Empathy as a competitive advantage

TP is a global digital business services company with big numbers. Hundreds of thousands of employees operating in nearly 100 countries, 300+ languages and dialects spoken, and over 56 million hours of employee training taken in just one year. With such grand numbers, it makes it even more impressive that, for the past three years, TP has ranked in the top five Great Places to Work worldwide.

The key? Human empathy. “We’re in the business of delighting customers,” explains Greg Vise, Global Senior VP of IT Digital Transformation at TP.

A human touch in a technology-driven world

As a business on the frontline of delivering positive customer experiences for its clients, TP places great significance on human interaction. The TP thinking is that to be truly impactful, technology initiatives must be centered on a human experience.

“We pride ourselves on being people-led and technology-driven,” says Greg. “For years, we’ve been using technology to shorten the time it takes to support each customer and provide the services they need, but with a human touch.”

It is no surprise such an innovative company would be an early adopter of AI technology. The TP difference is that AI shouldn’t be seen as a productivity tracker, it must be an enabler of human empathy.

With nearly half a million employees serving customers in 170 countries it would be easy to lose track of that. “Millions of interactions every month come down to a simple human moment,” comments Dev Mudaliar, Group Chief Information Officer. 

Creating a global standard, respecting local difference

TP faced some practical challenges, including the need to figure out how to manage the complexities of different regional support models, languages, and technologies across its global, 24/7 IT Service Desk support for employees. Worldwide, it had been using six different IT ticketing platforms, making it difficult to drive consistent automation, and a challenge to orchestrate IT services.

“Essentially, we wanted one enterprise service management platform at the heart of everything,” says Greg. “We needed something that was capable of working across multiple different countries and languages and that solution was the ServiceNow platform.”

The platform provided a solid base on which the IT Service Desk team could build its AI capabilities and fully integrate AI into its performance, automating routine processes and removing manual effort. This solid foundation involved IT Service Management (ITSM) and IT Operations Management (ITOM), allowing TP to unify its IT Service Desk processes and empower employees with real-time consolidated information.

As part of the ServiceNow AI Platform, TP is using Process Mining to analyze IT process flows. As part of the ITOM Visibility & Discovery product, TP is utilizing the Service Graph Connectors, which enable Greg’s team to connect to third-party applications, supporting an omnichannel approach.

Supporting human connection through AI

Encouraged by the incredible results the team achieved in just one year with Process Mining, TP saw ServiceNow AI capabilities as the next big opportunity to take its automation efforts even further.

TP believes that AI enables its employees to deliver more empathy, which is one of the reasons why the organization prioritized productivity for its IT Service Desk experts. This meant targeting the most routine and time-consuming tasks, including summarizing incidents and chats for Service Desk experts so they wouldn’t have to scroll through pages of histories every time they received a new job. The time saved resolving 300,000 IT incidents and requests from TP Experts every month, means TP Experts who directly support customers can spend more time focusing on delivering better customer care, while shaving even a few minutes off each job also translates to huge cost savings.

“Before, a request for a piece of hardware would mean multiple emails, follow-ups, attachments, maybe even translations,” says Greg. “Now, it all happens in real time through the interface with ServiceNow’s Employee Center portal, WhatsApp, MS Teams, or other mobile applications. It truly is amazing what we've been able to do – it’s brought our employees closer together.

True assistance from AI

With the ServiceNow AI capabilities, TP IT Service Desk experts can automatically generate closure/resolution notes which, normally, would have to be done manually. They now only need to check their accuracy instead of typing them up each time. Built into the ServiceNow AI platform, AI tools and capabilities are proving intuitive for Service Desk experts; it has not taken long for TP to start seeing results. 

“By leveraging incident summarization, we can get our stakeholders updated quickly and get through our root cause analysis and incident summaries fast. These two use cases were really big for us.”

Fewer tasks, better code, faster answers

Within major incident management processing, the company is seeing around 15-25 minutes saved per day. This means it can focus on restoring services thereby allowing its customer-facing TP Experts to deliver better customer care faster.

The technical staff’s ability to develop code has also improved: “Leveraging Now Assist for Creator, developers are able to write better code more quickly for major incidents and for the regular day-to-day tasks, therefore increasing our time-to-value,” says Greg. “They can now also release applications much faster.”

In Employee Center, AI is driving more accurate responses to staff queries, transforming IT Service Desk resolution rates. With TP employees asking their questions via AI-powered virtual agents, the company managed to double its deflection rate. Before AI, TP employees would get a multitude of catalog items and knowledge articles to sift through. With Q&A in AI Search, users receive real answers, quickly.

Taking the next steps on the AI journey

Encouraged by the initial results of the ServiceNow AI Platform, TP then deployed Predictive Intelligence to automate form filling and identified more than 20 use cases for leveraging generative AI further. The company is also looking at how AI could support change management, with creative prompts and consistent documentation. And their use of generative AI is laying the groundwork for future adoption of AI Agents that will act as collaborators with TP’s skilled internal IT Service Desk workforce to drive efficiency and improve quality.

“It’s had a domino effect throughout the company,” says Greg. And there are multiple new use cases to be excited about: “The great thing about the ServiceNow AI platform is that we can bring all these new ideas together into one user experience with our omnichannel approach around the Employee Center portal, MS Teams, WhatsApp, and mobile.”

The right partnership for the future

According to Dev, “The biggest benefit of the platform is making things simpler, so we’re putting AI to work for people.” And it shows. The ServiceNow AI platform for business transformation has truly made an impact at TP. The company’s ability to automate its IT Service Desk support for employees has grown by 38%, the case deflection rate for employees has improved by 10% using AI-powered Virtual Agent, and the CSAT scores with end users have gone up by 8% in just the first few months.

Encapsulating the entire experience and the excitement of putting AI in every corner of the business, Greg summarizes: “We've brought our world together and made it smaller from an IT standpoint. Instead of having disparate IT associates spread across the globe with different language barriers in different systems, we're operating as one global IT organization.”

But Greg also appreciates that a lot of its success is down to the relationship the company has with ServiceNow. “Having a trusted relationship with your partner is of the utmost importance. We truly trust ServiceNow to help us achieve our goals, while always having our customers’ experience at the core of everything we do together.”