Thrive NextGen and ServiceNow bring faster, effective managed services to SMBs

Small and mid-sized businesses often struggle to access the IT resources they need to grow. Thrive NextGen (Thrive) helps them by delivering specialized high-availability cybersecurity, disaster recovery, cloud, and managed services.

Thrive built its NextGen Platform on the ServiceNow AI Platform using Technology Provider Service Management (TPSM). Now, Thrive is able to grow its managed services offerings and deliver better IT service with less effort using AI.

“We wanted a technology partner that could scale with our business. ServiceNow was a perfect match,” says Michael Gray, CTO of Thrive NextGen. “Our decision paid off and we’re now delivering more effective services, faster, to help customers grow.”

Thrive routes over 315,000 tasks every six months using AI automation

Thrive has been an early adopter of AI innovation. Their latest AI related improvement comes from automated workflows—helping Thrive resolve more than 315,000 tasks every six months, saving 21,000 hours of manual work and boosting its CSAT score to 99.2%.

Thrive also resolves issues for its customers faster by centralizing customer service and technical support, allowing customer service to triage and resolve incidents at first contact. Comprehensive dashboards give teams complete visibility into customers’ environments so they can spot issues quickly and identify potential areas for improvement. This allows for a first contact resolution rate of 73% and reduces overall time to resolution by 63%.

Customers can often solve many IT issues themselves through self-service options, with automated workflows handling routine tasks like password resets. Now, people spend less time waiting for answers, which enhances productivity.

AI features such as advanced work assignment and task intelligence automatically sort, route, and investigate incoming tickets, reducing the time it takes to connect customers with an engineer from six minutes to less than a minute.

“We aim to use automation as much as we can to make our engineers’ lives easier and bring better value to our customers,” says Gray. “Our customers have taken notice, as our CSAT score skyrocketed to 99.2% as users spend less time waiting for support.”

Service Bridge connects Thrive with customers

Service Bridge links Thrive directly with customers' ServiceNow instances, enabling real-time collaboration among teams. This reduces handoffs and accelerates resolutions, giving customers faster answers and strengthening Thrive's role as a trusted partner.

“It’s amazing how Service Bridge improves customer relationships by allowing us to really feel like a single team working towards a common goal,” says Gray. “It’s been a great source of business growth because it gives us a strong competitive advantage.”

Clean, reliable data enables quick adoption of AI workflows

Thrive credits the success with ServiceNow to its solid data foundation. By taking the time to build out reliable data models and keeping up with data hygiene, the company is in a position to quickly grow with ServiceNow, adding new AI capabilities that improve operational efficiency and deliver more reliable managed services for customers.

Teams across the company collaborate more efficiently with generative AI case summaries. When assigned an incident, service staff can use the case summary to immediately understand the problem and previous actions. They jump straight to solutions instead of hunting for information. Thrive expanded this approach to teams across the company, having AI summarize tasks ranging from order fulfillment to project development.

“A lot of what we do involves connecting the dots between data and people,” says Gray. “ServiceNow gives us the tools and visibility to understand our customers’ IT environments and work with them to deliver the scale and performance to grow their businesses.”

Thrive scales AI to create more automations, quicker resolutions, and faster response times

Looking ahead, Thrive plans to expand its use of ServiceNow AI Agents to combine multiple automations with workflows. This will allow engineers to spend less time on manual tasks and more time enhancing customer-facing services.

“With ServiceNow AI Agents, we can build out automations more efficiently and shift engineering resources to creating customer-facing capabilities,” says Gray. “AI Control Tower and AI Agent Fabric will allow us to scale and manage AI to accomplish even more for our customers.”