 From Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering ServiceNow, Knowledge 17. Brought to you by ServiceNow. We're back, Dave Vellante with Jeff Frick. This is theCUBE, we're live from Orlando, ServiceNow, Knowledge 17. Our fifth knowledge, Jeff, Abhijit Mitra is here. He's the general manager of the Customer Service Management Business Unit at ServiceNow. Great to see you. Good to see you too. Loved your keynote this morning. Thank you. The energy, CJ introduced you as enthusiastic as today, as you were 20 years ago when he met you. Yeah, he said it's even more enthusiastic. He jumped off the stage. Well, you got a good reason to be here. Must be the solution. Business is good, you guys are rockin'. You got a hot new business unit that you're managing. That's true. You started off your conversation with, essentially saying, customer service is broken. I mean, you had us all raise our hands. Who's ever had a bad customer service experience? Every hand went up in the audience. Explain that a little bit, what's broken? So the thing is that, you know, when you think about customer service today, companies spend a lot of time and effort on customer service, but not necessarily the end customers are seeing the result of that. And, you know, when you talk to customers, I talked to a lot of customers asking them, like, why is this happening for you? What they're telling us is that, look, all the solutions that are available in the market today are the solutions really based on CRM systems, and these are very well suited for allowing customers to contact through a multitude of channels, we call it omni-channel engagement, and then for support agents to log their issues as cases, but they don't do anything more. And as consumers, as customers, we are looking for solutions, and as customer service departments, customer service agents want to fix customer issues. So that is really where the problem is. So the issues don't get fixed, and customers keep on calling again and again and again. That's how case volume keeps on going. But they always ask you at the end, are you satisfied with your service, and will you hang on for the survey and give me a five, please? That's the part that amazes me. No, you solved none of the problems that I asked you to solve. Came in the NPS. Yeah. Okay, so how are you attacking this problem? So the way we are attacking this problem is, again, this is something that I didn't invent. It's something which I learned, actually, again, after talking to a lot of customers after joining service now, what they told us is that they were looking for a service management approach, and really the benefit of the service management approach is that it makes customer service a team sport. Because now, not just customer service, but every other department, whether it's engineering or operations or finance or legal or sales, can come together on a common platform, and the root cause of customer issues are then assigned as tasks across the enterprise. And once these root causes are fixed, then the issues are permanently resolved, and that produces case volume that also increases customer satisfaction. You mentioned CRM-based tools, people trying to use CRM-based tools for customer service management, which essentially logs something, logs a customer service issue, but doesn't give you the whole workflow. What's the difference? Give us the, you know, CRM. Why not CRM, why service now? Yeah, like I said, it closes the end-to-end loop. So just to give me an example, let's give me an example, is that in service now, when customer has issues, these are logged as cases. And now the customer support agent may be able to give a quick relief to the customer and close the case. And that's what you do in every other CRM system as well, and you do the same thing in service now. However, closing the case is not necessarily the be-all and end-all, because the root cause of this customer's issues may still be there. And that's how you assign these as problems to other departments. So that's really the fundamental difference. There is a follow-up process that's happening. A follow-up process may not be just a problem. It may also require a change in knowledge. It may require a technician to go on-site through integrated field service. So basically, we close the loop. We allow companies to close the loop. So it's end-to-end customer service. So I'm just curious when you're out in the field talking to customers that are doing this, you know how receptive is kind of that next level of people and departments in terms of now being pulled more directly into a customer support role through taking the service approach? Is it, are they happy? Is this new? Is it just a different way to execute what was inefficiently being done before? Because they don't, you know, I'm not in customer service. I'm in whatever department I'm in. Now you're asking me to help you resolve it because I'm part of the root cause. So underlying this is the philosophy that everybody in the company is responsible for customer service. And companies who do well in business actually enforce that philosophy in their different departments. And it is such companies who either have aspirations to transform themselves or who are already along this way that actually have an affinity towards the service management approach. Now in terms of the people who are actually working in the different department, it's not that they're not working on their own systems anymore. Yeah, those systems are there. And, you know, for example, engineering will work in Jira. I mean, there's nothing stopping them from doing that. But what is interesting here is that the work is getting assigned to them from customer service in the service management system of customer service management. That's really what it is. And that increases visibility. It's all about visibility and reporting and analytics. So that really shows that here are where the issues are. And once you see the benefit of your impact on customer satisfaction, on net promoter scores, on revenues, then it becomes very, very compelling. Abhijit, you guys don't break out the revenues of your customer service management business unit. I understand that. But it's a real business unit. It's growing. You've got real customers. You showed some logos today. So what can you tell us about the business, the business momentum? Any proof points that you're seeing with customers? Well, we've been in the market for a little more than a year now. I will say a year because we just launched up this event last year. And in the last year, one year we've seen customers from all over the world adopt a solution, all over the world. We have customers now in 28 countries over 10 big industry categories. And many of our customers are early adopters who've been live with the system for a while. They were here. They are here at this conference. There are 18 of our customers who are here. They're speaking in their own sessions and they're sharing their experience with other customers. So it's been a tremendous adoption of the solution so far. Okay, and how about the impacts that you've seen on their business? Can you share any results? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, some of our customers without naming names have had up to 70% reduction in case volume just because of self-service and case deflection. Another customer had a 40% improvement in their promoter scores. I mean, these are unbelievable statistics. And a third replaced 50 different customer service portals and 15 CRM systems with ServiceNow's Customer Service Management. So these are just unbelievable results that our customers have achieved in the last one year. You call them light speed pioneers. That's right. That's the term you guys are using, light speed. That's right. But so your customers aren't saying, hey, calling you, oh, I need to move at light speed. What are they saying that you guys have, of course, translated into that rubric of light speed? It's really about business transformation. So most of the, you know, many of our customers, I would say, are looking for a better way to run customer service. You know, they have challenges in either improving customer satisfaction. You know, their customers are telling them that your service is very disconnected. Your SLAs are not being met. So either it's mostly that or in reducing costs because they have too many different systems, different business units who do work in different ways. So it's about standardization. It's about increasing efficiency. Do it, do more with less, automate more. And it's also about the effectivity. So when you, you know, complete the work, you complete it well. It's done. Yeah, so being able to reduce volumes like that is impressive, especially given the amount of data that we have, the amount of complexity that there is out in the world today. You know, we hear a lot of talk at these conferences about IoT, you know, that's going to create more data, more devices, more problems for customers. What are your thoughts on IoT and the impacts that it has on customer service? I think IoT is going to force customer service to be proactive. And to some extent, IoT is an opportunity to be proactive because now you have access to data that you've never had before. Now you can analyze the data in real time. You can find out any anomalies and, you know, for which you may need to take an action. And if you predict an outage, then you can essentially take action to avoid that, right? So IoT opens up totally new opportunities for customer service to be proactive now. Once again. Okay, so we're live. They're shutting us down here. As always, we shut down the expo hall. It's kind of a cube tradition. We're going to go away after the lights will be out. We'll still be going. The forklifts will be driving in. So we heard a lot today about Jakarta. CJ was explaining sort of the process that you guys use starts with a customer. You guys try to understand what the needs are and it comes back through the business units into the platform and then you guys take it back and they apply it. What are some of the things in Jakarta that you are going to be applying in your future releases and for your customers? So one of the things that I'm very excited about Jakarta is our community's product. And this is something that we announced today. We are releasing in Jakarta. Now with communities, it increases the level of engagement that customers have with companies because it allows the companies to provide a totally personalized experience. And think about it, in your own personal lives, when you look for help, you turn to people who you trust the most, right? Your friends and your family. Similarly, as customers, they would like to turn to people who they trust, which is like other customers like them, right? So that's why communities is a big step for us, essentially, in giving that features to our customers to have a better experience for their customers. So how will that work? It's a feature within the platform. Your customers will then create communities and cultivate communities? Yeah, essentially, it's a new product and you just turn it on and then you administer the community, you moderate the community, you wrote it out. So our customers would use it to create their own communities for their customers. That's how it would work. What are some of the objectives you have for the business unit? What are some of the things we should be watching as observers in terms of indications of success, momentum? Really, there is only one goal, which is for our customers to be our most outspoken references. That's really the only goal that I have for this business unit. And 18 of them are here today. They are speaking on our behalf and I hope to see many, many more of them in this conference next year. Customer satisfaction, as they say, is one thing, customer loyalty is everything. So, obviously. In public. In public, right. Thanks very much for coming to theCUBE and congratulations on the success you've had. Thank you very much. You're welcome for having me. All right, keep it right there, buddy. We'll be back with our next guest before the lights go out. Service now, knowledge is theCUBE. Right back.