 Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE! Covering Enterprise Connect 2019, brought to you by 5ix9ine. Hi, welcome to theCUBE. Lisa Martin from Orlando. Lots going on in theCUBE, so obviously as you can just tell I'm with Stu Miniman. We are at Enterprise Connect 2019 for day two. You can hear all the buzz in the expo hall behind the 140 vendors exhibiting new products and services. We're joined by ServiceNow, Venki, Subramanian, Head of Product Management and Customer Service. Venki, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. So, ServiceNow, give us a little bit of info about your role and some of the announcements that have come out from this week. Oh, absolutely, yeah. So, ServiceNow, I think all of you are familiar with, say, one of the leading cloud software vendors. Our sole purpose is digitizing workflows in the cloud and we do that for various different parts of an enterprise like the IT workflow, employee experience and customers. My role in ServiceNow is I lead the product management for one of our product, one of the business units which is customer service management that is focused on providing companies with the tools and technologies required for them to provide a great customer experience for their end customers. So, in that role, I'm responsible for defining the product vision, the roadmap and working with our engineering teams to release the product and capabilities that our customers love to use. So, Venki, we've heard in the keynote this morning, we heard ServiceNow come up. Tell us a little bit about, at the show, some of the partnerships you're working with and it's pretty diverse spectrum of activities going on. So, where ServiceNow has important plays? Absolutely, so, ServiceNow, like I mentioned, plays in multiple different areas and helps enterprise, deliver great employee and customer experiences. So, in that sense, this is a very appropriate show for us to be at, where we are connecting different parts of the organization to collaborate and to deliver great experiences and deliver outcomes for employees and customers. We have several of our partners, including, you know, 5.9 right here and, you know, we partner on various different areas like collaboration is a key area, focus for us and you heard us mention in the Microsoft keynote earlier today, we partner with them on integrating their teams and other products with our product portfolio. 5.9 actually serves a different part, different purpose for us, where they enable contact centers to operate optimally and they connect that with our customer service management, which actually combines both the customer engagement aspects and the customer service and the customer workflow aspects that we provide. Let's dig into that a little bit more, Manky, because the last day or so, Stu and I have been talking a lot about the customer experience. It's table stakes for any business because as consumers we're so empowered, we can churn easily. There's always another provider that's going to be able to deliver something and if we're unhappy, we have that opportunity easily. So, CX has table stakes. Talk to us about why companies should make customer service part of those table stakes. Oh, absolutely, yeah. So, if you look at the evolution of how customer service has evolved over several years, it started off as a key component of customer relationship management software, right? And customer relationship started with managing the customer records, the customer data, so that the companies can make sense of who their customers are and how to serve them optimally. The second stage of evolution added several engagement capabilities and the customer experience layer on top. So, how do we make sense of all of this data and intelligence that we're collecting about customers to provide contextual personalized experience to those end customers? But customer service is not just about engagement and experience, right? Ultimately, customers are looking for outcomes. They want their services to be delivered uninterrupted for them and things like that and that is where we are looking at the third stage of evolution, if you will, where we are connecting that customer engagement and the customer experience layer with different parts of the organization that needs to work together on a single platform to be able to deliver effortless customer experiences and deliver to the results and the outcomes that your customers come to expect. Thank you. I wonder if you could drill down a little bit. Do you have a customer example you can share of that or just some specifics understand as to how we're cutting across silos, helping to have the business act as a whole to improve that customer experience? Absolutely, absolutely. I can mention a couple of names. I mean, we drink our own champagne, so we are our customer as well. Service now uses our own software, our solutions to actually deliver customer service and customer experiences. One of the other customers that reference customer for us is NICE, I believe they're probably at the show as well. And if you look at what they have done, they have been able to connect their, the cloud data center operations, the product organization, the product engineering and R&D organization and customer service on a single platform so that when customers report issues they're able to reduce the effort for customers with great self-service experience that are contextualized and personalized. They're able to identify issues and drive all the way to root cause resolution and then provide that information back to customers so that it's not just about answering questions faster, it's about reducing call volumes. It's about eliminating the root cause of the issue so that the next customer does not face that and then have to call you again. So in terms of that integration, it's critical for all of the key constituents interacting with the customer to have the data the right time to be empowered to make the right decision, but that integration is challenging. Can you give us an example of maybe an old guard company that has to transform to stay relevant and to be competitive? How do they undergo that, those process and maybe it's more of a cultural change to facilitate that integration so ultimately they can deliver that personalized customer experience that you were saying that more and more we demand as consumers. Right, right. Yeah, I mean there are many examples but I mean most of it actually starts with the realization that we need to transform, right? And with more and more services or products getting enabled through technology and technology powered services, that is not an option for companies anymore. So it really starts with the realization. It starts with driving the change top down. A lot of it is really driving the change management throughout the organization. It involves identifying your customer journeys, mapping them out and identifying what are their touch points. It also is a huge challenge for many customer service executives in a lot of those companies where they still are in that traditional mode of operation where they find it difficult to hold the other parts of the organization responsible. Right, customer service is not an island. Customer service is not just a responsibility of a single department within the company. It is a thinking that needs to, it's a mindset that needs to actually get percolated down to every part of the organization. So really for me that is where it starts and that is where I think organizations start to transform. And then it's about deploying the right tools and technologies to really make it happen. So Finkie, a couple of themes that we've been digging into at this show is how cloud and AI are transforming a lot of these spaces. I don't think we even need to talk about the cloud piece when it comes to surface now because that's a given. But from an AI standpoint, where does AI and ML fit into the solutions that you're building to deliver today? That's a great question. And we cannot have a conversation about customer service or enterprise collaboration without mentioning AI there. So if you go back to what I said a little earlier about the third phase of evolution where we are now able to connect the different parts of the company, different parts of the processes on a single platform, a lot of that actually ends up providing a lot of insights, a lot of data. You need to convert those data into insights and that is really where AI comes in. And then you need to be able to surface those insights at the right points of consumption to be able to eliminate repetitive mundane tasks and to provide value added capabilities for agents and for customers. Because nobody wants to waste their time doing the same thing over and over again. If you talk to a customer service agent, what they really feel excited about is the ability to serve the customers, not being able to write down tons of notes and capturing all the interaction details. So that's something that they have to do. So if we can help them with those aspects with AI, with automation, with intelligence, that is what makes them more productive. And ultimately that results in a direct impact on customer experience positively. So when you're out in the field talking with customers as I imagine as the head of product management you are, where do you find service now coming in and kind of educating the customers on the opportunities and the enablers that AI can deliver to them? Are they still sort of on the fence about this? Or where are you from maybe a consultative perspective? Right, right. I think we are past that phase where people are kind of questioning the relevance of AI. We are, I think, way past that stage. Everybody understands the value that it delivers in different points, at different points of consumption for different people. I think we are at the stage where people are now trying to understand how fast they can move with this, how they can apply this, how they can adopt these technologies within. And this is where service now is trying to really be an enabler in that process, right? So we don't want an AI adoption, an AI initiative within a company to be a science project. We don't want it to be somewhere in the back office with a number of geek scientists and all that. We really want to bring it to the forefront. And the way we are doing that is by embedding AI capabilities directly into the experience and also by productizing a lot of those AI-based solutions so that our customers don't have to start from the very basics. So we are not asking our customers to go and define their own data sets and bring a number of data scientists to identify features and things like that. What we are saying is we have already done that heavy lifting for our customers. We have identified key scenarios that we can enable that can be powered with AI. We're productizing that. We're building that into our product directly and bring those innovations into the market. So if you, just one more point, I mean, just earlier this month, March 6th actually, we announced our latest version of our product that we released to in market. It's called the Medrid Release. And Medrid Release, if you go and look at it, it's packed with a lot of those innovations. For example, customer service, we are able to identify when a customer service agent is working on a case, we are able to identify similar issues that other people might have already reported. Some things that might be already resolved and the agents can quickly use that information and resolve this particular case that they're working on or being able to identify an issue that might be impacting multiple customers. Yeah, I wonder if you could give us a little bit of insight as to just the changing role of the agents and some of the stressors and strains on them. There are some concerns like, okay, wait, do your customers look at automation as something that will displace agents, make their lives better? And how much do they worry about that agent retention and how happy their agents are? Right. That's a huge priority for most customer service organizations. I would say it should be a priority for all customer service organizations. And the reason is very simple, right? Lot of these simple, easy capabilities are offered through self-service. As a customer, I'm sure we don't want to, our first option will not be to pick up a phone and call and talk to an agent. That'll be probably a few steps down the line. And that experience should definitely be enabled and should be easy, but when issues show up at the agent's desk, they're much more complex than what it used to be. And the expectation is that, I don't want to be handed over to somebody else. The last thing I want to hear is, oh, wait, let me hand you to an expert, right? So that's where these agents need to be upskilled. They need to be empowered with tools and technology. That, I think the term that we hear used in the industry is they need to be super agents, right? They're not the people who sit and answer a call and then pass it on to an expert, but the other people who can actually take a call and resolve the issue all at the same point, are the first-time engagement. Yeah, and if I understand it, it's some of the solutions and products that you're helping to build that take that agent and give them their superpowers. Exactly, exactly. Yeah, that's our goal. So we have interfaces that we actually design and build specifically for that persona, and we augment several of those experiences with applications of AI and technology. And we also leverage a lot of partnerships in that process. For example, the ability for an agent to seamlessly look at the call coming in to be able to identify who that customer is, what is the issue they might be calling about, previous interactions I've seen, all of that stuff in a single pane of glass and that optimized experience, that's a priority for us. That is something that we bake into our products. And how is it that agents want to be trained these days? And one of the gentlemen in the customer panel this morning was talking about, I think from Continental AG, that they identified about 20 different ways that internal users, whether they're agents or not, want to be trained. If it's send me an email, shoot me a video, send me a YouTube link, what are you guys finding as you're looking at these different personas? Any sort of top five training mechanisms boiling up to the top that you are going to be consistently delivering? I mean, training and upskilling is a huge priority because if we just look at, how do we make an agent a super agent, right? They need to be provided with the right kind of trainings and upskilling opportunities. There are various different ways. I mean, I'm not probably an expert on the training methodologies itself, but one thing that we can all realize is it has to be relevant. It has to be provided at the point of consumption and it also should be something that is captured back so that that learning or the knowledge that gets created in the process of researching and resolving an issue, it gets institutionalized, get actually put back into a system that is leveraged by everyone else in the organization. So those are capabilities that I think should be important for everyone. Last question for you as we're here at Enterprise Connect, what are some of the exciting things that people can see and feel in touch with ServiceNow at this event? So first I would say we have a booth. We are showing our product demonstrations and you can talk to several of our experts who are here at the event. I will have a small speaking assignment later today. So I have a session that I will be talking at. What you will actually see is some of our latest innovations that we are bringing to the market with the new release. So you will see how we can expand or extend the customer self-service to not just web but also to mobile. We are releasing net new mobile capabilities for agents which can also be extended out to your customers. You will see a brand new agent interface that I just talked about and how we are packaging some of the agent intelligence machine learning capabilities into that. And you will also see a lot of our powerful workflow platform and how you can apply that for orchestrating and optimizing processes. Wow, a lot to learn. A lot of knowledge to be gleaned. Thank you, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. And be on theCUBE this afternoon. We appreciate your time. Thank you, it's a pleasure talking to you. Of course Stu Miniman, I am Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE.