Driving innovation and sustainable growth with automated workflow

Unlocking productivity and creating a great experience

Digital transformation is essential to keeping pace with our pace of growth
ServiceNow is on its own digital transformation journey. We use our own workflow products to build a strong future for IT; proactively manage security, risk, and cost; create engaging employee experiences; reduce customer time to relief; and build cross-enterprise workflow apps fast.

Every day we rely on our own technologies to guide and measure our global digital transformation evolution. We call it the Now on Now program, where we are committed to drinking our own champagne every day.

The power of using our own products
While Now on Now is core to our digital transformation journey, the program doesn’t stop there. Our internal experts—those that implement and support these products internally every day—share the value and performance of the Now Platform with customers.  We share the art of the possible through real-world stories of our challenges, implementation journeys, and lessons learned. As Customer Zero, we provide ongoing product feedback to our product development teams, both for our platform releases and solutions.

As first adopters of our products, ServiceNow’s teams are constantly looking for ways to increase execution speed while keeping a razor-sharp focus on employee and customer satisfaction. We rely on the Now Platform to connect people, functions, and systems across ServiceNow—including HR, Finance, IT, Workplace Services, and Customer Support--among others. Native AI, machine learning, mobile, and analytics help us develop and analyze workflows that deliver intuitive employee and customer experiences while enabling us to scale.  The Now on Now program focuses on four main technology areas:

Customer Workflows: Delivering integrated customer experiences to reduce time to relief
One of the largest and most mature ServiceNow clouds is the one that supports our technical support engineers (TSEs). This cloud, a collection of different instances, is also one of our busiest, supporting 36 million Community members, 89,000 user portal searches, and 25,000+ cases/month. Creating a seamless customer experience is the goal day in and day out.  We use the Now Platform for proactive support and routinely detect and resolve issues before customers are aware of them. This averts services outages, minimizes downtime, and increases customer satisfaction to customers.

ServiceNow Customer Service Management (CSM) enables us to scale our service operations using connected digital workflows that automate work across functions, whether IT, data center operations, or customer support.  Self-service is driven by technology such as our Virtual Agent chatbots which use AI algorithms to contextualize customer issues and offer solutions. On the issue remediation side, we are using AI combined with the Knowledge-Centered Service methodology to automate the support agent’s processes by automatically supplying relevant content, eliminating agents’ search time and adding guided workflows to speed up issue resolution.

Outcomes achieved

• 11% increase in case volume and a 44% decrease in median time to relief (with Knowledge article attached)
• 87% of cases are created by customers via a portal or mobile app
• 96% completion rate in Virtual Agent chatbot conversations
• $20.3 million in cost savings due to automated requests through the service catalog on our Now Support portal

IT Workflows: Build the future of our IT operations and proactively managing risk, security, and cost
At ServiceNow, we’re using our Now Platform to digitally transform virtually every area of IT, with the three-fold goal of creating visibility and insight, increasing velocity, and delivering great employee experiences.

Visibility starts with accurate data, and for us that means a centrally managed and controlled Configuration Management Database (CMDB) that gives us a single source of truth for data. This improves visibility and insight, speeds decision making, and enhances reporting.

We manage our IT environment using ServiceNow IT Operations Management (ITOM). Discovery, Service Mapping, and Event Management give us a comprehensive view of all IT resources and services in our enterprise, both on premise and in the cloud. This allows us to monitor health in real time and not only respond faster when issues arise, but to anticipate and proactively prevent them from happening. We use AI and machine learning to drive self-healing, where the system can identify hot spots and problem areas, diagnose the cause, and take action, all without human intervention. Hardware Asset Management (HAM) and Software Asset Management (SAM) help us track assets throughout the entire lifecycle to optimize spend.

As we grow our environment, we use Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM) to plan, budget, and deliver projects on spec and on time. DevOps helps speed software development and deployment by reducing the time spent on administrative tasks.

Just like we use Customer Support Management (CSM) to deliver excellent customers support, we want to provide great experiences to our employees and our support staff. That’s where IT Service Management (ITSM) comes in. Both automate manual tasks and integrate support tools and communications into a single pane of glass to improve the support team’s responsiveness and productivity. Employees can access support through multiple channels, including an Employee Portal, voice, and chat, plus walk-up support at many sites. Mobility lets employees contact support from anywhere via their tablet or mobile phone. Our Virtual Agent and extensive Knowledge Base let users self-solve many basic issues quickly and easily—a support option that users increasingly prefer.

Finally, we use our Security Operations and Governance, Risk, and Compliance products to secure our environment and ensure regulatory compliance. Our entire security program, including many third-party tools, integrates to a single platform, giving analysts a 360-degree view of our security landscape. When threats are detected, automation speeds our response. Vendor Risk Management (VRA) helps us assess the security posture of third parties, so that others cannot access the ServiceNow network through them.

Outcomes achieved

• 58% Reduction in critical outages
• 25% Issues proactively prevented with AIOps
• 50% Employee requests fulfilled through self-service automation
• 94% Employee satisfaction
• 53% Time faster to release apps/workflows using DevOps
• 20% Reduction in security threat response time

Employee Workflows: Create connected and engaging employee experiences
ServiceNow uses its own technology to make our employees’ work lives as simple and intuitive as our personal lives. Great employee experiences improve productivity and job satisfaction, resulting in happier people and greater retention. 

Our quest for a great employee experience rests on a couple concepts: Improve and streamline self-service, reduce the friction and complexity of finding information and getting service, and expand mobile capabilities to handle common actions and requests. We use platform technology such as Enterprise Service Management, Enterprise Onboarding and Transitions, Virtual Agent, and Now Mobile to achieve this.

We depend on technology to drive self-service across IT, HR, Facilities, Finance, and Legal using native mobile apps and intelligent workflows. The foundation of this is a single portal based on personas (employee, manager, new hire) that personalizes the experience. Self-service is complemented by live help, including  tech lounges, a walk-up experience for IT support, and Live Chat via our Virtual Agent.

By using the Now Platform, employees can get what they need when they need it. By embedding intelligence into every interaction, we can deliver experiences that break down silos, unlock productivity, and improve self-service with native mobile apps and virtual agents. We give employees the power to get answers and help—anytime, anywhere.

As a result, productivity improves. We capture and automate processes incorporating institutional knowledge gained from employees. Functional service teams can maintain control and autonomy over their service delivery systems. We are also scalable so we can keep up with our steady growth.

Outcomes achieved

• 82% Employee engagement (2020 annual employee survey)
• 22% Increase to recruiter productivity
• 23% Order-to-cash staff productivity increase
• 1-day reduction in revenue & AR close

Creator Workflows: Build cross-enterprise workflow apps fast
With ServiceNow App Engine as our foundation and Integration Hub as pillars, we are building new workflow apps that seamlessly connect various technology stacks to address our unique business needs. Capabilities like Flow Designer, Predictive Intelligence, and Performance Analytics empower ServiceNow employees to tailor workflows, automate processes, and harness the power of machine learning and analytics. 

Our Citizen Developer program empowers line-of-business experts to fill capability gaps. With training, tools, and support from across the enterprise, everyday employees with little coding experience can create apps that address their needs in a visual development environment. IT guardrails ensure security while Integration Hub’s ready-made spokes connect the apps without manual coding.

For instance, one ServiceNow employee with no prior coding knowledge built a Virtual Agent-based app in just 32 hours, saving his team an estimated 1,900 hours that can now be redirected from manual tasks.[1]

In response to the demands of the pandemic in 2020, a small employee team used the Guided App Creator to develop the Safe Workplace suite of apps. By integrating what was needed into digital workflows, we were able more easily shift to a remote workforce. Since then, our Product team has added new products and capabilities, making the suite a true collaboration across silos.

App Engine and its sister products enable developers of every skill set to collaborate and build apps—from scratch or from an easy template. And by using the power of citizen development, everyone at ServiceNow can become a developer.

The power of Customer Zero
Now on Now offers a unique perspective of how to harness the power of workflows to generate improvements in productivity and both employee and customer experience.  Our strong commitment is driven by our company purpose—make the world of work, work better for ServiceNow and its customers, partners, and employees.

[1] Time saved is based on the time normally spend migrating data. 

Download PDF

See more about how ServiceNow uses ServiceNow