Within the span of a few years, ServiceNow transformed its nearly non-existent customer experience (CX) efforts into a program that is deeply embedded within its everyday business operations. Much of this rapid evolution has been driven by “action workflows,” a robust network of adaptive closed-loop processes automatically triggered by customer feedback, which allows the company to quickly absorb and respond to a constant stream of insights. To understand how ServiceNow built an “Insights to Action” culture based on this system of workflows in such a short period of time, we sat down with both its VP of Customer Experience, Matt Lombardi, and Senior Director of Customer Experience Analytics, Emma Sopadjieva.

Background

ServiceNow is a US-based business-to-business (B2B) software company whose cloud computing platform helps global organizations bridge internal silos and connect their systems, functions, and people through digital workflows. While “delivering world-class customer experience” has been one of the core tenets of its corporate philosophy since it was founded in 2004, it historically lacked a fully operationalized customer experience management program dedicated to realizing this ambition.

All of that changed in 2019 when the executive team, recognizing the need to scale its CX efforts at a rapid pace, brought Matt on board as the company’s first CX leader. As part of his approach to creating a holistic customer experience program, he built out three teams: one dedicated to analyzing customer feedback (led by Emma), one focused on designing improved customer experiences, and one devoted to activating a customer-centric culture. This new team – together with key partners across the organization – immediately set about elevating ServiceNow’s customer experience by building an “Insights to Action” culture. This starts with ensuring that the company collects the right customer and partner feedback across all their journey touchpoints, using that information to build a detailed understanding of their experiences, and then communicating those insights out to people across the organization, equipping them with the knowledge, training, and guidance they need to make consistently customer-centric decisions.

To institutionalize this “Insights to Action” culture, the new CX team built a powerful, interconnected system of “action workflows,” which automatically route customer and partner feedback to the appropriate teams across the business, allowing them to quickly and successfully address their needs. Since their launch, these action workflows have demonstrably improved customer and partner experiences, with NPS 12 points higher year-over-year for those whose feedback has been acted upon. This in turn has strengthened the company’s overall financial performance as satisfied customers are 66% less likely to churn, they have a 69% higher average upsell deal size, and their annual contract value is 24 percentage points higher over three years .

Action Workflows

“Action workflows” refer to the comprehensive system of listening programs, automated ticketing processes, and supporting activities that ServiceNow has built to transform customer and partner feedback into meaningful, customer-centric actions. An action workflow is first triggered when a customer or partner fills out a survey. Depending on how they answer a specific question – like NPS or satisfaction – it activates a different workflow, which automatically routes that feedback to the appropriate team across the organization. That might be a customer’s dedicated account team for relationship feedback, product management for product-specific feedback, or the marketing team for marketing feedback. These teams are automatically notified of this feedback through a ticket that appears within the systems they regularly use, such as email or CRM. Those tickets include specific, targeted guidance on how to respond to that feedback, and action owners document their key takeaways and actions taken. This documentation allows the CX team to surface insights and best practices from these “micro-moments” to drive systemic macro-improvements to customers’ experiences with ServiceNow.

These action workflows are the main instrument through which insights get converted into actions, and they touch nearly every system, process, and individual across the company. Everyone from the frontline teams to behind-the-scenes support groups engages with them as a regular part of their everyday roles. So far, ServiceNow has 15 programs with 31 action workflows in place, which, together, have generated nearly 9,500 follow-up actions from over 1,700 different owners . Here are some examples of the action workflows ServiceNow has in place:

• Promoter, Passive, and Detractor Workflows from relationship NPS Survey. When a customer completes ServiceNow’s Net Promoter® Score survey, it triggers an alert to the appropriate ticket owner from Customer Success along with other relevant account stakeholders, such as the renewals team, account executive, and solutions consultant. The exact action this owner takes will depend on whether the customer is a detractor, passive, or promoter. The CX team regularly reviews the documented actions to uncover improvement opportunities and best practices they can replicate and scale. On a quarterly basis, they meet with regional leadership teams from Sales, Customer Success, Alliances and Channel Ecosystem (ACE), Pricing Strategy, and Go-to-Market Excellence to go over customer insights and examine the quality of actions taken to improve the customer experience in that region.
• Dissatisfied Customer Workflow from Product Implementation Survey. At the end of a product implementation, ServiceNow sends a survey to the customer asking them to evaluate the success of that implementation. If the customer gives a low satisfaction score, it triggers an action workflow process. If ServiceNow led the implementation, an alert is automatically sent to the ServiceNow Delivery Manager – the ticket owner who is responsible for following up directly with that customer to understand the root cause of their dissatisfaction and either resolve their issues in real-time or create a remediation plan. If one of ServiceNow’s partners led the implementation, the alert is instead sent to the ServiceNow Partner Success Team, who then follows up with the partner to understand the root cause of the issue and coach the partner on how to improve. To close the outer loop, the CX Strategy team regularly partners with the ACE leadership team and the ServiceNow Customer Outcomes leadership team to identify and prioritize CX initiatives aimed at systemically improving the implementation delivery process.
• Negative Product Experience Workflow from “ServiceNow Impact” Product Survey. To measure the success of one of ServiceNow’s newly launched products, ServiceNow Impact, the company sends a survey to customers six months after they purchase the product, asking about their early product experience. If the customer indicates their product experience is negative, ServiceNow triggers an action workflow process that notifies a Customer Success leader – the ticket owner – prompting them to follow up directly with the customer to understand the root cause of the issue and either resolve it immediately or develop a remediation plan. Regardless of whether the customer’s experience was positive or negative, all actionable feedback is triaged and sent to the Product Management team to help them more effectively drive customer-centered product innovation.

Four Steps for Building an Action Workflow System

The process of developing these action workflows and embedding them within ServiceNow’s day-to-day operations has been a significant undertaking, requiring extensive collaboration across many teams over multiple years. While the new CX team helmed the project, they also secured strong executive support and collaborated with numerous teams across the organization, building powerful, ongoing cross-functional partnerships .

Thanks to this enterprise-wide dedication to building an “Insights to Action” culture centered around these action workflows, the CX team made substantial strides in a relatively short period of time. To build this comprehensive system, the team followed four steps:

• Step #1: Create an action-driven listening infrastructure. The CX team started by creating a robust, centralized listening program capable of collecting customer and partner feedback at the most critical moments along their journey, surfacing the insights that – when acted upon – would drive the most value for both the customer and ServiceNow.
• Step #2: Define a robust closed-loop process. The team then designed a closed-loop process made up of numerous feedback-activated workflows that automatically route customer and partner feedback to the right teams across the organization and lay out a series of steps for them to follow to respond effectively in real time.
• Step #3: Develop training and resources to guide action. The team partnered with enablement groups across the company to produce a suite of enablement materials aimed at equipping employees with the skills and tools they need to successfully close the loop with customers and partners.
• Step #4: Embed action workflows into ServiceNow’s operating rhythm. To ensure the company can absorb and respond to customer and partner feedback at scale, the CX team integrated these insights into the normal flow of everyday business operations.

Step #1: Create an action-driven listening infrastructure

Effective action starts with reliable insights. So before the CX team could begin designing action workflows, it first needed to establish a listening program capable of capturing customer and partner feedback at all the consequential moments along their journeys. This was no easy task as, prior to 2019, ServiceNow’s CX listening infrastructure consisted of two isolated posts, neither of which credibly measured customers’ experiences nor fed into any improvement efforts. As a result, when Matt and Emma joined the team, ServiceNow had both low institutional interest and trust in its customer experience data.

The CX team has increased both the quantity and the quality of the CX insights it collects, expanding from just two listening posts in 2019 to 15 today, with plans to expand it to 17 by the end of 2022. To build a robust listening infrastructure capable of producing actionable and meaningful insights, the CX team:

• Engaged senior leaders to identify action workflows. After meeting with the C-suite to define ServiceNow’s customer experience ambition – “to be the defining CX leader in the industry” – the CX team then worked with senior leaders to start understanding the foundational blockers keeping ServiceNow from achieving this ambition. To identify where and how the CX team could provide these leaders with better insights that would allow them to make more customer-centric decisions, the team held a Design Thinking workshop for first every vice president and then senior director across the business. It used the information gathered from all these different workshops to develop a three-year CX program roadmap, which outlined its plans for building out its listening infrastructure and associated action workflows.
• Established “NPS” as a corporate KPI. When the CX began developing its new listening infrastructure, it started with a relational NPS program. ServiceNow selected Net Promoter® Score (NPS) as its topline CX metric due to its proven effectiveness at measuring customer loyalty, its high correlation with business growth, and its immense popularity, which makes competitive benchmarking easier. While ServiceNow had previously used NPS to measure customer experience, it hadn’t been done very well. The new CX team revamped the NPS program, which allowed it to quickly surface key drivers of customers’ overall relationship with the company as well as build a compelling business case linking customers’ experiences to the financial and operational metrics that the rest of the organization cares about. NPS continues to serve as the main barometer of customer experience for ServiceNow. It is included on ServiceNow’s executive scorecard and discussed by the CFO alongside business KPIs at all-hands meetings.
• Used journey maps to define listening posts. In addition to insights from its NPS program and senior director workshops, the CX team also used journey mapping to determine where to establish new listening posts. This effort highlighted the most acute pain points and areas of friction during customer and partner interactions with ServiceNow. The team started building out listening posts during these “moments that matter” to capture both interaction-level feedback (e.g., first website visit) as well as journey-level feedback (e.g., post-implementation journey, sales process, partner onboarding).
• Consolidated onto a single platform. When the new CX team began its efforts, it had to rely on isolated customer insights generated by different surveys, living in different systems, and owned by different groups across the business. The siloed nature of these insights limited their usability and added overhead for the CX team, who had to manually intake data from these different listening posts and platforms. Early on, the team partnered with stakeholders across the company to implement a single listening platform – Qualtrics – to house all the customer and partner listening posts. Today, in addition to CX data, this centralized platform also includes relevant operational and financial data as well as data from other surveys. Having all this data stored within the same system has allowed ServiceNow to build rich customer and partner profiles as well as unlock richer insights and key drivers of people’s perceptions and behaviors.
• Redesigned its existing surveys. Before the CX team revamped the company’s listening architecture, ServiceNow’s customer listening posts struggled with bias and bad practices, which contributed to the low institutional trust in the data. Since then, the team has applied survey design best practices to ensure that all the CX insights they’re capturing are credible and reliable. When the CX team first implemented these changes, NPS actually dropped by 10 points thanks to the removal of these issues and biases. The company quickly got over this initial shock, however, as people across the business realized the value of having CX insights that better reflect the true state of customers’ experiences. The newfound trust in customer experience data has been crucial for building cross-functional alignment and support for CX initiatives.
• Made every survey program actionable. The goal of a listening post is not just to generate a measurement score; it is to capture data that ultimately drives meaningful actions and improvements. To ensure that every survey is actionable, the CX team first includes at least one high-level CX metric (e.g., NPS, CSAT, Customer Effort Score) that can be benchmarked against competitors. It then includes follow-up questions that drill down into why a respondent gave a certain score as well as open-ended questions aimed at eliciting richer, more explicit insights.
• Created a real-time, full-journey view of CX insights. The CX team has built a dynamic dashboard that maps each listening post to a point along the customer or partner journey and updates in real-time as data comes into the central XM platform. This dashboard now acts as a “control center” for ServiceNow’s customer experience efforts. This data is mapped against benchmarks, key drivers of experience and operational data, and other influential business metrics, like sales pipeline. This single, unified view of how customers perceive key aspects of their journey with ServiceNow has been eye-opening for groups across the organization. It not only allows people to track their own team’s performance, it also helps them put their customers’ experiences in a broader context by showing their upstream and downstream interactions with other areas of the business.

Step #2: Define a robust closed-loop process

While a well-designed listening program is a critical first step, gathering feedback is ultimately meaningless unless people act on the resulting insights. So as the CX team expanded and enhanced its listening posts, it also designed a robust closed-loop process built around the surveys it developed. This closed-loop process automatically routes insights from these surveys to the right individuals and teams across the business, providing them with explicit, step-by-step instructions on how to respond to the feedback. These responses can vary significantly by survey – and even by how customers or partners answered a specific question. While nearly every team across the business touches at least one workflow, customer-facing account teams – which include an Account Executive, Solutions Consultant, and Customer Success Lead – tend to be involved most frequently. Continuously sharing insights with these teams has not just helped them drive meaningful actions, it’s also built their empathy for ServiceNow’s customers and partners.

To define and then implement this system of closed-loop processes, the CX team partnered with groups across the business, including IT – who helped embed the action workflow ticketing systems within ServiceNow’s existing tech stack – and Change Management teams – who helped create guidelines and templates to add into the tickets. Together, these groups built an automated closed-loop process that:

• Assigns a primary action owner. People are more likely to act on customer or partner feedback if they know the responsibility rests solely on their shoulders. So while multiple parties may be alerted to a ticket, the action workflow automatically assigns only a single ticket owner. To help the “action owner” promptly and confidently close the loop on a particular piece of feedback, the CX team and their enablement partners have developed a number of supporting resources – such as templates, talking points around common problems, guidelines for handling responses, and next best actions – which are embedded directly within each ticket .
• Notifies all key stakeholders. Any piece of customer or partner feedback is likely relevant to numerous stakeholders across the business. So in addition to the primary ticket holder, action workflows also automatically alert other interested parties as well. For example, if a customer indicates in the NPS survey that they intend to reduce their usage of ServiceNow, the renewals manager will be notified along with the account manager and the customer success representative.
• Triggers alerts across multiple systems. Employees today spend less time in their email inboxes and more time in role-specific systems and software. So to ensure that no one misses a workflow notification, whenever a customer or partner submits feedback, action owners and stakeholders not only receive an email alert from Qualtrics, they also automatically get a real-time task alert within their CRM or customer success platform, Tableau dashboards, and any other customer-specific dashboards they’re using. Because these are all integrated with Qualtrics, when the action owner closes the ticket or a customer replies to the follow-up, these changes are automatically reflected across all platforms and all key stakeholders are notified. The CX team has found that nudging action owners to take action across every platform they operate in has significantly increased the likelihood of them closing the loop on feedback.
• Generates different automated workflows for different responses. A single listening program can spawn multiple different action workflows depending on how a customer or partner responds to key questions. For example, while the NPS relationship survey is a single program, it produces different workflows with different associated actions depending on whether the customer is a detractor, passive, or promoter. For example, customer success or account teams reach out to promoters to thank them for their response and offer help if needed, but for passives and detractors, they set up live discussions to dig into their issues and drive improvements on their behalf. These workflows are triggered automatically, which allows ServiceNow to immediately understand each customer’s needs and perceptions and route their feedback to the right action owner without having to redirect a request through different employees or departments.
• Requires action documentation. After the action owner has followed up with the customer or partner, they must document the root cause of their issue and the set of actions the owner took to improve their experience. The action owner enters this information directly into Qualtrics’ customer experience management platform, where it is visible to all key internal stakeholders on a designated account dashboard, ensuring everyone is kept informed about that customer or partner’s experiences with ServiceNow. Action owners also track any potential opportunities that arise from a closed-loop response, which helps drive ROI for the company and build the business case for the benefits of closed-loop follow-up.
• Creates automatic escalations. Action owners are expected to reach out to the customer or partner – either by phone or email – within 48 hours of them submitting feedback. If by the end of seven days, they still haven’t touched the ticket, an automatic escalation email is sent to the action owner’s manager, prompting the manager to follow up with their report. Additionally, the CX team sends their Sales Operations partners in regional offices a weekly automated ticket report showing all customer responses that still need attention. These processes incentivize action owners to respond to feedback in a timely manner and help ensure that tickets don’t fall through the cracks. ServiceNow then measures the percentage of tickets closed within 30 days.
• Measures the quality of closed tickets. In addition to measuring the percentage of tickets closed, the CX team also evaluates the quality of the action taken by manually (for now) auditing the required action documentation and assessing how many of the compliance requirements and best practice guidelines were followed. The team found that customers of action owners who write meaningful closed-loop notes tend to enjoy higher NPS year-over-year, so it looks for tickets with insightful comments and shares those with leaders on a regular basis. It also sends these examples to Sales Operations and Enablement, who work with the CX team to create assets to boost the quality of ticket closures.

Step #3: Develop training and resources to guide action

The CX team recognized that building an “Insights to Action” culture – one where employees are prepared to effectively respond to feedback – requires a significant investment in change management. So to ensure that everyone across the business feels empowered and confident when closing the loop, they partnered with the Sales Enablement, Change Management, and IT teams to build an extensive suite of enablement materials. This includes everything from training to documentation to videos to templates . These assets explain why customer experience is central to ServiceNow’s business success, what good closed-loop practices look like, and what each employee’s individual role in the follow-up process looks like. To ensure that these enablement materials are not only functional but easy to use and understand as well, the CX team designed them all in accordance with ServiceNow’s three guiding design principles: delightful, frictionless, and valuable.

Here are some of the enablement materials the CX team and partners developed to help employees across the company close the loop with customers:

• Universal CX training course. Every new hire at ServiceNow goes through a CX training course during onboarding. This foundational course covers the basics of what customer experience is and what it’s important to ServiceNow’s long-term business success as well as all the different listening posts and programs ServiceNow uses to capture feedback from customers and partners.
• Customized action workflow training courses. In addition to the general CX training everyone takes, new hires who join customer-facing roles where they will be expected to close tickets – such as Account Executives or Customer Success Representatives – also undergo required interactive training that covers the Qualtrics CX platform along with each relevant workflow and listening post. These training courses include a two-minute video by the Sales Chief of Staff on why NPS and action workflows are critical to the mission of the company along with short, two-minute videos with instructions on how to close tickets and build surveys in Qualtrics, all of which are also available for separate streaming. All future ticket owners must complete these courses within the first few weeks of joining the company and pass an exam at the end to ensure they understand NPS and how they will be expected to close the loop with customers.
• Role-clarity documents. The CX team also created role-clarity documents that outline who is the primary ticket owner for each action workflow, which account stakeholders should be notified, and what the next steps are depending on the action owner’s particular level and role. These documents are specifically shared during onboarding but are always available through the CX microsite and are embedded within each ticket alert.
• Common pain points and resolution guides. Perhaps the most useful resources for action owners are the resolution guides, which are also linked within each ticket alert. These guides are tailored to each specific action workflow and include explicit instructions on what actions ticket owners should take to close the loop along with resources like response email templates, talking points around common customer challenges, advice for responding to customer feedback, and next best steps. Because these guides link out to supporting guides and templates, action owners have easy access to all related resources within the ticket.
• FAQ documents. Also included within each ticket alert are extensive FAQ documents detailing the step-by-step process for using internal systems to close the loop with customers. Each FAQ document is tailored by workflow and includes links to all other relevant enablement materials, making it a ‘one-stop shop’ employees can use to understand what that entire workflow in action.
• CX microsite. While all action workflow resources are linked within the ticket, they also live on ServiceNow’s CX microsite, an extensive, company-specific intranet site. The CX team developed this microsite to house all things customer experience, like customer journey maps, key insights reports, experience design guidance, instructions for using Qualtrics, and a statement on the importance of CX to ServiceNow’s operations. In addition to this general CX microsite, each group has its own dedicated site – such as the Sales Success center that houses all sales-centric materials – where these action workflow resources live as well.

Step #4: Embed action workflows into ServiceNow’s operating rhythm

Because action workflows are at the heart of ServiceNow’s “Insights to Action” culture, the CX team invested heavily in integrating these workflows into the company’s day-to-day business operations, enabling ServiceNow to absorb and respond to insights at scale. People at all levels of the organization – from the C-suite to business leaders to the frontline – use insights from these workflows to shape their decisions and behaviors. As a result, these action workflows have helped the entire organization be more responsive to customer and partner feedback, which in turn has tangibly boosted loyalty and driven business growth.

To integrate insights from these action workflows into the everyday operations of the business and keep them top-of-mind, the CX team:

• Celebrates high-performing teams. To drive the desired behaviors around NPS, the CX team set up an employee recognition program called “Circle of Success” to celebrate account teams who go the extra mile and deliver great experiences to customers. The awards are based on the teams who earn the highest cumulative quarterly average scores on three NPS questions: 1) likelihood to recommend ServiceNow 2) account team partnership and 3) future company plans with ServiceNow. For example, a Customer Success Manager (CSM) on an account for a large European company recently won this award after following up with a customer that gave ServiceNow an NPS of -33 on the annual NPS survey. This low rating triggered an automatic alert to the CSM, who then followed up directly with that customer, explored the root cause of their issues, and developed an action plan focused on improving the health of their technical product implementation and helping them achieve their desired business outcomes. As a result of these efforts, the customer’s NPS improved to +75 and the value of the account increased by more than 25%.
• Regularly reviews findings with key business partners. To drive adoption and maintain focus on improving customer and partner experience, the CX team holds regular reviews with teams across the organization – including Sales, Customer Success, Renewals, Go-to-Market Excellence, Sales Ops and Enablement, ACE, Product Marketing, IT, and Support. During these meetings, the CX team shares relevant intelligence and trends, performance updates, best practices for closing the loop, progress on the roadmap, etc. These regular sessions are not just vital for communicating key insights or holding these groups accountable for their role in improving experiences; they also help maintain essential relationships and ensure the CX organization doesn’t become siloed – a particular worry given the high turnover of functional leaders and continuous introduction of new internal processes.
• Partners with leaders to set closed-loop targets. The CX team partnered with the Customer Success Group leadership to set workflow targets for each team, which were then approved by all customer-facing leaders. The original agreed-upon target was 80% of “action workflow” tickets closed within 30 days, with explanations required for teams who failed to meet this standard. However, as action workflows have become more embedded into the company culture, ticket closure rates have increased, going up 200% in the first year and hitting a closure rate of 88% for high-impact survey programs in Q2 2022. So to keep the company from getting complacent – and ensure that managers and action owners continue to prioritize closing the loop – the CX team works with leaders to set increasingly ambitious closed-loop targets.
• Continually proves the ROI of good customer experience. The CX team recognizes that to preserve cross-functional support and keep experiences at the forefront of people’s minds, it needs to repeatedly make a compelling business case for closing the loop. To do this, the team updates its ROI analysis on a yearly basis, measuring ACV (annual contract value) growth models using the most recent account figures. It uses regression models to show how customers with better experiences grow revenue faster than those with poor experiences (while controlling for other variables such as customer size, initial spend, and number of products owned).
• Infuses CX into executive behaviors. In addition to including NPS on their executive scorecard, the CX team meets with the executive team on a quarterly basis to share customer and partner experience insights and trends. The executives then use this information to prioritize company-wide improvement initiatives aimed at solving systemic pain points. In fact, today CX considerations are a primary input into all organizational priorities and budgeting decisions – a major change from three years ago when neither customer nor partner experience was not a major factor in any company-wide processes. Executives also frequently discuss the importance of CX at company-wide events, such as all-hands meetings and annual CX days. The Chief Commercial Officer also regularly gives special recognition to the teams who receive high scores and positive comments through customer listening posts.

Lessons Learned

Here are some of the key lessons that Matt, Emma, and their team learned during their process of building action workflows, which could be helpful to other organizations looking to build a similarly muscular closed-loop system:

• Secure C-suite buy-in early. Securing executive support and commitment was paramount to the CX team from the outset. Doing customer experience well at scale and over an extended period of time requires a significant investment of time, attention, and effort from groups across the organization – none of which would be possible without direction from the top. The CX team initially secured C-suite buy-in by creating an ROI model that tied ServiceNow’s existing customer experience data to its financial and operational data, which ultimately demonstrated that providing a superior experience is good for the bottom line.
• Make IT and analytics teams your strategic allies. Just as you need to get C-suite and senior director buy-in, you need to get the IT team to put CX on their roadmap. You need their commitment to get internal tools like Qualtrics, your CRM platform, your product, and other digital tools integrated so tickets can appear in the platforms your employees work in. The CX team reached out to IT early and secured them as a strategic ally, who has since guided the CX team through the implementation of the centralized customer experience management platform and action workflows. The team continues to meet with them quarterly to review its three-year listening program implementation plan.
• Empower teams with shared ownership for success. CX success requires active participation from business leaders and stakeholders across the company. Instead of dictating new processes, behaviors, or targets from within your centralized team, involve these stakeholders in the decision-making processes so they feel ownership in the outcomes. The CX team at ServiceNow did this in a number of ways, such as partnering with global Sales and Customer Success leaders to set closed-loop goals, meeting regularly with regional teams to surface and circulate best practices, highlighting high-performing teams with the Circle of Success recognition program, and tying CX specifically to the KPIs those groups care about.
• Don’t assume an account is happy just because it is growing. ServiceNow is a high-growth company, which means that often, even severe detractors are still growing their relationship with the business. Consequently, there can be a lack of awareness internally around existing customer pain points that are impeding even greater customer adoption and account growth. To overcome this, the CX team intentionally generates and shares ROI data showing that customers who are happier grow at a much faster rate than those who are less happy.
• Creating a CX culture is not a one-time project. Securing enterprise-wide buy-in around CX is difficult, but it’s just the beginning of building a customer-centric, “Insights to Action” culture. Employee turnover, changing priorities, and a shifting business landscape can all erode a company’s commitment to customer experience, so keeping CX top-of-mind requires constant attention and dedication. In addition to all its work integrating CX into onboarding, company mission statements, company-wide events, business meetings, etc., ServiceNow’s CX team also created a function dedicated to building a stronger customer experience culture by transforming people and processes.
• There’s an opportunity to predict behaviors. ServiceNow recognizes that these action workflows don’t just have to be reactive – triggered automatically by customer or partner feedback – they can be proactive as well. The CX team is working with the data science team to create a predictive model based on all the experience data, operational data, financial data, etc. that ServiceNow captures. While it is still early days, the team is now able to start forecasting which accounts are likely at risk without receiving any feedback. If the predictive model flags an account as potentially at-risk, it will also automatically trigger a workflow to the appropriate team, creating a ticket and providing them with recommendations on how to intervene to mend the relationship.