How a connected ecosystem can drive growth and lower costs

It’s an exciting time to be a service provider. The shift in enterprise digital buying preferences to everything as a service has opened vast opportunities to strengthen customer relationships and create new revenue streams in such things as robotics, autonomous fleets, analytics, drone-based inspection, and remote telemetry.

A connected ecosystem can help you seize these opportunities, accelerate innovation, and grow revenue while reducing the cost to serve.

Address a range of needs

No service provider can go it alone and achieve the time to market needed to gain a competitive advantage. It’s not enough to offer one or two basic services. Customers are looking to create strategic relationships with service providers that can address a broad range of business needs.

For example, let’s assume you’re launching a managed cloud offering. Your differentiation isn’t the compute and storage—it’s the services that are layered on top. Partners fuel this service innovation, speeding time to market and increasing market share.

Even with a broad partner ecosystem, the service provider is still the service provider. That’s the value proposition: one place to go, a trusted relationship, and a single point of accountability—a consistent experience that’s responsive and reliable. An end-to-end experience eliminates silos, connecting service providers and partners into a unified whole to serve customers’ needs.

Bring together people, systems, and processes

To achieve this, information must flow seamlessly across organizational boundaries. Automated, end-to-end processes can expedite service fulfillment, reduce service delivery costs, and enable responsive customer support.

A connected experience allows service providers to scale both vertically and horizontally, delivering high service volumes while expanding their service portfolio. That’s critical for growth—and it’s not just about integrating service provider and partner systems.

Customers want easy access to services and are demanding total transparency—whether that’s ordering new services, seeing how their services are performing, or tracking the status of their support requests. That means breaking down information and process barriers with customers as well.

Deliver speed and agility

When most people talk about integration, they mean APIs. After all, APIs—along with command-line interfaces and scripts—are the way most integrations are done today. That’s a problem.

Many integrations take three to six months, consume skilled resources, and cost far too much. Imagine taking six months to onboard a partner or trying to integrate dozens of partners at the same time. You can’t profitably scale your business or accelerate time to market that way.

It’s even worse on the customer front—a huge obstacle to customer acquisition and revenue growth, not to mention an enormous pain for clients.

Integrate in hours, not months

There’s a better way. With ServiceNow, you can connect your entire ServiceNow ecosystem—your customers, partners, and internal business and operations functions—allowing information and workflows to flow transparently and securely across organizational boundaries.

It’s a cloud-native approach that allows you to connect your ServiceNow instance to the ServiceNow instances of your customers and partners, unleashing new levels of customer experience while helping to drive down costs. For instance, you can:

• Embed your services into your customers’ ServiceNow service catalogs, giving them an “easy button” to order your services and increasing adoption.
• Let customers access your support services from their own ServiceNow instance, connecting them to agents who have complete visibility of your infrastructure, operational processes, and partners.
• Connect your own operational workflows with your partners’ workflows without custom coding, allowing you to automatically orchestrate end-to-end order fulfillment and other key processes.
• Create a marketplace for managed partner services to augment your own service offerings and drive incremental revenues.

These are only examples. The bottom line is a connected ecosystem can accelerate service innovation, lower costs, and deliver better experiences. That translates into sustainable competitive advantage, strong customer relationships, high top-line revenues, and increased bottom-line profitability—turning opportunities into business growth.

Find out more in our ebook: Seize new revenue opportunities while lowering costs.