20 01732 759725 Q&A ...continued TR: Can you give me an example of the impact you’ve had on an MSP customer? AV: I can give you a really good example. Three or four years ago we did a pitch to Bowmark, who had just acquired Focus Group, which they valued at $250 million. They introduced us to the operational leadership team, we onboarded them and have had a great partnership since. In a recent transaction, Focus Group’s new investors, HG, valued it at $1 billion. Between those two valuations, we were their strategic partner for service management and customer service. We have other customers where the return on investment is at least 10 or 15 times what they’re spending on our services. By adding automation to customer service, enabling self-service requests, delivering better adherence to SLAs, improving CSAT and all these things, we’ve enabled them to improve their operations by up to 40%. If you’ve got a team of 200 in customer support and so forth, that 40% improvement has a massive impact on the bottom line. TR: Are your customers generally pre‑existing users of ServiceNow or are they new to the platform? AV: We have a mix. Our existing customer base is predominantly net new to ServiceNow. Some had considered ServiceNow via the traditional professional services partner route and written it off after evaluating ServiceNow, meeting with a few partners and realising they couldn’t afford to do it properly. CSI falls into that bracket. When they found out about our model, they revisited it and they were able to get it through, because the board could see how our model was different. Some, like Node4, were existing ServiceNow customers that we migrated across. And we’re in talks with some other ServiceNow customers. TR: How has your market changed in your first five years? AV: I do think we’re changing it, moving the needle, as our message about our alternative model gets out there. The traditional model is really interesting: ServiceNow charge licence fees upfront in advance, so you’re paying ServiceNow before they’ve even turned the software on; the professional services partner, as I say, is getting paid by the hour, so you could argue there’s an incentive for them to make the project take longer; and the customer assumes all of the risk. I think that’s a bad deal for customers, and I think the market is starting to wake up and realise that. More broadly, as you would expect, people are moving away from ‘I just want a ticketing tool’ – I remember the saying ‘tools are for fools’ – and instead, they want platforms that are going to drive value. Where once people might have said ‘we’re looking to change our ticketing system’ they are now saying ‘I want to ingrain AI in my customer service operations, because I know the return from doing something like that is 20x or 30x. Changing a ticketing tool is great, but why are we actually doing it?’. TR: Do you exclusively use the ServiceNow platform or do you develop your own elements or offer other solutions? AV: We work pretty much solely on the ServiceNow platform. It is a wide‑ranging platform. For example, one of its components is a portal framework, which enables us to build portals that sit inside ServiceNow to complement the ticketing. How can you make ticketing work really well? You make it self-service, and you need a portal to do that. That’s traditionally been seen as an add on, but now it’s inside the platform. I mention that because I think it dovetails with your previous question about where the industry is heading. It’s all about the customer experience, and the portal is where the rubber hits the road in that regard. It’s also another opportunity to land AI in there. In terms of things we do develop, ServiceNow as a platform is a really flexible, powerful software development platform. We create our own intellectual property within the platform ourselves and we call this the POPX Smarts library. Anything big or small that delivers value for our customers, we call a POPX Smart and put it in our library. One of the key USPs of our service is that all customers get access to all our Smarts on day one. TR: What’s a good example of a POPX Smart? AV: In the MSP industry, a monthly or quarterly service review is a really big deal. MSPs will have service delivery managers (SDMs) whose job it is to review the service, go out and see their customer and essentially tell them how good a job they’re doing and talk about any issues or service credits from the previous month. SDMs collect information from all sorts of internal systems, put it through Excel and Word, create a service review pack and then present to a customer. We identified this as an opportunity to write a POPX Smart inside ServiceNow that does the legwork for the SDM. It goes off and collects data from the monitoring system, ticketing system, the SLAs, the CSAT surveys, brings it all together in a consistent format and prompts the SDM to add commentary. We’ve actually got ChatGPT writing some of the commentary now as well. One customer had four service
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