 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Knowledge 16, brought to you by ServiceNow. Here your host, Dave Vellante and Jeff Frick. Welcome back to Knowledge 16, everybody. This is theCUBE, SiliconANGLE's flagship product. theCUBE goes out to the events. We extract the signal from the noise. Jeff and I are really pleased to have Farah Ramtula here. She's the CIO advisory director at KPMG, one of the, I guess you call them a platinum sponsor here. I'm not sure what term they use, but the big Kahuna sponsor at Knowledge 16. At the top of the board. Abhijit Mitra, who's the head of products for the customer service management division at ServiceNow. Folks, welcome to theCUBE, thanks for coming on. Thank you for having us. Thank you. So Farah, I think, I don't know, I got that right. It's kind of, you guys have been a big sponsor for a while. Frank called you out in a good way. And he won, so you guys have been all in from the early days, so. Absolutely. At five years in the running, I think it's something that we definitely saw the writing on the wall with regards to where a lot of corporations and businesses were going in terms of their need for transforming their service management organization. And I think what ServiceNow came to the table with, it was very, very apparent. Cutting edge, leading innovation, wanting to do things differently with the right focus. And so it was a great big bet for KPMG and we're happy to be proud sponsors for the last five years. And we've developed a wonderful, wonderful relationship over the last few years with ServiceNow. Yeah, I mean, congratulations because it's not, I mean, it's not uncommon to see the big SI's wait, you know, till the big pile of money is there and then they go all in. But, so you guys skated to the puck on that one, so. Definitely. So good call. Abhijit, big focus on customer service today and the keynotes and this week in general. I guess if it has service in it, you guys are on it, but why customer service? It's very interesting. It's not really customer service management, it's customer service management. So it's all really about service management and that's really the differentiation here. So I have been building CRM systems my entire life. I joined ServiceNow a year and a half ago and I learned about service management first hand from our customers. Customers that Farah and team have been working with, for example. And they taught us like how service management principles can be applied to the process of customer service, which results really in a totally differentiated experience for the customers. Really what's happening in industry today is a digital transformation. And that means that expectations from customers are changing dramatically, right? Customers are expecting instant gratification. Customers are expecting always on services and customers are expecting a holistic experience, right? Now these are extremely hard challenges for customer service organizations to cater to. And service management actually gives us a structured way to solve these problems, solve these difficult problems in simple ways. So for example, automation. Automation through self-service. Automation in self-service. Well, self-service now becomes really actionable. It's not really just a way to read information, but actually do something, resulting in instant gratification, right? Like for example, solving root causes. Root causes are issues by connecting different departments in the company. That actually results in a holistic experience. So these are essentially the things that we apply service management in customer service management. So Farah, you're within the CIO advisory practice at KPMG. You talk to CIOs all the time. Obviously they understand this digital transformation imperative, but it's not so easy, especially for large organizations. How are they, there's no playbook really. So how are you helping them develop that playbook? How, what's it looking like? Yeah, absolutely. I think the first thing is it's creating a conversation, understanding the strategy, where the business wants to go. And it's not just an IT conversation anymore. If we're talking about customer service transformation, business transformation, we have to bring all the leaders to the table. We're talking to the CFOs. We're talking to the chief sales officers. We're talking to the CIOs and bringing them together to say how do we transform that customer service experience, right? And in terms of the approach, I think it has to start with the very basics. You having a product-based conversation, we need to bring the sales and support views together to say, hey, let's have a common language, common terminology. Let's take your contracts when you sell something and rather than gathering dust in a drawer, leverage the platform and here's how you can take those and as Abhijith mentioned, turn them into something that's actionable. Where you're creating entitlements, you're tracking what you've committed to and creating a measurable way to actually incorporate that into automated workflow to work on that customer service. Maybe take us through an example with the customer in terms of, and we'll get to the actual use case, but when you get called in to a customer situation, what does it look like? And then talk about the outcome that they desire and how you help them get there. Let me tell you my perspective. The first thing is that you get called in itself is a problem. So our belief is that we should be resolving the reasons or reducing the reasons why customers call for help in the first place. That's really true customer service which is really resulting in always-on services. So a lot of focus is really on proactive monitoring and pre-empting issues from happening in the first place. But let's suppose that you do get called in, right? And you're a support agent who's actually talking to a customer. I think the number one thing that we find that customers don't have is the context of what is the issue that a customer is talking about and what do we already know about it? So these are areas in which we are using the platform and the infrastructure from service management to be able to give that context to the agent. Farah, you want to talk a little bit more about that? Yeah, no, definitely. I think one of the, if I could turn it into an actual use case, if you look at an organization where the end consumer might be calling for support, a lot of organizations have their customer service systems but they're very segregated. And as a result, if there is something that needs additional support or routed to another part of the business, it's a manual handoff often, if any. And that creates a disjointed view of the organization. Now what we're able to do is, through that preemptive root cause analysis and trending, we can log a customer case, it gets triaged, it gets looked at, but now because we're unifying that service management applications or suite of applications with the customer service application, if I need to dispatch a technician, I can relate a case to a field services case and I can get a technician dispatched on site to go and replace a part as an example. I can then take that and maybe create an incident where I might need to engage IT who needs to now look at resolving the issue because they see that an instantiation of a customer's product is actually down or unavailable because that server in the data center they support is down. And what that does is it creates that automatic handoff. On the proactive side, I can now look at the root causes of these cases that are coming in. Maybe there's how tos around a certain type of a product that comes in. Now we can inform the account manager to proactively go visit that customer and say, hey, we were looking at your case data and we noticed a trend in the amount of questions and these types of things that you were doing. We can now give you some knowledge articles or targeted information or targeted training so that we can reduce your call volume. That changes that relationship, that changes that experience for that customer and that's what we're doing with that data. What it sounds like you're talking about is something that we hear all the time, the 360 degree view of the customer, right, that everybody wants, the context they call in, you know. I mean, is this the, is this the platform? No one has said that here in the last two days but is this, is this the way to approach the 360 degree view of the customer to bring in all that other context? Yes, absolutely, from a support perspective, for sure, yes. But it's not just stopping at the 360 degree view of the customer. What we're really talking about is customer service as a team sport because when you, you know, I'm a customer service agent, I'm talking to you, you're asking me a question, you have a problem, right? I can't solve that problem by myself but you want a solution. You don't want me to tell you that, yeah, you know what, I know everything about you, yeah, I do know everything about you, you want a solution, right? So what we are allowing you to do is connect customer service to the rest of the company, whether it's engineering, whether it's operations, whether it's finance, whether it's legal, whether it's field service, operations, right? So all of those departments can work collaboratively in a single system of record and track that work through tasks. And these are, these are not chats and collaboration and emails and phone calls. This is really, you're tracking it in a single system of record and solving that. So, Begg's the next question, right? Which is, the customer service team's excited to do a better job and to incorporate more of the team to help but now you're moving into a different process as we talk often on theCUBE, right? It's people process and tech. Now you're coming into my operations process. Now you're coming into engineering's process and your implementations and putting this in, how are you finding their acceptance to, now you're asking for a whole other level of commitment from me and interconnectivity into what I'm doing. We want to support you customer service person but I don't know if I want to direct connect. You're absolutely hit on a challenge that I think businesses have struggled with for a very long time and continue to do so. I think one of our ways that we approach this is I think it's one conversation at a time. Once you generate momentum and you demonstrate the results of what one particular area of the business can do or is doing, it's like a wildfire that spreads, right? And I think communicating that and having a strong organizational change management and communication program is the best way and you get people excited through creating that awareness but the desire is created when they start to see something in action. So often we will segment and say where are some of our biggest pain points, right? Where is one area that's bleeding the most that we can come in and say let's do a targeted exercise, let's get you up and running, let's get some transformation going and then we share that story and we communicate it out. And I think that's how that wildfire spreads and that's the best way to get the rest of the business engaged. Okay, so customer service is broken, we can all agree on that, right? Gone are the days where apologies and take a survey at the end of the call and provided any value. That's decades. And please give us a 10, right? Give us a 10. Okay, so we know it's broken. We live in a world of digital transformation where instant gratification is an imperative and I'm hearing that customer service is a team sport. So what's the right regime for customer service? Who owns it? Whose responsibility is it? What are the responsibilities? What are you advising organizations? That is a great question. Typically customer service is with the VP of customer service or the head of customer service, right? And typically this is a person who's really chartered with the goal of increasing customer satisfaction. Now, frankly speaking, increasing customer satisfaction is a very ephemeral goal. It's a very difficult goal. The customers are never satisfied really. So on the other hand, loyalty, for example, customer loyalty and the net promoter score is also a measure that organizations cater to. And this is really a C level goal. It's a CEO level goal. It's a chief operating officer level goal. So a lot of the time, the conversation that we are having really is with the head of customer service in conjunction with the CEO or the CEO. And the CIO and the IT folks are really actually supporting that transformation because they are the ones who are connecting on the system. They are the ones who are bringing everybody to the same place. So that's really the kind of conversation we're having and the player that we're working with. Farah, what do you think? Yeah, no, I would absolutely agree. So I think that's a very important angle and definitely from an accountability and responsibility perspective, that's where we want to drive it. What's interesting is if we look at just IT in itself and what's relevant now, the spending of the CIO is going down, but the spending and technology has gone up because there's different portions of the business now investing in technology. So for the CIO to stay relevant, I think it's important that if they haven't had that conversation with the chief of customer service, this is a great way to start that conversation because I think it really brings a whole new level of relevancy to IT when we start looking at customer service and being able to inject ourselves and partnering with the other business areas to bring this transformation to that. Customer service is a catalyst for collaboration amongst the executive, I'll give you that. Yesterday we heard Secretary Gates speaking to the CIOs and he basically poo pooed consensus. He said, consensus management, dead, don't bother. Now you're talking about your CIOs. And CIOs are consensus managers, right? They got to herd cats, they got application development, they got architects that are basically running the show. So the elephant in the room was, how are we supposed to not operate on consensus? But you're putting forth an approach where actually the IT organization ahead of IT could come and help solve that customer service problem. Is that a viable premise that I just laid out? I think they have to. I think if we, you know, a lot of the times when we see what other organizations or other business units or other areas of the business are struggling with, I mean, the good thing is, sometimes IT has a bad rep, but at the very end of the day, from a service management perspective, what they have done to automate what they do is the same as what everyone else is doing, right? Everybody provides information to their associates or employees, everybody or to their customers for that matter. Everybody is resolving some type of an issue, tracking an asset, it's no different. So I think if we want to see the trend or where CIO conversations need to go, I think it becomes an important element to say, can we have some flash foresight and help catapult a customer service view in this format leveraging a business transformation initiative? You know, there's another angle to look at as well, which is when digital transformation is upon us, some people say that every company in the world is going to be a software company. That's interesting, actually. If you think about that, every company in the world is going to be a software company. Who are the software guys in the company other than IT to help with that transformation? So I think that's where IT can play a very strategic role in this transformation. That's true. I mean, you know, Benioff has picked up on that and others. Peter Barris actually was one of the first I heard to say, would be more SaaS companies that are non-IT companies than IT companies, so. But it does beg the question is, where's that expertise live? And is the expertise that exists in IT the right skill sets to actually affect that transformation? I mean, is that a conversation amongst the CIOs? I think so, absolutely. I think the IT skill set, if you think, you know, I think there's definitely some strengths, but I don't think that IT would be successful without understanding marketing, without understanding relationship management. And those things often come from other parts of the business. So it becomes, as down to it, a team sport. And IT is really more in the supporting role, especially in customer service, because in this case, really it's a business position. And, you know, think about it. It's really your brand that you're talking about. It's not your employees. Yeah, the employees are very important to understand that. It's really your brand you're talking about. It's your customer loyalty. It's your revenue that's what you're talking about. So this is the CEO level decision. Business transformation, customer loyalty, customer satisfaction is, you know, improving that is really a CEO level decision, sort of chief operating officer level decision. So customer service is really a critical function of the business. And IT is there to help facility that. That's what we're seeing actually in all the customers that we're working with. Excellent. We have to leave it there. The Cube bringing, bringing servicing our audience customers, keep bringing all the information for Abhijeet. Thanks very much for coming to the Cube. Appreciate it. All right, keep it right there. We'll be back with our next guest. This is the Cube. We're live from the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas, Knowledge 16. We use service now to interact.