In the spirit of the collaborative nature the ServiceNow community is known for, VividCharts set out to facilitate a roundtable discussion between two mature ServiceNow customers (and VividCharts customers 😄), Huntington National Bank and Southwest Airlines.
Our Panelists
We are very thankful for these panelists and the knowledge that they shared with us. Hundreds of guests attended live, asking great questions and raving about how insightful it was. For those that weren’t able to attend live, this post will outline the top 3 takeaways for you, and actionable insights within each.
You can also review the recording on LinkedIn at any time.
A quote came out of this discussion that does an excellent job of framing the actionable takeaways from the panel.
“Make the process as easy as possible. Everything in service management has to be approached from people and process first, and technology last. If you can’t get the first two right, the technology doesn't matter.” - Jonathan Bledsoe
You have to create good relationships with customers to truly learn what they need out of the ServiceNow platform. A defined team structure and system to input new ideas and feedback helps with this.
However, sometimes customers won’t use your system of feedback. Building confidence in the system should be an ongoing aspiration, but totally constraining customers to formal channels did not sound like the consensus best practice from the panel. Here are some of proactive steps they shared that can help you to build great relationships with your customers:
Here is another great quote from the panel that can help guide how you approach customer relationships, and strike a balance between formal and less formal intake channels:
“If we ask for everyones opinion it will never get done, so we need to have advocates embedded in teams.”
The panelists also shared some actionable advice on the best practices when you are in a discussion with a customer advocate/group.
Set a cadence in which you review the roadmap for various customer groups with your internal teams to keep everything up to date. Have a similar cadence with key stakeholders from the customer groups to keep them informed, and to have proactive dialogue around prioritization. This is another area where defined champions/ambassadors can add efficiency to the process.
2 actionable insights around prioritization were shared:
Dan from Huntington shared how important it is to constantly look for ways to automate the roadmap process. It can be a lot of manual work, but that can pave the way for a more automated process.
By creating a visual that suits the discussion, it can show you the different ways you need to manage and classify data in order to report effectively.
Ed spoke about the growing appetite for data and reporting as the ServiceNow footprint, and the range of customer groups it supports, expands over time. Serving up data and reports for your customer groups to slice and dice strengthens your relationship, and finding automated ways to serve data and insights up is crucial in order to keep focus on iteration.
Showing value back is an accelerator. “The more value we see and more cost savings that we have allow us to reinvest in the platform to leverage the other apps that ServiceNow offers and take advantage of the platform.” Patrick from Huntington shared.
Jonathan recommended establishing KPI’s before the project to make it easier to come back and see why certain things worked, didn’t work, and identify potential improvements for the next time.
Every organization is different, but a discussion like this truly shows how common our challenges tend to be. We can definitely relate to this at VividCharts. We provide visuals and engagement layers that can be configured to accommodate a wide variety of company needs, but we continue to see so much in common when it comes to the problem we are actually trying to solve with the customer.
If reading this brought up any questions you’d like our take on, reach out to us a info@vividcharts. We’d love to hear from you!
The time is right to ensure accurate, actionable, agile, and data-driven decisions for positive business outcomes in your organization. Here are some ways you can get more engaged with your data today: