Leading IT services and consultancy
NTT Holdings is one of the world’s largest telecommunications companies. Headquartered in Japan, 70% of interactions with smartphones will touch its infrastructure, network, or cloud – and it’s also known for inventing the emoji. The group operates multiple holdings companies, and NTT Ltd. was formed when a number of these companies merged.
“NTT Ltd. provides IT services and consultancy. As of April 2024, we will be the fifth largest consultancy firm in the world,” explains Chris Pope, Vice President of Digital Experience at NTT Ltd. “We’re in the middle of bringing together two large organizations that will see us become NTT Data Inc. by April 2024. Our team is responsible for creating great employee experiences that scale, streamline process, and make life easier for employees.”
With a wealth of platforms to choose from, ServiceNow is a key enabler for transforming and digitizing workflows and shaping employee experience, providing great out-of-the-box functionality and a framework to make changes that have a positive impact on employees.
As well as being early adopters of ServiceNow, NTT Ltd. is a partner, implementing ServiceNow for its customers. When it comes to innovation, NTT Ltd. itself is always its own customer zero. And as the Global Business Services team discovered when the company built them an app in just 24 days, being customer zero has its perks.
Swapping manual processes for automated workflows
Before the app went live, Global Business Services (GBS) agents were handling service incidents and requests from across the organization using email, spreadsheets, and conference calls. It was very difficult to show an audit trail, overviews, or individual accountability.
Today, service agents across the globe respond to cases from 50-plus countries using the Service Issue Management app built on the ServiceNow low-code App Engine. Cases are submitted by business users and span topics such as contracts, tax, operational difficulties, data issues, and much more–in short, the issues employees face on a daily basis that are nothing to do with IT.
“We want ServiceNow to be perceived as more than IT support. Our team rapidly worked out the need we wanted to address and started designing the app to fix it,” adds Chris.
That basic functionality was to log, track, and close cases in one place, with automated workflows doing the heavy lifting behind the scenes. The team also realized that centralizing cases was a great opportunity to analyze the data and identify processes for optimization–not just solving employee issues but putting processes in place to stop them from happening again.
Empowering staff to self-manage
The Service Issue Management app was built using out-of-the-box functionality, such as decision tables and rules. The team embedded logic around ticket assignment to help route them to the right place quickly.
“Service Issue Management empowers staff to self-manage. We delegated lots of capabilities to business users to give them ownership of certain tasks,” says Chris. This creates an audit trail and helps to foster a culture of accountability, with employees actively invested in making processes smoother.
The app comes with dashboards and reports that staff can configure with drop-down menus. This helps them to measure SLAs and KPIs with a user-friendly interface.
“The app swaps a siloed, disjointed way of working with a single source of truth, a single set of KPIs, and a standard way to engage with business users,” explains Chris. “We had no way of capturing intelligence for CAPA (corrective action preventive action) before, but now we’re closing cases 65% faster and getting greater insights into how we can improve services.”
For future releases, the team is exploring predictive analytics and looking to embed playbooks to drive faster, consistent resolution. They’re also planning to implement Agent Assist, which will automatically suggest possible solutions for cases when the agent opens them.
Wowing litigators with a custom app
Following the success of Service Issue Management, Chris’s team decided to take their learnings and build an app for the litigation team.
“We tried using another platform but ran into security and data confidentiality issues. Our teams are happy that App Engine provided the right levels of protection to help the legal team be more productive without compromising on security or confidentiality,” he recalls.
The team defined personas and user journeys before developing a prototype in four weeks using Flow Designer and Configurable Workspaces. When it goes live, the app will give the legal team a digital workspace to help them manage all the moving parts involved in a complex process.
Features include contextual data, real-time audit trails and visualization using maps across regions/countries which NTT is actively engaged with. This will help the team to determine if cases arising are preventable and how processes need to be adapted to comply with local regulations.
“Legal teams work with many third parties; sharing information in a secure and confidential way is paramount. The challenge of data quality and consistency, coupled with human errors and incomplete data, results in time lost and a significant amount of follow up,” says Chris. “By capturing information in the app, we’ll be able to make sure it’s all there, drive the process and utilize for reporting.”
Legal teams need to report to executive leadership on a frequent basis. It can be a lengthy and laborious, repetitive process to pull together timelines and succinct updates based on the reporting frequency. With the new solution, we will be able to generate reports in the correct format in one click. Early estimates show up to 90% reduction in time and effort.
“A lot of knowledge work relies on information stored in people’s heads, which can be a single point of failure,” Chris comments. “By digitalizing workflows and capturing data centrally, we can eliminate that point of failure and make life easier for our teams. They were blown away by the prototype.”
Future developments will likely see the use of artificial intelligence to create summaries of documents stored in the solution.
Keeping the human experience front and center
In just a few months, NTT Ltd. has launched two apps with the power to transform life for two very different teams. But keeping human centricity in mind is vitally important.
“ServiceNow is a key platform for our success. We make it work for us to deliver quick wins that make our employees feel empowered,” Chris explains. “There’s no point iterating quickly if you lose sight of your employees. We listen, learn, and act to design solutions for their biggest pain points. Instead of talking about problem solving, we align our internal messaging with what motivates them and deliver outcomes.”