(upbeat music) >> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas It's theCUBE covering ServiceNow Knowledge 2018 brought to you by ServiceNow >> Welcome back to Las Vegas everybody. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. What we do is we go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise. This is our sixth year at ServiceNow Knowledge. Jeff and I, Jeff Frick, my co-host, we started in 2013 I believe, Jeff. >> Yes. >> At the Aria, right? >> At the Aria, third floor. >> Small conference. 3,800 people, we were kind of tucked in the corner Now we're in the center, the ecosystem is burgeoning. As is ServiceNow, the company started with core IT service management and has been extending its applications on its platform into new areas and Abhijit Mitra is here, he's the general manager of the customer service management unit at ServiceNow. It's great to see you again my friend, welcome back to-- >> Great to see you Dave and Jeff. >> Great to see you, welcome back. >> So we met several times at headquarters, at shows like this, you've been educating me and us on your business, but let's start with customer service management, what is it to you guys? >> Interesting you ask the question because two years ago I remember explaining to you that it's not customer-service management. It's customer service-management. So, I want to go back to that once more and start off explaining what that was about. You know, I have been building CRM applications for a long time, in my career and especially in the customer service domain, I always felt there's something missing and I didn't quite really know what it was until I came to ServiceNow. And I discovered service management and what I realized, and after talking to so many customers what I realized is that traditional CRM solutions are meant for, they're very well architected for customer engagement which is about allowing customers to contact you by different channels, by phone or email and logging their issues as cases. And that's important, we need that in customer service. But what is also very important is, how do you streamline your underlying operational processes? So that it can close the loop and fix those issues or deliver to your customers request and that's what service management is fundamentally designed to do. So what we have done here is we've combined customer engagement with service management into customer service management to give you a solution that can cater to the end to end process, that's what it is. >> Okay, so we had your boss on earlier and he said, "I have three things on my whiteboard "when people walk in with a new idea. "First one is, what's the problem? "Second one is, why now? "And the third one is, why us?" So when you guys had that conversation, (laughs) what was the answer? >> So, the problem, it really has been that customer service has been fundamentally broken and we all experience customer service every day of our lives and as consumers, I can tell you, I expect that experience to be much better today. I don't know about you, but I expect that experience to be much better. >> I was going to say expectations are pretty low unfortunately. I'm going to have to tell you for the 18th time, my name, account number, and social security number, my mom's maiden name, but I just told the other four people that I got to before I got to you. (laughs) >> So, feel the pain. >> We feel the pain. >> Let's rest that argument, OK? Now let's go about, sort of a why now, right? So, what we are seeing in the industry is massive digital transformation. Now digital transformation is a heavily overused buzzword. When I talk about digital transformation, I am talking about products becoming services, services becoming connected services where you're offering solutions to consumers and customers digitally meaning they are powered by technology. In that kind of a world, when we are customers we expect our requests and our issues to be resolved and delivered instantaneously and we expect those digital services to be always on. Now this kind of a challenge was not there like you know five, 10 years ago, this is something new. And this is where, when you combine service management which is all about how do you deliver that end to end service in a technologically technically connected world to the customer through the different channels of their choice becomes truly differentiating. So that's why now, now is the right time for doing something like this. >> Well, why ServiceNow? >> Well, ServiceNow is a market leader in service management. We are the market leaders in IT service management. And so what we are doing is we are essentially taking the core capability of the service management and just to explain a little bit for people who are not so familiar with service management, service management is about automating repetitive requests through workflows, we apply that to what we say an effortless customer experience. So customers now through self-service for example, they don't need to call anybody, they can go to your website and they can sort of request services which get automatically delivered to them, right? So that's essentially something ServiceNow does very well because of our automation capabilities. Service management is about driving down root cause of customer issues through a structured process. Problem management, change management and we do that. Service management is about monitoring connected services and being proactive and taking actions to prevent business disruptions and we do that. So that's why service management is extremely applicable to the problem of offering services in our digitally connected world. >> So you said you've been doing it for a long time in your career, before was it just really thinking about the ticket as an individual transaction in customer service management versus trying to build really more robust processes that are integrated in service management that now you're applying to the customer problems? Is that kind of why this is a fundamentally different approach? What makes it so different? >> Yes, so service management is essentially the underlying operational process, you're right. And one part of that is the ticket. Customer engagement on the other hand is being aware of who your customer is. Who that person is, what's the customers 360, what is his purchase history, what's the service history of this customer? What service contracts do they have? What entitlement do they have? All the information. So, combining it together on one common platform is what's unique. >> OK, talk a little bit about how you're innovating in that platform. You guys announced virtual agent technology, you're infusing artificial intelligence into the platform. Discuss that a little bit. >> Yeah, so, let's talk about virtual agent. I said one of the things that we focused on is making that experience for customers as effortless, as simple and easy as possible, right? So, we know that, you know companies around the world like 75% of all organizations, they want the self-service to be the primary channel of help and mass consumers, we also want self-service, right? But self-service today is primarily very static because you get, what do you get? You go, look at a knowledge base article, some self-help article, right? >> Right, right. >> And OK, maybe you lock some cases, that's all you can do. With virtual agents, what's happening is self-service is becoming actionable. Because when you are in the self-service experience, a virtual agent can anticipate your needs and start helping you, you interact with the virtual agent and it's not just a human-like interaction with you, but it can also perform actions. Automated actions using workflow capabilities of ServiceNow. And this is very unique. Now it's an extension of the service process, it becomes a living, breathing entity. The website becomes a living, breathing entity. Not only does it reduce a lot of, on the organization side for example, the customer service organization side. Not only does it reduce a lot of repetitive work for customer agents, but it makes the experience for customers very simple and effortless. >> The thing I think is so interesting on the AI side of it is that, the system learns from every transaction and can apply that learning to the next transaction versus an individual interaction between myself and say a customer service agent where they might learn a little bit on how to solve that particular problem. But it's not shared system-wide. It's not necessarily learned by the machine to help the next person get that answer a little bit faster. So it seems like the application of AI, and machine learning to these workflows really opens up an efficiency gate that's like nothing that you've been able to do before. >> Absolutely, you know one of the features that we offer is something called agent intelligence I have not seen if you talked about that, but what agent intelligence is about is that when you do need an agent, right? And you need to find the right agent, you can essentially convert or route these cases essentially which is just descriptions of words or descriptions, right? You can categorize them, you can prioritize them, and you can route them to the right cues. So that the right people can actually now help you out to solve these issues. This is something that we are using machine learning for. To be able to learn from like past history and then be able to do that without writing any rules or thing like that. The machine simply learns and figures out the best way to categorize, prioritize, and route the cases to the right people. >> Based on real behavior, as opposed to trying to figure out the rules in advance. >> The thing is that you, every time you figure out a rule, it becomes outdated very quickly. So, it's very difficult to keep rules up to date. I know and I've been building rules engine for a very long time. I know exactly how it works, It's very difficult. If AI can actually solve this problem, there is a tremendous productivity gain. >> Talk about why I wouldn't use a CRM system to do this, I have all my customer information in there, everybody's using it, I got my sales guys involved and why not just use CRM? >> Yet again, goes back to the core value proposition of CRM. CRM was essentially invented as a methodology to enforce the sales process. So you track your leads, the opportunities, codes, convert MTRs, and that's what most companies use CRM for. Now, since we had your prospect data in there used, you know some customers would start thinking that okay, you know what? My customer database is in CRM, but actually if you think about it for most companies, the customer data is not in CRM. It's in their ERP system. >> It's in Oracle SAP. >> SAP that's where the data is so, in a service process, you're actually interacting with your customers. The customers are interacting with your system through self-service. In CRM, and in traditional lead opportunity management, there's no customer interaction. It's your company's internal process. So here, you are talking with a customer interacting with the system and you servicing that customer in an end-to-end process. So, I don't think for customer service, CRM was ever well suited actually. So specifically in the customer service domain, I think a service management approach is a much better approach. >> Abhijit, what are some of the KPIs? What are people using as yardsticks of success when they're doing these types of implementations? >> Yeah, so one of the key KPIs for our customers is, you know from a business stand point, it's Net Promoter Score and we have had, customers like Epicor, for example, who've implemented customer service management, actually retiring 15 CRM systems including everything you can imagine. And within 10 months of going live, they're seeing 10 percentage point improvement in Net Promoter Score, just by switching to CSM. These are unbelievable numbers, then we have had nice systems, by the way both these companies have won awards for innovating customer service. And they've seen more than a 70% reduction in cases because of self-service. 'Cause they are going to the self-service channel. So these are sort of the obvious, let's say customer satisfaction improvement or cost savings that some of our customers have seen from using our solution. >> That's great. >> Okay, takeaways from K18, what should we, what's the bumper sticker say in the back of the car as they're pulling away as it relates to customer service management. (laughs) >> You know, to summarize for customer service management, we essentially combine customer engagement with service management to offer and to help you offer an effortless connected and proactive customer service so this is really our key value propositions that we offer to companies. Effortless is all about simplifying the customer experience. Connected is about breaking down the silos in your organization. Getting everybody on a common platform to drive down root cause of customer issues and the customer service team support, and proactive is about monitoring the data and reacting to issues before customers are affected. And this is what makes customer service experience, a superior customer service experience. >> Jeff: Three word bumper sticker, it works perfectly. (laughs) >> Abhijit, it was great to meet, however briefly your team last night, we saw you guys, you took your team out to dinner, they seem motivated, really charged up, a lot of smiling faces, so congratulations on the progress that you've made. You're super excited, I can tell and it's really great having you back on theCUBE, thank you. >> Yeah, yeah, and if you wanted even the shortest bumper sticker, I would say customer service is a team sport. >> Beautiful that's a good one. >> The other won't fit. (laughter) >> That'll work, all right. >> Okay keep it right there everybody, we'll be back with our next guest. We're live, you're watching theCUBE from ServiceNow Knowledge18, we'll be right back. (upbeat music)