ServiceNow, Inc. (NOW) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hello, everyone, and welcome to ServiceNow Webinar. Today's topic is, Empower Agents With Real-Time Information & Intelligence. My name is Harriet Franklin. Joining me today, we have one of our customers, Digital River, we have Bill and Paula. We're going to talk to Bill and Paula later in the presentation. So I'm going to get started with the agenda. For today, we're going to talk about how we empower our agents. We're going to have a nice conversation with Digital River. They're going to talk about their implementation of ServiceNow, what their key challenges were as well as how they solve those key challenges. And then we're going to do a wrap up. We welcome your questions. If you have any questions, please put them in the Q&A. We will answer those questions at the end of the webinar. If we're not able to answer your questions, we will get back to you afterwards. And then, please hang around because we have a survey. We've listened to all the feedback in your survey, and that's why we have these great customers joining us today based on your feedback. All right. So let's get started. I have a quote here from McKinsey & Company. And when we look at what organizations are looking for customer service, the customer care leaders are saying that their Top 3 priorities for the next 12 months are: the ability to retain and develop the best people, that's your agents; drive a more simplified customer experience while reducing call volumes and cost to build out their entire digital care ecosystem. And so when we take a deeper dive and look at what some of the issues are that we're hearing from customers, agents struggle with the ability to address some customer issues quickly and accurately. Also, we seem to find that agents are spending a lot of time on administrative or mundane tasks. And managers struggle really to try to measure like what are our agents doing, how are they performing? What are the right skills that are needed for agents? So what we're going to talk about today is how you can empower agents with real-time intelligence, giving you what tools and what features and functionality are available to help your agents solve these cases quickly, you're going to hear how Digital River is doing just that. Also, things for you to think about, like how do you digitize and automate your processes and get those automated so that that takes the stress off your agents. And then once you've done that, how do you continue to optimize their performance and monitor their operations to see how everyone is doing. So first, let's just talk about how we help agents solve cases quickly. And when we say quickly, we also want with empathy. And we have a number of features available that's really going to make sure that we are presenting to your agents the right information that they need, whether that's contextually providing a holistic view of the customer so that they're not swiveling to other systems. And what we have for agents is the configurable workspace. And what that does is that's going to intelligently serve up information for the agent, based on a number of factors. And then we want to make sure that we are routing that case to the right agent, the very first time. And then once the agent is in the process of solving that case, how can we assist them with things such as agent assist, playbooks, predictive intelligence; all these things to make sure your agents can solve their cases quickly. And the next part of that is, you really need to take a deeper dive at what your business processes are and how do we digitize them and automate those processes. And with the existing product that we already have, there are a lot of artificial intelligence solutions that are out there. Now you've heard us talk about the future, which is generative AI and that's going to be in another session. But let's talk about what we currently have. And with the AI and based on your data and existing models, we can do things such as auto populate fields inside the cases automatically, saving that task from your agents, categorizing your cases, ability to detect languages and route that to the right agent. And just the ability also to look at things with Document Intelligence and scanning in a document and having that scanned document auto populate fields. So lots of things that we have here now to bring in that intelligence to your agents. And then, finally, how do we optimize that agent performance, understand each issue? How the agents are tackling those issues? Where we have opportunities to improve on those particular case types? And then, not only that, but looking at the KPIs, key performance indicators, so agents themselves can say, "Oh, this is what I need to do a better job or management teams." Digital River has done a great job with this, and you'll hear them talk about how they're using this for their organization. So before we get started, we'd like to know a little information. Our first poll question here is, is your organization currently using the Customer Service Management Configurable Workspace? You have 2 choices, "Yes" or "No." And we'll take a few minutes. Once you select your answer, please click on the blue -- the submit button in the bottom right. Okay, we see a few people still haven't answered. So why don't you go ahead and please let us know if you're using CSM Configurable Workspace. I'll give it a couple more seconds. Okay. Thank you for your feedback. It's good to know who's using and who isn't because all these features are coming out in a configurable workspace and you're going to need to move to that to take advantage of all these features and you'll see how that's worked out for Digital River. All right. So we're ready for our customers to take over and join the call. And before we get started, I'm going to let each person introduce themselves, but I'm going to ask Bill. Bill, why don't you tell us a little bit about Digital River and then introduce yourself and then toss it to Paula.

All right, great. Thank you, Harriet. Yes, I mean, Digital River, we were founded nearly 30 years ago and started out straight up in the e-commerce business. This isn't something that we evolved into. We started obviously as e-commerce provider. And today, we provide everything that you need in order to grow and protect your e-commerce business. So it's everything from simple to complex payments, as you can see here on the screen as well, to sophisticated cross-border logistics solutions, and all of this delivered through modern age apps. I myself, I've actually been in Digital River for a little over 25 years. I'm the Senior Director of Customer Operations today. I've done a lot of different roles at Digital River, and I can very transparently say that this operations we're all living in today, and in particular, working with the ServiceNow, the CSM is very exciting and it's providing us with lot of opportunities to really provide our customers a delightful experience in our support areas. Paula, over to you.

Hi, I'm Paula Romsdahl. I manage our customer-facing support team. So that's both our shopper support team as well as our customers, so those that are using the digital river products. We take in all of those cases that are coming in through that CSM tool as well as manage our prudent management team. We're super excited to be using ServiceNow. Thanks, Bill.

Thank you. And I'm super excited to have you both here today, and thank you so much for taking time out of your busy schedule to join this webinar and help other customers and they want to hear what you're doing. So I know you had some initial challenges, which help decide which features that you wanted to implement. Let's talk about what was one of the first challenges that you had. I'm going to toss this up to Bill. And then Paula, please chime in and talk about with those challenges, kind of the history of how you ended up solving that first challenge.

From my perspective, Harriet, the biggest challenge that we had at the time is when customers would request work from us. And obviously, this is before us using ServiceNow. There was often a single -- oftentimes a single point of failure, right? So one of our operations folks was literally the primary responsible person for acting on that support request, regardless of where that came from, meaning geographically, right, is we have global customers and e-commerce doesn't stop anywhere round the clock. And so one of our biggest challenges was following this up and having a way to keep track of that work as you follow the sun. And this -- the CSM Configurable Workspace, in particular, CSM and ServiceNow as a whole has provided us that visibility that we really need in order to make sure a good responsiveness to our customers. I'll let Paula kind of get into the details there.

Yes. Bill, that's a great, great way to kick it off. With CSM Configurable Workspace, that not only gave us a visibility to our work as a whole, but it gave us individual access to what each of those individual reps were doing. So if one rep is out, you can see exactly what they've done historically. You go in and you have full visibility to everything they've done. It also allowed us to look at where we had opportunities for processes that we were doing over and over again to make sure there was consistency within those as well.

So in essence, what you're saying is, the work that the agents needed was all consolidated and right there in the workspace and served up exactly when they needed it.

Correct. We went from an e-mail outlook where a distribution where maybe 5 people were picking up the exact same e-mail, so now it's all going into a case. That case is offered up to 1 individual member of the team at a time through Configurable Workspace. And then everyone within the system can see exactly what's going on with that individual case.

Great. So you had mentioned e-mail. So this really -- it got you out of the e-mail cycle and into more strategic targeted assignments as well as ability to solve these cases faster. That's great. So let's talk about some of your other challenges and how you met that. You touched on this a little bit. I think we can dig into it, where you talked about inconsistent response rates, and let's drill into that a little bit deeper. I'll toss this to you first Paula.

Yes. So when we talk about inconsistent response rates, when you look at e-mail, anyone can pick it up. It can sit in someone's inbox for a few days, [ outside ] of looking at something that lose track of it. Move into ServiceNow, you now have full transparency and visibility across the board across all reps, but you also can now measure how long does it take from that -- first time that case first point in to when we acknowledge it and let that customer know "Hey, we're looking at your case. We've got it. We're triaging it." And then all the way through to resolution. All of it is now measurable, it's transparent, not just to us but also to our customers through our portal. And we can offer those cases up to an individual. So you don't have to worry about duplicate work occurring where maybe Rep A, Rep B are both working on the same thing at the same time. You also make sure at the end of the day that that case is paired with a rep who is skilled to handle that item, which also brings down that resolution time when you're getting the right person on that case, right somebody [indiscernible].

Okay. And thank you, Paula. And I'm going to toss this next part to Bill because one of the things that you're doing in helping set expectations with your customers is that you are sharing with them the estimated time to resolve. And I don't think a lot of our customers are doing that. So I think this is going to help them out. Why don't you talk about your ETTR?

Yes. One of the things that we have found was that within the case work itself is that even though we were communicating that the case was open and that we have started working on it, we'd see frequent requests from our customers asking for an update or asking when it would be completed. And some of these things, where they would pop in several times a day. So what we did is, we took the ETTR and actually posted it in the portal itself, so the customers, as they're looking at that case, they can actually see an expected resolution time, which saves them time in checking in, but it also allows them to set internal expectations of when the resolution will happen as well.

Yes. And that's something that I think is very -- it may sound very small, but the fact that you're making that available to customers for all the benefits that you said, setting expectations with their organizations, but it also cut down on the calls into your contact center as well. So something like that that you guys have done, I think other customers can benefit as well. So yes, thank you for sharing that. And then just one last thing here, Paula, and I'll pass it to you for -- would you talk a little bit about Agent Assist and how that has helped your agents.

Yes. Agent Assist is super helpful in bringing all of our knowledge together and putting it at the fingertip of those reps. So they're no longer digging through multiple systems looking for that additional information to help them solve the case. They immediately have access to the related knowledge articles, they have access to related cases where they can go see what they have done previously and make sure they maintain that consistency from one case to another.

Perfect. That's something else that I think helps your agent solve faster with that information right at their fingertips. Let's talk about one of your other challenges here. And I think it's important when we talk about transparency really across the entire organization. So Bill, I'm going to toss it to you and talk about how you're using some of our performance analytics at the organization level. And then Paula, I'll toss it to you for how your -- how agents are actually using that?

Yes. I mean, one of the -- I really like this feature of the visibility for our entire organization. One of the reasons being is that you would often get internal requests what's the status of this, how many of this happen? What's the oldest case? Basic statistics would typically be asked and then answered. What we're able to do with all of this data and all of the -- frankly, a lot of the out-of-box stuff, is present that not only to our own teams and our own managers for how it's going, but we can at least enable a basic dashboard for all the other internal teams for what they would like to look at and then explain to them and help them understand how they could customize it. So we have what we want to look at. We've now empowered the rest of the organization to look at what matters to come.

That's great. And Paula, let's talk a little bit more in detail on how your agents benefit from this.

Yes. So this gives the team full visibility into everything that's going on. So not just at my level as a manager or my team manager's perspective, but every team member can come, get a quick view of what's in the queue, how much work is left to do. They can see which cases are the oldest, what are average ages as far as performance goes. And it almost helps it become like a game to the reps. They want to make sure that those oldest cases get closed out and bring that time down so we can meet our service levels. And while they're doing that and working towards bringing those times down, it gets transparent to everyone. So every rep knows exactly how we're performing and then anyone within the company that wants to see how we're doing can take a look as well.

I think that's great. And I think that's why you're so successful and the fact that the rest of the organization can participate, I think that's awesome. So kind of just to summarize here some of the key pieces. You've already talked about this for our audience. Please take advantage of the Configurable Workspaces, if you haven't moved to them. Automating that assignment to get that case to the right agent, the first time leveraging Agent Assist to get that information at their fingertips as well as knowledge, providing full transparency with the analytics. And one of the things we didn't talk about, if we could Paula just quickly talk about on the use of playbooks and how you're using playbooks.

Yes. So we use playbooks as part of that consistency piece, right? So knowledge gets you to a certain point, but playbooks you can actually attach and then that call flow or contact flow for those reps that that's going through it. So as we know, every time it's a specific case type, you have to do steps 1, 2 and 3 that put those steps right in front of that route. Then a checklist format where they can check off those items. It's not just improve consistency, but it also helps them with the speed of resolving that particular case. It makes it easy for them. It's like an easy button right?

Right. I think I've heard some people call Playbooks as it's the window into your workflow. You know exactly where you are, what's happening and what's going on.

Exactly.

Okay. So let's talk about your success and the return on investment and Bill, we'll start with you and then Paula, but feel free to just kind of jump around and talk about the benefit that you've achieved with just implementing those pieces of ServiceNow?

One of my favorite things and actually, it's not even on here, so I'll throw in the one out here is the e-mail reduction, we touched on it earlier. Since we've been using ServiceNow, we probably avoided somewhere around 150,000 e-mails going across the board and that's distribution as well, too, right, which means multiple people get it. And the [ thinking ] moving here, too, it's important from a customer even wondering if you're working on the case, did you even get my case? Did you get your e-mail? That was one of our challenges. And you wouldn't know for 3 days as you see here. But now we've boiled it down and got it very consistent to a customer knows once they've got a case that we've acknowledged it within 6 minutes. So they're not spending a day or multiple days wondering if their work is even being addressed or not. Paula?

And even in addition to bringing down that acknowledgment time rate, letting them know within an hour that we're working on their case. We've been able to improve their resolution time. So previously, when we're looking through those e-mails to understand where we're at, it was taking sometimes 2 weeks to resolve those cases. Now we're consistently resolving them within 1 day. And that's not just like 1 business day, that's like a 24-hour clock, 1 day, which is super nice. We've also been able to...

That's a huge improvement. I'm sorry that's huge.

It's massive. At the end of the day -- I mean it also when we implemented ETTR, we saw a reduction in the number of those questions coming in from customers asking when is my case going to get an update? Because right away, they go in there and they look and "Oh, this is going to take them a little bit longer the topic type." So that's been super helpful. It really allows the reps to focus on resolving that issue rather than trying to figure out which they handles and which ones they haven't yet.

So we touched on measurements earlier as well, too. And from an adoption perspective, it was interesting and, I guess, in a way not surprising either, as you get the data in and we start showing some of that data to the other internal teams, and they're like, "Wait, what you can show that? You can measure that." I can tell my boss what I'm doing and how much is -- how many and how long? Yes, they become adopters once they see what they get out of using it because you get so much more out of it than just using it, than just flowing things through it. You were able to measure, report, over long periods of time, seeing the trends and things like that. So the adoption of the rest of the internal organization is care -- it's a co-cared approach. You don't use that.

Yes. And I think that's a testament to how you and Paula have made all this information available and they can see the great results. And yes, they can get enthusiastic because it's right there. So great thing for those that are looking for more adoption, great tips for everyone. So in addition to that, I think the important thing here is that you improved your customer effort score, and it's all about customers. So why don't -- I'll toss this to either one of you, talk a little bit about your customer efforts score.

I can jump in and take this. So this has been a big project of mine to understand satisfaction from our customers and measuring that. And one of the things we're looking at is, what can we do within the portal to improve and increase the transparency to make sure that they understand exactly what's going on. So this year, we kicked off customer effort score. We did a super simple, are you having a really difficult time working with the Solution Center Portal and submitting cases to us? Or is it this effortless amazing experience. We started off the year at 77%, which is fairly good. Over the course of this year so far, we're up to 82%. So we continue to see market improvements in that performance within the team and customer satisfaction within the portal.

Yes, that's great. And I think when you ask customers for feedback and they give it to you, you're rolling those changes back into the product. So once you start rolling them in, then it's going to go up. But I think -- that's pretty high. That's very good. Okay, again, it's very important to hear from customers, but it's also important to hear about -- hear from your agents. So here are a couple of quotes from agent feedback as well -- and their experience with the Configurable Workspace and here is feedback from your customer portals. If you want to read off a couple, that's fine or I could read them off, but I think it speaks for itself.

It does. It's always nice to get feedback from our customers on how happy they are with the tool and how quick and easy it is to use, Bill, go ahead.

We've mentioned portal a few times. We see it there in the lower right as well to the solution center portal. I just wanted to share, that's out of the box, right? That's not something that you went and did a whole bunch of crazy stuff to create or anything like that. That is an existing out-of-the-box solution that we put a little bit of our look and feel on it, but that's something that everybody can implement very, very quickly.

Yes, thank you. And then -- and if they're solving the problems that way, that's less that come into your agents so your agents can concentrate more on the more difficult issues. So let's talk about lessons learned. This is always my favorite part, and feel free to pluck either one in any order. We'll start with you, Bill.

Let's see which one is my favorite one here. Again, for me, it was really about the data, not as in the hours people spend or anything like that because it's going to take what it's going to take. But it's having the quantity of cases by customer, by type of case and which allows us to gather that data. And as Paula has spoken to as well, too, we can now focus on certain things that needs the improvement, right? When we're hearing from our customers. We've got a rough spot here, and then we can go look at the data and see how big the rough spot is because of how much that is part of our data. So it allows us to really be effective in where we lean in and tune on this stuff.

Yes. Now the data is there, a lot of people don't take advantage of it, but you guys really use that data. Paula, what else do you have?

I would just say that when you're looking at what you're going to do next. So I think it's the first point here on this slide is, look at what's coming in ServiceNow, while your customers may want a specific feature within that portal, it's tough that it's coming in a release in the next cycle. So when you do your upgrade to the next version to ServiceNow, you may get that feature out of box; then you won't have to customize and build something. That's one of the things we've done in planning our road map every year as we look at what's coming next and then we plan in those features to our release cycles in ServiceNow.

Yes. I think that's a good point. A lot of people don't look at the roadmap or figure out what's going on and align that with their immediate needs. And Digital River actually upgrades each release, right, instead of waiting every other like some customers do. And the advantage of that is that you can help your customers faster and help your agents faster by taking advantage of what's coming out. And I think that's important to spend some time and look at your road map and ServiceNow road map and put them together. I think we talked about quite a bit the internal champions that I won't go on with that. But it is important to use the data and share that data with your organization. So yes, I like what you're doing there. So let's talk about what's next for Digital River. And before we get started with that, the first one on the list, which is Knowledge Insights is currently part of the product. And basically, what that does is it helps you automate the discovery of knowledge gaps. And one of the things I like about what you guys do is you play with this in a test environment. You see the liability of features, and then you roll it into your products. So I know you're currently looking at Knowledge Insights. So can you just talk about that a little bit, please?

I think -- I can start. It's -- for knowledge and our Training & Knowledge Management team is part of our operations organization and it's multifaceted and you mentioned knowledge gaps. So there's -- our agents finding a gap where they need information that wouldn't necessarily be directly customer-facing in a customer-facing knowledge base. So there's that. We can have just the other operations people where they know, "My customer asked this, there's no reason that it should not be publicly" you know to our customers available information, that would also be a knowledge gap. And then just the broad internal information you need because our knowledge goes beyond operations as well. So we're using the knowledge Insights also for our own internal use as well, not just externally take some knowledge.

And Paula, how are you playing with that future?

It's interesting because it gives you a little bit of an idea of how -- what knowledge is being used and where we might have potential to fill in some gaps there. It will be super exciting as we get more data out of that.

Yes. And what I like about it is that it leverages existing machine learning models, and it's going to kind of hold together all of your existing cases, all your data, all your knowledge and then give you a nice graph chart and say, "Hey, here are a number of cases that we're just not solving. So you might want to create a knowledge article for that." So let's talk briefly about like the [ hit ] thing right now, which is generative AI, and I know that's something that's very important to Digital River. I could talk about a couple of features or you can talk about what you're excited for in the future that's coming out actually this month. So what's your experience with that so far?

We have not had a chance to implement anything live in production for Generative AI. The way we're approaching it is really to help our agents, and frankly, most of the organization, scale. So this is not about reducing our workload. This is actually allowing us to take on some of the more sophisticated workloads and really engage there in the more deeper way, right, and not have to rush through things to try to push things through. So generative AI, for us, will literally allow us to continue to add additional customers without having to scale at the same rate with our operations absorption.

And if I may, just talk a little bit about some of the features -- so if you have an agent that has a case, and that case has been going back and forth and has a lot of information. One of the things that Gen AI can do is summarize that case very quickly in a box for the agent to immediately come up to speed without looking through a lot of information. You can do the same thing for a chat section. So if you're in a chat with a customer or the customer has been chatting with virtual agent, we can summarize that when it comes to your live agents. So -- and then the other piece is now assist, which is basically helping you with your search. So if a customer is on your portal and they are searching for information, if they're using Virtual Agent before, it may come back with 3 knowledge articles that fits the criteria for the search. But what Gen AI can do is look at those articles, summarize it, and then come back to the customer, with just one group, very naturally.

Yes.

Yes, yes. So I think this is exciting. And I know with Digital River you still find many, many more use cases for this.

The summarization is particularly useful as well, too, right? Because you get occasionally an escalated case. This didn't go well for one reason or another. Today, without having case summarization, your choice is to go probably through the entire thing, read it and try to understand it. So case summarization will be very handy to get a quick look on what went on in this case.

Definitely. Definitely. Okay. All right. This takes us to our second and final poll question for the audience here. Now you've seen and heard Digital River talk about a lot of capabilities. How are you empowering your agents with real-time information and intelligence. And with this particular poll, you can select more than one. If you're not using these capabilities, you might want to think about adding them. So let's just talk about what you're using today? Okay, I see a few people answering. Let's see if we can get a few more people to answer. The options are; AWA, Advanced Work Assignment; B, Agent Assist; C Configurable Workspace; D, Performance Analytics; E, Playbooks; F, predictive intelligence, G; Recommended Actions and Task Intelligence. So you can select more than one and then press the submit button once you have your answers. All right. Okay, thank you. This is good information. It will help us know where we need to help target. Okay. Let's do a little wrap up. We're going to do some Q&A and then please hang on till the end because we want to hear from you, and it's always awesome to have customers like Digital River here as well. So to summarize, we're -- we just talked about how you can empower your agents with real-time information and intelligence at their fingertips to help them solve cases quickly and with empathy, spend more time with the agents, digitize those business processes with playbooks and making sure that we look at the full analytics to optimize the agent performance and overall operations. So let's go ahead and start with the Q&A. I'll take a look and see what we have here. Okay. So we do have a couple of questions. The first question here is, how is automating processes for agents impact productivity positively? And how do you justify cost and investment, Bill or Paula?

Bill, I can jump in from a productivity perspective just because we're living it from a day-to-day perspective. So when you look at the automation compared to what we had pre-automation, we went from that whole bunch of people to take up a case that I talked about earlier to now the right individuals getting it. It's reducing frustration for our reps who are getting a case, looking at it and saying, "Oh, you know what, I can't do this" and having to go find that correct resource. instead, we're automating that case, getting to the right rep every time, the one that knows to handle that work. So there isn't that bounce around that we have previously.

And I think that's key, the words you used there. It's not frustrating for your agents. And if the agents are frustrated, then the customers might be frustrated.

Exactly.

Okay. And so we have a second question and I think we talked about this a little before, but how are you trying to leverage AI to help your agent scale? I think we did answer that. You talk a lot about the regular AI that's part of the product, where you're going to be using machine learning to help with knowledge gaps, with Knowledge Insights. And then we talked quite a bit about the ideas that you have and how Gen AI can help as well. So I think we're going to wrap this up. Please everyone take the survey. But before that, I want to thank Bill and Paula for joining today, sharing your knowledge, giving great tips for people. It's always great for customers to hear from customers. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you for joining us today.

You're welcome. It's a great and easy subject to talk about.

Yes, happy to join you.

All right, everyone. And so before we finally close, sign up for the knowledge digital experience, you have access at the conference that we had in May. Over a 150 recorded and on-demand sessions. So you'll be able to hear from other great customers and any tips that you can pick up is always great. And then, this webinar, I'm sure you're going to want to -- after you hear it the first time you're going to want to go back and play it and share it with other colleagues. You can catch these webinars on demand and the link here, that's provided. Thanks, everyone, for joining.