Pandemic blockades around the world have forced companies to quickly change the way they provide products and services, creating unprecedented customer service challenges for new digital businesses.
In the ever-changing business environment, John Ball resigned from the position of Executive Vice President of Salesforce Einstein’s Artificial Intelligence Tool Products, and instead had the opportunity to manage ServiceNow’s customer workflow business unit. As the general manager and senior vice president, Bauer’s current focus is on improving customer support, Including field service management and customer service management.
In this question and answer, Ball discussed improving CX, Current platform AI strategy, and the integration of customer service and field service.
Why did you leave Salesforce for ServiceNow?
John Bauer: I see a huge opportunity to improve customer service in the market, mainly because of the power of the platform. I have never seen a better technology or company, and I have been doing this since 1999. In fact, I work at Salesforce. As early as 2007, I started Service Cloud. I think my experience in the Salesforce startups of other companies is relevant because I have seen challenges for 30 years.
What do you say when you say that ServiceNow is a very well-positioned company?
John Ball
Ball: This can be traced back to the fundamental origin of the company. The platform is designed to help coordinate work in the enterprise. If you think about what is currently happening in digital transformation-directly to consumers, all major trends-it all has to do with two things: improving the customer experience and increasing operational efficiency. In fact, in every industry, everyone is working hard to improve interaction with customers and increase operational efficiency. If the request falls into a black hole and is finally resolved, it is not enough to have a cool modern omnichannel experience. You need to make the other end of the equation, the customer operations end, more efficient.
Can you show us the similarities or differences between AI ServiceNow’s approach and Salesforce’s approach from a macro perspective?
Ball: Obviously, I am not responsible for the AI here, but I am a very interested party. Artificial intelligence is very related to customer service. Think about what it takes to deal with things like payment disputes. In a very old system, it was a swivel chair, a spreadsheet, a telephone. All of this is glued together by those service workers and agents, not even really defined in the software.
When it is defined in software, it is often very low-level proprietary code used to orchestrate these tasks. This sounds like a detail, but it is a very important point, because when you write low-level custom code to orchestrate tasks, it is not product driven. Unless you write more custom AI code, you can’t really apply AI to it.
When you adopt a product-driven approach like we did at ServiceNow, you can do things like process optimization. Then, you can intuitively find where the bottleneck is. You can then use AI to automate and enhance these processes to increase their efficiency.
Can you talk about how Low code Is changing the way technology vendors enter the market?
Ball: Low code/no code is not just about citizen developers who develop small applications. Fundamentally, this is also about making the main applications we put on the market (such as customer workflow, employee workflow, and IT workflow) easy to extend and customize.
We play a role in ITSM, customer service space, and employee space-people with domain knowledge are line-of-business people. If you can provide them with out-of-the-box applications and customer workflows, which contain a lot of pre-defined content, such as enterprise case management, major case management, knowledge bases, etc.-all of these content-and their specific processes It can be done by mortals, not by the person who wrote the code. It changes the rules of the game.
I think people now understand that artificial intelligence will not replace humans.
John BallSenior Vice President and General Manager of ServiceNow Customer Workflow Business Unit
The feedback from early adopters and beta testers on the AI tools in the latest Now Platform version surprises you the most, Quebec?
Ball: I’m new here, it may be a recent bias, but one of our big customers with 5,000-6,000 contact center agents is now about 30% biased towards virtual agents and chatbots, and it is increasing every day. We have been talking about chatbots for many years, but its deployment is often not very good.
This is a good one. AI search is another. It undoubtedly improves the experience of end customers and agents on the service portal. If you can find the correct information faster, you can solve the problem faster.
Which AI features users are talking about with ServiceNow seem likely to be on the platform?
Ball: The artificial intelligence industry has gone through many waves. First, “it will take over the world”, and then “this is a total disaster.” I once joked that what you call artificial intelligence depends on when you get your degree, because it was originally data mining. Then, data mining is not cool enough. Therefore, we have to call it predictive analysis. Predictive analytics is not cool enough, so we call it data science. Then all of a sudden, we now call it artificial intelligence.
[It works now mainly because] More data and more computing power allow us to apply technologies that have long been known to real business problems. I think people now understand that artificial intelligence will not replace humans. This is about improving specific processes. It’s about focusing the user (no matter who the user is) on the important things and getting rid of mundane tasks. Maybe it is not sexy, but it does improve the customer experience. It really improves the experience of the agent.
When will customer service management and field service technology merge together?
Ball: I think the market itself created these two barrels, but I see them increasingly mixed and blurred. In the final analysis, this has to do with the customer experience. Sometimes you need to send someone to the site for installation, maintenance and monitoring.
In field service management, you have different requirements: scheduling, scheduling optimization, asset and inventory management, but whether you are on site or not, everything is related to customer experience. In customer service, when you are a large-capacity B2C transaction contact center, this is different from complex case management for loan origination or health insurance claims.
So, the way I want to describe is to have a customer service and support market. It has market segments in the industry and even professional fields, such as on-site service and off-site service. I would also like to say that on-site services are more extensive than you think…-Trucks with helmets are on the road. Field service is basically a mobile worker. You now have more activities with mobile workers, third-party contractors, and you regularly schedule appointment tasks.
Amazon sets standards for customers Experience before the pandemic. How deeply ingrained are we now mainly through it?
Bauer: Think about what the pandemic has done to all of us. It accelerates this trend that has become popular a few years ago. Digital transformation is a buzzword, I admit, but it is actually true. See what the company can do when there is no other choice.
When the pandemic began, millions of customer service agents around the world went home overnight. Companies that have invested in modern digital customer service have performed well. They had to adapt, but they did a good job. Those who have not been screwed up-they have suffered major damage. Now they have millions of agents working from home and using modern digital customer service. That is something that will last for a while. Due to the pandemic, direct-to-consumer behavior has been magnified on a large scale, and all expectations have changed. Everyone is looking forward to this now.
Editor’s note: For clarity and conciseness, this question and answer has been edited.
