Belfast-based Kainos is a service provider that helps businesses make the most of digital opportunities. Its Workday Services operation specialises in making Workday available and delivering value to smaller businesses for which it would normally be out of reach.

"There's definitely a common market challenge for Kainos: everyone wants to do it cheaper and faster," explains Peiter la Cour Freiesleben, Director of Application Management and Strategic Growth—EMEA, at Kainos. "Our mission is to find the solutions to meet our clients' needs, using technology and the latest innovations."

For Kainos, the key to achieving this key objective is leveraging the power of generative AI.

Optimising the growth journey

Beyond the challenge faced by Kainos lies a considerable opportunity. According to Peiter, some 30,000 businesses across the EMEA region sit in the sweet spot that Kainos is serving by providing Workday today instead of buying a mid-range solution that they would soon outgrow.

A critical component of this offering is the support from Kainos's team of agents. It's an area where Kainos itself needed a solution that would deliver the same levels of service and efficiency that it aimed to offer customers—and that would grow and evolve with the business.

Kainos sought a smart solution to support its agents in delivering seamless customer service to an expanding client base with ever-increasing demands.

Now Assist spreads knowledge and support

Using Now Assist's GenAI capabilities and natural language tools, Kainos has quickly and significantly improved both its customer-facing service experience as well as its internal operations.

"Customers have a portal at their disposal where they can get generative answers that point them faster to the right piece of knowledge they need," Peiter explains. "It's also helping to spread user support. With Now Assist, we can automate support for basic tickets and enable smaller clients to have tier zero or tier one support that we weren't able to offer before."

"Then, internally, we can leverage AI search in Now Assist to train junior consultants to make them more self-sufficient earlier in their careers. Now Assist is effectively delivering senior consultancy support for juniors."

Personalised interactions

To date, Kainos has used Now Assist to create over 600 knowledge articles from its growing wealth of solutioning data. It has also created an employee portal where this knowledge can be accessed and shared.

"Compared to writing to colleagues on a chat, using GenAI to search the employee portal is so much faster, and we're only at the very start of this," Peiter says. "I see it evolving significantly over the next year."

Peiter also sees important value in Now Assist's case summarisation feature, which gives an overview of account activity to agents who aren't familiar with a particular case or customer.

"It's an area where GenAI can actually make interactions between agent and customer more personal," he notes. "They can look into more cases and see account histories earlier, which means they're providing consultancy to the customer based on real-time information."

Building the foundations for success with ServiceNow

But success didn't magically land in the lap of Kainos; its forward-thinking approach to customer service delivery is just one of numerous results achieved during many years of a foundational journey with ServiceNow.

"Before we found ServiceNow, we had multiple disconnected solutions and processes," Peiter adds. "It was also difficult to get the right business intelligence to drive the change we needed and understand how our services were performing."

ServiceNow Customer Service Management Professional (CSM Pro) stood out instantly for Kainos as a platform on which it could build its innovative model. In addition to meeting all the business's immediate requirements, Kainos saw CSM Pro's potential and capacity to evolve in line with its needs and those of its customers.

"We knew that ServiceNow would be such a big partner, and that it would develop its roadmap and take us even further along on our journey," Peiter recalls.

"And that's what we are realising right now. In just two years, new ideas have been developed and ServiceNow has evolved with us. Now, we can go everywhere we want."

Adopting CSM Pro was also an opportunity for Kainos to embark on an important path of process standardisation. Harnessing data and analytics would allow the business to move away from strategies based on emotion and gut feelings, and enable educated decisions based on hard evidence.

"The opportunity we saw with CSM Pro was that if we could merge all our data into one system, we could standardise all our processes," Peiter adds. "That standardisation would then allow us to start simplifying what we do."

By standardising and simplifying, Kainos saw an opportunity to build its Workday business further while maintaining a lean and agile operation that could deliver more value to its customers.

"More efficient processes allow the company to grow without necessarily growing our staff at the same rate," Peiter notes. "The revenue percentages from the same people are much higher."

Foundational capabilities

For Peiter and Kainos, a key area where CSM Pro delivers value is its ability to simplify complex services and enhance the customer experience.

"Foundational things, like workflow design and all the reporting and dashboarding capabilities, are all key for us," Peiter notes, adding that acquiring data on which to base key decisions was a task that previously took up to two days.

"That can be done in seconds today," he continues. "So, within seconds we have information that tells us how to best deploy staff and where we need to cross-skill." These insights, combined with the core capabilities of CSM Pro, have resulted in a significant improvement in customer satisfaction for Kainos.

"We had an 80% satisfaction rate, which we actually thought was quite good," Peiter says. "But with CSM Pro, it has reached 99% across all our EMEA clients. That's obviously very significant."

Focus on the future

The positive impacts on the customer experience are also reflected in other improvements to key performance indicators.

"Fund utilisation is up by 7% now," says Peiter. "Case resolution times have dropped 71%, from an average of seven hours to just two, and we used to have as many as three account escalations a week, which took up around ten hours. Now, we have maybe one a quarter, and we can typically resolve it in around three hours."

Another critical gain is a 17% increase in operational efficiency, which represents a significant win in terms of achieving Kainos's goal of serving more clients with headcount growing at a lower rate.

"That frees up time for everyone to focus on future development and take us further down the path we're on," Peiter adds.

Enabling 'Spark & Grow'

CSM Pro's contribution to 'Spark & Grow'—a Workday deployment methodology for SMEs in the EMEA region—is also an area about which Peiter is highly enthusiastic.

"We have a portal on ServiceNow where customers can seek out information, get a quote and start accessing support immediately," he explains. "They can then follow the implementation process, access all the training and user adoption content they need and raise cases that can search for content that enables them to carry on with their everyday work."

End-to-end process alignment

ServiceNow CSM Pro and Now Assist capabilities are all part of a wider roadmap that will take Kainos and its customers further along their journeys. As GenAI continues to evolve and the data resources available to Kainos grow, Peiter sees a raft of exciting possibilities.

"We will have insights from background data that enable us to work more proactively," he explains. "Instead of simply handling a raised case, we can make more personalised suggestions and resolutions."

The end goal for Kainos is complete, end-to-end process standardisation, using AI and automation to focus fully on customer interaction.

"We want to be the consultancy that proactively knows its customers, both to avoid customers running into foreseeable problems and to enable them to take on the next project that's relevant for them," Peiter concludes. "With ServiceNow, we can be the partner that truly enables their journey."