Setting the gold standard for cruising
Launched in Norway in 1966 with a single ship and now headquartered in Miami, Florida, Norwegian Cruise Line is the undoubted cruise industry standard bearer, a byword for luxurious quality, innovation and outstanding customer experiences.
It’s been responsible for numerous industry firsts, including the purchase of two Caribbean islands for the exclusive use of its guests. It has also been voted the ‘World’s Leading Cruise Line’ in the prestigious World Travel Awards for five years in a row.
Today, more than 40,000 team members look after 2.7 million travellers every year, with a state-of-the-art fleet of 31 ships—and six more on order—visiting 700 destinations around the world.
Recovering at pace and scale
The global travel industry and Norwegian Cruise Line have been enduring the most turbulent times in their history following the COVID-19 pandemic.
Now, as society returns to normality, the volume of holidays has soared. The stark contrast between these two extremes has created unique challenges for travel companies which need to pivot quickly, re-establish teams and resources to meet the surge in demand, and resume business as usual.
As one of Norwegian’s long-standing partners, ServiceNow was well placed to play a key role in its recovery. To provide renewed focus in its deployment of digital technologies at this crucial time in its history, the company recruited Shannon Chapman as its new Director of IT Service Delivery.
As Shannon and her team assessed ServiceNow’s contribution since its purchase in 2019, they identified both short- and longer-term priorities for the platform. “The initial deployment of ServiceNow had not gone to plan, there was an absence of core ITIL foundations.
“But ServiceNow delivers industry best practice out of the box, so there was clearly huge potential for the platform to play a much more significant and valuable role for the company in the future”.
Onboarding automation provides catalyst
A key requirement in Shannon’s in-tray on arrival was the need to support an urgent recruitment drive, to fill roles made vacant due to the pandemic. She immediately identified ServiceNow as the ideal technology to transform the speed and efficiency of the recruitment and new starter onboarding process, providing a quick win to a pressing problem and an important use case for ServiceNow’s capabilities.
“To meet the surge in demand, which has accelerated as we’ve launched new ships, the company had to rapidly hire lots of new people, hundreds every month. We needed to onboard them and get them up to speed quickly, to handle the rapidly increasing volume of sales and bookings.
“We used ServiceNow to integrate with existing systems to pull together all of the data about each new hire and their job profile in one place, and then to automate workflows to meet all of their onboarding requirements”.
Previously each onboarding request for a laptop, mobile device and access to software was processed manually. Using Flow Designer and Process Automation in ServiceNow App Engine, Shannon’s team built a bespoke digital replacement in just two months, transforming speed and efficiency.
“More than 1,100 new recruits, almost 17% of our onshore workforce, have now been onboarded using the ServiceNow automated workflow. This way we’re ensuring that everything they need is ready for them on arrival, so that they can hit the ground running and get to work.
“We have around 45 job profiles in ServiceNow, so the system knows instantly what each new recruit needs and how those needs will be fulfilled, eliminating the need for multiple manual interventions and approvals.
“Onboarding a new recruit is now routinely completed in two days with ServiceNow, compared to 14 days previously and we’ve reduced the number of new hire day one issues and incidents resulting from human error by 80%.
“We estimate that this workflow is saving the company more than $100,000 worth of employee time each year, by eliminating manual tasks”.
For Christopher Rivera, Senior Manager for Training and Quality Assurance, saving time means that teams can now focus on more valuable tasks. “Thanks to the automation provided by ServiceNow, my team now has the time to rebuild and revamp our knowledge base for our thousands of users to better perform their individual roles, across several departments, such as legal, contact centre and revenue management. For example, we can now spend more time recruiting sales agents rather than focusing on new hire onboarding”.
Data provides transparency, control and efficiency
With ServiceNow transforming the onboarding process, Shannon and her team were able to focus on Norwegian’s other ServiceNow assets, using ServiceNow IT Operations Management (ITOM) to maximise their value to the business and day-to-day operations.
“In three months, with ServiceNow’s support, we established a foundational CMDB, with a clear strategy for the future. Thanks to the Discovery process in ITOM, we have a clear picture of our assets, where they reside, who owns them and who has access. Colleagues trust the data in our CMDB now”.
Shannon says that an ongoing application and service mapping programme with ITOM is set to provide valuable further insights and help facilitate the company’s strategic move into the cloud.
IT support on land and sea
ServiceNow IT Service Management (ITSM) is the company’s go-to IT support system, not just for its onshore corporate teams, but for key cruise ship personnel too, with tickets logged, tracked and resolved in ServiceNow.
IT and customer service teams aboard ship use ITSM to resolve myriad operational IT issues, such as credit card processing, that inevitably crop up on 1,000 feet long, 18 deck vessels carrying 6,000 passengers and crew. Norwegian has also built its first low-code, no-code application using ServiceNow App Engine. The app streamlines the collection and updating of merchant records within Norwegian’s extensive supply chain.
Explains Shannon: “Previously the merchant information would be provided via email by the payments acceptance team which was approved by accounting and processed manually in the database by IT data management. The process was slow and time-consuming.
“Sometimes emails would be lost or updates to the database were incorrect. Data accuracy problems not only caused low confidence in the data but also would impact the accounting team that reconciled the general ledger at the end of each month.
“With App Engine we’ve automated the entire process, from request to fulfilment, all carried out in ServiceNow and captured in the database, cutting out all manual intervention and time. This provided an 80% time reduction across several business and IT teams”.
“Before ServiceNow, adding or updating merchant IDs was a weeks-long effort of emails with IT and accounting”, says Shaira Flores, Senior Director of Payments Acceptance and Financial Services.
“Constant back-and-forth often led to errors. Now with our personal agent workspace, we can view the merchant information in real time, submit requests for changes, obtain approvals and automatically update the database for accounting reconciliation within seconds”.
Shannon and her team plan to increase Norwegian’s use of App Engine in the future to build on this success and automate more key employee workflows.
Full steam ahead, on one platform
Future plans also include expansions to the next level with ITSM, Software Asset Management and Employee Center with Virtual Agent, integrated with Teams, to unlock further cost savings and efficiencies. ServiceNow Service Operations Workspace is on the roadmap too, to provide a unified, collaborative user experience for the IT service and IT operations teams.
“Having one place for everyone to work in ServiceNow, with everyone sharing the same experience, the same information, the same dashboards, and talking the same language, will be huge”, concludes Shannon Chapman.
“There’s been a lot of change and we’ve achieved a lot in a short time, but there is huge potential to do so much more with ServiceNow. I firmly believe that not only can ServiceNow deliver great technical solutions to business challenges, but it can also help to shift our culture and our mindset, to one of innovation, collaboration and continuous improvement, with our customers our top priority”.