Striving for a superior customer experience

Lenovo’s vision is to deliver smarter technology and AI that is accessible and beneficial to everyone, both individually and in businesses.

Building on its success as the world’s number one personal computer manufacturer, Lenovo has expanded its products and services to a broad range of AI-enabled services including Digital Workplace Solutions (DWS) delivered by its Care of One platform. As part of the DWS portfolio, it offers Cloud Service Provider (CSP) Managed Services to enterprise customers that require a scalable approach to Microsoft 365 license management.

To address this complexity, Lenovo adopted ServiceNow Technology Provider Service Management (TPSM) and Workflow Data Fabric to coordinate service delivery and customer support by streamlining workflows, managing entitlements, and automating fulfilment across global operations.

As Lenovo looks to further simplify processes for support services and enhance its customer experience, it has also rolled out Now Assist for TPSM to accelerate resolutions with AI and automation.

“Using the ServiceNow AI Platform, our Level 1 support agents now have smart answers at their fingertips and deliver faster, better services to our customers,” says Martha Politakis, Director of Global Managed Service Desk at Lenovo.

Lenovo’s in-house teams engaged with ServiceNow Expert Services and leveraged their best practices, customer knowledge, and product expertise to drive Now Assist deployment. As a result, the implementation was completed in just three months.

Agent productivity supercharged with AI

CSP provides managed services to around 25,000 enterprise customers globally. Before ServiceNow, 95% of cases sent to the managed service desk were captured across six mailboxes. Customer information was also held in multiple systems and different locations—from individual laptops to SharePoint, making it difficult for support agents to track interaction histories and case statuses. It could take up to 10 minutes for an agent to create a case from scratch, and 25 minutes to close it, assuming there were no escalations.

In addition, the previous platform was designed to track hardware parameters only, such as serial numbers or hardware components. There was no capability to capture cases related to software services. Support agents had to use a different tool to track subscription information and interaction history.

“With siloed customer information and case management practices, it was time consuming for support agents to find out who the customer was, what software they had with Lenovo, and the issues they had experienced,” Martha adds. “This resulted in prolonged resolution times.”

Lenovo’s strategy is to bring AI to all offerings, so Martha wanted to overhaul the case management process to lift software support services and fuel business growth.

By adopting TPSM with Workflow Data Fabric, the managed service desk now has a purpose-built case management platform that can be easily configured for software services. This enables support agents to track all activities for different accounts and groups via a single Workspace instead of six mailboxes.

With Now Assist enhancing the TPSM experience, support agents can quickly resolve issues using AI-generated case histories, case summaries, and resolution notes. For example, when a customer transfers from a Virtual Agent chat to a live chat, the agent receives a summary of the previous interactions. And when a conversation ends, Now Assist provides an automatic summary and suggests a resolution. It also provides an option to auto-create a knowledge base article for resolutions that haven’t previously been covered.

“With the ServiceNow AI Platform, we have seen a 35% decrease in resolution time,” Martha explains. “This has helped lift productivity across the business.”

Sujo Joseph, Director of Global IT Engineering and Product Development, explains that the next step is to leverage the auto-ticket and auto-assignment capabilities within Now Assist to empower agents with more intelligence—knowing which agents are available in what region and then assigning the ticket automatically.

“We’re aiming for a 40% productivity gain through more AI orchestration opportunities and continuous improvement of the AI platform,” Sujo says.

Martha adds that support agents are excited that they can now leverage AI for case handling. Improved efficiencies also give the sales team an opportunity to share positive stories with other customers and partners, emphasizing that Lenovo is making AI technology available to them, and will continue to make more services available through an enhanced portal.

Revolutionized support experience with one AI platform

With the goal of modernizing its global software support operations and enhancing the customer experience using AI, Lenovo has transformed the way customers access its services.

For example, TPSM offers a self-service portal that allows customers to track the status of cases from start to finish. Customers can also use live chat within Now Assist to determine the right catalog to use, instead of going through over 40,000 different catalogs.

Using Workflow Data Fabric to connect data from various applications, including Microsoft Dynamics and Genesys, into a single customer data model, support agents and Now Assist now have access to the complete service management history of support services. This helps accelerate the self-service process and contributed to a 100% CSAT score in a three-month period.

“With Now Assist quickly identifying customer intent and finding the right answers, customers can self-serve common issues rather than wait for a live agent,” says Sujo. “It’s a far richer experience than before.”

Improved productivity is also set to free up service desk capacity to offer new services without additional headcount, such as providing more language support on the AI platform. This empowers Lenovo to scale its services more cost effectively to other business units, such as using CSP data for future Customer Success Enablement.

Leveraging AI as a value differentiator

Sujo adds that ServiceNow is the orchestration engine for Lenovo’s Care of One platform, enabling the business to personalize service offerings based on customer needs.

“ServiceNow is the platform of platforms. This allows Lenovo to create value differentiators for our services,” Sujo says. “For example, we are working on a new Unified Knowledge Management project to share common knowledge on hardware and software issues.”

Lenovo is now set to upgrade to the ServiceNow Yokohama Release and enable ServiceNow AI Agents on the platform. This next phase builds on its investment in TPSM, extending more intelligent, connected service experiences across the DWS portfolio.

“ServiceNow is a strategic platform for Lenovo. We can take advantage of its AI capabilities to accelerate time to market, improve efficiency, and enhance customer and agent experience,” Martha concludes. “We look forward to expanding the technology footprint to other service providers.”