Smarter service management

Founded in Australia in 2017, LAB3 Pty Ltd is a fearless innovator that offers expertise in cybersecurity, cloud technology, AI solutions and managed services.

Through strategic technology partners, LAB3 focuses on helping top-tier businesses and government clients across Australasia to modernise and transform their critical infrastructure with cloud platforms and new AI technologies. Its vision is to deliver real business value by developing ready-made solutions with speed and certainty, allowing clients to "fear less and achieve more".

With significant business growth in recent years, Anthony Wales, Director for Strategic Growth at LAB3, explains that service management is an obvious area that the business needed to transform, both to improve efficiency and deliver premium services to customers.

"We wanted to minimise manual or repetitive work for our support engineers, and empower them to become thought leaders that serve customers better," Anthony adds. "Our clients are also focusing on driving costs down, so enabling new ways of working is inevitable."

Being at the forefront of technology innovation and pioneering AI solutions, the decision for LAB3 was whether to build its AI capabilities in-house or use ServiceNow. It also wanted to ensure that efficiency and cost savings didn't compromise business outcomes.

LAB3 chose to implement Now Assist for IT Service Management (ITSM), Customer Service Management (CSM) and Creator, for improved productivity and continuous access to support offered by ServiceNow.

"It was a logical step to leverage ServiceNow's AI capabilities that are already integrated in the platform and meet the majority of our requirements," Anthony explains. "Continuous innovation in the Now Platform was also a key factor, knowing that we could take some of the pressure associated with upgrades away from our engineers."

With many of LAB3's clients operating in highly regulated industries, compliance was also a critical consideration. "Our previous experience partnering with ServiceNow provided confidence that we could adopt this solution without compromising our high standards.

"We wanted to increase efficiency and empower our engineers to elevate the work they do to provide that additional value-add for our customers," Anthony says. "AI was the clear path to take."

LAB3 offers high standards of security for customers. For this reason, it provides service management through a hybrid model, giving customers access to a service portal underpinned by the Now Platform, but with a separate domain to ensure security.

"ServiceNow is a safe platform," Anthony adds. "It gives us the confidence to meet sensitive customer needs in a highly regulated industry."

Accelerating customer service productivity

For years, LAB3 had been using ServiceNow CSM and ITSM primarily to manage cases and incidents.

With over 7,000 customer tickets a week, LAB3 saw an opportunity to expand its use of the Now Platform to deliver even more productive and efficient customer service. For example, first responders to a major incident would need to spend time writing detailed notes on case activity. The senior manager or next support engineer then had to read the work notes to get up to speed on the customer's issue, so they could best implement a resolution.

After deciding to bring AI into its service desk, LAB3 was able to get up and running with ServiceNow's AI capabilities within three months. The first stage was to roll it out to LAB3's service desk, followed by other employees and then customers. The primary goal was to achieve faster resolutions, improve the service experience and lower customer costs.

Using the AI and GenAI capabilities of Now Assist, support engineers can now easily generate case summaries and resolution notes at the click of a button. Senior managers can also quickly review summary notes without having to chase engineers for information. This has significantly reduced time wasted through back-and-forth communications and improved collaboration between teams.

Using AI with the request catalogue, LAB3 has cut the time to validate request items by 37% and enabled faster resolution times.

"Previously, we had a lot of contact follow-ups for L1 tickets and it could add up to a week for a case to be resolved," Anthony explains. "With the ServiceNow AI platform, we have seen a reduction in mean time to resolution by 47%."

In addition to case summarisation, AI can also help junior support engineers to ask the right questions or articulate relevant responses using natural language. This saves time when responding to cases, while enabling them to focus on helping customers.

"We went from a standard service management interface to the Now Assist AI panel with conversational interface embedded within the agent workspace," Anthony says. "It's like having a companion to bounce ideas off."

Anthony adds that LAB3 will gradually bring in more workspaces to more support engineers and analysts in the business.

"By unlocking AI capabilities in the Now Platform, we expect to improve the efficiency and quality of our work, and make it more financially viable for our customers."

Transforming the self-service experience

 LAB3 has enhanced its service portal with AI Search. When a customer submits a query such as how to raise an incident, they receive fast and personalised answers instead of search results. This allows the customer to use reliable information to solve requests without needing to contact the service desk.

"By leveraging AI Search in the ServiceNow AI Platform, we have uplifted our self-service rate by 20%, which has also reduced the call volume to the service desk", Anthony says.

In addition to AI Search, LAB3 has integrated Now Assist with Microsoft Teams to further improve self-service rates and deliver a more seamless experience for customers interacting with LAB3.

According to Anthony, the integration has significantly improved the ease of communication within the existing Agent Workspace and achieved higher deflection rates. Users are also finding it easier to get answers and take action with Now Assist and Microsoft Teams, resulting in a 100x increase in usage via the service portal.

"With significant automation of ticket notification and enhanced self-service capabilities via the ServiceNow AI platform, we have realised a 47% reduction in our workflow bottleneck," Anthony says.

Looking ahead, LAB3 plans to leverage Now Assist Skill Kit to quickly create and deploy new AI skills. Anthony also expects that ServiceNow's natural language experience will attract more users to self-service and self-resolve.

Driving faster time to value through developer productivity

With around 150 DevOps processes, speeding up the app-development lifecycle is critical for LAB3 to help customers migrating to the cloud platform. However, writing code could be a steep learning curve for junior developers.

By automating app and code generation with ServiceNow's AI capabilities for Creator, developers at all levels can write natural language statements that automatically translate into code segments. Junior developers can now kick-start app creation quickly and bridge skills gaps with senior developers.

"Using Creator's AI features, we have removed the complexity of creating those automatic workflows and reduced the onboarding time from months to weeks," Anthony notes. 

Putting AI to work in service management

To ensure continued success in a competitive technology space, LAB3 is looking to stay ahead of the pack by anticipating future customer requirements while supporting business growth.

"We're transformative and future-ready, and typically our clients are too," Anthony adds. "They're happy to jump on it as well."

Going forward, the success point for LAB3 is having all support engineers and analysts using Agent Workspace as a single place to manage their work. It also plans to have customers use ServiceNow as the main platform to request help from IT, maintaining a balance between self-service and person-to-person interaction.

"ServiceNow gives us a single AI platform to connect and simplify work across the business. Our customers also feel safe using ServiceNow," Anthony explains.

"Our service desk staff also really like the AI platform," he concludes. "They can work smarter and be more productive, enabling them to deliver an exceptional customer experience."