telecom companies improve the customer experience in three key ways:1. Take a people-first approachTelecom companies that don’t adapt to customer demands won't be able to compete in the marketplace. In a global market expected to reach $2.7 trillion in 2021 and $3.5 trillion in 2025, according to Research and Markets, that’s a risky move.Our on-demand webinar Putting customers at the heart of digital transformation will walk you through British telecom company BT Group’s service experience transformation. Hear from BT Principal Enterprise Architect Alex Bell how adopting a cloud-native, co-innovation plan led to the company's “digital born” portfolio strategy.Omdia analyst James Crawshaw and Chris Holmes, LIKE.TG telecommunications industry director, join Bell for this in-depth discussion.2. Embrace integrationOne thing that can help customers have a more seamless experience with telecom companies is integration and interoperability of components within their IT systems. Open APIs can facilitate that by enabling plug-in capabilities a company might not have on its own, such as click-to-call.Watch our How to lead in the open API economy webinar to learn about the more than 50 REST-based open APIs developed by members of the TM Forum. You’ll also discover how these APIs are being used, their benefits, and what they mean for customers.3. Support connectivity as a serviceIn its simplest terms, connectivity as a service is an end-to-end managed service that bundles connectivity technologies to best meet user requirements.Our TM Forum: Connectivity as a service webinar tackles this subject head-on to provide insight into the advantages of adopting a CaaS business model and enabling CaaS services. You’ll learn how much automation is required for these solutions and how they can put your organization in a better position with customers. Panelists include:
Tim McElligott, senior analyst at TM Forum
Andrew De La Torre, group VP of technology at Oracle Communications
Chris Holmes, head of telecom, media and technology at LIKE.TG EMEA
3 ways 5G can help telecommunications companies improve business
5G technology promises user benefits that include faster network speeds, better remote access to networks, more seamless videoconferencing, and more robust network security. These are all necessities for the new world of work, and many are eager to embrace them.The technology also offers advantages to telecommunications companies:
Higher system capacity
Reduced latency
Increased data throughput rates
Energy savings
Cost reduction
Despite those benefits, many telecom providers continue to struggle with legacy processes. LIKE.TG, has you covered with webinars on the benefits of 5G for telecom companies. The webinars address three main themes: Service assurance, order management and business outcomes.1. Service assuranceEnsuring services offered meet predefined service quality levels is always top of mind for telecom companies. The rise of 5G is transforming the nature of service assurance. Watch our Service assurance in the 5G era webinar to learn strategies to break down silos and legacy processes. Two analysts from TM Forum join LIKE.TG’s Rohit Batra, head of product, telecom, media, and technology, for this discussion.2. Order managementThe key ingredient for keeping customers happy is efficient order management. Communications service providers are revamping the way they address this all-important initiative to not only improve customer satisfaction, but also to optimize internal operations. In our Order management for the 5G era webinar, a panel of experts share the latest trends and tips to help you streamline order management in your organization.Optimizing order management is only half the battle. You also need to scale it to truly reap the rewards of 5G and multi-access edge computing (MEC). To do that successfully requires a new approach. In our Reimagining order management in the 5G era webinar, Jim Hodges, research director at Omdia, joins LIKE.TG’s Batra for a conversation about ways to enhance order management.3. Business outcomes approachTraditionally, telecom operators have sold network capacity. The rise of 5G and MEC have led to a need for transformation. Capacity is no longer enough. To embrace ecosystem partners, operators need to shift their focus to business outcomes. Join our Can operators sell outcomes to ecosystem partners? webinar for an interactive discussion between LIKE.TG experts, the head of GSMA intelligence, and a mobile industry journalist.
LIKE.TG EMEA Partner Summit awards 2019 and the winner is…
First we had the Golden Globes, then came the Baftas and the Oscars. Then, just to keep the glitz and glamour of award season going strong, LIKE.TG hosted its annual partner awards ceremony as part of this year’s LIKE.TG EMEA Partner Summit 2019.Staged in the Catalan capital city of Barcelona, LIKE.TG is driving forwards with a renewed effort to create a vibrant and world-class partner ecosystem that enables and accelerates our growth.LIKE.TG’s partners are a diverse and vibrant group of professional organisations who drive digital transformation agenda and valued business outcomes for their clients. From large global systems integrators and strategic outsourcers through to organisations operating in specific industry verticals or solution areas, LIKE.TG’s partners share a common thread in terms of their commitment to accelerating customer success and driving the realisation of our customers desired business outcomes.This year’s LIKE.TG EMEA Partner Summit 2019 winners included the following luminaries.EMEA IT Workflow Partner of the Year: FujitsuThis award recognises Fujitsu’s commitment to delivering extremely high standards to its customer success charter and digital transformation strategy. In 2018, the company set the benchmark for large-scale training and broad coverage of the LIKE.TG portfolio.EMEA Employee Workflow Partner of the Year: DevoteamThis award recognises the huge impact that Devoteam has made within the Employee Workflow space, creating new, people-focused solutions that enable employees across businesses to communicate, store, share, collaborate and much more.EMEA Customer Workflow Partner of the Year: AccentureLIKE.TG’s Customer Workflow offerings were the foundation of the biggest EMEA joint wins with Accenture. Accenture’s domain expertise around customer service provided the innovation as LIKE.TG customers looked to transform the way they were delivering customer service.EMEA App Development Platform Partner of the Year: WranguThis award recognises Wrangu’s significant contribution in EMEA, achieving the top Annual Contract Value in 2018.EMEA Service Provider Partner of the Year: AtosDuring 2018, Atos expanded its LIKE.TG footprint with some flagship accounts and complex, but highly rewarding wins. Its increased technical capabilities in-house and updated LIKE.TG outsourced platforms also made the company stand out. Notably, Atos also unveiled a new market offering to deliver secure hybrid cloud, machine learning, and collaboration solutions for the enterprise, all of which are underpinned by the NOW Platform™.EMEA Accelerated Growth Partner of the Year: CrossfuzeWith its innovative Smart Launch services package, Crossfuze UKampI grew its business more than six times in 2018, helping to accelerate Commercial and Named account acquisition.EMEA Digital Transformation Partner of the Year: DeloitteDeloitte has delivered notable flagship transformation programs across EMEA within IT, employee and customer workflows, with Client Transformation underpinning the company’s LIKE.TG practice growth in 2018.EMEA Industry Solutions Partner of the Year: DXCThis award recognises DXC’s outstanding industry-focused go-to-market strategy and expertise, which drove successful joint business with LIKE.TG in EMEA in 2018 across industries such as healthcare, manufacturing and energy.EMEA Partner of the Year: AccentureAs LIKE.TG’s EMEA Partner of the Year for 2018, Accenture holds the top spot in terms of influenced Annual Contract Value and LIKE.TG Practice practitioners in EMEA. Its commitment and investment in LIKE.TG are anchored on a tightly aligned, joint multi-year business plan that drives innovation and positive business outcomes for mutual clients.
Elevating telecom service delivery: A chat with industry experts
The telecommunications industry led the charge on technology adoption decades ago. Now the industry is facing a severe technology debt. As customers demand faster and better products, companies must somehow update or adapt legacy infrastructure to deliver cutting-edge services.To keep up, executives are making bold choices: investing billions in infrastructure to keep up with demands for digital services and building workflows to eliminate silos between departments. But these moves are easier said than done.I spoke with three industry experts on the Innovation Today podcast to learn how companies at the top of their game are elevating telecom service delivery.The quest for quality experiencesTelecom companies are under tremendous pressure to deliver digital services on demand. That’s not as simple as shipping new products. Most telecom companies’ customers have already experienced a digital transformation, which has elevated their expectations for their telecom service providers, according to Ben Bendre, an associate partner with the Global Center of Competency for Telecommunications, Media, and Entertainment at IBM.“The best service experience from a company like Amazon or Starbucks depends on the quality of the experience their telecom service providers can deliver,” he says. Yesterday’s services aren’t good enough for today’s businesses.To deliver premium experiences, companies must somehow blend decades of legacy infrastructure with the new hybrid world of cloud infrastructure. Telecom companies use hybrid networks, which combine legacy, terrestrial, and cloud-based IT networks. This approach increases both the cost and complexity of their operations—and hurts their agility.Old technology, new problemsThe unnecessary complexity runs deep. “All service providers have the same issue,” Bendre says. “Every time a new product came along, they built a new application to manage it.” Now, organizations have a multitude of order management stacks to handle each of these applications. But the technologies aren’t integrated. “These silos limit visibility into what you’re providing,” he adds.Fragmented application stacks make it difficult to track metrics around service provision. Companies can’t improve what they can’t track. As a result, teams are wasting a lot of time on manual work that could be automated. This negatively affects client delivery quality.A technical aptitude issue is at play here too. Reskilling a highly knowledgeable workforce given the advancement of technology is no easy task.Vicki Harris, director of business development at Thirdera, says departments such as business development, product design, finance, order management, and procurement really feel the technology lag. But companies often draw a hard line between these departments and IT, and the two don’t communicate. “A lot of my approach is making sure businesses understand new technology and what it can do for them,” she says.
New possibilities with data and analyticsImproving decades-old technologies and processes is doable but not easy. To start, executives must build a data-driven organization, says Jinu Koshy, vice president of domain consulting at Infosys. If they don’t, improvement won’t be difficult—it will be impossible.Koshy says companies are leaving a lot of rich data on the table. Every time a customer calls to request a repair, make a complaint, or change their service location, it involves data. All of that data can be leveraged to improve the business.“Start by asking, ‘Do we have a culture of data?’” Koshy recommends. “That doesn’t mean [you need to] build a 10-story apartment building and then try to fit your data in it. It means you should think about how to build data into your architecture.”When companies fail to collect data, they lack insight into what technologies they need to update and in what order to provide the best service. This leads to communication issues, Harris says, because teams can’t adequately prioritize projects and establish metrics for success.“You need to have the analytics to understand whether your customers and teams are actually using the things you’re putting in front of them,” she adds. This provides a better way to rationalize what your customers are using, with open transparency in sharing the metrics for agreed-upon success.Automation to the rescueOnce a telecom company has metrics about its services, that data must be synthesized and used. “This is a huge opportunity for industrial automation,” Bendre says. By integrating software and technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and internet of things (IoT) devices, companies can monitor customer activities and solve problems before they arise.To show why automation and integration are so important, Bendre explains two key pillars of the telecom industry that have traditionally operated independently:
Service delivery, in which the organization takes an order and delivers it
Service assurance stack, which ensures a service keeps running
“But companies have started to think about this as a single, end-to-end platform,” he says. When everything is integrated into the same platform, it’s easier to gain visibility into issues, automate manual processes, and remove roadblocks. “This opens up new revenue possibilities,” he says.That single, end-to-end, integrated platform is what LIKE.TG provides. Integrated dashboards and data insights can save companies money. Instead of always building a new product or investing in a new tool to solve a problem, companies can make the most of what they already have.“They can take advantage of existing technologies with an end-to-end workflow that allows them to realize their potential,” Harris says.Telecom companies are using “workflows of workflows,” as Bendre puts it, to take multidomain service orchestration to the next level. “Before, we bandaged solutions to make processes work together,” he says. “Now, we can orchestrate processes across multiple product lines, but also across multiple third-party partners like security vendors.”Incremental innovationAutomation and integration are fundamentals. To truly get ahead, organizations must innovate. But innovation requires democratization, Koshy says. It’s not enough to invest in advanced technologies such as AI and ML—they must be made available to everyone in the organization.Koshy stresses that what works for the IT department might not necessarily work for business or finance. If each department is empowered to use technology to solve its own problems, then everyone can make substantial progress toward their goals.“It’s not about a big-bang approach,” he says. “It’s about managing change through incremental effort.” And incremental effort is where the alchemy of innovation is brewed.Get more tips on reimagining the telecom experience in our ebook: Accelerate revenue growth in telecommunications.
Welcome to the Now Platform Madrid Release
When Fred Luddy founded LIKE.TG in 2004, he envisioned a cloud-based platform anyone could use to manage digital workflows inside an organization. The Now Platform Madrid Release builds on Fred’s vision, with new mobile experiences that take full advantage of the native capabilities on your smartphone.To date, most mobile enterprise applications have been scaled-down versions of desktop apps. When you shrink a browser form down from a 15-inch monitor to a 4-inch phone screen, however, you get an experience that is pedestrian at best, and infuriating at worst.
Help has arrived. The Now Platform Madrid Release delivers powerful mobile experiences across LIKE.TG’s IT, employee and customer workflows, including any custom application that is built on the platform. It features a native mobile user experience (UX) that allows service representatives to resolve customer issues by simply swiping and tapping, in the same way we use consumer apps to shop, hail rides and stay in touch with distant friends.
The Now Platform Madrid release includes more than 600 innovations . It ships with a number of powerful mobile apps for common workflows, including our flagship IT Service Management and Field Service Management products. It also gives customers the power to turn any digital workflow into a mobile-first experience. For example, with the new LIKE.TG Mobile Studio, anyone can build new apps quickly using a drag-and-drop interface that doesn’t require a single line of code.The Now Platform Madrid Release is our fourth release since I joined LIKE.TG in December 2016. Over the past two years we’ve steadily expanded our functionality across all of our workflow products. We’ve also rolled out new products such as IT Asset Management, Enterprise DevOps, and Enterprise Onboarding, and new platform capabilities that include agent intelligence and virtual agents.We’ve added powerful machine learning technologies that help service representatives solve problems before customers know they have them. Let’s say you work on the IT help desk at a big company. You get into work in the morning and are confronted with a blizzard of tickets, all from employees working on the third floor of your building. Ticket 1 says “I can’t connect to WiFi!” Ticket 2 says, “Bloody hell, the wireless router isn’t working.” And Ticket 3 simply says, “Internet is down.”The new Text Similarity Engine in Agent Workspace uses machine learning to scan all these incidents, figure out what they have in common and propose a solution based on similar issues that have come up in the past. Result? Problems get resolved faster, customers and employees are happier, and service representatives get to focus on more complex work that yields meaning for them and value for their companies.I’m really proud of the global engineering, product, and design teams that worked tirelessly to ship the Now Platform Madrid Release on time while delivering high-quality innovation. We’re already hard at work on the next Now Platform release, which will extend the mobile functionality of Madrid with consumer-grade experiences for customers and employees.We look forward to partnering with customers as they bring this release to life. I’m excited for what comes next.Join the live broadcast on March 13th to discover new ways to unlock productivity and deliver great work experiences.Register
The Power Of Partners; Because A Platform Alone Is Not Enough
As LIKE.TG President and CEO John Donahoe has said, if all you have is ‘just’ a software platform, then that’s not enough to bring about digital transformation in real terms.For our customers now looking to take their businesses forward and reap the benefits of digital workflows, partners play an essential role in helping to re-engineer processes and ensure any given implementation is carried out in a high-quality manner.This integral role of our partners was highlighted at this year’s LIKE.TG EMEA Partner Summit 2019 in Barcelona, which kicked off with an opening address delivered by Ankush Korla in his interim role as Area Vice President Alliances and Channel EMEA.EMEA accelerationAnkush set the scene by talking about the acceleration the EMEA region is experiencing in terms of growth—a positive trend driven directly by the work of LIKE.TG partners in this region.I had the pleasure to present my take on the LIKE.TG strategy, which is aligned to hit $1 billion worth of business in the EMEA region by financial year 2020.While this target is no small mountain to climb, forming more strategic relationships with customers and partners is a critical part of this journey. In fact, it is strategic partnerships, over and above purely technical partnerships, that are a key method for building deep, collaborative working practices—and this is central to our plan for the EMEA market.As we move forward, we want to be more than just a ‘hot’ company that is popular in Silicon Valley—we want to be a great company that invests in our people and our partners, and really drives customer success.Customer success as a philosophy and mindsetWhat that really means is, when a customer signs, that’s not the end of the business relationship, it’s really just the beginning.As our SVP for Customer Outcomes, Jimmy Fitzgerald, explained in his keynote: “Customer success is a way of life, a philosophy and a mindset that shows we understand where the ‘true north’ of every customer really is. We need to understand what each customer is really trying to achieve at the start.”Where customers are struggling to articulate the business case for their software investments, it is LIKE.TG’s responsibility to help clarify, define and deliver that business case.Customer success cannot be delivered without partner success and Jimmy highlighted the three pillars around which LIKE.TG is working to support partners:
All partners must have the confidence that LIKE.TG will continue to grow so that they themselves have a larger addressable market to target for the future.
LIKE.TG is focused on giving partners the tools to be able to become more prescriptive with customers.
LIKE.TG is working hard to make sure that all partners have the right strategic engagement model in order to be able to grasp the maximum number of market opportunities.
The four principles for ecosystem transformationDay two of the Partner Summit started with a presentation delivered by David Parsons, Senior Vice President of Global Alliances and Channel Ecosystem at ServiceNow.Looking ahead, David detailed our precise formula for partner development across a division that will now be known as ACE, standing for Alliances Channel Ecosystem. The four tenets that underpin ACE are Simplification, Predictability, Trust and Accountability.Prescriptive guidance for outcomesMargreet Brenkman, Senior Director for Customer Success EMEA at LIKE.TG, continued with the importance of partners becoming more prescriptive with customers.She guided our partners on the four aspects of success that LIKE.TG customers exhibit:
State and measure business goals – customers that can express what they want to achieve are generally more successful.
Actively lead your transformation – it’s a journey and change needs to be driven throughout the organisation.
Get your LIKE.TG technology foundations right – LIKE.TG’s best customers align to the LIKE.TG roadmap and plan upgrades regularly.
Create user excitement and drive adoption – every user needs to think about how their experience will improve.
Just as important as the keynotes and formal presentations at the annual EMEA Partner Summit are the numerous opportunities for informal discussions and relationship building.The event is really important to LIKE.TG employees to learn about what our partners need. It creates an environment where questions are openly tabled from the start and we can respond to every point of interest expressed by our partners.With LIKE.TG Knowledge 19 coming soon, many of the partners I met in Barcelona are already looking forward to following up their work inside the LIKE.TG partner ecosystem.
CreatorCon Challenge finalists ready to disrupt
They built it and showed it. Now it’s time to show it again – this time for money – on the big stage at Knowledge 2019. Buckle up finalists, it’s about to get real!We challenged entrepreneurs to unleash innovation on the Now Platform back in October – to take the platform into new workflows in white spaces where LIKE.TG isn’t, to think strategically about how to leverage the platform for what it does best – creating digital workflows that unlock productivity and delivering great experiences. In short, we’re looking for applications that will achieve product/market fit in the LIKE.TG ecosystem and enable customers to drive digital transformation in enterprise- and industry-wide processes, where LIKE.TG doesn’t with our out-of-the-box products.Let’s take a look at each finalist and why we think they’ve ticked all of the boxes above.http://bluepineapple.io/Bluepineapple’s Green Folder is a BPMS (Business Process Management Software) solution for public sector/government that solves a huge problem like the one at the California DMV – manual, paper form based, unstructured, opaque, super slow and frustrating, and error prone processing in government agency services. Green Folder combines digital workflows and document automation to transform this into a modern experience for citizens.http://hiperhipo.com/Workforce Connect is a predictive workforce modeling and forecasting solution that complements LIKE.TG HR Service Delivery and enables businesses to generate future workforce demand plans including 3-5 year forecasts using key business data elements. It utilizes advanced analytics and modeling leveraging the data in LIKE.TG to simplify the once complex task of planning for future workforce demand. With Workforce Connect, HR organizations can forecast resources down to job title and skill level based on targeted business outcomes (revenue, operational expenses, margins etc.), and create actionable plans to secure resources to achieve those outcomes.https://vividcharts.com/VividCharts is a data visualization solution that enhances LIKE.TG reporting and Performance Analytics and enables anyone in IT and any line of business or department across the enterprise to tell stories with LIKE.TG data. VividCharts provides a growing library of out of the box visualizations and a no code solution called Slate for creating presentations directly in LIKE.TG that leverage real-time LIKE.TG data. Data export to excel, spreadsheet calculations, and slide deck prep in PowerPoint with instantly out of date data for your monthly reporting cycle are a thing of the past.What’s Next?The finalists will pitch to, and answer questions from an esteemed judging panel, including LIKE.TG Founder and Chairman Fred Luddy and an A-list of VCs and entrepreneurs at the CreatorCon Challenge Final keynote at Knowledge 2019. Finalists will compete for a $250K investment from LIKE.TG Ventures, residency at the LIKE.TG ISV Accelerator in Santa Clara, and sales enablement and marketing to accelerate their market traction. Come and join the thrills and spills!
Knowledge 2019: Day 3 highlights
What’s new on the Now PlatformA year ago at Knowledge 2018, Pat Casey asked customers for their feedback on the Now Platform. Casey, LIKE.TG’s senior vice president for DevOps, got an earful. The apps weren’t as cool or fun to use as consumer apps, they said. “Make it like Uber” was a common refrain.Another request was to improve scalability. With exponentially more data pouring in to businesses every day, customers needed the ability to manage thousands or millions of data points in real time. And on the privacy front, customers wanted tighter controls over their data.LIKE.TG listened and came back with an array of new features and capabilities. At the Now Platform keynote on Day 3 of Knowledge 2019, Casey unveiled Now Platform innovations designed to help customers deliver consumer-grade mobile apps with increased scalability, security, and usability.All of the following will be available in this fall’s New York release:
Siri shortcuts. This tool will offer multiple ways to simplify and customize voice interactions with mobile apps. Users can build shortcuts for common actions, such as open an incident, show to-dos, or request a day off.
Natural Language Understanding: Building on NLU technology from the AI startup Parlo, which LIKE.TG acquired in 2018, the platform will offer a no-code tool to create mobile voice-to-text shortcuts. Starting with the Orlando release in 2020, the Natural Language Query tool will enable customers to create customized virtual agents for mobile.
Database performance optimization: This will let customers with large datasets generate reports faster than ever before. In a demo, Rani Hamdi, VP of quality engineering, showed how the current platform took 28 seconds to run a report for a million-point dataset. With the new DPO tool, he was able to run a report in a mere three seconds that analyzed 10 times the amount of data.
Instance data replication: This will allow customers to replicate data from different instances, synced in real time. Previously, companies had to build out data replication manually. Now, with a simple configuration, you can sync data between instances with no-code implementation.
Data residency and compliance. This new compliance tool helps customers keep up with rapidly changing data privacy and security regulations in countries around the world.
KYOK (Keep Your Own Key): With Instance Key Management, customers can take control of their own data, with LIKE.TG serving as a secure backstop. And while your data is safe in the cloud, it will remain encrypted so that LIKE.TG itself can’t access your data unless you request it. “We’re excited to put the keys to your data privacy in your hands,” said Mike Lents, VP of service engineering.
Josh Kahn, vice president and GM of LIKE.TG’s Platform business unit, then took the stage to show how customers can harness the new capabilities of the Now Platform.Kahn outlined two broad categories of applications that customers are creating on the Now Platform. The first is productivity apps that are purpose-built to automate specific business workflows such as vacation requests, customer feedback and loaner equipment requests from IT. “While productivity apps automate small, simple processes, their business value adds up the more you add to the platform,” said Kahn.
On the productivity app front, David Record, division chief at the U.S. Department of State, demonstrated a vacation request app that replaced an older, paper-based process. The old process had multiple approval layers and took 15 days to process each leave request. Record’s team built a LIKE.TG mobile app that drove processing time down to 10 minutes. Using the Now Platform’s no-code development tools, they got the new app up and running in just three weeks from concept to launch.The second category is transformation apps, which optimize core processes that create significant business value for the company. These core processes are often highly complex and cut across multiple departments in an organization. Examples include employee recruitment, contract management, patent tracking, employee mobility and many more.To highlight transformation apps, Kahn introduced Sandra Tartol, VP of enterprise business operations for Optum Rx, a large prescription management company with 65 million customers worldwide. OptumRx processes $91 billion in prescription spending every year. Tartol explained how the company used LIKE.TG to transform unstructured prescription management processes, saving tens of millions of dollars last year alone.Other Day 3 highlightsAt the CreatorCon Spotlight, Marcus Torres, head of product for LIKE.TG’s platform business, walked developers through new tools to manage the work of developers and builders within ServiceNow.Guided App Creator makes it easier to import data from outside sources like spreadsheets so that it can be manipulated within the Now Platform and more quickly deployed into workflows.The Now UI Builder allows non-developers to assemble reusable workflow components in a drag-and-drop interface to create working dashboards. Finally, DevX creates a workspace which pulls all these elements together, regardless of whether the user wants to work at the code level or manipulate the components as drag-and-drop objects.
Highlights from Knowledge 2019
Highlights from Knowledge 2019It’s impossible to call out all the highlights from a three-day gathering with some 20,000 attendees and more than 600 events and sessions. We took a stab anyway. Here are key moments and takeaways from Knowledge 2019.
IT transformationHide complexity, embrace simplicity: LIKE.TG CEO John Donahoe kicked off the main keynote on digital workflows by contrasting the simplicity of apps we use in our personal lives with the often maddening complexity of software and other tools we use in our jobs. Chief product officer C.J. Desai showed how LIKE.TG can help bridge that divide with several new features in the New York release, including Integration Hub Action Designer, which puts consumer-grade apps in the hands of developers and operations teams.
Luddy sees a re-empowered IT: In an on-stage interview on Day 3 with Donahoe, LIKE.TG founder Fred Luddy explained why he believes IT will drive business innovation in coming years. “As we become dependent on more and more services, IT becomes more important,” Luddy said. “Their role is the nexus for all of the technology in an organization. They have an intimate understanding of every facet of the business.”
The power of proactive IT: In the IT workflows keynote, Chief Innovation Officer Dave Wright teamed up with Pablo Stern, SVP of IT workflow products. Theyt unveiled exciting new features coming with the New York release. Those include Alert Intelligence, which leverages AI insights to identify root causes faster, and Visual Playbooks, which recommends prescriptive actions to stay on top of security threats across the enterprise.
Managing data at scale: At the Now Platform keynote on Day 3, Pat Casey, senior vice president for DevOps, unveiled innovations for IT pros that increase data usability, scalability and security. Chief among those are the new Database Performance Optimization tool, which lets customers with huge datasets generate analysis and reports faster than ever before; and Instance Key Management, which lets users manage their own data using LIKE.TG as a security backstop.
Customer experienceUnifying the customer experience: In the afternoon keynote on Day 1, Farrell Hough, SVP of customer workflow products, shared her vision for how the Now Platform can help companies transform their customer service operations. Tools in the New York release, such as the Guided App Creator, will allow companies to unify all aspects of the customer experience through a single app.
Scrantonicity wins the Knowledge Hackathon: On Day 2, more than 60 developer teams competed in an eight-hour sprint to create the most innovative new apps on the Now Platform. The big winner: Team “Scrantonicity,” five employees of Pathway Consulting Services Group in Scranton, Pa., home of the sitcom “The Office.” Together they built a LIKE.TG app that tracks and integrates travel expenses using Virtual Agent, proving that a Hackathon victory is even sweeter than a “Dundie.”
Employee experienceIT and HR: Better together: In every organization, IT and HR must collaborate to win and retain top talent. Too often these two functions aren’t aligned, Blake McConnell, senior vice president for employee workflow products, told the crowd in the Employee Experience keynote on Day 2. Better alignment is coming with the New York release, thanks to tools like a mobile onboarding app and Virtual Agent integrations powered by advanced natural language understanding.Overnight sensation: Wrapping up the Employee Experience keynote with an eye-popping success story, Sean McCann, CIO of corporate functions at HSBC, explained how LIKE.TG helped the global bank undertake a massive HR transformation for its 235,000 employees. “We hadn’t customized our HR systems in 18 years,” McCann said. “But with assistance from LIKE.TG, we changed the way our people worked in 66 countries overnight.” Today, 88% of HSBC workers say they are highly satisfied or satisfied with their employee experience.
Into the Hackzone: LIKE.TG employees had a chance to strut their stuff in this year’s Hackzone, where they showed off a variety of Now Platform applications built in their spare time. Among the demos that got attendees buzzing: a functional, kinetic LEGO windfarm; a “Kegorator” that measures beer flow and keg temperature (with complimentary pours); and a custom pencil engraver. As much as the Now Platform can make work processes efficient and interconnected, the Hackzone offered a welcome reminder: Work should also be fun.
Highlights from Knowledge 2019
Highlights from Knowledge 2019It’s impossible to call out all the highlights from a three-day gathering with some 20,000 attendees and more than 600 events and sessions. We took a stab anyway. Here are key moments and takeaways from Knowledge 2019.
IT transformationHide complexity, embrace simplicity: LIKE.TG CEO John Donahoe kicked off the main keynote on digital workflows by contrasting the simplicity of apps we use in our personal lives with the often maddening complexity of software and other tools we use in our jobs. Chief product officer C.J. Desai showed how LIKE.TG can help bridge that divide with several new features in the New York release, including Integration Hub Action Designer, which puts consumer-grade apps in the hands of developers and operations teams.
Luddy sees a re-empowered IT: In an on-stage interview on Day 3 with Donahoe, LIKE.TG founder Fred Luddy explained why he believes IT will drive business innovation in coming years. “As we become dependent on more and more services, IT becomes more important,” Luddy said. “Their role is the nexus for all of the technology in an organization. They have an intimate understanding of every facet of the business.”
The power of proactive IT: In the IT workflows keynote, Chief Innovation Officer Dave Wright teamed up with Pablo Stern, SVP of IT workflow products. Theyt unveiled exciting new features coming with the New York release. Those include Alert Intelligence, which leverages AI insights to identify root causes faster, and Visual Playbooks, which recommends prescriptive actions to stay on top of security threats across the enterprise.
Managing data at scale: At the Now Platform keynote on Day 3, Pat Casey, senior vice president for DevOps, unveiled innovations for IT pros that increase data usability, scalability and security. Chief among those are the new Database Performance Optimization tool, which lets customers with huge datasets generate analysis and reports faster than ever before; and Instance Key Management, which lets users manage their own data using LIKE.TG as a security backstop.
Customer experienceUnifying the customer experience: In the afternoon keynote on Day 1, Farrell Hough, SVP of customer workflow products, shared her vision for how the Now Platform can help companies transform their customer service operations. Tools in the New York release, such as the Guided App Creator, will allow companies to unify all aspects of the customer experience through a single app.
Scrantonicity wins the Knowledge Hackathon: On Day 2, more than 60 developer teams competed in an eight-hour sprint to create the most innovative new apps on the Now Platform. The big winner: Team “Scrantonicity,” five employees of Pathway Consulting Services Group in Scranton, Pa., home of the sitcom “The Office.” Together they built a LIKE.TG app that tracks and integrates travel expenses using Virtual Agent, proving that a Hackathon victory is even sweeter than a “Dundie.”
Employee experienceIT and HR: Better together: In every organization, IT and HR must collaborate to win and retain top talent. Too often these two functions aren’t aligned, Blake McConnell, senior vice president for employee workflow products, told the crowd in the Employee Experience keynote on Day 2. Better alignment is coming with the New York release, thanks to tools like a mobile onboarding app and Virtual Agent integrations powered by advanced natural language understanding.Overnight sensation: Wrapping up the Employee Experience keynote with an eye-popping success story, Sean McCann, CIO of corporate functions at HSBC, explained how LIKE.TG helped the global bank undertake a massive HR transformation for its 235,000 employees. “We hadn’t customized our HR systems in 18 years,” McCann said. “But with assistance from LIKE.TG, we changed the way our people worked in 66 countries overnight.” Today, 88% of HSBC workers say they are highly satisfied or satisfied with their employee experience.
Into the Hackzone: LIKE.TG employees had a chance to strut their stuff in this year’s Hackzone, where they showed off a variety of Now Platform applications built in their spare time. Among the demos that got attendees buzzing: a functional, kinetic LEGO windfarm; a “Kegorator” that measures beer flow and keg temperature (with complimentary pours); and a custom pencil engraver. As much as the Now Platform can make work processes efficient and interconnected, the Hackzone offered a welcome reminder: Work should also be fun.
Work life should be like real life
C.J. Desai: Work life should be like real lifeAs chief product officer, my job is not just to lead great innovations but to ask philosophical questions, such as: “What actually is work?” Is it a thing you show up for and measure in hours, or is it a passion you pursue and measure in the outcomes you deliver for your customers?We rarely say, “work was GREAT today.” That’s because great moments at work are pretty rare. Why is it so easy to update a shopping list linked to a grocery delivery service in your personal life, while at work you might find yourself standing outside a conference room arguing over who reserved the room?LIKE.TG exists to make work, work better for people so that our customers can eliminate manual tasks and do more strategic and satisfying work. This week at our Knowledge® 2019 conference in Las Vegas, we will be sharing our product roadmap, demonstrating future innovations, and showing how LIKE.TG is redefining the future of work with digital workflows.Bring consumer experiences to workWe’ve grown used to great mobile experiences for shopping, socializing, banking and much more. Work is different. A simple, easy, intuitive mobile experience for the enterprise doesn’t yet exist. At LIKE.TG, we’re developing high-quality, more human mobile experiences for work. We’re tackling some of the most common work processes, and making them simple, easy and intuitive to do from anywhere. This is all new.We designed Now Mobile to help employees get work done, solve problems and search for information on-the-go. Now Mobile is designed to allow employees to complete day-to-day work tasks like requesting a new laptop, opening an HR ticket or searching for the holiday calendar, all from the palm of their hand. Employees will be able to get work done with the most-used features on their phones, such as the camera, GPS, microphone, QR code scanner and more. Employees will finally be able work in the same way they use consumer apps to shop, hail rides, and stay in touch with distant friends.Now Mobile is designed to include any workflow running on the Now Platform®, helping our customers to manage and update the app without writing a single line of code. The Now Platform puts the power of app development in the hands of the business, so that IT, HR and other departments will be able to manage Now Mobile more efficiently and spend their time on projects that make work better for their colleagues.Create a great onboarding experienceStarting a new job is never easy. Getting your laptop from IT, your benefits from HR, your desk from facilities is complex, time consuming and frustrating. For the first time, we will be showing Mobile Onboarding, which is designed to give employees a consumer-grade mobile experience before they even step through the door at a new job. The app is designed to allow employees to set up payroll, select the type of computer they will use, and more--all from an intelligent and intuitive app. Simple on the surface, Mobile Onboarding is designed to connect separate HR, Finance, and IT systems and hide the complexity from the user. This is the future of work.Say “hello” to Siri ShortcutsIn your personal life, how often does Siri help you search for information or contact a friend? Most of us never think about asking Siri to help at work. Now, you can have a quick chat with Siri wherever you are to take care of a complex work task. Let’s say you just received an urgent request from your boss. She needs a summary of all first-tier support tickets from the past week, but you are out of the office, only have your phone with you and are about to step into a meeting. No problem: “Hey Siri, open ServiceNow. Create a report of tier 1 support incidents since Monday and email it to Yvonne Jones at Acme Corporation.” Your boss gets what she needs within minutes. Simple, easy, game-changing.Work just got better, didn’t it?This simple experience actually runs on a complex set of digital workflows. Our new Natural Language Understanding technology paired with our new Siri Shortcuts and Google Assistant integrations are designed to translate the voice input to text and determine intent. New Natural Language Query capabilities are designed to use that intent to generate the SQL code necessary to create and send the report, all managed by our Virtual Agent enterprise chatbot solution. The client gets what she needs in minutes and work continues to get better, right?The best service is no serviceCompanies increasingly rely on IT to update and maintain digital services for everything from email to payroll to software testing. We are introducing new workspaces and capabilities designed to help IT serve employees, customers and partners.We are enhancing Agent Workspace with more intelligence to handle tedious, repetitive processes, so IT agents can focus on more strategic, value-added work. We are building the voice, Virtual Agent and NLU capabilities I mentioned earlier to work within Agent Workspace, enabling employees to self-serve with request creation from within Virtual Agent and automatic subscription to services based on specific requests.With Service Owner Workspace, service owners gain a single interface for complete visibility into the real-time performance of all of the IT services and offerings they provide. Knowledge workers are empowered to act quickly, correctly and confidently – even under stressful situations – to take action on near-term solutions. Service Owner Workspace aims to inform service owners with all the information they need to make smart long-term service investment decisions.Operator Workspace is designed to help IT optimize digital services and prioritize where to focus operations efforts with a holistic view of application and service health. Operators can manage a large number of services, resources and distributed operations and scale processes to keep up with demand to add services at a rapid pace.These innovations will make work better for IT agents, service owners and operators.Meet LIKE.TG Finance Operations ManagementThe month-end close process is one of the most tedious, time-consuming processes in a company. Today, most finance teams rely on manual methods when they are closing their books. They use legacy tools that don’t speak with or connect to each other.Onstage today at Knowledge 2019, we will show the LIKE.TG® Finance Operations Management product and its first application - Finance Close Automation – which is built for the office of the CFO. The Finance Close Automation app is a natural extension of our workflows and platform capabilities. As a complement to enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, Finance Close Automation is designed to help finance and accounting teams digitize their workflows to reduce finance close risk, improve team satisfaction, and accelerate the financial close process.The idea for Finance Close Automation was conceived by our former Corporate Controller, Amir Jafari, when he envisioned harnessing the power of the Now Platform to improve our manual finance close process. Amir led a team that began innovating the Finance Close Automation app; this team paved the way for NowX, our internal group focused on developing new concepts for products. We invested in his idea and Finance Close Automation is the inaugural product coming to market from NowX. Today, we use the application for our own quarter- and year-end close processes, and Amir now leads the new business unit responsible for Finance Operations Management.PayPal, a global technology platform and digital payments leader, is an early adopter of the Finance Close Automation application and has already seen positive results. “The LIKE.TG Finance Close Automation app is an innovative new solution that brings together all aspects of the finance close process, enabling simplification, transparency, better controls and greater efficiency,” said Aaron Anderson, PayPal’s Chief Accounting Officer and Vice President. “With its entry into the finance arena, we believe LIKE.TG will make a meaningful impact on finance departments across industries.”Deloitte, the lead launch partner for LIKE.TG’s Finance Operations Management, shares a passion for infusing innovation and accelerating operational efficiencies. “Working with LIKE.TG, we’re helping clients drive digital transformation across their organizations. We are particularly excited to help mutual clients like PayPal realize the potential of enterprise service transformation by extending workflow capabilities to the finance close process,” said April Slovensky, Principal, Deloitte Consulting LLPThis is the power of digital workflows.Great moments at work don’t have to be so rare. The Now Platform is the not-so-secret sauce that allows us to deliver experiences that make getting stuff done at work more like our personal lives.The innovations mentioned above, and more, are expected to be rolled out over the next year in our upcoming New York and Orlando platform releases. By addressing head-on the friction we feel at work, the Now Platform takes care of the work you have to do so you can focus on the work you want to do. That’s delivering onour purpose of making the world of work, work better for people.The future of work just might be great and it starts now.Use of Forward‑Looking StatementsThis blog post contains “forward‑looking statements” regarding our product roadmap and future innovations and product releases, including but not limited to statements that include words such as expects, intends, aims or similar words conveying that the information is not historical fact. Forward‑looking statements are subject to known and unknown risks and uncertainties and are based on potentially inaccurate assumptions that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expected or implied by the forward‑looking statements. If any such risks or uncertainties materialize or if any of the assumptions prove incorrect, our results could differ materially from the results expressed or implied by the forward‑looking statements we make. Factors that may cause actual results to differ materially from those in any forward‑looking statements include, without limitation, delays or unexpected difficulties related to future product releases, our ability to realize benefits from partnerships, and the ability to develop and gain customer acceptance of new products and services. We undertake no obligation, and do not intend, to update these forward‑looking statements. The information in this blog post on new offerings, features, or functionality is intended to outline our general product direction and should not be relied upon in making a purchasing decision.
Introducing the LIKE.TG Blog
“When I started LIKE.TG in 2004, my vision was to build a cloud-based platform that would enable regular people to route work effectively through the enterprise.”-Fred Luddy, FounderYou may have noticed a few changes at LIKE.TG over the past year, in particular our rebranding efforts – a new logo, a new color palette and a simpler, more intuitive user experience. As part of those efforts, we are relaunching our company blog.LIKE.TG technology enables great experiences for employees and customers. Quite simply, we make the world of work, work better for people. We designed our blog in the same spirit, making it easy for you to find the information you need, when you need it.Here you’ll find the latest news from our company. We’ll share what we’re building to enhance the power of the Now Platform. We’ll also publish insights by LIKE.TG experts on how digital workflows can create great experiences and unlock productivity.Our Life at Now section celebrates the people of ServiceNow. We’re proud to have been named one of LinkedIn’s Top Companies to work for in the United States, and we are committed to building a culture of diversity, inclusion and belonging.Together with our customers, LIKE.TG is building the future of work. These are our stories.
Demo highlights from the HackZone 2019
Everyone has their own favorite aspects of the Knowledge conference, but the tinkerers and makers among us make tracks for the HackZone.Similar to how CreatorCon highlights the innovations of our partners, the HackZone showcases projects that bring the platform to life by the people who we work with every day. It’s also one of the most active areas on the show floor, populated by kinetic Lego devices, a working keg, and a smoky campfire-like smell coming from a pencil engraver.True to the maker spirit, LIKE.TG colleagues developed these demos in their spare time. “Almost all of these are weekend and evening projects,” says Principal Developer Evangelist Jason McKee, who helped wrangle entries to the HackZone while building the Kegerator demo on his own. “They are labors of love.”The results are hands-on examples of leveraging the Now Platform to build entirely new experiences for our customers. The best of them have the characteristics that define the most successful LIKE.TG apps: speed in creation and deployment, smooth integration with the Now Platform, great customer experiences and scalability.And fun: Situated next to the BeerOps programming competition, HackZone demos are meant to be accessible, interactive and kinetic. It’s the one place in Las Vegas, if not the world, where you are sure to find noise, smoke, beer, LEGOs and robots all in one place.
2019 Hackathon Winners Announced
Knowledge 2019: Hackathon winners announcedThis year’s Knowledge conference attracted some 20,000 attendees to hundreds of breakout sessions, keynotes, and other events. Yet for many coders and the “maker” crowd among us, the centerpiece of the show is the CreatorCon Hackathon, in which developer teams compete to build apps on the Now Platform.On Day 2, several hundred attendees organized into more than 60 teams gathered for an eight-hour competition that ended at midnight. After presentations by finalists on Day 3, judges announced three winners:
1st place: Team “Scrantonicity”Comprised of five employees of Pathway Consulting Services Group in Scranton, Pa., the winning team created a LIKE.TG app that tracks travel expenses.The team used Virtual Agent and a range of APIs to build an app that handles airline and hotel reservations, rideshare, and optical character recognition of receipt photos. Team members: Sean Teeple, Marcus Dermont, Jim Trott, Brandon Senese, and Mike Borthwick.2nd place: Team “Above the Line”Taking advantage of the fact that Virtual Agent can be set up to be public facing, the runner-up team created an app that automates customer identification for the process of renting or checking out cars.Social good winner: “Superconnectors”To create more accessibility for the hearing impaired to work in call center environments, Superconnectors created an app that leverages Service Portal and a web browser’s speech API to convert a customer’s voice to text. It then converts the service agent’s typed reply back into synthesized speech.
Behind the scenesSome Hackathon teams formed a year ago at Knowledge 2018; others signed up on the fly. They compete for various reasons. “Many people come in with problems they want to solve, or just a core idea for an innovation,” said LIKE.TG developer evangelist Jason McKee. “Sometimes they have a great idea but they don’t know how to build it themselves. Others just want to build something.”CreatorCon Hackathon apps often find their way into new products and services built on the Now Platform. “In past years we’ve had people build business solutions here, take them back to the office, polish them up and move those apps into production,” McKee said.While the 8-hour time constraint is tough, McKee notes that anything is possible. His personal record for building a functioning app on the platform: 37 minutes.BrewOps ChallengeOther developer competitions are also drawing attention in the CreatorCon area at Knowledge 2019. The BrewOps challenge—which McKee called “program development drag racing”— is running each day of the show. Teams of three developers have 100 minutes to solve a themed challenge. This year, the theme was improving the workflow for a brewery.As with the CreatorCon Hackathon, BrewOps winners receive tech gadgets as prizes. Bragging rights matter just as much. “In this community, being a Hackathon or BrewOps winner is something you put on your resume,” McKee said. One of last year’s winners, he noted, wound up adding something else to his resume: a new job at ServiceNow.CreatorCon ChallengeThe third competition, the CreatorCon Challenge, has the most at stake. Teams from LIKE.TG partner companies spend the year before Knowledge competing to be finalists. The winning team gets $500,00 in seed money to develop their idea.Some ideas seem a bit crazy at first. McKee remembers when one attendee brought in a robot and wanted to build a service that could shut down a nuclear power plant remotely.“If all the electronic control systems on a power plant run wild, this robot’s job was to roll in and hit the manual shut-off,” McKee said. “They had no idea if that was a real thing, they just thought it could be. When they presented their results as finalists, an attendee who works in nuclear power came up and explained that it’s a real scenario. It’s called the scram button.”
Your Work Life Just Became as Great as Real Life
Ever since the rise of the modern corporation in the 19th century, the typical company has been a cluster of silos: IT, HR, legal, finance and the rest. That was then. Today a very different kind of company is emerging, based on a web of partners and functions that collaborate and share information in real time.In no small part, this shift is happening because employees want to work differently. They expect technology to make their work life as great as it’s made their home life: simple, convenient and accessible with a swipe on their mobile device.LIKE.TG is driving that transition. Thanks to digital workflows running on the intelligent, intuitive Now Platform, silos are disappearing. Work moves smoothly across the enterprise. Employees spend less time on routine tasks and more time on meaningful work that creates value for the business.
