 Live from Orlando, Florida. It's theCUBE, covering ServiceNow, Knowledge 17. Brought to you by ServiceNow. We're back in Orlando, everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events. We extract the signal from the noise. We're here at Knowledge 17. I'm Dave Vellante with my co-host, Jeff Frick. Donna Woodruff is here. She's Service Enablement Leader at Cox Automotive. Donna, thanks for coming to theCUBE. Thank you for having me. Good to see you. Welcome. Tell us a little bit about Cox Automotive and specifically your role. Are you an IT practitioner by trade or business process person? Share with us. Yeah, a little bit of everything, actually. So first of all, Cox Automotive is a large privately held organization. It's part of the Cox Enterprises family. And we are changing the way the world buys sales and owns vehicles. So we are made up of five key solution group areas. Everything from inventory solutions, which includes our auto auctions and everything to get cars from dealerships to our auctions and back out again for their inventory. We have financial services, which provides floor planning to our dealerships so they can buy cars from our auctions. We have media services, which are all about how do you connect the cars that you're selling to retail customers. So auditrader.com, Kelly Bluebook are some notable brands as part of our organization. We develop software around analytics and like an ERP system for dealerships to help them move their inventory and do their floor planning so they can maximize sales in their dealerships. And then of course we have International. We are a global company. We have over 34,000 team members that we support. So we're a very heterogeneous organization and that can drive complexity into the organization. My role is I am the service enablement leader. I am based out of technology but I look at my role as much broader than that. It's about solving problems for our business and being able to deliver services internally and externally and help the organization run more efficient and effectively. So you've seen the narrative in IT and the service now described that very well over the years and IT getting beat up and you only call IT when there's a problem and obviously the platform and the adoption of that have changed a lot of organizations presumably you're experiencing something similar. So take us back to sort of the beginning days, the early days of what it was like kind of the before and after service now. What led you to that decision? What were some of the drivers and how did you get there? Absolutely, well Kelly Bluebook was an acquisition for an auto trader group of companies about four or five years ago and they had implemented service now as a help desk ticketing system. And so when we acquired them we saw some great wins with the platform that we thought, hey this really should be our help desk ticketing system. And so it broadened across that small group of companies but it was always viewed as a help desk ticketing system and over time just like many other platforms it starts to get highly customized. And so fast forward to a couple of years ago we had a need, I was supporting HR and communications from a technology liaison perspective. And the problem that they were trying to solve is that they have two employee service centers. One on the East Coast, one on the West Coast that were staff fight analysts and they primarily helped our auto auction personnel deal with their benefits and questions around just HR all the way down to time sheet corrections and things like that. And they came to me with this problem and they said, you know, we've been using Remedy to some extent, we were in a transitional time in the organization where we were collapsing our help desk tools onto service now. And they said, we need some help here, we just want to do a few requests. Well, we identified early on as that liaison that I really think that this ticketing platform can do what you needed to do. And myself along with a business analyst and an intern sat down with the business, we understood the requirements and that was the launch of our HR portal. While we were in there. Just you, an analyst and an intern. That's correct, that's correct. And we weren't developers, it was all about configuration but we understood the tool. We understand that this is really no different than any other business process. And we set out to deliver the first service catalog around HR services. And since then we haven't looked back. We learned a lot about the platform. We diagrammed out what was wrong with how the service desk had been highly customized. We sat down with our VP and we just showed him the diagram and said, we think that this platform can do a lot more. And he listened to us and he turned us and he said, well, do you guys want the platform? And I turned to my team and I said, you guys, we want it. And we took it on and since then in the last 18 months we have expanded the platform very broadly. We've implemented performance analytics to improve our help desk services. Beyond the HR portal, we are now implementing governance risk compliance, vulnerability management. We're now doing PPM as well. We are re-looking at our CMDB because we want to do more with automation. We've done some orchestration with storage agility and how we can get those engineers more productive by doing zero-touch ticket requests from our developers to expand file shares and to sunset file shares or to request new file shares with our end-up applications. So what'd you do with all the custom mods when you talked about the Kelly Blue Book coming over did you sort of scrub the hose and start over? Well, you know what, we took it back to out of the box and it wasn't difficult to do. We just rationalized the things that were duplicated across request and incident. We pulled it back to out of the box. We took an agile approach. My team now is very agile. We do weekly releases on the platform and by bringing it back to out of the box it allows us to upgrade to the latest major feature releases within a two week period. So because of that, we're able to adopt and consume the new product enhancements that ServiceNow has to offer very, very quickly. So obviously you had success or you wouldn't have been able to expand the footprint. So radically, how are you measuring success? How did you kind of go from a little bitty thing to a very large thing? You know, I think it's about visibility, visibility and strong leadership support and showing how we're getting better incrementally over time. I think one of the strategic things that we've done probably in the last six months is implement performance analytics which that started to show the behaviors of how people were working within the platform, how they were addressing incidents, how they were responding to our mean time to response, to our mean time to closure of a ticket, the aging of these tickets. And when we first implemented performance analytics we found a lot of anomalies in the platform. We found orphaned assignment groups which said the behavior of the organization, they weren't necessarily working the system the way they should be. Orphan assignment groups. And you know, tickets were going in and they were backing up and nobody was working them. So it allowed us to change the behavior of the organization, to drive consistency in how they were using this, which then made the metrics more meaningful. Now people are running their areas of operation from the platform. So the next thing I got to ask you to talk about in the open is behavior, right? It's a text hard, but it's not that hard compared to people in process. And you know, how did you get people at that moment of truth when I need something to not send an email like I'm used to and to actually execute my work through this tool? Well, one thing we did that was very unique and we've continued to do that is as we roll out major feature functionality we actually create commercials about ServiceNow, about the platform. Internally, we call it service station. Everything is associated with a vehicle. So we've promoted our brand around the platform as well. And our brand is about doing things more simply, getting things routed to the right people. That's why it's better than email and demonstrating the power of what it will do to you and getting those answers more quickly instead of going to your favorite IT person or your favorite HR person. How this platform is helping you get to your answers more quickly as well as all the self-service capabilities and the knowledge articles around, hey, fix it yourself. You don't have to talk to somebody on the phone. But we still give that personalized touch if they really need help and they want to talk to an individual. So really a lot more carrots than sticks. A lot more carrots than sticks, absolutely. It's if you can solve your problem fast or why not? Because at the end of the day that's ultimately what you want to do. Solve your problem and get on to the rest of your day. And how long does it take for just kind of a typical employee to go, ah, this is fantastic and to really shift their behavior and buy in and start selling it as your advocate? I think we're doing a better job now of introducing it to our new hires as soon as they get engaged in the organization about this is your platform to go to when and if you need help. And here's how easy it is to find the things that you need. You know, it's something that just happens over time. And I think if you address some of those small wins you create advocates in the organization and when they have a good experience, they tell others. So some of it's word of mouth. Some of it is internal promotion. And a big part of it is leveraging the platform to get the work done and having a great user experience along the way. Don, you mentioned service catalog and CMDB is a consistently two components that allow customers like you to get more leverage out of the service now platform. So specifically as it relates to CMDB, what are you doing there? Do you have a single CMDB across the organization? That's something you're considering. So that's probably one of our next big transformational areas. We do have a CMDB within the platform. It's been used primarily around the linkages for incident problem and change management. But we know that we need to do more with it. And like I said before, we've grown through acquisition. So there's a number of other CMDBs and we are in the process of bringing that all together onto the service now platform because we're seeing the power of everything else that that connects to. And that's also going to be a key on how we promote more orchestration, more automation, more about the health of our services. So service now is obviously promoting you guys throughout this event and showcasing some of the things that you're doing. What have you been talking to other customers about? What are you most proud of? Honestly, I'm really proud of my team because we are responding to the needs of the organization and the fact that you can add value through what you do on a day-to-day basis is great. I think one of the most unique things that in terms of the application is we actually built an application for our safety auctions. So as you can imagine, we have 100 auctions. There's a lot of people working in the auctions. We have everything that a dealership would have and we have lanes of vehicles running through to be auctioned off with our dealership. So we have service areas. We have vehicles and people moving about the auction. So safety is a very critical thing for our organization. And about a year ago, the safety director came and said, you know, we have this problem. We are doing these auction safety checklists around compliance and how can we make our auctions a safer place? And, you know, we don't have a lot of money, but we think there's a better way to do it. And they explained the process where they had six area safety managers that were distributed across these hundred auctions and trying to get the safety message out there through making sure people were wearing their goggles or that they had all the appropriate OSHA standards in place. So after having a lot of conversations around this, again, we found service now would be a great solution. So we did work with a partner to help us build it, but we took a very manual process and we automated it on the platform. Now we've moved the safety business process to the auctions themselves, where they own it, the general managers involved, the shop leads are involved in it. And what instant it's been a catalyst to reducing our workers comp claims. We've seen a two basis point improvement over the number of workers comp claims, which is cost avoidance. You know, when your average worker comp claim can be around $10,000, that's a significant saving with a very, very small investment. We saw 3,000 ROI, percent of ROI on this initiative alone. We're bringing visibility to the process using the platform and the reporting capabilities. And it's gotten the general managers and the shop leads engaged in having the conversation about safety. It's just great, because you got the platform piece of it and went from the basic application delivery to seeing that it is just a workflow tool. Exactly. And the benefit of the automation and now applying it to, I don't know they have a, I don't think they announced a auto auction safety module this morning. No. Not yet though, we are doing a session. We don't blame this every time. It's pretty impactful that you were able to kind of see that executed with a really small investment, like you said, your initial one with you at an analyst and an intern, and now really grow and expand the footprint within the organization. Yeah, it's really just about business processes in general. You know, you've got everything. You need to collect some attributes or some information. You need to route it or get approvals around it. And then you can measure it and you can see what's going on with that business process. And then you focus on, how do we improve the business processes? The tool helps enable that and facilitate that. And how has the conversation around IT value changed since you started this journey, right? Yeah, yeah. It used to be very cost-focused, I'm sure. Has it evolved to more of a... It is. Do you know, look, it's still cost-focused. It's still about savings, but it's also about how do we get things done in an organization more efficiently, with less people doing, pushing paper, and actually focused on solving problems. And being able to measure how we get better in the activities that we're supporting, and then the dollars will follow. Is there a recognition in the business units that things have changed? You know, there really is. One of the areas that we're starting to see real recognition is we're now stepping, dipping our toe into customer service management. We are, we are, we brought two platforms together with one of our business units that we acquired in the last year. They were doing some things on Zendes, they were doing some things on another tool, and they were the same team. So we've taken that experience, we've brought those agents onto the platform. We are still, we didn't change the experience for the customer just yet, because we wanted our agents to be very successful and help them work differently than through email. We pull those channels onto the platform and now they have a dashboard of these issues in supporting our lenders and who are our customers. Next is really around the portal in changing the experience for those end customers. And moving it out of the reply to all with email and making it more measurable. So we've gotten halfway there and we see a big growth area there for us and making a better experience around our customer support. And are you sunsetting some of these other systems as you bring stuff in? We absolutely are. I mean, our goal is to eliminate all other ticketing type systems. In fact, all of the people that are on those ticketing systems, like when can we get on the platform? We want to be there now, help us get there. But bringing things together is going to help us across all of our functional areas and supporting our customers and our team members much more effectively. It really is becoming our system of action, where you go to get things done. Donna, what from your perspective is on ServiceNow's to-do list? ServiceNow's to-do list, you know, and I've been pretty vocal with ServiceNow. It's like make it easier for us to use and consume the other capabilities of the platform much more quickly. Allow us to use the great capabilities with some of our external collaborators a little bit more effectively. And I think that's where it is. I think ServiceNow does a fantastic job of bringing more capabilities and maturing all of their service areas. I like the fact that they have two major feature releases a year, and we consume them as quickly as they can send them out probably faster than some other customers do. But, and continue to listen to your customers. Just listen to what our problems are and our needs are and continue to answer them. And they're doing a good job of that. Well, Donna, I have to say, thanks for all the great products you guys build. You know, the Kelly Blue Book, we've used it for years. Oh, wonderful. It's a great way to shop for vehicles, and so thanks for that. I appreciate it. You're welcome. And thanks for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate it. Thank you so much. It's a great, great to hear from you. Really appreciate it. Right there, everybody. Jeff and I'll be back with our next guest. This is theCUBE, we're live from Knowledge 17. We'll be right back.