Syncing with ServiceNow

In today's business landscape, the employee experience (EX) and customer experience (CX) are closely connected. Improving CX can have a positive effect on EX and vice versa, making it crucial for both customers and employees. Join Kristen and Moin as they delve into the importance of the total experience and customer success, and explore how improving CX and EX can benefit everyone involved.

Host: Moin Khan
Co-host: Kristin McDonald

The retail, banking, telecom, and tech sectors have been trying to prove their love of customer experience (CX) for years. But the COVID-19 pandemic has underscored the need to elevate those vital customer relationships.

German shoemaker Adidas is a case in point. In November 2020, it reported strong quarter-over-quarter performance. CEO Kasper Rørsted told Seeking Alpha that a great deal of the company’s success stemmed from using digital channels to woo people into enrolling in its membership program, which had tripled from 50 million to 150 million during the prior 12 months. Members shop more and spend more on each transaction, resulting in a lifetime value 2.5 times greater than non-members.

[Ready to enhance customer experience? Read IDC’s Spotlight, sponsored by ServiceNow.]

Digital has changed the CX tune

The COVID-19 pandemic has turbocharged the migration from physical to digital channels. And expectations are high. The "app for everything" mentality is rampant. If one app—or product or service—doesn't work, we can easily switch to another.

The pressure is on for customer success leaders to set priorities that turn things up to 11. According to an IDC-ServiceNow survey conducted in Europe in late 2020, these are the top three priorities for customer leaders:

Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-host: Kristin McDonald

A 2021 Deloitte study found knowledge management (KM) to be one of the top three issues influencing company success. According to the survey, 75% of organizations reported that creating and preserving knowledge across evolving workforces would be critical to their success over the next 12 to 18 months.

This is clearly a competitive advantage. Yet only 9% of surveyed organizations felt prepared to address KM. Blame that on the sudden shift to a remote workforce.

In the aftermath of the pandemic, traditional views of how to handle knowledge are changing. The new environment champions an iterative, knowledge-sharing culture that fosters a repeatable content creation and transfer process. An intentional environment like this is sustainable only when employees and processes are front and center.

Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-host: Kristin McDonald

You retrieve data about the service in question and instantly see exactly which infrastructure components the service depends on, as well as their statuses. You quickly engage IT operators to address the issue and notify the line-of-business lead with an estimated time for its resolution. 

This scenario doesn’t have to be an impossible dream. Infrastructure visibility is a reality for numerous enterprises around the world, including many ServiceNow customers. It can be your reality too, without nearly as much time and effort as you might think. 

Developing an infrastructure visibility strategy that includes automated discovery and service mapping can give you an up-to-date picture of all your business-critical services. When an issue arises, you can quickly drill down to identify the component causing it. Even better, you can anticipate potential disruptions and take action to prevent downtime. 

Let’s explore six steps to help you increase service visibility.

Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-host: Fred Reynolds
Co-host: Kristin McDonald 

From humble beginnings to becoming an enterprise with more than 20,000 employees globally, ServiceNow has been through a lot of changes since its founding in 2004. Although it started as an IT service management company, it's grown to connect people, functions, and systems across organizations.

Today, ServiceNow offers solutions for IT service and operations management, the employee and customer experiences, low-code and hyperautomation, and a whole lot more—all built on a single, unifying platform that eliminates silos.

If you think that sounds like a mouthful, you’re not alone. In the tech world, it can be tricky to explain what your company does, especially to nontech family and friends. We put our employees to the test and asked them, “What does ServiceNow actually do?” Watch the video to see their responses...

Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-host: Fred Reynolds
Co-host: Kristin McDonald 

ServiceNow is a Leader in the 2022 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for IT Service Management (ITSM) Platforms for the ninth year in a row. We also ranked first in all three use cases evaluated in the 2022 Critical Capabilities for ITSM Platforms: Service Desk (3.76/5), Service Operations (3.73/5), and Business Workflow Automation (3.81/5).

We believe these recognitions validate our strategy and direction as we continue to invest in making ServiceNow an enduring platform for a fast-changing world.

Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-host: Fred Reynolds

It's a new era at XenTegra.  

Today we interviewed our new host Fred Reynolds and found out about his background and experience building out automation and workflows with ServiceNow.

And we had a little fun... Right!

Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-Host: Moin Kahn
Co-Host: Fred Reynolds

Transformation. Everyone’s tossing that word around these days to the point it almost seems meaningless. Yet, it’s not. According to the 2021 EY CEO Imperative Study, nearly two-thirds of CEOs believe technology and digital transformation will have the greatest impact on the future success of their enterprises.

In fact, 68% of these CEOs plan to make big-time technology investments throughout 2022. In particular, the study uncovered that increasing the use of artificial intelligence (AI) was one of the top three priorities for C-level executives seeking to propel organizational growth, followed closely by disruptive innovation.

It's no coincidence that innovation is also a top priority because technology fuels it today. Yet, too often, technology hampers innovation. Too many organizations believe they need to settle for things working as they are, including archaic, legacy systems and a patchwork of processes. But trying to muddle through these resources is time-consuming and inefficient, robbing the organization of the time and means needed to drive innovation.

Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-host: Moin Kahn

Provisioning new databases and cloning database requests make up a hefty portion of a database administrator’s (DBAs) workload. As reported in Forrester’s Total Economic Impact survey for Nutanix Era, database provisioning is time consuming, tedious, and often requires additional approvals for new systems to support the new provision. DBAs reported that “to handle the capacity of existing database management and incoming requests, the DBA teams often needed to work overtime and weekends” (Forrester p7). As one respondent noted: “We get requests for new databases all the time, but we have to have a server before we can even start. Our database and operations teams were resource-constrained, and a request could take up to two weeks to deliver. That was just too long” (Forrester p7).

The Forrester study also noted that many organizations lack standard workflow procedures that can streamline the provisioning process for more effective procedures in database provisioning. Surveyed customers commented that, when workflow best practices are applied holistically across several different database types, common provisioning mistakes could be avoided.

Nutanix has partnered with ServiceNow, Inc. to integrate Nutanix Era™ into the ServiceNow® platform. Using the ServiceNow Nutanix Era Plugin for Database Management, Era and ServiceNow customers can use standard workflow processes to ease database provisioning even further.

Nutanix Era can increase database provisioning by 97% through its one-click database management and control plane as noted in Forrester’s TEI report for Era. This process can be streamlined even further through the integration with ServiceNow’s digital workflow processes.

Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-Host: Eric Schwarts
Guest: Jon Spallone
Guest: Harvey Green
Guest: Jirah Cox

As more and more companies settle into the new reality of hybrid work at scale, the ease of making desktops accessible from anywhere—along with the adoption of workflow technologies and processes all from a single platform—will be critical.

To enable the best employee experience, companies need to be able to transition seamlessly between remote and in-person work environments. The hybrid way of working will require organizations to quickly create new workflows while focusing on how employees and teams get work done.

More than half (59%) of employees say their companies don’t have a fully integrated system to manage digital workflows, according to The Work Survey by ServiceNow. On top of that, the use of digital collaboration tools has skyrocketed, with active users in Microsoft Teams surging to 145 million users per day in 2021, up from 75 million in 2020.

ServiceNow and Microsoft are continuing to find new ways for employees to seamlessly collaborate while delivering great experiences to our joint customers.

Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-Host: Eric Scwartz