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Meeting Recordings app: Overcome Zoom fatigue and FOMO

We’re beginning to see light at the end of the COVID-19 tunnel, and companies are rolling out their plans to return to the workplace. For those of us in business resilience (aka business continuity, incident management, or crisis management), it’s game on. However, the game has changed.Business resilience has traditionally been operationally focused—on site security, utilities, fire safety, natural disasters, and the like. In a post-COVID world, resilience is personal. Anyone who enters our doors and becomes infected could trigger a potential crisis. Resiliency plans must address that scenario.Return to the workplace is about far more than getting butts in seats (frankly, the easy part). It’s about helping to ensure the safety of everyone in the entire ecosystem. To do that, we must up-level our resilience programs, because future risks are likely to be at least as complex and disruptive as in 2020.There’s another, equally important reason to embrace resilience: The future of work itself is being reimagined. Nobody fully knows what it will look like. We have the opportunity—and the mandate—to help shape that future.Let me offer four steps business resilience teams can take to help enable a successful return to work in 2021 and beyond:1. Build a culture of resilienceMost return-to-the-workplace efforts will be focused on people and places and heavily driven by the human resources, workplace, and/or strategy organizations. To be a trusted partner for the business, be sure to engage all functions in the process.Establishing a culture of resilience will support an organic transition from crisis response mode to strategy mode and create a resilience framework for the future of work.It’s also critical that we integrate what we’ve learned from the pandemic into our culture of resilience. One of the biggest lessons at LIKE.TG is that if you digitize your workflows—as we have using our Now Platform®—location clustering isn’t required for individual productivity or operational efficiency. This insight gives us more options as we map out what work will look like post-COVID-19. 2. Increase program visibilityWhen a resilience program is working as intended, nobody knows about it. On one level that’s how it should be. But be sure your leadership knows how your program supports the return to work, and how you’ll provide continuous resilience support going forward. Active leadership support is essential, both operationally and culturally.The best way to keep senior leadership up to date is through dashboards that let them see the state of response for any future event and health of the program. These dashboards can be easily built on top of a business continuity tool such as LIKE.TG® Business Continuity Management (BCM), where you house all your program-related details.3. Assure your employees, customers, and vendorsUnlike personal safety guidelines, employee outreach needs to be very high-touch. Regular updates, safety protocols, and resources are essential for providing peace of mind and a productive work environment. At LIKE.TG, we use the Now Platform and Now Mobile app to facilitate outreach and information sharing.Providing seamless service to customers is a must—not just to fulfil contractual obligations, but also to build relationships based on trust. After all, as we’re working toward our own business continuity, our customers are doing the same and need to understand our resilience posture.Vendors, too, need to be comfortable with our plans, just as we need to understand theirs.4. Digitize your programDigitizing program workflows will provide the speed, agility, and real-time visibility needed to respond quickly when crises occur. Digitization will also enable your program to scale with company growth.There’s another key benefit: mobility. When a disruptive event occurs, you may not be near your plans or tools. A mobile app gives you access from any location and virtually any device. As noted above, we’re taking full advantage of mobility in our outreach to employees before, during, and after return to the workplace.And remember this formula in your post-pandemic workforce planning: distributed work + digitized workflows = increased productivity, efficiency, and resilience. Keep learningAs the saying goes: Never let a good crisis go to waste. Whether it’s a pandemic, an office closure, or another event, there are things to be learned that can improve the responsiveness and effectiveness of your resiliency program.For example, the pandemic taught us that if you digitize your workflows, where employees are located doesn’t impact their productivity—and we can factor that into our future decisions.At LIKE.TG, that also means incorporating new technologies and tools. Risks don’t stand still; neither should we. We expect to migrate to our new Business Continuity Management app in Q3 of this year, and we look forward to the added capabilities it will bring.Resilience must be a priority, not an afterthought. If we can create a culture of resilience, build resiliency into all we do, and digitize workflows for speed and scale, we won’t just be optimally prepared. We’ll also help shape the future of work.Watch our webinar to learn how LIKE.TG is ensuring its own safe return to the workplace.LIKE.TG, the LIKE.TG logo, Now, and other LIKE.TG marks are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of LIKE.TG, Inc. in the United States and/or other countries.

ESM: How we break down silos, boost productivity, and reduce costs

Nick Borgwardt, director of ITx workflows at LIKE.TG, co-wrote this blog.How do I reset my password?How do I add someone to a distribution list?How do I request ergonomic home office equipment?At many companies, when employees have questions like these or need help, they face the complexity of threading together siloed processes. Sometimes a task can require getting in touch with multiple departments, creating friction and frustration. Other times, it’s not even clear where to start. Seemingly simple requests such as submitting a name change are actually fraught with complexity because they involve multiple teams across HR, IT, finance, and workplace services, among others.When departments deliver services separately with different portals, systems, and processes, employees get a fragmented and inconsistent experience. The burden is on the employees to figure out the right tools, learn to use them, and coordinate between different functions.Hide the complexityEnterprise Service Management (ESM) improves productivity and performance through the application of IT service management across the business. By using automated workflows on a common platform, ESM helps remove friction and accelerate innovation.LIKE.TG has been on an IT digital transformation journey for three years. We use the Now Platform® to bring together numerous processes across many different functions, ranging from legal to procurement to IT to finance.Most of our employees may not even notice how complex the service delivery is. That’s the whole point of ESM: to hide complexity and create delightful experiences for employees—all while digitizing workflows to grow at scale.Grow the ratio, not the budgetLIKE.TG is growing at around 30% per year. But we haven’t increased our IT budget at the same rate. Last year’s unprecedented world events saw a worldwide decrease in IT spending by 3.2%, according to Gartner, just as enterprises needed more—not fewer—resources to keep the business going.We were lucky that we could use the Now Platform to drive speed, efficiency, and productivity. By doing so, we supported the company’s ever-increasing workforce with a nominal growth of IT support staff. In fact, over the last three years, our headcount has been flat. That means we’ve steadily increased our employee-to-IT-support ratio during a time of continued growth. Also noteworthy is that the 2020 figure of 336 employees per one IT support staff member only takes into account full-time employees. When we consider the contractors that IT supports, the actual ratio is even higher.Meeting employee expectationsWhen we set out to transform the employee experience, we quickly identified three key expectations from employees that were going unmet: Round-the-clock self-service capability Digital experience across multiple channels Consumer-like experience In response, we made it easy to use self-service and Virtual Agent, leveraging machine learning and AI. Today, we count more than half of LIKE.TG employees as monthly active users of chat-based self-service, automating common requests such as Okta multifactor reset, deleted email recovery, and HR case status check—all on Virtual Agent without human intervention.Learn more about our journey, as well as results and specific use cases, in our Knowledge 2021 session, Now on Now: Scale enterprise service management. See for yourself how we use ESM to grow and innovate.

The journey to AIOps begins with an automation-first mindset

Abhishek Gupta, manager of application development at LIKE.TG, contributed to this blog.AIOps isn’t an IT magic wand, but it sometimes works like one.One day last fall, our IT ops team was heads down on a major cloud migration project. Meanwhile, LIKE.TG Event Management detected a high volume of alerts from the monitoring system—600% more than usual. That typically means a lot of unplanned work for our IT team, not to mention a delay in our cloud migration schedule.[Learn more about the promise of AIOps at Knowledge 2021.]The new AIOps capabilities in LIKE.TG® IT Operations Management (ITOM) were our magic wand. Using historical data and text-based correlation (included in the Paris release of the Now Platform), our AIOps solution combined the noisy alerts into a single incident. The magic wand part was the fact that the system did all of this automatically; we didn't have to manually comb through an avalanche of alerts.To date, AIOps has reduced our IT support and IT ops incidents by 39,000, saved 13,000 hours, and helped us realize $397,000 in savings. Those are some pretty big wins, and we’re just getting started.Those wins only happened by taking a systematic approach. Here’s what we learned in our journey to deliver on the promise of AIOps:Cultivate an automation-first mindsetIT’s traditional role is reactive: Something breaks, and we fix it fast. An automation-first mindset is proactive: anticipating and helping prevent things from breaking in the first place or, if there is an issue, addressing it quickly.To do this, we had to make data-driven decisions, which required a single source of truth for data. We also needed to make changes to drive self-healing. This meant addressing gaps such as implementing major incident management, improving our problem management process, and revamping change management. Use AIOps to enable the strategyAIOps is just a bunch of technologies unless it’s part of an overall strategy with clear outcomes. At LIKE.TG, we call it our three zero strategy: Zero outages – Use AIOps, predictive analytics, and other technologies to create a self-healing infrastructure to help ensure100% service availability. Zero physical footprint – Move everything to software as a service and the cloud. Zero incidents reported – Although we can never prevent someone from spilling coffee on their laptop, we’re all in on virtual agent, AI, and self-service workflows to get as close to zero incidents as possible. Sure, it’s bold, but that’s how you tap into everyone’s—and everything’s—full potential and push boundaries.Plan the journeyStart with a self-assessment to understand where your ops maturity is with respect to people, processes, and technology. Identify use cases that align with your strategy and prioritize them—for example, by return on investment, cost savings, strategic benefit, or user productivity gains.It’s also critical that you evaluate your staff—both roles and skill sets—to determine where you need to train and grow.Integrate, integrate, integrateBroaden the Now Platform® integrations to include SaaS solutions—for example, how logs flow in from Zoom phone to LIKE.TG Event Management. This is crucial for voice call quality and can proactively identify issues.Integrations are also helpful in smoothing the IT staff transition to AIOps by putting everything in one pane of glass.Map next steps with dataData is the fuel that drives IT decision-making, so make data quality an investment priority. That way, you’ll be able to prioritize use cases that deliver maximum business value.Data also helps surface new focus areas for AIOps, such as personas. What capabilities and services can IT deliver to make a salesperson—or product engineer or software developer—more productive? The power of AIOpsLet’s close with another example. As part of a data center migration to the cloud, we temporarily shut down a primary VPN authentication server at 10 pm.As we streamed the VPN logs to Health Log Analytics (HLA, based on Loom Systems technology), LIKE.TG Predictive AIOps detected an anomaly and proactively notified the operations team, which fixed the issue within 30 minutes. A worst-case scenario—3,600 users losing VPN connectivity—was averted with zero impact to users.AIOps is a hot trend in IT, and LIKE.TG IT is all in. But it’s important to get on board for the right reasons. If you stay focused on your goals—in our case, three zeros—AIOps will open opportunities to innovate, deliver game-changing solutions, and take you from incident firefighter to strategic business partner.See us at Knowledge 2021Join us at the Knowledge 2021 session, Delivering on the promise of predictive AIOps using ITOM, where we share our AIOps journey and the key lessons we learned during our implementation. The session is available on demand, and registration is free.LIKE.TG, the LIKE.TG logo, Now, and other LIKE.TG marks are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of LIKE.TG, Inc. in the United States and/or other countries. Other company names, product names, and logos may be trademarks of the respective companies with which they are associated.

The Rome release starts at home—a customer zero story

Now is truly the digital age. In a world where operations are increasingly powered by code, there’s enormous potential for changing the way people work. But you need to know how to code to create this change…right? Wrong.Using LIKE.TG App Engine Studio, LIKE.TG’s citizen developer program empowers anyone with little to no coding experience to innovate and create the apps they need, when they need them.[We’re hiring. Visit our careers page.]Streamlining work, boosting efficiencyFrom interns to managers, employees across LIKE.TG have taken the initiative to build applications that change the way their teams work. These low-code apps mean precious time saved and the ability to take matters into their own hands to solve problems for their teams. Citizen developers found opportunities to streamline tedious work through automation and increase efficiency. Britt B. has been developing applications and workflows on the Now Platform for 10 years. “It seemed like a no-brainer to come back to our own platform and get this automated in such a way that we could continue delivering at the same level with far fewer resources,” she says.Mara Z. created an app that collects and stores best practices so that she and fellow success architects don’t have to hunt for them. Courtney D. and John P. co-developed an app that mitigates the need to copy and paste information from one tool to another—with no errors.The power of low-code developmentAs the world of work continues to evolve, LIKE.TG’s citizen development program shows the revolutionary power of low-code development. John agrees, adding, “To be able to create these applications with very low code is just—it’s amazing. I’ve never seen anything like it at any other company that I’ve worked for.”Learn more about how these four citizen developers transformed the way their teams work in this video:

Low code, high impact: Empowering citizen developers

Project management for non-project managers

When the pandemic hit, the pressure to adapt LIKE.TG training offerings grew exponentially. An increasing number of customers from the Americas, Europe, India, and Australia wanted more virtual classes, more flexibility in scheduling, and more customization.Answering basic project planning questions in a timely manner became more difficult for the LIKE.TG custom training and adoption team. With the rising demand, our team resources—spread across the globe—had to scale.To effectively manage custom training projects from inception through project close and post-implementation review, we needed a standard project management approach. We wanted to be able to answer questions such as: What projects are in the pipeline? What is our resource capacity against our future needs? How do we see a project’s progress, risks, and issues? Can we see our key business metrics in one dashboard? A standardized approachWe knew a single system of record could capture the demand and resource pipeline for delivering customer projects across the team’s global portfolio and help us scale using real-time, centralized reporting. It could also help us provide a consistent customer experience.Our team had very little experience in project management. Although unfamiliar with concepts such as project plans, risk registers, and resource plans, we were very familiar with the Now Platform®.We decided to try Project Portfolio Management (PPM), a LIKE.TG solution that provides project, program, portfolio, resource, demand, and timecard management capabilities. It’s part of Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM), which helps organizations drive business outcomes by aligning their strategy with their work across different methodologies and structures. We chose Performance Analytics, another Now Platform solution, to track our progress over time.Adopting a feature-rich package such as PPM could have easily overwhelmed us. But we were able to start with the features we needed straight out of the box. Project management out of the boxLike many customers, we were keen to avoid a long development cycle. We wanted to reap the benefits of PPM as quickly as possible. So, we started with some basic guidelines for adoption: Stick rigorously to the concept of a minimum viable product. We wanted to track projects and resources and then continue to iterate after our initial migration and go-live. Remain true to out-of-the-box features and zero customization. In this way, the solution could be rapidly implemented, easily upgraded with each release, and used by other teams in the future. Streamline processes to drive adoption and simplify reporting. Templates would give us a way to set up standard reports. Postpone complex integrations such as Microsoft Dynamics CRM that support the seamless handover of customer data between sales and training delivery teams. We needed to get our bearings with PPM first before taking on complex integrations. 3 areas of positive impactPPM has been a game-changer for our team. It has greatly increased our productivity and efficiency and helped us sharpen our project management skills. Here are three areas where PPM has had a positive impact:1. Project managementWe dramatically improved how we track and manage demands, customer projects, and resource usage. We can now create and manage a wide range of demands and projects, whether they involve a few small tasks or a large portfolio of projects with complex relationships and dependencies.Tracking and managing all work from a single system of record ensures all project activities are captured and underlying financial data is instantly available. Separately, this has improved our processes for learning credit consumption and pricing. Mobile features are next on our wish list for adoption.2. Resource managementWe’re now allocating our staff more effectively by analyzing workloads and distributing tasks appropriately. Little automations, such as resource plans that autoskip scheduling someone during planned holiday time, make life much easier.Timecards ensure we know where resources are spending their time, and we can compare that against our plan. As our program matures, we also plan to adopt a skills matrix. 3. Real-time reportingWe use dashboards to make better informed investment decisions about training initiatives. Leadership dashboards offer visibility into key business metrics such as project financials. With this information, leaders can plan for the future, create roadmaps, and make smart investment decisions.Sales team leads can review customer training portfolios and provide proactive, targeted advice. This improves both our customer experience and sales pipeline. By aggregating customer data, we can make smarter decisions about our market offerings and price points.To make the transition as seamless as possible, we assigned a dedicated change enablement leader to manage communications and stakeholder engagement, and to gather feedback at every step of our implementation.On-demand training on the Now Learning platform allowed team members to familiarize themselves with PPM early in the process. We also ran process user training for different personas that included both instructor-led sessions and demo videos.The best decision we ever madeMore than a year later, our team adoption of PPM has been a greater success than we anticipated. Implementing the base functionality has drastically improved our understanding of our daily operations. We’re easily managing scope through our templated project deliverables, and a project-on-a-page dashboard drives our post-implementation review process with zero effort.LIKE.TG customers are choosing to invest in their people and processes as part of their digital transformation. With our adoption of PPM, we’re doing the same. Armed with it, the custom training and adoption team is ready and able to scale to meet customer demands more efficiently and productively to improve the customer experience.Find out more about our internal adoption of PPM in the case study.

Behind the scenes: Tips from a LIKE.TG upgrade expert

The Now Platform® San Diego release is generally available (GA) with many new enhancements to help people work fast, easier, and more efficiently. I’m excited that GA day is here, knowing my team helped deliver another great release.In my career as a LIKE.TG upgrade program manager, I’ve managed upgrades for 13 releases—three as a customer and 10 within ServiceNow. Generally, on GA day, my team’s work is complete, and we’re already preparing for the next release. A lot of work goes on behind the scenes in the months leading up to GA.What it means to be customer zeroAt LIKE.TG, we pride ourselves in using our own products internally, a program we refer to as Now on Now. As customer zero for our products, LIKE.TG internal teams—including IT operations, product engineering, cloud operations, and Now Support—upgrade to the new platform release in the sub-production and production environments during the six months prior to GA.Being customer zero gives our teams the opportunity to provide feedback to the product team during the development process. Our testing includes areas such as performance, reporting, user experience, and upgrade times to help improve the release.This approach gives the development team time to rectify many of the issues prior to GA so that customers don’t encounter them. The result? Our customers get the best possible experience.On to the San Diego upgradeFor the San Diego release, two internal instances, Now Support and product engineering, were upgraded in September/October 2021. Four upgrade teams conducted a total of 23 planned upgrades in the past six months. Click the image to see a detailed infographic.Accessibility note: The infographic is transcribed at the end of this blog. My team, Now Support, has been running on the San Diego release for six months. We’ve performed more than 11,000 automated tests and completed four rounds of testing, identifying several issues that were fixed prior to GA.The Now Support upgrade process is 2.5 weeks from build to production. This involves creating the build, testing it in sub-prod, fixing issues, validating the fixes, and upgrading our production instance.Tips for a better upgrade experienceHaving completed 10 upgrade cycles in my tenure at LIKE.TG, I’ve learned quite a few lessons to help things go smoothly. Here are a few tips for anyone wanting to improve the upgrade experience. Treat each upgrade as a separate project with a detailed plan that includes resourcing, scheduling, and communications. Be sure to identify any new features you want to implement as part of the upgrade. Reduce testing time by using automated tests. We reward our testers with treats—chocolate and ice cream are favorites on my team. Schedule upgrades for slow traffic times to minimize user impact. Schedule retrospectives after each upgrade to identify and implement process improvements. Seek support if you have questions. There may be a related knowledge base article or community forum discussion on the topic. If not, log a case. Upgrades can be easy and funWith an average of three to four pre-GA upgrades per release, my team has successfully completed more than 40 upgrades on Now Support and consumed many boxes of chocolate.As we celebrate the San Diego GA, we're getting ready to test the Tokyo release, targeted for September GA.I realize my excitement on GA day isn’t really about the release availability. It’s about knowing we’ve done everything we can to make our customers’ experience better. That alone is worth it.Get your upgrade kit and other resources.Transcript of infographicNow Platform® San Diego release:Drinking our own champagne to connect people and systems across the companyLIKE.TG upgraded to the San Diego release starting in late Q3 2021, before it was available to customers. Our upgrade teams offer ongoing feedback to the product development teams so they can deliver stronger, more reliable product capabilities and enable faster, easier upgrades for our customers and partners.205 bugs found before general availability1,2,3,4First upgrade was on Sept. 1 in the engineering sub-prod environmentDays on San Diego release Now Support – 179 sub-prod, 160 production Engineering – 203 sub-prod, 190 production Global Cloud Ops – 75 sub-prod, 0 production IT Ops – 87 sub-prod, 18 production 23 total planned upgrades1,2,3,49% faster upgrade time compared to Rome3~79K automated tests over 25 rounds1,2,3,41 Now Support2 Global Cloud Ops3 Engineering4 IT OpsLearn more about Now on Now at www.servicenow.com/nowonnow

Collaboration: The key to a reimagined employee experience

The LIKE.TG product team had a clear goal: Reimagine the employee experience on the Now Platform. That meant designing a solution that would deliver a unified and proactive experience personalized for each user.The team started by talking with customers around the world—of all sizes and across many industries. They also turned to the LIKE.TG IT team. IT provided firsthand knowledge of what it means to deliver an exceptional employee experience on the platform. During these meetings, no topic was off limits, whether technical, functional, or design- or deployment-related.The result was Employee Center—a new solution unveiled in the Rome release of the Now Platform. The features in Employee Center provide the single, unified portal experience the product team was after.Employee Center offers a modern interface where employees can find information and take action across applications. Popular features include dynamic topic pages that curate catalog requests, knowledge base articles, links, apps, videos, and points of contact. Topic pages are designed and organized for fast self-service and intuitive navigation.The power of many voicesEmployee Center was released to the public in September. Just 25 days later, we launched our own version inside LIKE.TG—a perfect example of CEO Bill McDermott’s directive to “innovate quickly and deliver fast time to value.”According to Aarti S., an IT product manager at LIKE.TG, this project perfectly illustrates the power of cross-functional collaboration in creating the best product possible for both employees and customers. We call this customer zero, where product and IT work closely to shape products before their release to customers.“We have the privilege of seeing and using our solutions while they’re still a work in progress and giving our product team feedback early on,” Aarti says. She adds that close collaboration allows the product team to incorporate IT feedback in near-real time.“All new products come with their own limitations initially,” says Sunil S., a UI/UX developer in IT at ServiceNow. “Using our own products allows each of us to say, ‘OK, this is what we are looking to add. This is what needs to change.’” Sancho P., a senior director for the product team, says putting our products through the paces internally ensures they’re ready for prime time from the very beginning. This enables us to gather valuable feedback that we can share with customers, an incredibly important step in the process.“Customers always ask, ‘What’s the best practice for deploying this solution?’” Sancho says. “While we can cite other customer examples, ultimately, they want to know how LIKE.TG deploys it. We show our Employee Portal [Employee Center] as the starting point for what best-in-class looks like. Collaboration between our product and IT teams doesn’t just benefit the product; it also benefits customers who want to know how to best implement the product.”Serving as customer zero continues to be a source of pride for employees.“I think it’s important for us to drink our own champagne and experience firsthand what we’re rolling out to the market,” says Reema S., a senior business systems analyst in IT. “It feels great to be part of the bigger vision and deliver value for our customers.”Consensus: Collaboration drives successAccording to Sunil, the amount of testing—and changes—to implement this type of solution can typically take four months. How did they do it in 25 days? Through constant contact and collaboration.“This was one of the best examples of collaboration between teams that I can recall,” Reema says. “We had so many cross-functional dependencies on the business, technical, and product sides—and everyone worked together to make it happen.”She adds, “I’m so proud to be part of a team where everyone relies on each other so that if one person is not there, the others will pick it up and get the job done.”We’re hiring. Explore careers at ServiceNow.

AI Search: The secret to better customer self-service

Hari Vats, senior knowledge manager of global technical support at LIKE.TG, co-authored this blog.Who wouldn’t want a faster, more relevant search on their knowledge base? Improving search results is tricky. Organizations can spend a lot of time and money making small improvements to very complex, dynamic environments of information.When LIKE.TG acquired an AI search technology company in 2020, we were thrilled to see an immediate return. Since we adopted AI Search, we’ve seen our search results delivered 3.5 times faster than with our previous search engine—from an average of 10.3 seconds down to 2.3 seconds. Perhaps even more important, relevancy improved, with results now 2.9 times more relevant.How did we achieve these results? AI plays a big role. But AI is just a technology in service of a business goal. Our goal was simple: Deliver the right content from our knowledge bases to our customers at the time they request it. We knew we had a lot of useful content on our Now Support portal. But if our customers couldn’t find the right content at the right time, all the AI in the world wouldn’t help. Improving search relevancy and resultsAI Search connects employees and customers to the answers they need in a simple search experience with personalized, relevant results. It uses machine learning to identify user intent and deliver results users can act on from within the search results window.In the past, our legacy search engine used keyword searches to match words or phrases within a query. AI Search delivers a very different user experience. It can interpret contextual cues to identify user intent and produce highly relevant information.To see how AI search worked, we conducted extensive user acceptance testing in global technical support for more than six weeks. We engaged subject matter experts from 13 different teams who tested more than 50 functionalities in only two weeks. Using these suggestions, our development team improved relevancy and performance prior to the go-live date.Our favorite AI Search featuresHere are a few of the AI Search features we found especially useful: Auto suggest: We refine the list of popular keywords by analyzing what users click and search. AI Search doesn’t yet support an index-based auto-suggest, but we look forward to that in a future release. Spellcheck: The spellcheck function can find multiple spelling mistakes in each query and use AI to correct them and deliver more relevant results. Search as a service: We can now index once and create relevancy models across applications. Once implemented, this solution can help make operations more agile and maintenance more streamlined. Powering multiple channels with a single search solution means users can access quick, relevant information regardless of whether they use a desktop or mobile device. Attachment search: Our engine can search attachments as well as articles, a feature that was unavailable in the past. Promoted result: One major challenge of any search engine is to surface relevant content around generic queries, which make up about a third of all queries. Subject matter experts decide which answers are the best match for these queries. This has significantly improved our relevancy, as well as how people engage with the results. Personalized query rules: We can now personalize search results for different user roles and user groups. Gone is the black box relevancy algorithm that didn’t recognize different needs for different user types. Content security: Following a content security enhancement in the Rome release, users can now search external content securely using a single search application across all data sources, providing a more cohesive experience. Other new features included integrated support for five languages, fast setup and integration, and easily configurable synonyms and stop words. Impact of AI SearchThe power of AI lies in its ability to constantly learn and to improve relevancy through machine learning. For example, if users consistently click on the third entry in the list, the system recognizes it to be the most relevant and changes rankings. AI learns from users’ behavior to predict the best answers. This is called automatic tuning.The impact of AI Search is proven by our metrics: A 3.6 average click rank indicates the user clicked one of the top five results. 80% of users click on one of the top five results, compared to 52% previously. 92% of the time a search automation request does not lead to a case submission. Although we’ve seen dramatic improvements in our search functionality, we’re working on further improvements to both time and relevancy. It’s all about delivering the right content to the right person at the right time. AI is just one way we can give customers the tools they need to self-serve answers quickly and move on to their next task.Learn more in our Now at Work 2021 session, Migrating to AI Search—a customer zero story. Registration is free. Take a deeper dive into how AI is transforming work.

3 simple steps to rejuvenate your IT learning program

How proactive support operations can reduce customer escalations

Minesh Patel, senior manager of support account management at LIKE.TG, and JP Renaud, senior director of support management at LIKE.TG, contributed to this blog.As part of our customer service and support team, the LIKE.TG support account management (SAM) and customer escalations (CE) teams are committed to averting situations where performance affects customers’ ability to operate their business.Our job is to focus on customer health—in other words, keep LIKE.TG customers out of harm’s way. Our teams are responsible for preventing and mitigating P1 outages and major performance issues.Many of the issues our customers experience are performance-related, due to poor maintenance or variations from best practices. To provide the highest level of support operations, our focus extends beyond LIKE.TG to issues our customers may inadvertently create.Scaling prevention effortsAs the company has grown, we realized reactive problem-solving in the SAM and CE functions couldn’t scale. We were efficiently monitoring our customers’ cloud infrastructure from different angles, but we needed a way to resolve issues more rapidly.We wanted a coordinated approach that could quickly identify and communicate indicators of issues. Detecting these anomalies early would mean we could begin mitigation efforts at these first signs, sometimes before the customer even knew about them.After surveying 6,004 customers throughout six different countries, Gartner® found that 42% prefer proactive service, compared to 21% who prefer reactive service.1 Intercepting issues promptly would enable us to move to a proactive investigative approach integrated across both teams.Our SAM team had a siloed view of overall customer health. It was focused on individual alerts relevant to its specific accounts in the areas of networking, capacity, and database management. The team wasn’t looking for broader problems that could potentially turn into a customer escalation for the CE team to address. The CE team entered the picture when customer issues had the potential to make a large-scale impact. Often, the issue was spiraling out of control before the CE team knew about it.Reducing issues and escalationsThe SAM and CE teams adopted a unified, proactive approach, tapping into the power of the Now Platform®.CE developed two models to help predict and prevent issues. The models monitor and analyze a selection of alerts that have been identified as early indicators for major performance problems or outages. The team is notified so team members can intervene before a significant impact. The models include: Predictive Performance Alerting – identifies customer instances at risk using monitoring alerts Top Transaction Trending – identifies customer instances at risk using transactional response times With these models, the CE team is seeing fewer performance issues and escalations.The proactive mindset has shifted the dynamic. Now, we often approach customers and recommend actions instead of waiting for the account team to alert us. This creates a partnership to solve the issue. (Read more about predictive modeling on the Now Platform.)To complement this partnership, the SAM team developed a Predictive Analysis Dashboard (PAD). It gives support account managers a view into customer health so they can: View specific customer alerts in aggregate to identify early indicators of trouble. Zero in on important metrics and act accordingly based on shifts. Approach monitoring with a forward-thinking mindset. Support account managers log in to the dashboard to spot anomalies in aggregate. They can then try to prevent or mitigate issues before they cause real trouble. This visibility has boosted customers’ trust as they see the value we provide in helping to avoid or substantially reduce the impact of performance issues.Just as important is the feedback from SAM team members who live and breathe customer support. Making a positive impactOne of the most noticeable outcomes has been a sense of relief. Instead of being blindsided by issues, both the SAM and CE teams have visibility into customer health earlier in the support process. The number of proactive actions and recommendations to our customers are trending up, creating a positive impact.The result is a better end-to-end experience for both our customers and our support teams. And that goes a long way toward alleviating some big-time pressure.Find out more about how LIKE.TG uses its own products to run its internal operations.1 Gartner, Proactive Customer Service Is Valued by Customers, Despite What They Say, https://www.gartner.com/en/documents/3985773/proactive-customer-service-is-valued-by-customers-despit, Customer Service and Support Research Team, 29 May 2020.GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.

4 ways IT support can scale and deliver exceptional service

LIKE.TG IT support prides itself on providing world-class support services for employees. Because of the company’s hypergrowth, our previous model of 24/7 IT support couldn’t scale.We needed a better way to deal with the exponential increase in support case volume while maintaining a lean IT support team that continues to deliver exceptional support services.Here are four changes we’re undertaking to meet this challenge:1. Embrace an automation-first, stewardship mindsetAs a team, we’re radically restructuring our thinking to view obstacles from longer-term stewardship and automation-first perspectives. Instead of reactively solving one-off support requests and being satisfied with a reduction in mean time to resolution, we’re expanding our responsibilities to include strategic work that traditionally falls outside the scope of IT support.For example, it was IT support’s responsibility to replace every out-of-date laptop at LIKE.TG with a new one. The increase in support case volume caused by aging laptops added unnecessary incidents to the IT support caseload.We identified areas within the laptop refresh process that were ripe for automation. We collaborated with the IT engineering and IT Asset Management teams to build out a zero-touch initiative, which automated the entire end-to-end laptop distribution process. For our end users, zero touch means quicker time to productivity when unboxing a new machine. John Lee, a content analyst at LIKE.TG, filled out a zero-touch hardware refresh request. A few days later, he opened his new laptop, placed his old PC into the same shipping box, and scheduled it for pickup.After Lee input his credentials, automation took care of the rest. The same applications, files, and experience of his previous PC were recreated in the new laptop without any manual configuration required.“Getting a new computer was seamless. I didn’t need to leave my house. I loved unboxing a new computer. I had to fill in my username and password, and I was back working on my files within 30 minutes,” he says.Collective zero-touch efforts in 2021 resulted in 1,522 completed requests and $152,000 in cost savings, equaling 1,141 IT productivity hours saved. By taking an automation-first perspective, we were able to use out-of-the-box thinking to solve a long-term issue for our team.2. Dive into Knowledge-Centered Service (KCS®)KCS is a framework that helps effectively capture and continuously improve and deliver IT knowledge so employees can solve IT issues themselves. The framework is central to our strategy to increase employee self-service and reduce overall support caseloads.One of our key measurements of progress is attach rate, or how often an IT support team member documents their knowledge from a case. This knowledge is shared with employees through knowledge base (KB) articles. Employees can self-diagnose issues, and IT support can shorten resolution times because issues are solved only once.LIKE.TG IT is early in its KCS journey. Since January 2021, our L2 attach rates increased by more than 30%. Our highest-performing L2 team had an attach rate of approximately 69%, just short of our 85% goal. Here are some hard-earned lessons from our ongoing KCS implementation: Be ready to shift team culture and mindset.We knew KCS was a permanent behavioral change for IT support and would require a concerted organizational change management effort. KCS best practices, such as creating and attaching KB articles to incidents and managing knowledge to increase employee self-service, are baseline responsibilities for our team. We’ll continue to expand our expectations over time. People are core to KCS success.In the beginning, KCS adoption was uneven. For example, we knew the initial time commitment required for IT support engineers to create and attach KB articles would add more workload but would lead to overall time savings for the IT support team. We brought in resources such as KCS coaches to drive confidence and success and, more importantly, shift the team mindset. The overall work experience of our IT support agents and advisers has improved. Future support cases can be solved faster by simply attaching a KB article. Employees are empowered to self-solve. IT support can resolve challenges in minutes, not hours. That means we get to spend more time on complex and exciting projects instead of getting bogged down on redundant cases.3. Use technology to multiply impact and eliminate toilWe use the Now Platform® to operationalize and magnify IT support’s transformation. For example, we built dynamic KB search into incident search for our engineers who handle incidents. KB articles are automatically recommended to engineers, reducing the manual steps to search for a relevant KB.We also added the ability to create, publish, and check for article quality within the incident record itself to make the entire KCS experience frictionless. To make KCS fun, we’re adding gamification elements that award points for attaching and creating articles. We also use dashboards to track the real-time value and progress of our adoption, so we can celebrate our progress over time. 4. Automate the boring stuffWe investigate every nook and cranny of IT support to find automation opportunities that make human intervention optional instead of not mandatory. For example, a large portion of our inbound IT support cases consisted of access requests related to cloud VPN, RSA tokens, and Okta Verify.Each incident required a three- to five-minute phone conversation and a lot of toil for IT support, which delayed work on more complex incidents. Never mind the frustration factor when our customers wanted to work but couldn’t.IT support partnered with engineering to set up automated workflows that redirect employee requests to KB articles detailing a solution for each of these requests. We took this a step further. Now employees can use the LIKE.TG Virtual Agent chatbot solution, NowBot, to resolve common issues such as RSA unlock and PIN reset without human interaction.From January 2021 to the present, NowBot has completely handled—or deflected using KB articles—12,432 tickets for RSA token requests, resets, installation, and login issues. Plus, 60.8% of all RSA-related issues are solved without human intervention.One of LIKE.TG’s biggest priorities is improving the employee experience so our people can be productive and focus on the more challenging aspects of their work. Our implementation of IT Service Management (ITSM) workflows and analytics dashboards have helped us improve how we work, whether in IT support or reporting an IT issue.The mindset shifts may be challenging, but the end results are happier employees and, in most cases, customers.Learn more about our internal adoption of ITSM, IT Operations Management, and other ITx products.

Why we adopted Microsoft Teams—and what others can learn from it

Collaboration apps, such as Microsoft Teams, have become critical during the pandemic because they enable employees to stay connected and engaged while they work. Just how critical?Microsoft reported 270 million Teams users in January 2022, up from 75 million in April 2020, a few weeks into the pandemic, according to ZDNet. Teams and similar apps have proven essential to the remote workplace.LIKE.TG is one of the companies benefiting from Teams adoption. Teams isn’t just an app to bridge the pandemic; it’s a valuable part of our strategy to enhance employee engagement and productivity. As we shape the future of work, whether employees are in the office or remote, we want to provide the tools to stay connected.Empowering employeesFrom their first day, employees need to access files and complete tasks from anywhere and from any device. With many different systems and platforms available, employees can benefit from a unified and consistent experience.Microsoft Teams provides a vital link to complement our employee productivity portfolio of tools, improve efficiency, and simplify processes. It natively integrates with software LIKE.TG already uses: Office 365, OneDrive, and CRM Dynamics. But implementation wasn’t enough. Communication and education were also key to successful adoption. We couldn’t expect employees to wholeheartedly embrace Teams without assistance. We had to determine: How do we educate employees to use the platform? What are the benefits for each particular job? How do we support employees when they have questions? How do we motivate employees who are hesitant? 4 keys to a smooth rolloutWith these questions in mind, we planned a phased rollout by leadership function. We learned four main lessons during our transition:1. Communicate the how and whySpending time and effort to prepare employees for the change was vital to gaining broad support and buy-in. We didn’t want to catch our employees off guard. That meant developing an employee communications strategy for before, during, and after the rollout.We defined the transition to Teams and emphasized how new features could help save time and reduce frustration. We made sure employees understood the change, why we were doing it, the impact, timelines, and the resources available to help them.2. Tap the expertsWe talked to other organizations that had undergone this process to learn from their mistakes. After listening to the feedback of early adopters, we adjusted our plans to fit our culture.Many employees had used Teams at previous employers; we encouraged them to share their knowledge and champion the switch. Hands-on tips and tricks were invaluable in helping employees transition to the new platform and take advantage of all the new capabilities.3. Amp up the knowledge exchangeTo help bridge any gaps and support a smooth transition, it’s important to encourage employees to get comfortable with Microsoft Teams early. We did this by making information—such as Microsoft Teams searchable content, live user training, and a self-help site—available in all the places employees go for help: our employee portal, Virtual Agent, knowledge base, internal portals, and the mobile app. Setting up multiple support methods enabled employees to get answers to their questions fast. We used email and internal portal posts to alert employees of upcoming changes, avoiding surprises. This type of knowledge sharing prepared employees for success.4. Get leadership buy-inIf employees don’t use the platform, the organization won’t benefit from it. Adoption needs to be championed from the top down.We made sure our chief information officer understood the rollout strategy and the value the technology would deliver so he could advocate for it with other senior leaders. That included defining expectations: Individual leaders would lead by example, endorse the switch, and discourage shadow IT. During the transition process, IT provided consistent guidance to build trust that Teams would be the preferred solution.Seamless adoptionWithin three months, we achieved 100% adoption on Teams and decommissioned our previous tool for all employees. Today, 97% of employees are active on Teams weekly.“Teams adoption within LIKE.TG has opened up new ways of collaborating across global functions and time zones,” says Mirza Baig, senior director of IT Service Management at ServiceNow. “Because information can be shared easily and quickly, Teams supports our culture of making work better for our employees.”The world of work is changing, and we’re adapting along the way, embracing other features in our employee experience with Teams. It’s just one tool in our tool belt to digitally transform our business by helping employees remain engaged and productive well into the future.Find out more in our Making hybrid work, work for you ebook.Take a deeper dive into how LIKE.TG uses its own products.©2022 LIKE.TG, Inc. All right reserved. LIKE.TG, the LIKE.TG logo, Now, and other LIKE.TG marks are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of LIKE.TG, Inc. in the United State and/or other countries. Other company names, product names, and logos may be trademarks of the respective companies with which they are associated.

Balanced metrics: The key to success in DevSecOps transformation

When measuring the success of large-scale transformations—particularly in the technology space—it’s natural to look at hard metrics, such as cycle time, mean time to recovery (MTTR), and so on. In IT, for example, hard metrics are what we do all day long.But within any organization, change is ultimately personal. In my experience, relying exclusively on hard numbers often leads you to ignore the human side of transformation, and sometimes even action the wrong things. That’s why we use both hard and soft metrics to guide our DevSecOps transformation at ServiceNow.Measuring progress in 2 waysIn our transformation journey, we look at more than 20 data points, with equal weight given to soft numbers and hard numbers: Hard metrics are quantifiable, such as the number of releases flowing through the pipeline, the frequency of deployment, and the number of teams using the pipelines. Soft metrics are qualitative, subjective values, including Net Promoter Score (NPS) and Adoption Readiness surveys of our program leads, that assesses the engineering community’s satisfaction with the transformation. We often follow these surveys with retrospectives where engineers can share their thoughts on changes from a people (culture), process, and technology perspective. To help us transform insight into action, we use a combination of both metric types to consider the human side of a project via satisfaction and feedback surveys. Including soft metrics brings team members into the transformation process, giving them the chance to voice their views and influence change.Teams that show great self-reported metrics, such as satisfaction scores, and hard metrics, such as deployment frequency, are the ones that make steady progress and find new ways to improve week over week.On the flip side, teams that rely only on the rigor of hard metrics and overlook user satisfaction often hit a plateau quite quickly. This results in frustration—pushing hard but not reaping rewards.I must admit that although I love to see high satisfaction scores, I welcome the low ones because they yield a goldmine of feedback that will help us improve how we work. Gaining insights from divergenceHard and soft metrics often track with one another; good progress against hard metrics often results in high satisfaction. Where it gets interesting is when the two metrics diverge.For example, one of our teams’ high satisfaction scores showed they were very happy with their new process. Yet, they were used to their previous release schedule and saw no great need to increase their deployment frequency. By considering both metrics, I knew we needed to create encouraging conditions for them to deploy more frequently and experience the benefits themselves.At first blush, it may seem like low satisfaction scores are purely a symptom of cultural challenges, but a deeper look can reveal whether it’s the process, technology, or culture that needs fine-tuning.As an example, one of our teams had low satisfaction scores—not because they resisted change, but because their unique setup wasn’t supported by our technology. They listed their complaints, and the DevSecOps tooling team enabled features to accommodate them. As a result, the releases going through the pipeline and satisfaction increased not only for this team, but also for other teams that had this problem but not as severely. (Read more about using metrics to gain visibility and achieve desired outcomes.)Transformation is a journeyTransformation is an ongoing process, from crawl to walk to run to sprint. Because of that, attitudes and metrics are going to change. Be sure to take the pulse of your community periodically—on both hard and soft metrics—to assess your progress and make any necessary course corrections to achieve your goals.Find out more about how LIKE.TG uses its own products.

Q&A: Transforming customer support to elevate the customer experience

4 easy ways to keep your knowledge base relevant and up to date

Knowledge is king in today’s information-driven business world, as most knowledge managers like me know. Having the right information at customers' fingertips can greatly influence their perception of the customer support experience.In today’s self-service world, a well-populated knowledge base with a reliable group of contributors is not enough to create a great experience. The content must be relevant and timely.Like a car or motorcycle, knowledge base content needs regular maintenance. Over time, your knowledge base can become filled with hundreds or even thousands of stale, irrelevant articles. That’s when customers stop using it and new cases spike.Facing knowledge base maintenance can be overwhelming. If you’re like me, you may have an impulse to bypass this step, delete everything, and start over.Don’t do it. As a member of the team that uses LIKE.TG® Knowledge Management to run our knowledge base, I have some tips to help you get your knowledge base content program on track:1. Empower expertsOur front-line technical service engineers (TSEs) work alongside customers to solve issues every day. They have firsthand access to valuable knowledge. That’s why we have TSEs update and republish knowledge base articles as they work on cases. This way, the content stays relevant, even as an issue evolves over time.Some knowledge managers fear losing control of content or publishing inaccurate information. That can happen. We use Knowledge-Centered Service (KCS®) to mitigate mistakes and ensure team-wide best practices. Having a methodology in place helps us find and correct errors quickly. 2. Choose groups over singlesIn the past, it seemed more productive for one TSE to update articles in their area of expertise. That assured the right answer. We find it’s even easier to have a group of people own a topic.When an author owner leaves the team or company and takes that knowledge with them, delays to KB updates result. Instead, we rely on an owner group of experts, overseen by a manager. Updating articles is part of a routine, with shared accountability across several people, not one.3. Ask for feedbackWe encourage feedback on knowledge base articles from both customers and employees (those outside the article’s ownership). This helps us determine when an article is no longer useful.Negative feedback is especially valuable. If someone selects the thumbs-down icon, we request a comment to help us understand why the article isn’t beneficial. Then we either fix it or retire it. We also use service-level agreements to verify an issue is resolved by the appropriate article owner group.4. Review, update, and repeatTo ensure information is relevant and timely, we also incorporate four standard processes for updating knowledge base content: Quarterly content reviews — We ask our subject matter experts to refine and improve the top-performing content. They make edits, add images, and insert links to other content to make articles more relevant and searchable. Automatic retirement — We define usage criteria, such as number of views or attaches, to identify and retire low-performing content. You can always bring retired content back if needed. External content — We examine how much of our content is internal versus customer-facing. Our goal is to make all relevant content available to customers. Top-performing internal articles can often be made accessible to customers with light edits. For example, a content creator may have forgotten to make the content external-facing or wanted another review before making it public. Proactive, not reactive — We challenge our TSEs to create content based on trends they see. A usage dashboard is extremely helpful in tracking search terms or cases/incidents without articles attached. It offers great opportunities for proactive knowledge creation on popular topics. Making relevant, timely articles available can help customers find the answers they need, when they need them. It can also help reduce the number of new cases being created.Find out more about our knowledge management journey in 7 tips for knowledge managers to increase self-service.KCS® is a service mark of the Consortium for Service Innovation™.

Automating the employee offboarding experience

For the past year, the unprecedented movement of workers leaving jobs and switching career paths (aka the Great Reshuffle), has been top of mind for most organizations. Although losing talent is largely inevitable and a natural part of any company’s ongoing evolution, many organizations are recognizing the velocity of employee exits as one of the greatest risks they face today.To assess your organization’s risk, answer these questions: Does IT deactivate an employee’s user credentials but miss local logins or other sensitive systems, leaving the organization wide open to unauthorized access? Can an employee exfiltrate company secrets on their way out? Are final paychecks paid accurately and on time? Are laptops recovered from exiting employees in a timely manner and restored appropriately? At LIKE.TG, we identified offboarding as an opportunity for improvement. A patchwork of manual processes involving multiple teams and multiple handoffs exposed us to risk. We saw that the offboarding process could be automated across the enterprise. Taking it a step further, we wanted to deliver an offboarding experience as good as the onboarding one and address the needs of both remote and in-office employees.Simplifying offboardingFor us, the employee journey is a series of moments that matter. We invest heavily in our employee onboarding, ramp-up period, and training and development. But we hadn’t made an employee’s last weeks at the company as constructive and meaningful as their first.Our people team collaborated with our digital technology (DT) team to design the LIKE.TG offboarding experience and automate the entire process for our departing employees, their manager, and supporting team members. The people team can now centrally track tasks, helping to ensure nothing is missed. DT, finance, security, and workplace services receive the information they need when they need it. The employee, their data, and LIKE.TG all remain secure and protected.We created the process to be as easy and frictionless as possible, whether the employee is on-site or remote. Automation makes a complicated process across functions easy and intuitive, ensuring the right people receive the right offboarding notifications at the right time while keeping the employee’s data secure.For example, an employee confirms their personal details, including their preferred method for returning their computer equipment and receiving their final paycheck. Managers no longer need to collect information and documentation and confirm offboard details via email. The information is automatically updated in the appropriate systems of record.Providing a consistent experience was important to us. We use our HR Service Delivery solution out of the box to deliver a uniform global experience regardless of: Role – manager or individual contributor Location – US, Germany, Japan, or elsewhere Workplace – remote, office, or flexible Workflows trigger specific tasks, depending on the departing employee’s country of work and worker-specific details. For example, we provide e-signature software for signature validation across the globe but can also share country-specific exit documentation as needed.Employees with mobile numbers can opt to keep or cancel the mobile number; their info is automatically sent to our mobility team. Remote employees may have different tasks than those located on-site, but the experience is the same.Building a positive end-to-end experienceWe centrally measure and track offboarding data. Based on our initial projections, we expect to see a 70% decrease in offboarding time and a 73% drop in cost per offboard. These positive results are primarily due to the reduction and elimination of manual tasks involved in the exit process.All system access is now automatically removed on the employee’s last day of work. Addresses for final paychecks are automatically updated instead of requiring a manual cut and paste. Managers have transparency into all offboarding tasks, avoiding confusion. One of my favorite stories about the impact of offboarding occurred the day of our internal launch. Before we had even communicated availability of the offboarding experience, six exits had been initiated with no help at all. That’s an intuitive user experience.The hiring landscape is exceptionally competitive. Although no organization wants to lose employees, people switch careers, go back to school, take time for themselves and their families, and retire. We want employees to leave with a positive experience as they transition to what’s next in their lives.With our new offboarding experience, employees, managers, and the people team can take care of basic tasks and focus on what really matters during an employee’s last weeks with us.Learn more at the Knowledge Digital Experience. Registration is free after selecting your time zone. Once logged in, visit the Library and search for: Now on Now: Using the CHRO Dashboard to make the best decisions for our people (SES1267) Now on Now: Safe, agile, and convenient: Our new world of work (SES1269)

Building our own employee journey

When you hear the term “employee journey,” you might think of a few HR requests and a stack of onboarding paperwork. You might also conjure up phrases such as “retaining talent” and “increasing productivity”—both valid and worthy pursuits that just skim the surface of the employee journey’s potential.At LIKE.TG, our employee journey reflects a larger cultural movement within the company, bolstered by our own technological innovation. We believe work should be purposeful, enriching, and fun. Toward that goal, we've created digital solutions to support the various aspects of the employee journey, driven by a genuine desire to care for our employees and help them live their best lives and do their best work.[We’re hiring. Explore LIKE.TG careers.]Four employees who worked on various stages of the LIKE.TG employee journey built on the Now Platform® share why it’s really “all about the journey.”An offer too good to refuseWhen Vijai K. joined the LIKE.TG people technology team in 2020, he was struck by the seamless remote employee onboarding process. “During these COVID times, we’re all working virtually and separated. The Now Platform is the first touch point where a new hire interacts with the company...If the experience is good, the employee will gain confidence,” he says.Vijai and his team baked a new element into the pre-hire process: Offer Calculator, which they built on the Now Platform in only three weeks. The solution enables recruiters to quickly assess a prospective candidate’s offer salary with real-time graphical representations of market salary range and anonymized internal comparison of the full package. When we rolled out Offer Calculator internally, Vijai could see how comfortable and easy it was for our recruiters to use. “It quickly transformed the way they worked,” he recalls.Before then, recruiters had to use Excel spreadsheets to make manual adjustments and jump between various disconnected systems. Now, “it’s all just one interface, and they get all the information they need,” Vijai says. Offer Calculator also enhances our candidate experience by enabling a smoother, faster, and fairer offer calibration process.Seeing the amount of time (and frustration) this saved his colleagues, Vijai felt emotional. He likes the platform’s plug-and-play ease of use and how quickly he could add value. “Our platform is so robust,” he says.The human touchLate one evening, LIKE.TG’s Dublin office brimmed with excitement. There, Ryan O. and his Europe, Middle East, and Africa people care team had developed Live Agent and just received its first chat notifications. “It’s a thrill to solve something in the moment for people,” Ryan says.The new feature in LIKE.TG® Virtual Agent enables in-the-moment messaging between employees and the people care team. After a pilot program in Ireland, Live Agent was released companywide—to glowing reviews.Although we don’t have HR representation in every office, "we don’t want to lose the human touch,” Ryan explains—even at a growing company like ServiceNow. “We don’t call ourselves the care team for no reason. We really want employees to feel that we care, because we do.”For Ryan, Live Agent represents more than process efficiency. Dealing with serious events, such as taking a leave of absence to care for a sick loved one, is already a difficult situation for an employee. It doesn’t need to be made more difficult (or tedious) with logistical frustration.“In people’s moments of need, we should be there to help, easily and immediately,” he says. “It’s about being authentic, transparent, and open-minded.”Ryan feels “an immense sense of pride and belonging” at seeing how his work has enhanced the lives of others. “It’s kind of that sweet spot in a job…when the work that you’re doing [feels] connected to the goals of the company,” he says.Staying accountableWhen Carlos V. joined the digital technology (formerly IT) team at LIKE.TG as a product manager, he could tell something was different. Here, he found his colleagues focused on building both great technology and a great culture. It’s a “place where people feel safe giving feedback, talking about their goals, and seeing the bigger picture,” he says.Part of that picture, he learned, is mutual accountability. In a remote work world, accountability and clear direction are more necessary than ever. “If somebody is half a world away and they don’t do what they’re supposed to do, you’re gonna feel that, big time,” Carlos explains. “You can’t go to their desk and be like, ‘Hey, can you please do this?’”Carlos spearheaded Goal Setting, an internal tool that organizes regular goal-setting conversations between employees and managers. It makes what could be a difficult or awkward conversation a cohesive, organized process. Carlos found himself shocked at how quickly he and his team could do the work.Within six weeks, they ideated, developed, executed, and released the Goal Setting tool. “I was like, ‘This is crazy,’” he remembers. “But as we kept getting closer and closer to our release date, I realized, ‘OK, wow! We’re moving really fast. This is not taking as long as I thought it would based on previous experiences [at other companies].’” The next chapterAlthough we never like to see people leave our company, it's part of the employee journey. Whether they're retiring, changing careers, or moving to another company, the offboarding process can be strenuous. During the onset of a pandemic, it’s even harder. That’s when Anna Rita H., an HR project manager, was tasked with lightening the load.As a former member of the people care team, Anna Rita knew the pain points of a manual offboarding process, as well as the downstream effects it could have on countless teams within the organization. “It’s a tricky transition for managers, too. It adds a lot of pressure,” she says.“What we really wanted to achieve was a workflow, a system that supports employees with all of their different questions—and supports managers in the same way but also automates a lot of the manual processes that happen behind the scenes.” Anna Rita and her team succeeded.Now, employees, managers, and members of the people care team have specific digital tasks, automations, and data gathering integrations between systems that help guide them through the offboarding transition. When Anna Rita heard how much time the improved process saved her colleagues, it sounded like “music to my ears,” she says. “Helping all of these people, to me, felt really rewarding.”Leading a project on the Now Platform, was “a whole new dimension” for Anna Rita. “One of the things I was most surprised about was just how much our platform can actually do,” she says. “Sometimes you’re like, ‘Could it do this?’ And then you’re like, ‘Yeah, it can do that’…That’s just awesome.”Treating employees like customersAn employee journey filled with manual tasks across multiple systems is more than an inconvenience; it’s a detriment that can inhibit the professional and personal growth of an employee.“The more time we spend working on things that aren’t what we got hired to do, or don’t contribute to the company’s core mission, it’s either time wasted or extra time we have to spend out of our personal lives to make it up,” Carlos says.Providing care to our employees is “dynamic and ever-changing" work, Anna Rita adds. Given the large scope of these projects, there’s a “level of resilience needed,” she says. But the best part about building solutions that optimize the employee journey experience is that we get to be the first to enjoy the perks.“We want to treat our employees equal to customers,” Vijai says. “They are not different entities.”Join an inclusive, empowering team. Browse job opportunities at ServiceNow.

Using the Now Platform to scale account-based marketing

In a world where executive and buyer attention spans are declining, how do sales and marketing professionals create the most relevant and timely experiences for customers and prospects to learn about your company’s solutions? By designing account-specific experiences that ensure the right message is delivered to the right executive at the right time.We differentiate LIKE.TG using relevant, targeted messaging in conversations with our strategic accounts. Using digital workflows created on the Now Platform®, we’ve embraced a disciplined approach that exponentially increases the scale and impact of our account-based marketing (ABM) as a service program. Our strategy exemplifies a new way of doing business across the entire company, with a conscious effort to center all activities on a customer value model.The industry endorses our approach. Our ABM program was recognized with ITSMA Marketing Excellence Awards for two years running, including gold awards for Driving Strategic Growth and Orchestrating Executive Engagement in 2019 and 2020.Thanks to a mix of cross-functional teamwork and workflows, we’ve scaled our operations, improved our return on investment, and simplified enablement for the sales and marketing teams—and our customers. We also optimized our processes so our employees can do their best work. Sharing content via self-serviceOur ABM technology strategy is simple: We rely on Now Platform workflows to scale. A self-service model called the Global ABM Center of Excellence (CoE) offers a fully searchable resource and central hub for all ABM-related content.The CoE provides field marketing and other internal teams with a single framework, along with centralized guidance and resources. This makes it easy to access and deliver the most relevant, business imperative-specific content to our customers. It’s explicitly designed to optimize our learnings and impact our three-tiered ABM strategy (one-to-one, one-to-few, and ABM-style self-service). By connecting previously siloed teams using the Now Platform, we can now deliver a seamless user experience.The ABM as a service framework is the foundation of the CoE. This model automates the request tracking, development, and delivery of new account-specific assets via our internal portal. Workflows automate the process for tailoring the content to the account and help ensure the content meets brand quality standards. Using a create-once, deploy-many mindset, we can spread the cost over more accounts, resulting in a significantly greater return on the original investment.Gaining usable insightsThe ABM team delivers strategic, thoughtful marketing that’s easy to understand and implement by teams interested in rolling out effective, results-driven, ABM-style campaigns. Traditional metrics, such as the number of marketing qualified leads, don’t capture the true impact of investments in long-term senior stakeholder relationships that increase advocacy and adoption of ServiceNow.The ABM as a service model helps us understand how long-term investments deliver outstanding return. We can measure content engagement by our global sales, marketing, and services teams. Because the model works as a continuous loop, we can easily embrace feedback and continue to improve the relevance of our content to multiple accounts. Collecting insights and data helps us identify and understand the key business issues facing our customers. We use these insights to co-create custom value propositions that highlight the business impact of the Now Platform and key business imperatives the platform can help solve.Centralized asset and project tracking capabilities give the team a consolidated dashboard to see trends, financials, and operations. As a result, the overall asset quality has improved while lead times have dropped. Automated processes have dramatically reduced unexpected variants and inconsistent templates from our vendors and enabled us to reduce our standard agency cost per asset by up to 40%.Realizing business-wide successSubsequently, the ABM team has been able to reduce the number of regional silos and offer more services to more accounts around the world. We create new value for LIKE.TG by innovating at scale and speed. And we see results: The CoE received approximately the same number of requests in Q122 as it did in all of 2021. In addition, the asset portal saw 10 times growth in the number of requests between Q121 and Q122.The ABM program isn’t just a marketing success story—it’s a business-wide success story. By prioritizing and delivering value more effectively and consistently, we can impact markets across the globe. Workflows drive collaboration and engagement, enabling us to create relevant and timely experiences for customers and prospects well into the future.Find out more about using the Now Platform in marketing at the Knowledge Digital Experience. Registration is free after selecting your time zone. Once you’re logged in, go to the Library and search under More Filters for Now on Now: Using the Scaled Agile Framework to drive global digital marketing (SES1385).

Reimagining training and certification: A customer zero story

Activity on Now Learning, LIKE.TG’s learning platform for training and certification, is on the rise. Total logins rose 25% between 2020 and 2021, and on-demand course completion increased 43%.As LIKE.TG revenue continues to grow at 30% per year, the demand for skilled administrators, developers, and architects is rapidly increasing. Rising demand, spurred in part by the move to virtual learning amid the pandemic, compelled the training and certification team to partner with IT in early 2021 to reimagine how it delivered training.“Our primary goal is to offer training that is engaging and easy to use so anyone can train and certify with LIKE.TG,” says Eric Martinez, director of digital learning at ServiceNow. “By making learning more enjoyable and accessible, we can help increase the number of job-ready LIKE.TG professionals. The best way to accomplish this is to embrace the Now Platform as the foundation. It shows our users the power of the platform.”Responding to changing demandsThe teams set out to transform the user experience, whether it was an on-demand course, live class, or hands-on lab. They wanted learners of all skill levels and backgrounds to: Easily find and complete courses, paths, and certifications Broaden their LIKE.TG expertise Accelerate their careers Clearly understand the paths to LIKE.TG certifications “Our priority was to replace the fragmented, clunky navigation with an intuitive user interface, better search, and consistent branding,” Martinez explains. “We needed to scale so we could broaden our training service capabilities. Plus, we had to make it easier for customers to manage their learning credits so their employees could enroll in and complete training and certifications without delay.” Using the Now Platform, a small development team quickly built a scalable, cost-effective solution with reduced infrastructure maintenance requirements. The Now Platform provided a single data model and automation engine, reduced native coding requirements, and offered an abundance of reusable code and API integrations.Critical part of customer value accelerationThe time and effort paid off. We can now help our customers manage their data and track learning usage with flexible workspaces, dashboards, and reporting. Additionally, we can easily expand our customer support capabilities with the Customer Service Management application.Few companies can say they use their own technology to deliver their training and certifications, especially a company that doesn’t specialize in training software. Delivering these services on the Now Platform is an achievement the training and certification organization takes pride in. The Now Learning platform is also a key component of LIKE.TG Impact™, a new value acceleration solution that helps customers accelerate their digital transformation with personalized recommendations and insights, premium technical support and preventive tools, role-based training and certifications, expert coaching, and prescriptive guidance. “Now Learning brings to life our shared vision of an amazing customer experience, opportunities to grow the market of LIKE.TG talent, and a chance for anyone to start building a career with LIKE.TG,” says Cat Lang, senior vice president of education at ServiceNow. “Now Learning is our number one enabler for expanding the community of job-capable Now Platform professionals in step with LIKE.TG’s growth.” Register for the Knowledge Digital Experience to learn more. (It’s free.) And check out Now Learning Live. You can also sign up for these sessions: Now on Now: Transforming training certification to a truly digital experience (SES1262) Now on Now: How we built a great digital learning experience using our Platform (SES1273)

7 tips for knowledge managers to increase self-service

Knowledge managers have an ongoing challenge: They want to encourage customers to self-serve and quickly find answers to their questions. They also want to minimize frustration if customers can’t quickly find an answer.Delivering great self-service is key to customer experience. It’s in everyone’s best interest if a customer doesn’t open a case (or incident). But where is the line between keeping your customer happy and causing undue delays? Balancing the increasing amount of product information against the rapid delivery of relevant content is a constant battle—at least for me as a LIKE.TG knowledge manager. Thinking about the role of self-service is one of the most important aspects of my job. These seven tips guide me in encouraging customers to self-help their way to success:1. Keep your content freshThe most tedious part of a knowledge manager’s job is keeping the knowledge base healthy by retiring or deleting old or unused content. Incorporate customer feedback in the comments into updates and revisions.Review all your content regularly for duplicates, views, attaches, reuse, updates, or improvements. Check if internal content can be made customer- or public-facing. Don’t forget to add customer context when creating articles, in both the title (great place for an error message) and the text.2. Tap hidden knowledgeThink of your knowledge base as an iceberg. The smallest part is above water and represents explicit or captured knowledge. The largest mass—the tacit knowledge stuck in people’s heads—is below water. Figure out a way to tap into and share that dormant knowledge.At LIKE.TG, we use Knowledge-Centered Service (KCS®) that enables agents to update knowledge base content as they resolve cases. That way, knowledge is immediately available to customers when they need it, not later. In Q122, we saw a 40% decrease in median time to relief for cases with a knowledge base attached compared to those without. 3. Use a powerful search engineWe use AI Search, introduced in the Now Platform® Rome release, to deliver the right content to customers at the right time and help avoid opening cases. By constantly learning, AI improves relevance. We’ve found that 89% of the time, a search automation request does not lead to a case submission. Delivery of relevant content means a better user experience and more satisfied customers.4. Channel your usersWhy do customers open cases? Because they can’t find information or aren't sure what they’re looking for. Point them in the direction you want them to go. What actions do you want them to take instead of opening a case? Would the knowledge base, product documentation, or an online community provide the right answer?Determine the behavior you want, and then use breadcrumbs to encourage customers to follow a certain path. Encourage visitors to self-serve resources so they’ll do it again.5. Add recommendationsIf a customer shows intent to open a case, keep the self-service options open. Content recommendations should be an integral part of the case submission process. We use machine learning to match categories to the case issue, find relevant content, filter by popularity (number of views or attachments), and then offer a piece of content as an option.Relevance is the key. If something is broken, the customer should be directed to a different place than if they want to learn about the product.6. Encourage customers to dish (with each other)Who doesn’t appreciate recommendations from someone facing the same challenges in their job? We host an online community that fosters active exchanges. The Now Support community has 37 million annual views. Of the 83% of questions in the community that received a reply, the reply was within the first six hours of the question’s posting.We take it a step further and host regular customer video meetings focused on popular topics. Our customers ask questions, and internal experts provide answers that we socialize in the community.7. Solicit ideasWe created an Innovation Portal that encourages customers to suggest product enhancements or features. We run it Reddit-style. Participants can socialize their suggestions and vote for the best ideas. We integrate the most popular requests into our product development process.Self-service contributes to customer successKnowledge management best practices are constantly changing. Technology is a critical tool in creating a great customer experience by allowing us to adapt quickly as interests shift. We’re always looking for ways to improve, such as building a Knowledge Management widget to show how content is performing in real time. This helps us stay on top of knowledge base trends and grow accordingly.At the end of the day, our efforts are centered on helping customers find the information they need to use the Now Platform efficiently and effectively. If we use technology to help them self-solve faster and create fewer cases, we can transform their frustration into delight. The sooner they’re on their way to a new task, the happier they are with ServiceNow.View the Now on Now snackable video series to explore the first three steps in any knowledge management journey: Governance Implementation Operationalization The KCS® methodology is a registered service mark of the Consortium for Service Innovation.

Taming the supply chain: Addressing vendor risks to the nth tier

Vendor risk ranks alongside cybersecurity, compliance, reputational, and financial risks as one of the top risks to any organization.With any risk, you need to identify, monitor, and mitigate that risk, especially when it comes to your supply chain. The question for someone in my role as a senior manager of compliance management is: What level of risk is being posed and why? Stated another way: Do I really know what my supply chain is doing?When looking at our vendor contracts at LIKE.TG, I can easily find information about our first-line supply chain vendors. But digging deeper has proven to be challenging. How do I get objective visibility into the risks of the second-line vendors’ business relationships—and third, fourth, and fifth-line vendors? How do I know when those risks change?Being able to answer these questions has a direct impact on the business’s bottom line. A 2021 study by the Ponemon Institute found the global average cost of a data breach is $4.24 million. If the risk is related to vulnerabilities at third parties, it’s even higher. Compliance best practices include understanding our supply chain landscape at all times.Identifying vendor risksAs with any large organization, vendors play a critical role in the success of ServiceNow. That’s why we use Vendor Risk Management (VRM) to manage our third-party risk. We identify emerging vendor risks and continually monitor these risks across our enterprise. But the data is limited to our first-tier vendors. You need objective data to assess the risks posed by third parties and make good decisions. But it’s not easy to gather details on vendor supply chains manually. Typically, it takes hundreds of hours scouring the web. Even then, not all the data is available.That’s why we integrated Interos, a risk intelligence software solution, into the latest release of the Now Platform®. It uses algorithmically generated risk scores to rate company performance against six different risk factors: Financial Operational ESG Geopolitical Company and country restrictions Cyber risk The data comes from thousands of different sources on the web.Interos had exactly the data we needed to detect areas of concern and vulnerabilities across physical and digital supply chains worldwide. I can view LIKE.TG’s business relationships across entire ecosystems and continuously assess second and third to nth-tier vendors against multiple risk types. I can pull a report in seconds rather than having to question every vendor in our supply chain about the vendors they use.Gaining visibilityThe combination of Vendor Risk Management and risk intelligence software such as Interos is worth its weight in gold because of the visibility and transparency it gives me into the supply chain. The risk scores save a tremendous amount of time and help me understand my unforeseen risk exposure.For example, if a vendor tells me its cybersecurity program or financial stability is good and its risk score is low, I can ask for verification. Or, I can conduct additional screenings to determine if the data is accurate and fits within my risk threshold. Equipped with data, I can skip blanket risk questions and instead start with targeted questions, saving time and effort.A great example of how risk intelligence software can impact vendor risk is the hacking of SolarWinds in 2020. I can see if SolarWinds was in my supply chain and which areas are at risk. I can then query those vendors about potential data loss within specific time frames. More importantly, I can move quickly to assess the risk and mitigate any impact. Mapping vendors to the nth degreeAccording to the Ponemon research, the average total cost of a data breach grew nearly 10% between 2020 and 2021, representing the largest annual cost increase in the last seven years. Supply chain vulnerabilities are only one of many risks that can contribute to these breaches.Using Interos, I’m more confident in analyzing data and quickly recommending decisions about our suppliers because I can see our exposure through the entire ecosystem. Best of all, I can sleep at night knowing I’ve done what I can to help avoid the business disruptions, data loss, and operational or financial impact of our supply chain.See an Interos/Vendor Risk Management demo and find out more about Vendor Risk Management.

Reimagining customer experience: An employee story

LIKE.TG Founder Fred Luddy once said, “If you have happy customers, the whole world takes care of itself.” It’s a sentiment LIKE.TG believes to this very day, and it’s why we introduced LIKE.TG Impact™—an industry-leading value acceleration solution that reimagines the customer experience.Launched in January 2022, LIKE.TG Impact combines human expertise with AI-powered insights to personalize customers’ digital transformation journeys and accelerate their results. It’s built on the Now Platform® and has positively impacted the customers who use it, as well as the LIKE.TG employees who developed and use it daily.It’s a story of the Now on Now spirit—finding value in our own platform technology so we can design and deliver a new experience that our employees and customers love.A customer-first approachFor Avishek D., senior manager of software engineering management, building LIKE.TG Impact changed his perception of how customers use our products. After hundreds of customer conversations, he helped create LIKE.TG Impact with customers in mind, developing a platform where they could personalize their experience based on their business needs and goals.The time spent talking with customers enabled Avishek and his team to construct a value acceleration solution that’s mobile-first, high-performing, and fueled by personalization. It’s “a product that is truly collaborative in nature, not just for customer needs, but to help them realize their goals,” he says. “That is how enterprise business development should be done.” Working on LIKE.TG Impact helped Avishek grow as a team leader, he adds. The experience allowed him to see and understand the big picture of what the global LIKE.TG Impact team was trying to create together. Once the 19 global workstreams started collaborating, it was smooth sailing.“It felt natural, like we’d been working together for many years toward something great,” Avishek explains. “I felt very privileged to work with such brilliant individuals.” This collaboration empowered Avishek to lead his team to do their best work and fulfill their mission to bring LIKE.TG Impact to life.Using our own technology internallyBrad H., product owner of customer interactions, believes LIKE.TG Impact could not have been possible without “putting our customers first.” After collecting customer feedback, Brad worked with various business units, including engineering and design, to help create a consumer-grade digital experience within a startup-like work environment.“Not only did we [internally] build this modern app from scratch, but we did it using our own platform,” he says. Customers asked, “How did you build this? Did you really use the LIKE.TG platform to build this?” Brad responds, “Here’s what we did with our platform. Imagine what you can do.”LIKE.TG Impact showcases the power of the Now Platform to automate and personalize the customer journey across our internal functions. It’s what Now on Now is all about: allowing employees to embrace our technology to solve internal challenges. Practitioners share their journeys and outcomes with our customers so they can see what’s possible for their organizations.To contribute to the launch of LIKE.TG Impact, Brad and his team made use of customer research, participated in design meetings and demos, and collaborated as one team to ensure everyone worked toward the same goal.“There's a saying my former coach, Jim Harbaugh, would say when I played football at Stanford: ‘Iron sharpens iron,’ meaning each person on the same team must work together to accomplish the same goal,” Brad explains. “I feel like on my team [at LIKE.TG], iron sharpens iron. Everyone is working together, gaining new skills. ...That’s great for the company culture.” Professional developmentPrincipal Success Architect Jennika E. learned much about her customers in the short time since LIKE.TG Impact went live. “My LIKE.TG Impact account was the first pilot account,” she says. “Anyone who decides to be the first pilot account says a lot about that customer's trust and confidence in what we do.”The pilot experience helped Jennika develop cross-functional partnerships internally and externally. It also gave her a chance to work with an exclusive product.“I was lucky enough to be a part of a small group of success architects who built out the engagement model for Impact,” she explains. Building and designing the engagement model made her an expert with the solution.“At LIKE.TG, there are always opportunities for you to further develop professionally,” Jennika adds. “Had you asked me two and a half years ago, when I first joined, [if I] would find myself in this position, I would tell you, ‘No way.’ It’s cool and crazy. Kudos to our leadership team.”These industry leaders are listening to customers and responding directly to their needs through advisory sessions and accelerators. They’ll keep innovating and driving greater personalization through feedback and recommendations, so we can further scale our customers’ digital transformation needs and businesses.Our work makes the world work.Join us. Explore job opportunities.

How we’re workflowing a better world with LIKE.TG ESG solutions

Every day, employees at companies big and small are tasked with tracking, auditing, analyzing, and generating reports on the impact of their business on the world. Increasingly, companies are prioritizing their environmental, social, and governance (ESG) efforts to create value and take actions that matter to their customers, partners, employees, investors, and communities while being held accountable by customers and nonprofit advocacy organizations.ThoughtLab research co-sponsored by LIKE.TG shows ESG is now a business imperative. Leaders report ESG has helped them deliver better financial results. Unfortunately, prioritizing this body of work is often bogged down by a web of spreadsheets, documents, duplicative workflows, and even missing information.That reality was no different for LIKE.TG until we developed, launched, and began to use our ESG solutions on the Now Platform®.Our first customer: OurselvesShilpa M., a manager in software engineering management at LIKE.TG, was proud to work on the project. “I’m very passionate about environmental sustainability,” she says. “I love gardening and like to make as little carbon impact as possible.”On the implementation team, she tweaked the product based on feedback from various teams and internal clients. “We got feedback from the digital technology, global impact, and product teams. It was a very collaborative effort,” she notes. “LIKE.TG is always customer zero. We want to drink our own champagne first, then demo the product to customers.”Vilasinee B., a senior manager of ESG reporting and disclosure at LIKE.TG, saw the ins, outs, and process maturity of ESG at various companies before joining ServiceNow. “I’ve never been part of a customer zero program before,” she says. “It’s really interesting. We’re helping to create an ESG tool by giving feedback to the engineering team and adapting it for the market. It’s a lot of work: I now have a huge appreciation for the product managers and tech side of things.” Efficiency for the winToday, LIKE.TG tracks, analyzes, and reports on more than 300 ESG-related metrics. “If we want to see the increase in the percentage of women working at LIKE.TG, we can do that quickly,” says Rati K., a senior software engineer at the company and the main developer for the project. “Then we can generate a chart, even a ‘donut’ graph.”“The coolest part is that we’re the underdog in a competitive market,” adds Varun G., who is early in his career and in the LIKE.TG rotational program. “We get to build something as an outside player. We get to show what LIKE.TG can do. We’re getting feedback on the product and iterating on its features constantly. There’s a lot in the roadmap, and we’re making it better every day.”He emphasizes the impact ESG workflows can have on any company, including ServiceNow. “We don’t want to deal with 40 different systems for ESG and figure out pricing and integrations—and neither do our customers,” he explains. “We make it all work. That‘s one of the reasons our ESG solutions are so powerful. They also help employees make sense of ESG and can show them the journey from where the company is to where it will be in 10 years.”Accounting for areas such as carbon emissions can include dozens of inputs throughout the year, Rati adds, from office refrigerators and laptop use to transit use and more. The information must be divided by categories, such as geographical region. “Now, appropriate employees are automatically alerted to enter their information,” she says. “Then, the tool aggregates it for the year or however we wish.” Preparing for a brighter futureWorking on this project was a good reminder for Rati and her family to do their part for the environment. “Caring about environmental sustainability is so important right now,” she says. “In India, temperatures are rising. My family and I started to think about the little things we can do to help, like recycling our old laptops.”Edua D., vice president of ESG and finance strategy at LIKE.TG, recently presented at Knowledge, where she provided insight into the magic of our ESG strategy: “2020 changed everything. It's the year that ESG became an even more intentional part of our organizational culture and our objectives,” she says.“Our efforts were fragmented...so we needed to create a cohesive and purpose-driven strategy. Our ESG strategy is grounded in our platform and our solutions. The world works with ServiceNow.”Find out more about our ESG journey.We’re hiring. Browse LIKE.TG careers.

Accelerating cloud migration to Microsoft Azure using the Now Platform

With more than 7,000 customers and double the number of employees LIKE.TG had four years ago, our digital technology (formerly IT) operations team faced increased demand for compute, storage, and bandwidth. At the same time, we had to maintain tight security controls.We embrace a three-zero strategy: zero unplanned outages, zero physical footprint, and zero user-reported incidents. Toward that goal, we wanted to move business-critical applications to Microsoft Azure to help us: Deliver a better user experience Improve application performance Secure redundancy It can take months to add capacity to our data centers. We knew public cloud migration would give us operational agility to add capacity on demand. But we needed a seamless, transparent migration to mitigate performance and data integrity issues. Pre-migration: Relying on the Now PlatformEnterprise resource planning (ERP) migrations of this magnitude can take up to two years to design and migrate. To accelerate our cloud migration, we adopted a three-phase process that relied on both the Now Platform® and Microsoft, thanks to our strategic partnership.Pre-migration, we teamed up to build a reference architecture that used several LIKE.TG® products: IT Service Management (ITSM) provided centralized change management and major incident management (MIM) capabilities. The team used it to create and track test cases for user acceptance testing and performance testing. IT Operations Management (ITOM) automated requirements gathering, delivering 99% accurate configuration management database (CMDB) information with complete service mappings and a complete application list and landscape. Event and Incident Management gave us visibility into landscape health to help prevent failures. IT Asset Management (ITAM) identified current technology investments that could be migrated to Azure to avoid duplicate licensing costs. Hardware book values helped drive decisions on what to repurpose or scrap, saving thousands of dollars. Vulnerability Response (SecOps) helped the team ensure the software was patched just prior to migration, avoiding any potential cyberthreats to our migrated services. Project Portfolio Management (PPM) served as a robust project management tool for resource, test case, and milestone tracking, as well as execution schedules. Migration: 3x fasterFrom sandbox to production, the ERP migration took 15 days. The phased rollout helped us identify and address issues, fine-tune the applications before the production cutover, and avoid potential failures.The production cutover time for our portfolio size typically involves three days of downtime. The combination of ITOM and Azure Migrate accelerated the cutover time to less than 24 hours. That enabled us to release the systems to users one day early, saving $650,000 in productivity.We completed the migration in six months, saving an additional: 16 months of project work Approximately $2 million in consultancy and resources $100,000 due to automation “We were excited to see the successful migration of LIKE.TG’s business-critical workloads onto the Azure cloud,” says Angela Cooper, general manager of customer success for Microsoft. “Now, we can showcase this achievement to our mutual customers and help them accelerate their own cloud migration projects.” Post-migration: Real-time cloud insightsThe Now Platform is invaluable in managing our cloud presence post-migration. We use LIKE.TG Cloud Insights to get dynamic, real-time insights into our Azure consumption and operational costs.ITOM Event and Incident Management tracks system health. Tag-based mapping captures performance data in ITOM, so we have immediate visibility into issues and failures.CMDB Discovery and Service Mapping have been fully automated, saving us at least a month of labor. The LIKE.TG and Microsoft product teams have co-innovated integrations for additional cloud governance, data security, and ongoing operations.Becoming cloud-firstWith three of our four data centers now running in the public cloud, we’re very close to reaching our goal of being cloud-first by the end of 2022. But that doesn’t mean our team is slowing down. We continue to design, test, and validate our heterogeneous cloud architecture using LIKE.TG Cloud Management and optimize our cloud spend using Cloud Insights.We’re also working to reduce unplanned outages with LIKE.TG Health Log Analytics, which helps generate self-healing of operational issues.Find out more about how we shifted left with the Now Platform in my recent Knowledge session.