Smarter technology for all

Lenovo is the world’s number one personal computer manufacturer and a Fortune Global 500 company that offers the widest portfolio of technology products and services to customers across 180 countries. Its vision is to make smarter enterprise technology solutions and services accessible to all organizations including large enterprise customers as well as small to medium-sized businesses.

One of the newest pillars in Lenovo’s corporate structure is its Solutions and Services Group (SSG). It provides pocket-to-cloud solutions to more than 400 enterprise customers around the world and assists them in dealing with challenges related to cloud adoption, performance, scalability, and security. SSG is expected to be one of the growth engines that will help Lenovo reach its USD10 billion revenue target by 2028.

Over the last seven years, Lenovo’s SSG portfolio has expanded its Digital Workplace solutions to more than 15 service lines. This includes its flagship Device-as-a-Service (DaaS) solution that helps large enterprise customers manage their device lifecycle and enables them to free up internal resources and align expenses with revenue.

However, delivering large-scale commercial devices and services to customers around the world can be a complex operation. Lenovo needs to track order status and customer communications across multiple time zones and locations while managing hardware deployment and configuration. And it must do so consistently and around the clock.

“We recognize that we service customers across different market segments and geographies, and this requires different tiers of service,” explains Damo Srinivasan, Director for Solutions and Services Group International Sales, Presales at Lenovo. “ServiceNow platform enables us to deliver and connect with customers in different ways and deal with complexities.”

Delivering exceptional experiences and lowering churn

To drive its vision to scale SSG business globally, Lenovo rolled out ServiceNow Technology Provider Service Management (TPSM) with ServiceNow Automation Engine. Its goal is to provide globally consistent services to large enterprise customers and unlock new revenue opportunities.

“Lenovo’s customers use ServiceNow. We wanted to meet their needs and will leverage ServiceNow to do that,” says Damo. “ServiceNow also offers a roadmap for technology industry that aligns with our growth aspirations and allows us to remain agile.”

One of the key capabilities that Lenovo uses is the customer data model within ServiceNow TPSM. This helps Lenovo bring in customer information and context as it delivers its DaaS solution—a personalized service for its enterprise customers around the world.

“We are working with over 400 enterprise customers across multiple countries and regions. It’s important that we can map their assets, procurement, catalogs, and cases across the ecosystem,” says Damo. “ServiceNow gives us the ability to build a structured and repeatable onboarding process for our customers.”

Using the Service Bridge capability within ServiceNow TPSM along with ServiceNow Automation Engine, Lenovo can seamlessly integrate with customers’ technology platform and deliver seamless customer experiences.

“ServiceNow has simplified our registration process, enabling us to onboard an enterprise customer 40% faster,” says Damo. Lenovo can now onboard 95% of customers within 12 weeks and plans to further accelerate the onboarding time to four weeks over the next year.

With the Service Bridge capability, Lenovo has also reduced the effort for customers to deploy its services and products. This led to a 20% reduction in customer churn and a 25% increase in Net Promoter Score in just one year.

Accelerating time to revenue through seamless integration

One of the key goals for the Lenovo DaaS solution is to take the burden of device lifecycle management off its customers, allowing them to focus on what matters to the business.

By using the separate domain capability within ServiceNow TPSM and integrating with third-party applications—such as Absolute, DocuSign, Kafka, and Microsoft Dynamics—via ServiceNow Automation Engine, Lenovo provides a self-service portal which hosts a device catalog personalized to each enterprise customer. This allows them to engage with Lenovo easily and securely via a single platform.

For example, with the self-service portal underpinned by ServiceNow TPSM, enterprise customers using DaaS Desk can view the hardware and services that they are entitled to in the catalog. They can then place an order and track its status through the portal. On receipt of their devices, customers receive a notification to accept the service.

Lenovo can also use Service Bridge to export catalogs and services directly into the customers’ technology platform, reducing the time spent on API integration. This allows Lenovo to easily personalize the device catalog based on individual customer’s service offerings and expedite delivery processes.

“With ServiceNow TPSM and Automation Engine, we can collaborate effortlessly with our large enterprise customers and accelerate time to revenue,” Damo explains. “For example, we leverage ServiceNow to provide DaaS to a Global Fortune 500 customer with a presence in 99 countries. These automated workflows empower us to seamlessly deliver 120,000 devices to their users at home and at different office locations.”

Increasing business agility and supporting growth

Before ServiceNow, most of the IT tools at Lenovo were internal-focused. As Lenovo shifted to focus on as-a-service business models, the company wanted to leverage ServiceNow’s industry best practices and deliver service offerings that are specific to IT service management.

With the success of using ServiceNow TPSM for providing DaaS solutions to enterprise customers, Lenovo has implemented ServiceNow IT Service Management (ITSM) Professional to support a wider range of services, including Service Desk, Unified Endpoint Management, Cloud Migration, and Managed Services for M365.

“ServiceNow is out-of-the-box, which means that we don’t have to start from scratch. Our employees really like it,” says Sujo Joseph, Lenovo’s Director of Global IT Engineering & Product Development. “Leveraging the Flow Designer feature and the platform capability of ServiceNow, we can quickly create new processes and expand Service Desk and other offerings to more customers.”

Using ServiceNow ITSM, Lenovo has successfully deployed the first Service Desk and DaaS solutions to a global cosmetics company in just 23 days. This includes providing an AI-guided knowledge base for 24/7 self-help as well as offering a single point of engagement across various channels to help users resolve issues proactively and promptly on any device (Lenovo and non-Lenovo devices). The initial Service Desk rollout manages 5,000 devices for the customer’s Singapore office and will gradually expand to other locations over the next one year.

Lenovo also leverages out-of-the-box spokes with ServiceNow Automation Engine to simplify the integration of customers’ diverse devices and platforms. For example, ServiceNow is integrated with Absolute software to lock and unlock endpoint devices and with DocuSign to confirm the customers’ acceptance of services.

“Working with partners like ServiceNow gives us the agility to offer Digital Workplace solutions to any organization—large or small,” comments Sujo.

Damo adds: “We are also leveraging ServiceNow’s built-in AI capability to recommend products and services to customers. And in a support scenario, we are expecting to resolve up to 60% of incidents before the ticket reaches a support agent.”

Scaling future service offerings with unified processes

ServiceNow’s out-of-the-box solutions proved to be the right choice for Lenovo. In fact, the company is now working with ServiceNow to leverage its advanced capabilities, such as predictive intelligence and Generative AI, to provide more value-added services to customers in the near future. Lenovo is also considering ServiceNow IT Operations Management and ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management as part of its roadmap.

Overall, Lenovo aims to be the one partner that provides the Digital Workplace solutions to all customers. With ServiceNow, Lenovo is looking to unify its processes for all service offerings, help its customers manage IT costs better (with predictable expenses), and uplift productivity.

“ServiceNow is flexible and scalable, enabling us to connect and deliver seamless experience to customers across different geographies and verticals. It really is enabling our vision of Smarter Technology for All,” Damo concludes.