welcome to another workflow wednesday and yes this is at a different time i delayed because i get to have two great people join me in this conversation to talk about employee experience and the word happiness and so let me unpin my video and uh introduce you guys where's my remove pin there we go dan churchin you just popped up on the screen say hello troy marco good to be here dan terchin ceo of peoplerain the ai first system of intelligence for hr and it employee service here to talk about my favorite topic in the whole world free experience nice marco thanks for joining dan and i a little intro from you charlie good to be here good to see you then again uh we meet weekly nowadays my name is marco rusinek uh country manager for happy signals uh we are a platform for employee experience in it so good to be here excellent excellent and yeah both happy signals and people reign are part of the broader third era family and so we're excited to bring you guys together and part of being that better together story and and the reason that i invited you on to now with troy today is really pick a little bit further back at employee experience and and dan and i talked about a little bit further on our webinar that we had a couple weeks back um that the term happiness kept coming out i'm like oh i need dan and marco on and so happiness let me drop that kind of you know that topic in there why is that such an important thing for organizations to be considering either the happiness of their employees or customers troy i can start we uh we went out and asked 250 cios what are you doing to combat what's been labeled the great resignation the rate of employees quitting in the united states spiked 10x in the fourth quarter of 2021 so something's happening mind-blowing yeah absolutely mind-blowing so we want to know what's going on specifically as advocates for better employee experiences like we're not doing something right when we went out and asked 250 cios it became pretty clear so what they told us is that of the top seven reasons that employees cite for leaving relations for quitting zero of the top seven have to do with compensation seven of the top seven have to do what i would casually group into the category of employee happiness or employee satisfaction it's things like you know what i want to feel like my values are aligned with my organization i want to feel like my time is valued i want to feel respected i want to feel trusted i don't want to have to wait for routine requests or feel like you know i'm a second class citizen because i have a question about you know needing to upgrade you know the antivirus software on my uh on my laptop you know easy requests when delivered in a way that creates a lot of friction lead to the kind of frustration that ultimately leads to employees seeking higher ground and so when we think about you know the real vision the real mission behind delivering an ai first exceptional employee experience that automates away the drudgery from work we think squarely about addressing those top seven reasons and keeping key employees at companies and really you know doing our doing our little little piece of work to be able to eliminate this uh this trend of the great recession or sorry the great resignation yeah the great resignation great revolt it's a huge change thanks for that dan marco um coming from you know the organization that you represent happy signals you know it's it's almost like could we tee that up any better for for you to talk about why even more so now is is happiness so important for it organizations yeah i think that's a that's a great question uh i'll share a few slides just the thought give a thought so i haven't one brief example here um i think this is the one one uh typical example like how it has you know traditionally performed and and especially um pre-call with this was you know very clear situation now very linear in it yeah and and today uh we are working from home you know it's no more that the colleague is physically next to us the manager is probably sitting you know in a 200 kilometers away so it turns into the situation that people will be at the center they are the best sensors also happen like telling that what's happening at the moment they know it all the time and if you think about traditional id we have been great at measuring and understanding the the typical kpis like um i know what's our resolution time for for for an incident but then how was the end user actually were they uh happy about it and and what happened so we also collect a similar kind of a uh uh data from from from our customers so this is currently millions of of end users who are in the center and giving feedback like hey what are the services and how how happy they are with those services so you see for example whenever they're collaborating with i.t and the support services those are the typically the ones that where there is a human at the other end and people are relatively happy with those services and then there is a lot of other areas um well portal one one example which has been improving but there is still a lot of room to improve further and these kind of um different solutions to um like dams to improve the uh um self-service when people want that self-service so that that's also something to get to understand that there are people who want to self-service and then there is the people who prefer the the the human touch so i think though those are the kind of a few insights like how and why it's you know turning with within i.t also in this direction so many customer-facing organizations are already there but within it this is kind of a new thing right yeah it's interesting you know that that last graph that you showed where you know portal and mobile are often or have been you know really cumbersome to use i think it's an area that you know we together if we look at third era and look at their digital as well as where we see servicenow really investing is those areas of how do we change that experience and then dan as we kind of couple in the the system of intelligence on top of it that can span languages right um you know it's really shoring up and continuing that human interaction where you saw the high scores in there but looking around that wheel in and seeing where there's there's huge negative to be able to change it and turn it around it's like exciting to be part of that um you're both at an hdi conference recently um you want to talk a little bit about some of the the ahas that came out of that conference some of that that speaking session that you guys are involved in yeah we both gave uh lightning talks to i think was it was three or four different hdi chapters that got together in a virtual meetup which was fantastic because uh i've been in and around hci for more than 20 years and the organization kind of went dark when we when we went uh when we canceled all the live events so it felt really good to get three or four chapters together again it's a it's a vibrant community a you know community that really embraces the kinds of things that mark and i are talking about in terms of delivering better employee experiences and the the key takeaway for me was listening to some of the members talk about ways that they've taken some of the innovative approaches to better employee experiences from our days in the office and tried to migrate those to you know similarly innovative approaches to supporting employees working from home one example is uh some of the most progressive employers uh you know back kind of pre-2020 had deployed things like it vending machines uh in in in office locations so you know if you need to replace your mouse or your keyboard or you know get a new headset like that's just a quality of life issue you don't need to go into a request portal and wait three days and have cdw you know procure it and go through sap like that's insanity right so just walk up to the kiosk we trust you like it's like a 10 you know item but some of that went away so what they're doing is shifting to technologies that continue to make the employee feel like they're the center of the organization's universe and doing things like you know providing virtual agents that are multilingual and providing you know live interactive support 24x7 so everybody feels like you know it may not be a a mouse that you get from the the it vending machine but if all of a sudden your wi-fi goes down in your home office you know and you're hosed and you're you know you're based 12 hours away from the hq well what do you do well things like a virtual agent things like better knowledge content things like automated recommendations based on looking at trending issues applying some of the principles of ai and machine learning turns out can replicate that kind of high-touch white glove treatment that employees come to expect that was what i really you know i was inspired hearing some some of these stories from the hdi community yeah i mean yeah yeah it's i think it was a great great uh you know to meet meet people even virtually uh and i think uh the um well kovit obviously changed a lot and i think many were thinking like already hey look like hey how do we do and move forward from here um and and and the thing is that when the people you know are there and they have this you know knowledge they are the you know i said best sensors to you know tell uh uh to i.t department to hpr that hey what do we need like how am i feeling now what's what's the you know uh causing frustration uh and and there it comes to the point that you need to understand not only you you can't ask once a year hey what what do you need like what should we improve it needs to be kind of a continuous process to understand like and when you implement those changes like for example vending machines let's say that that's an issue okay you implement vending machines and get that part working at the headquarters uh what next i mean it it's not that you should be you know be satisfied okay hey this is it it's a continuous process okay we fixed that part uh and then what's next maybe there is missing some items that should be there and and once you have this kind of a continuous you know understanding what's happening you can improve again so um i think that's also one one mindset mindset shift what's what's happening that um allows to add new things and people change i mean once you have been you know working for one year already for a company my needs often times are very different than than when i started maybe i get even more technology savvy i i i'm more open to start using like you know self-service tools for example when i when i uh first started for example so to understand that shift is is very fundamental i think some of that comes from you know they're having some doubt about whether the self-serve will work right you do it a couple times you realize oh this this virtual agent this ai system can respond in a way that it's helpful that i don't just sit there going operator human being yeah representative yeah that i think the systems that you guys are both helping through era implement with our clients is adding that intelligence so there is you know with people rainband with your solution that it really meets humans where they're at and market with your system be able to get that that signaling back to see how did that work do that really meet your needs or not um to your point a few years ago when we started the company our expectations as consumers were a lot different well today if we have a question related to you know our credit card our our bank balance you know we need to update our flight information the last thing we want to do is wait on hold for live agent because most of the time the live agent's just just going to redirect us back to a mobile app or a web portal or something like that um when we're for example you know shopping on amazon or finding a movie to watch on netflix like we actually kind of like the fact that there's some intelligent recommendations and you know the system just kind of gets to know us yeah and so the like the corollary to that is we come into work and before a system whether it's you know happy signals or you know an intelligent system like people rain like we're back in the stone ages and so now like it's less tolerable to have i.t systems that are antiquated at work when in our personal lives we're getting really comfortable with smart technology so the most progressive organizations are already deploying smart technologies to personalize or humanize the employee experience but soon in the next 12 to 18 months it's going to be just as commonplace for you to expect that you know concierge service from it hr just like we've come to expect it in our personal lives or else yeah yeah that leaves me kind of the next topic that i wanted to touch in the time that we have left is we've seen x used in a number of different places as a variable but we've seen x used in acronyms for things like user interface user experience uiux we've seen you know customer experience cx show up as a significant things you know dx as design experience right there's a lot of things where it shows up but one of the things that i'd like you guys both to talk of about where x is not a variable for all the different things we can do with it you know insert the management tell me about it experience management um i have one again a brief slide maybe i could share my screen here um this is um lots of data on one slide but i think this is relevant so let me share um so the way we see it you know x and experience is that it's a little bit similar kind of a framework what what um itil was you know how it was introduced to it service management and and uh there is a lots of i'm not gonna go to into details uh there's free training available uh um if if anyone is interested so please take a closer look but the thinking is that uh when we put people to the center like the end users in the center we need to understand you know how they feel where they are today and once we have that information we need to share that information so that everybody not only end users but all the stakeholders understand where we are we align behind the common goal being happiness being productivity and once we have that data we understand that hey it's based on data that we need to improve our portal services people are are are not happy for example on that part we know that we improve uh and and they're asking for it and once we improve those services well the end users you know they will be more happy because that was something that they asked for and once we again measure so it will become this kind of a positive wheel and and starts promoting itself actually so um uh important peace there thanks marco you go on a little history tour of the history of itsm rewind the clock about 25 years and itsm service management came about as this insight within it that we could essentially run i.t run the service organization like we run the business their slas and their workflows and their roles and that led to the introduction of the term esm or enterprise service management because all the other departments saw it behaving like the business and said well we want that too and so we extended it workflows to any any organization in the business and then as we started to introduce kind of automation for routine tasks we said oh you know you could actually have a smart version of itsm if you could automate an approval or a request process or something like that and then along came itom i t operations management in the last decade and we said well gosh you could deliver much better service if your services were infrastructure aware but even at that point the automation was deterministic you basically had to know what workflow to script and the the best we could do was to listen for the signals from the infrastructure to try to figure out what kind of downstream impact there might be on a user well now when we talk about you know itxm or the future of the employee experience now we can go a step beyond because we finally have the capabilities to be able to automate non-deterministic workflows that's the magic of ai machine learning even when we don't know what the right thing to do is we can use patterns in the historical data to have these intelligent automated conversations whether it's via nlp natural language processing or smart recommendations for live agents but all of a sudden this you know this vision that we had 25 years ago for automating the business you know for internal service providers now we can extend to what you know at least the people name we refer to as the intelligent enterprise where when ai is kind of ambient across the enterprise we can actually predict prevent diagnose resolve issues that might impact employees before any service has been degraded that's always been the holy grail of providing the best customer experience and it's really gratifying you know having having lived through some times when we always wanted to promise this but we couldn't deliver it well the technology is finally available that we can do it the right way and that's what really makes me so optimistic about the kind of employee experience that we're capable of delivering in the years ahead right yeah and i think that's a great example like uh like i'm i mean i to started to bring the promise that okay we will run you know uh i do like business but i think what oftentimes happened is that okay it was was run like a business in a sense that okay you had the kpis okay hey we need the internal you know performance metrics that okay we will you know solve these issues within an sla and and then we have a certain budget and then we have a cost per you know incident and we know the cost of you know second level incident and and we have all that data but i think what experience management is bringing to the picture is that long forgotten the end user like let's say a good example again one one quick share not our slide but this is from our friend from metric net um just to kind of the cost of you know that uh internal cost of of uh uh incidents and if you think about the service desk you know ticket on on the first level it's based on this data 22 dollars per per incident but at the same time per incident uh our benchmark data says that end users lose three hours of their time per incidence and three hours you know fifty dollars per you know hour that's 150 dollars so you can easily make a business case like hey instead we should maybe invest within it maybe instead we should you know have a intelligence ai tools that you know would reduce the lost work time of the end user where we have 150 dollars to save versus then uh 22 dollars for example per per um ticket and i'm saying of course that you should not think about you know also maybe internally there are things that you can improve but at least that understand that the end user uh as is is losing a lot of time and the organization as as such so sometimes i think when it is run as a business we have forgotten actually the the paying customer or the consuming customer so even though it's an internal you know service unit but who's the uh yeah yeah yeah that's important i think that the the thing i was going to add is is the thing that i like about that that and it kind of scales right you talk about the cost of an incident and you start looking at the opportunity cost for the employees well you know mix in the great resignation a great revolt you know the the cost of of losing an employee because dan to your point one of the seven factors drove them out of the organization um is we address some of that with happiness what you're doing is you're really reducing retain you know increasing retention reducing that cost of having to find higher onboard train and engage a new employee you know that cost to the organization is is significant and so it's ratcheting levels of value i guess you could say uh looking at itxm it costs twice as much to hire a new employee as it does to retain an existing one indeed and in many cases the impact on the culture i'm sorry well i was going to say if if you can find them i mean that's one of the things i'm hearing from a lot of people yeah exactly yeah it's in the servicenow space for otherwise you know finding those employees is is a true challenge and so retaining them is even more important more expensive to find another one very true very true we're coming towards the end of our time you know one of the things that i'd like you guys both to sound off on is you know we talked about happiness we talked about different ways we can bring in a system of intelligence we talked about ways we can really look at signaling to understand happiness and where we can find and grow and improve and you know i talk about third era a lot so we don't need to focus so much on our work but together we bring these solutions what's a good next step if you think about leaders that that we're watching some of this content they're wrestling with employee experience and how do i change retention how do i reduce opportunity costs for people that need help from my t or hr and and then how to reduce cost of sales what's kind of that next step from both of your organizations that people should reach out and what's that journey look like for them i'd say ironically you're speaking to two technology vendors but i'm going to lead out and say don't make it a technology problem these are people problems the the organizations that are most successful are the ones that put the employee at the center of the organization's universe and if we always think about how to extract friction between the employee and their employer get all the things that they hate doing out of the way give them more time to be the best version of themselves at work that's when we can start to be really innovative and the ways to deploy some of these modern technologies like mark and i have been talking about it's actually pretty easy once you reorient your culture around placing the value on the employee experience that's the the number one coaching i have to cxos or you know any organization looking to deliver better end customer experiences is to start with your employees and figure out what you can do to deliver a better employee experience i like that dan one of the things that i think all of us have heard is we have to focus on people process and technology and so oftentimes we don't focus on technology well i've i've caught myself for years yeah gray hair i know saying technology is easy because in many places even though it's complex engineering our teams do and it's it's innovative and it takes you know brilliance to come and do that the best technology is going to fail if we don't have the process and the people in place and so completely completely agree uh marco your thoughts uh following the same same thinking um people must be in the center um i think coming from you know the experience management and if if if that's kind of the thinking that you know humans are there at the center i think the first thing is that you need to start understanding them and you know how to do that how how do you get that feedback um um we can help talk with troy right uh there's a solution that can help you get this understanding but it's a journey right so it and it's ultimately about the people so it will be a cultural journey culture change culture shift so there's a lot of into it uh but the first step should be clear is to get the understanding of the of the um users and users customers many names uh but the same it's it's all about people so cool with with that i'm going to close this up again thank you for joining us on a workflow wednesday dan marco thank you for joining me in this adventure and thank you for being part of the third era broader family where we look to really help people get more out of the servicenow platform thanks so much guys always a pleasure thank you thank you thanks troy marco bye dad