ServiceNow has rolled all of its customer service offices into a single consolidated one, for customers who want that, backed by additional service, training and support.
Paul Fipps, SVP of Customer & Partner Excellence at ServiceNow
Last January, ServiceNow rolled out an entirely new offering, ServiceNow Impact. It consolidates all of ServiceNow’s customer service offerings into a single one, backed up by the multi-faceted support of a ServiceNow service team. It is a fee-based offering.
“What we did differently is take a step back,” said Paul Fipps, SVP of Customer & Partner Excellence at ServiceNow. “We interviewed 500 plus customers, who had invested three billion globally in digital transformation. But we found that only 26% of these have met their ROI.
Fipps said that these 500 customers had three main priorities in their discussions with ServiceNow.
“They wanted value faster,” he stated. “They wanted more prescriptive knowledge. And in the war for talent, they wanted us to help them bridge that skills gap.”
Fipps indicated that in the early days of designing the product, ServiceNow used outside consultants to help them out.
“We used about five of our most strategic services providers to help us evolve the product in those early days,” he said. “They didn’t understand why we brought all our success offerings into one product, when in fact what we are doing is creating a single pane of glass from the customer lens.”
When Impact launched in January, it was all underpinned by consumer experience. Each customer was assigned both a customer success manager and an Impact squad. Impact is all AI-driven, and provides Impact Squad recommended content.
“The real core of Impact is the recommended training courses, which provide unlimited access to on-demand training, certification, and customized learning,” Fipps said. “Impact is really focused on training and certification for our customers, and all Impact customers go through this.”
Fipps said that the ServiceNow Squad is assigned to deliver on the pre-sales process in the post-sales journey.
“While in the post sales journey, we want to help each specific customer realize how much value that they receive from our solutions,” he stated. “We put a dollar figure on everything customers want, around KPIs. If you want to build a strategic KPI around employment experience – increasingly it’s a key KPI – that will show how we affected the number of tickets that came in as we built our automation
Fipps said that eventually, an entry-level version of Impact will be made available to all their customers.
“It’s a tiered offering,” he said. “Over time all customers will have Basic Impact, with a dedicated team of resources that they can purchase.”
Fipps said there is a role for channel partners within Impact as well.
“A key thing in looking at the products that the customer has purchased. It shows which of those products that they have actually adopted, and which ones they have not,” he said. “The customer can grant the partner access so that the partner can see where customer is going with their value goals. We give some advisory information up front, and the partner can take it the rest of the way from there.”
While only around 200 Impact offerings have been sold to date, Fipps said that number isn’t bad at all.
“Impact is one of our fastest growing products within ServiceNow,” he said. “When we sit down and show them what they get, we show they how they can accelerate their results. We are really pleased with how fast customers have invested here.”
