How Deloitte, the WNBA and others improved customer experience in 2020

The pandemic forced organizations in all sectors to accelerate their embrace of digital technology. At Knowledge 2021, ServiceNow’s virtual user conference, many customers shared how doing so helped them improve the customer experience during a challenging year.

WNBA flipped its business model

When COVID-19 put professional sports in lockdown early in 2020, the WNBA faced an “existential” challenge, according to Commissioner Cathy Engelbert. The league had to figure out “how to have a season,” she says.

Doing so would require all 12 teams to play games safely in a single venue—the WNBA bubble, or “wubble,” in Bradenton, Florida—without spectators. “We were flipping our business model around on a dime,” Engelbert explains. “We had no infrastructure, no systems, no processes, and definitely no workflows to help us set [the health and safety processes] up.”

Working with ServiceNow and other technology partners, the league built the digital infrastructure to handle essential tasks, from testing players for COVID-19 to tracking 2,600 league staff members, vendors, and guests.

In the wake of George Floyd’s murder and the Black Lives Matter protests that followed, the WNBA season took on new dimensions—uniting players and providing “a real platform that we would amplify around social justice,” Engelbert says.

“All 144 players came together,” adds Atlanta Dream player Tianna Hawkins. “We were playing for one thing, and it wasn’t for ourselves. It was for social justice.”

Deloitte made big productivity gains

With more than 300,000 employees spread across 150 countries, Deloitte looks for digital transformation projects that can succeed at scale. Using the Now Platform, the company has made significant gains with digital initiatives in multiple areas, explains Deloitte Americas CIO Stephen Mansfield, who's also the global executive sponsor for ServiceNow use at Deloitte.

In human resources, he says, Deloitte replaced a manual, paper-driven process with the ServiceNow mobile onboarding solution in the UK. This is an example of how the platform is yielding productivity gains of as much as 20% to 30% in multiple areas.

In finance, one region of the company digitized its accounting and billing functions in a matter of weeks using ServiceNow. “We have productivity gain, we have less headcount, and DSO [day sales outstanding] has been reduced by greater than 20%,” Mansfield says.

NHS Scotland streamlined logistics

NHS Scotland, the publicly funded healthcare system that serves more than 5.5 million Scottish citizens, was already using the Now Platform for IT services before the COVID-19 crisis, says Deryck Mitchelson, NHS Scotland’s director of digital and security.

When the health system had to pivot quickly to manage logistics for personal protection gear, contact tracing, and COVID-19 testing, the platform served as the digital backbone for those new services.

Then, in December 2020, NHS Scotland began scheduling vaccinations with the same platform tools. Aside from meeting immediate needs, Mitchelson says, the new crisis management functions “will very much be a legacy for what we do to manage any outbreak in the future.”

Xerox implemented augmented reality

Over the next few years, Xerox faces a slow-moving workforce challenge: the retirement of 70% of its field service technicians and engineers. “They’re not just leaving. They’re leaving with a lot of the company’s experience,” says Sam Waicberg, general manager of Xerox Digital Services.

One strategy helping Xerox through the transition is the use of augmented reality (AR) tools layered on top of ServiceNow Field Service Management. This allows service techs to use tablets or smartphones to remotely diagnose and maintain office printers, 3D printers, and other equipment.

As a result, even junior technicians “can open up their mobile device, follow a set of self-guided instructions, and perform that task as if they were an expert with 20 years of knowledge,” Waicberg says.

AT&T unified views and service experiences

For AT&T, investing in digital transformation “was not a choice,” acknowledges Sapna Jain, vice president of operations engineering and automation. “It was a much needed thing.”

Three factors drove the change, she explained: the need for improved customer experience, the complexity of legacy technology systems, and rising costs. “We knew we could do better,” she says.

Leaders began by recruiting a team of people from front-line business teams who identified important needs and pain points. Then, working with ServiceNow, they fast-tracked more than 50 digital initiatives using the Now Platform to tackle those problems.

Chief among them were new “digital dashboards” that service agents and managers used to help improve customer experiences. The dashboards, Jain says, have helped reduce overhead costs and “removed swivel”—the need to perform closely related tasks on different devices, platforms, or applications—on more than 20 internal systems.

Mars Inc. digitized factory operations

Digitizing factory operations has been a major undertaking for manufacturer Mars Inc., one that requires two key components: ensuring the security of new digital operations and seamlessly integrating new digital capabilities, says Praveen Moturu, vice president of digital technologies and chief enterprise architect.

Working with ServiceNow, Moturu and his team achieved both objectives, which has opened the next opportunity for digital tech efforts. “Now we’re moving into how we can serve our employees better,” says Moturu.

These are only a few of the many digital transformation customer stories shared at Knowledge 2021. View more customer stories. Registration is free.

ServiceNow, the ServiceNow logo, Now, and other ServiceNow marks are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of ServiceNow, 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.