pleasure to make your acquaintance thank you all very much for joining us today my name is kevin adler and i'm one of two presenters going to walk through a story for the next hour talking about uh defining next generation of customer service for the federal government my name is kevin ether i support the uh us army team here at pub at uh the public sector space at servicenow as a digital transformation advisor with me is doug razobeck doug do you want to say hello yeah greetings thank you appreciate it kevin um yeah i'm the uh director of strategic initiatives at soft tax solutions and also run our service now practice so um i'm gonna be kind of walking you through a little bit of a use case that we've done for the u.s army as part of today's session fantastic thank you doug if there's questions that you folks have on the line um you're welcome to submit them through the chat feature which is active and open ashley's going to manage that with us and we'll be able to address your questions either as they pop up or we're going to wait for the end and address them at the conclusion of this session the goal is to have conversations and elevate the understanding of the value of providing good customer service in the federal space so any questions of of mine please feel free to to to share them with us do want to walk through a safe harbor notice we'll be talking about we might be talking about some future capabilities here at servicenow so we do want to reference the safe harbor slide as with any presentation we have a good agenda that we built for you today we'll walk through we've done the introductions and the welcome which is great we will highlight the white house executive order and we'll talk about some stories that are making the news recently we'll talk about our own experiences as each of us as a consumer and how that impacts us working with large retailers or banks or other uh large logos out there in the world and bringing that experience and how the government is successfully bringing that experience into its own customer space within the u.s federal government we'll also highlight the citizen experience and satisfaction report and then as doug mentioned earlier we'll be talking more about army housing maintenance and notice i cross out the word housing so there's a reason for that as well and then we'll come to conclusions and additional next steps so again as we progress i want to invite questions on the chat and uh appreciate everybody joining us this afternoon recently in the news there's been a lot of developing articles popping up around the federal customer experience and the challenges that the federal government has had and has successfully overcome to remove these obstacles to delivering good experiences to their customers throughout the engagement process that could mean requests that can mean resolving the requests or uh promoting additional use cases that we haven't even thought of today but these experiences that all of us have as taxpayers to the u.s federal government or our local government or our state government really does change the way in which we think about the challenge of engaging for instance with the department of motor vehicles and how that might have evolved over the last few years but from a federal perspective the president has issued an executive order on customer service and that has really dictated the goal of the biden administration to improve the customer experience and service delivery for all americans who engage with the federal government at one point or another this specifically calls out high impact service providers but it doesn't limit it just to these mostly civilian agencies so these are the ones with the call centers who handle a lot of volume it doesn't limit the goal of improving customer experiences just to these providers it really encourages all providers to the attack taxpayers to improve the entire efficiency process just like when we are at night engaging with large retailers before we walk through some really good examples i want to just walk through some uh a video that we prepared here at servicenow so without further ado let me kick off this video and we'll pick it up on the other side the president's management agenda recognizes that americans expect consumer-like experiences from government simple intuitive and on-demand agencies are making progress but there's more work to do the customer experience transcends single interactions positive experiences that build trust really matter when navigating certain life events often across multiple agencies a presidential executive order advocates harnessing technology to improve service delivery what holds back progress legacy systems manual processes and siloed information customer service management from servicenow integrates front middle and back-end operations in a cloud-based platform self-service offerings and omni-channel communications for government contact centers enable exceptional customer service experiences for those that the agency supports and servicenow's automation machine learning and predictive analytics help leaders prioritize scale responses and enhance efficiency get in touch for a test drive and examples of customer service success i always like a video to set the stage for the conversation so as we think about evolving the customer experiences for the federal government when i speak to customers i always like to have them imagine what if the exchange that they provided their customers were more like that for american express how simple is it for all of us to you know go to american express their world-class services really predates them even from a digital perspective and log in and see how simple you can use their search as a tier you can find answers to questions you can use their digital service catalog to find the nearest uh resources to solve your problem you can fire up a chat message if you wish you can find their toll-free number if you wish you can even send them an email and someone will respond to your email if you wish so i always enjoy when i talk to customers to think about what's your north star what's your largest goal out there and what if you were to model some of your requirements to reflect that of leading retailers like american express as you build out the next generation the other one that i think many of us are familiar with is amazon when we log into amazon it's a unique experience and my experience is different than ashley's or lillian's or jeff's and every one of us have a relationship with amazon through a personalized portal that brings up our latest orders our most shiptude addresses our payment options all of this is created so that of course we go to amazon more frequently but also so we have a frictionless experience when we want to replace the um the light bulbs in our house we no longer want to leave the house we can just log on to amazon search light bulbs or whatever else you're searching find that answer put it in your cart and frictionlessly then just check out and move about your day the goal is to minimize the interaction challenges and to maximize the return on investment we get from dealing with retailers like american express or amazon and when we flip this around in a public sector experience it's very much like we're seeing with lots leading public sector uh customers today with servicenow so this is one of my favorites it's down in atlanta the city of atlanta has a fantastic experience for their users their atl 311.com portal again you can use the telephone you can use the live chat you can search with the gazetteer to find the answer that you're looking for you can also use their digital catalog for products and services and find out the answers to your questions or if you can't create a case and then your issue is resolved personally for you by their team down in the city of atlanta the next example i always love to show off is the county even counties are getting into this with making it simple through very clean user interfaces that from a back end harmonize all of that workflow that so frequently is left in manual work processes it's so frequently using spreadsheets so frequently accessing information from separate systems maybe at something sharepoint maybe some is elsewhere but all that information from an end user or a customer perspective harmonizes through an easy to use portal just like we've been seeing up to now and i like this one specifically because it talks about animal services so that's very important to me so it's easy for me to see how i could get information from the county of riverside california they're very easy to use customer facing portal not leaving states out we've got a great story with state of tennessee they also use a very easy to use interface you'll notice all of these experienced customers that we're showing you have their unique look and feel and flavor for what kind of experience they want to design for their customers but they're all using the back end toolsets of servicenow and that's really the strength for that one platform capability from servicenow so state of uh tennessee is able to expose their knowledge base you can search either by topic or by um a issue that you want to resolve you can also create an inquiry it's a very easy to use form down at the bottom of the screen and they have chosen for whatever reason not to utilize the um the capabilities of live chat you can see it up in the top left it's not enabled maybe it's because it's outside of core business hours but the ability for when agents are available for that live chat to become available pop up on the screen it will help deflect cases and provide a better seamless experience for their customers when those agents are there so again the flexibility is built in to customers creating their own experience one of my other leading public sector experiences that i actually love showing is stanford university out in california they have a very easy to use portal how can we help you you could either search for your issue and remember i'm not authenticated in this example if you'll notice in the top right it says login i'm not logged in but i'm still able to find information that might help me make decisions about engaging with stanford so i can look at facilities i can look at information technology to a point as a non-authenticated user and find answers to my questions if i wish to authenticate i'm certain i would be able to then find even more information about stanford university through this very easy to use self-service experience and again these are all live examples you can find them on the web today and experience them yourself so as we move up the the chain and we look at a civilian agency example u.s fish and wildlife has a self-service portal for e-permitting it's very easy to find answers and apply for your permit check the status of your permit pay for permit it's very simple to engage with u.s fish and wildlife services because they value the simplicity the frictionless experience and just like we've seen from other examples and they're doing a fantastic job as that as well one of the most exciting ones that i think doug's going to talk about more on our presentation today is the goal for the us army and they initially had an uh a challenge which i'm not going to steal doug's thunder but the army has um erected a solution army maintenance application it's a public portal you can see you can either register and log in or if you've got a cat card um you can use that and you're already registered and logged in so they've already designed this frictionless experience and they've been able to deliver world-class service to their soldiers and families around the world with servicenow and i should actually point out i remember when this was actually launched and doug might go into this more again i'm not trying to steal his thunder the nice thing that i re the most exciting thing that i remember about this specific use case was how quickly they deployed this this was deployed in 12 weeks and to me that's fascinating because we're talking about security ramifications you're talking about data ramifications you're talking about integrations with existing systems standing up an application for the federal government let alone the department of defense is wildly fast 12 weeks is wildly quick in terms of uh success stories so i always like to highlight the the ease of our tool set here at servicenow and smart partners like doug and his team at soft tech who can deploy solutions very rapidly for a quick return on investment so before we dig into more of the army housing application our other technology partner carosoft did a survey in in for 4 000 users talking about their experience and their satisfaction with the united states federal government so let's dig in and just take a sample of my favorite um key findings that i found from this survey which they actually published on their caresoft website they surveyed more than two thousand americans from their opinions and experiences for engaging with the federal government and of those two thousand respondents they found that seventy three percent prefer self-service interactions that could mean all your cell phone that could mean on your laptop or your tablet but the ability to self-service which is becoming so commonplace we're seeing it obviously we it started with banks at atms and now we're seeing it in grocery stores self-checkout it's becoming commonplace that citizens want the ability if they choose to self-serve 27 of those respondents still prefer to speak to someone by telephone and i love that because that means all of the other people who don't want to speak to somebody by telephone they get their problem solved by self-service technology but those 27 percent that are going to call that 800 number for support are going to receive that support faster because there'll be fewer people in line ahead of them waiting for waiting for support customers expect more improvements 39 of these respondents indicated that they have not seen any experience or improvement for that engagement with the federal government since the onset of covet 19. so that that leads us a lot of opportunity to help our agency customers our department of defense civilian state local all of our public sector customers deliver on that goal of a white glove service and then 53 founded that their experience has been about the same so again no change there the feedback is expected users customers are willing to provide feedback when they and they want to when they have a bad experience additionally when they have a good experience they want to provide feedback but 76 percent said that they were very likely to tell others about their poor experience through social channels so again going back to that department of motor vehicles example or even dealing with the federal government or the state government at any level the better off they can deliver service to their constituency to their customers the better off that feedback that is shared on social will be and then finally i think we can all agree digital is the future forty percent responded that wait times are over five minutes and that's just unreasonable 39 percent of respondents have had slower than normal mail delivery so they're ordering products or services through the mail and then 33 reported that the information was difficult to find on federal websites so beyond just searching for an answer once you land on that federal website how do you find that nugget that answer of information that you're searching for you can get your answer move about your day so those are some good recaps my favorites from this government citizen experience report that the survey is available on the carousel website that we'll share later but i think at this point i want to turn the microphone over to doug who's going to walk through the rest of the presentation doug kevin hey i thank you very much let me go ahead and take control of the slides if i can here um so yeah i'm going to touch on a couple of pieces that you you were i think you gave us a lot of credit for for what happened on our implementation and we'll take some of that or actually the team that worked on it but i'll explain a little bit of how we met that the speed of the implementation here in a second but what i want to start with is uh the army cio dr iyer published the army digital transformation strategy in october of last year and as part of that this was a quote that went out as part of that release um and you know the acknowledgement that rigid institutional processes do exist and that we need to overcome those through through true digital transformation is really kind of the mindset of what we are doing with the arma project or what is known as uh army maintenance uh the army maintenance application uh or armymaintenance.com and so kind of with that as the the mindset going in let me just give you kind of a brief overview of of what we did um the project itself was an outgrowth of the army housing crisis of 2019 and there's actually been a lot of information even recently in the press about the privatized housing issues that currently uh are continuing to to uh challenge the army i guess let me use the right right term there and as part of that uh the congress basically put the hammer down on on the dod and on the army to basically do right by the soldiers do right by their families and give them an environment as they protect our our freedoms and our country to give them a safe place to live and one that's free of challenges that that have plagued them and they put some mandates on the privatized housing groups and in addition to that um the army runs a lot of barracks has some level of uh family housing also and they said if we're going to put these mandates in against the privatized housing we basically need to do the same thing for ourselves and that's where armymaintenance.com came from so our focus was really on the soldier and their family and giving them the ability to easily interact with the directorate of public works and those are the entities on each army installation that manage the facilities that do the repairs and the the other than some home-grown portals some home-grown sharepoint sites for the most part the process was pick up the phone tell somebody your issue and hope hope they show up hope it gets fixed hope it doesn't get lost and at the end of the day uh that's where servicenow and armymaintenance.com came in to solve that problem so as uh kevin mentioned we did have a very short timeline we had a four-star general mandate uh from general daily here in huntsville alabama at the army materiel command and that date was december 1st of 2020 for our ioc to be live worldwide in our initial operating status and that date didn't move um we ended up getting this on contract in mid-august had to do some ramp-ups of the team that was working on it and a combination of some really good servicenow subject matter expertise and equally as important if not more was the army subject matter expertise that we were able to bring to the table in order to push through this process um the part i can't take credit for and that softac can't take credit for as part of this is that when you've got a four-star general a three-star general and a two-star general actively engaged in your project your project does not move at the normal speed of government and from our optic that was really beneficial because it allowed us to push through barriers and to work either around over or through challenges that we had because we had that kind of firepower uh helping us out so with that and kevin mentioned this we're all expecting this consumer grade experience so um to kind of leverage a phrase from one of my colleagues at soft text first first things first and that is when looking at this and looking at what is the consumer-grade experience you got to kind of look at a couple of things from from my perception and that is first of all what are we trying to automate let's not try to boil the ocean uh and deal with every problem that we might or challenge that we might have but let's pick those things and start with something that we can take down and be successful in and that's really important to truly understand what your target is that you're trying to take down and once you know that then you can identify your stakeholders who are the people that are involved in the process and how do they want to interact with us and when you're dealing with customer service management that's a key question to be asked and answered as part of the implementation so in our case as i mentioned the ability for a soldier and their families and that's a really important part of our charter was that it's not just the soldiers that we're interacting with it's the spouse uh and even the children uh of a particularly deployed soldier even you know being able to enable them uh to self-serve and making their requests for maintenance um and doing that wherever they were whether they're on their smartphone whether they're on their desktop computer how easily can we let them initiate the conversation with the directorate of public works so those are things that we kind of appealed back very quickly in the process make sure that our whole team understood what we were doing and it really came down to kind of six different piece parts i guess that make up the arma consumer great experience and i'm going to walk through each of these so i won't touch on them here necessarily but the main thing in this and this is actually doug enfield who was our program manager uh this was in an article that was recently published and and he's spot on it's what dr iyer said it's the things that kevin covered uh in terms of the carousel survey and that is that customers expect a consumer great experience and quite honestly deserve it it's just that simple so if we look at the connect piece the first kind of part of the process here is how do our customers get to us and that's no matter what you're trying to do in in a project of this nature where it is a customer facing uh environment we need to understand how they're going to get to us and so in our world it's a combination of phone and desktop and not surprisingly given the timing of this particular implementation and the rollout of arma being that it was right smack dab through the middle of covid and the lockdowns that we were in um the qr code has become a ubiquitous part of our lives it's whether it's a bar menu a restaurant menu um you know directions to get through a mall whatever it may be you've got qr codes out there we all pull out our phone and we scan it it takes us to the site and so that has been a fundamental part of our uh deployment strategy if you will and these are just a couple of examples putting the qr code on a key chain so that a soldier can have their barracks key and if they have any issue at any point in time you can immediately flip that thing over scan it get into arma and submit your maintenance request you see a poster here this one happens to be at fort bragg these things are depending on the garrison uh put up in all kinds of locations uh that that are there and and one of the things that's really important i mentioned our stakeholder group being the soldiers and their families we very quickly within the first three months of the deployment of arma the army made the decision and this was at the the request of the garrisons they said we're doing maintenance one way with arma for housing and it's really good people are embracing it it's starting to work and now we've got a situation what about the other stuff that we've got what about these other facilities that we have whether it's the ball fields the picnic pavilion the headquarters building all of these other facilities are out there and it's a totally separate engagement strategy for the dpw and so there was an immediate decision to basically expand the scope of arma and basically as we stand now by the end of next month the end of may we will be live at 70 plus garrisons in what's been coined fence defense so rather than just housing we have expanded the number of facilities and buildings that we support by about six-fold in terms of what we were on day one go live and what we will be at the end of next month so in doing that you'll see this poster here um that's was a big part of that is being able to then put these things up in different places on installations so that anybody walking anywhere in any building has very quick access um the qr code also manifests itself in refrigerator magnets in a number of installations so the garrisons have had those run up and when their teams are in working on things they slap one on a refrigerator and now that soldier will have that information basically at any point in time going forward um so kind of a an interesting part of what we did in a in a key part of our consumer grade experience and i will say that we had this poster at fort bragg that's showing here i got a sure little anecdote apparently this poster was so good that uh in the not too recent past uh someone tried to steal one um and walk out of a building with it and uh they were like no you can't take that with you that needs to stay here but um kind of a good uh what's the word i'm looking for endorsement i guess of the process from that perspective the flip side of that is being able to access it from a desktop um and initially when we were dealing with just soldiers and their families as our customers the need for the desktop was was not as great because typically people were you know there they got their phones and stuff but when we got fence defense and we know that we're dealing with buildings that are office buildings other workspaces the idea of supporting that uh from a desktop perspective went up and uh the ability to cac log in is fundamental to that one of our barriers to adoption initially has been on the the soldier and family side was around our registration process it's a process that we have to have from a security perspective to keep nefarious actors from trying to get into to the arma system but at the same time that security requirement created a barrier to adoption in the cat login world if if that user has been authenticated through the enterprise authentication system from the army there's no need for us to do anything beyond that so a big part of our solution has been allowing that cat login to the point that if somebody logs into the system we automatically create the registration for them if they happen to get locked out we automatically unlock them as part of that process and the other thing that was interesting is right in the middle of our whole implementation the army has gone through updating their uh email system from mail.mill to army dot mil so a global enterprise change from an email perspective and as you know a lot of times email is used as the fundamental login for a servicenow system ours was no different and all of a sudden we had a moving target there so we did some things within the system again from the consumer grade experience making it easy on the user that when their account got changed from mail.mill to army.mill we did a little sleight of hand in the background did a little bit of a system update they jump into the system and they don't even know that we've actually updated their account on their behalf so uh kind of some good things from that perspective uh just thinking about how you interact with your customers and doing the things that need to be done at the system level in order to minimize the the impact to the end user so the next part of it is after we connect with them is how do we listen to them how do we get the information and start that conversation i mentioned that historically it was always the pick up the phone and call the dpw but in the digital world hey you're going to collect some information from them and so from our perspective creating that consumer grade experience is reaching the right balance of structured and unstructured data if we know certain things about the information that's going to be provided to us hey we can go ahead and create some structured data for that it clearly enhances reporting uh it makes uh things actionable from an automated perspective where there's no human involved because there's no interpretation of the data you've predefined the checkbox the radio button the pick list and been able to sort of spoon feed the user with the information that they've got but the flip side of that is what if i don't know all the questions to ask what if they're asked differently in different geographies so when we've got a worldwide system in multiple geographies uh multiple nationalities and countries how do we go through and do that well that's where the unstructured data comes in just give me a box and let me tell you what it is and let a human interpret what's going into that box so from our perspective this was a key part of the system if you look at that left side image there when someone comes in to arma to submit a case um if we know uh well not if we know who they are we know what building they're registered to from a housing perspective if they happen to be in a headquarters somewhere else they go and they select that that's structured data we know the buildings that exist on a given installation but then there's two boxes at you know in terms of the mandatory fields give me some detail location in terms of where i'm gonna find this thing what it's particular you know that i'm looking for and tell me what's wrong and once you give me those two pieces that's all i'm going to require of you after that anything else becomes gravy uh in terms of the process but that's been a big part of the solution and quite honestly the success of it is you know and you see in this quote here um the the interface is simple to use but at the same time it's innovative and it works and that was really a big driver for us was keeping it simple what are the things that we have to have what are the things that would be nice to have and how do we streamline that to minimize the the the effort and the uh the pain if you will uh to our customers so after we listen we've got the information from them is look what what can we gather from them you know we we all and i know i've done this kevin mentioned the whole amazon is is to a lot of us i think the gold standard in terms of customer service and how you interact in a digital world um and i know personally that i have had times where i'm looking at a product and i'm looking at a competitive product and i'm going back and forth and the images that they put out there of their products so that i can evaluate it oftentimes have a determination as to what you buy hey these images look better i like the way it felt just based on what i saw there so i'm gonna buy this one versus this one well in the arma world it's the other direction rather than the uh provider in this case the director of public works providing imagery to the customer the customer's sending it the other direction and from the perspective of the director of public works this information is invaluable to them if i look at this case of the fence that's damaged here i've got a pretty dog on good idea of what i need to have from the shop before i ever go out there if i'm looking at a thermostat that's running at 85 or 84 degrees fahrenheit and somebody's in there roasting i know what that thermostat is i know what things in terms of if i was going to have to replace that i know what to take with me because i can see it as part of this plumbing is another good example you know not every toilet or sink or faucet on garrison is exactly the same if you include a photograph of that it gives the repair technicians a pretty good chance to to a better chance of providing uh the right tools the right materials on the first time and that results in savings if you're not familiar with an army garrison some of these installations are very large and you might have a situation where the drive from the maintenance repair shop to the location to execute the repair can take 30 minutes or more well if i drive out there put my eyes on a potential repair and realize i don't have the right tool or i don't have the right parts whoop i am at least an hour if not more that it's gonna take and so now i'm spending my work day driving back and forth across the installation as opposed to actually fixing the things that need to be fixed and so we've found that when customers are providing photographs as part of their communication with the director of public works with the dpw the repairs are getting done on average 25 percent faster so now not only have i i've been able to have a better experience in terms of initiating with them by just using my phone take a picture and then i can go about my day now my repair that i'm looking for is going to get done even faster and that again is that consumer grade experience that that we're really trying to to push towards and one of the other things i'll kind of share anecdotally here on the picture piece one of the things that this is also facilitating is identifying situations of non-fair wear and tear and this is actually an advantage to the director of public works somebody takes a photograph of a situation and they've got that visual representation and i look at why are all these ceiling tiles damaged right in the same spot why would i have four to five tiles right in one area is there a chance that that might be um not accidental but somebody for whatever reason was trying to get up in there to do something or whatever it may be and i can then uh have have that documented and from a chargeback perspective i can can defer that cost to another entity the unit that owns that particular location so just another way that the photographs that are being provided just are invaluable to support the process so after we go through and we've we've connected we've uh listened to the customer we are looking we're they're sharing information the next part is that in terms of maximizing the value of the communication is how do we communicate when we need to ask a question when we need to schedule their time how are we doing that and obviously the servicenow platform has numerous ways to go about doing that so whether it's sending them an email sending them a text using the ability to put comments into a record and have it visual uh to the the customer when they go and look at their case on the phone those are things that we have all emperor that we have embraced as part of the consumer grade experience with arma but there's more right kevin mentioned uh earlier in his session his uh overview about a given site that wasn't using chat we're not using chat we've got 70 plus garrisons that have different work schedules and different teams and that was particularly with the timeline that we had not something that the army would even consider but don't even don't even go there stop right um virtual agent not something that we are doing in terms of repairs we don't want to have some soldier or family member or even a contractor or civilian in the office trying to go fix an hvac unit right that's not going to happen that needs to be in the hands of the professional technicians to go do that so that's not part of our solution but those are things that from the interaction capability uh between the customer and the provider are really important and at the ready in terms of of a given implementation of the platform from a customer service perspective so um it's it's invaluable to be honest with you because part of what would happen historically so the customer calls up they reach out to the dpw i've got this particular issue oftentimes if the dpw needed to reach back out to that individual it was done with a phone call okay so now all of a sudden i've got i got a phone call going back to the customer what if they're not there what if i can't get in touch with them and you've uh you've got this you know the phone tag that we've all played at some point in our life and we're delaying the actual resolution of the issue because of a single threaded mode of communication that is you know not necessarily efficient in all uh all given points in time so being able to use multiple mechanisms to communicate and to basically leave those messages out there you know for example in the in the service portal as soon as that customer goes back in to check the status of their uh their situation they see that oh the request is back in my court they're asking me for some information i provided and now the process continues down its way so that's kind of the fourth piece of it um the fifth step in our consumer grade experiences about the update is how do we make sure that that particular customer knows what's happened okay and so a combination of those mechanisms and it might be all three we might send them an email shoot them a text and then it's also available from a chat perspective in the portal that they've got that information at the ready so after we listen and look we go out we execute the repair and this creates transparency there is a level of transparency in the army maintenance process that exists today that was not even on the radar scope two years ago and it really has been able uh been important from the customer perspective because they have the information i can go to the service portal on my phone like you see here and 24 hours a day seven days a week i've got access to be able to see what i uh see what the status of my case is and also then if necessary to to follow up with a question hey what's the status i haven't seen anything posted lately can you give me an idea and the dpw then takes those those are the the cases that need attention that need to get looked at from the dpw side clerks look at it provide a response and now the customer has that information you know again we expect it we expect the domino's pizza tracker experience where i can look on there and i know that that joe bob just put my pizza in the oven and that you know fred is going to leave the store in 10 minutes or whatever to deliver me my pizza those are the things we're and i'll first put my hand up here we're impatient as a society we expect everything at our fingertips we expect it yesterday we want amazon prime to get you know oh wait it's going to take two days to get this here instead of show up tomorrow that's unacceptable right and that experience is what has become the norm in a lot of cases and that's the consumer grade experience that we're trying to provide full transparency to the information um and ultimately trying to improve improve the efficiency of the dpw so they work faster let's get it done quicker let's get more repairs done and actually look at the soldier the contractor the civilian the family member as a true customer in every sense of the word which leads to then the evaluation how what feedback are we getting and how do we take advantage of that what can we do uh to improve you know and and being able to truly gauge from the customer space you know whether they are happy with the service is not something that has been typically focused on within the context of army maintenance but it is now and it's an important part of the full loop the full feedback loop um and that's how we've we've you know can make things better you know get new enhancement ideas how can we streamline the system a little better how can the technicians function a little bit better in their uh in their day-to-day operations and these are things that we've now got some uh visibility into that historically was just not an option so that's kind of what we've done um like i said it all starts at the end of the day with who are our customers and how do we want to engage with them how are we going to most efficiently engage with our customers and once you know that then you can take advantage of the platform you know servicenow i've i've contended this for a while and if they ever put it into a marketing uh slick or anything i tell them i want royalties but at softac solutions are kind of mantra or the culture that we have is that we're problem solvers that's how we look at it is we need to go in and use our abilities expertise to solve problems and servicenow is the problem solvers platform for solving problems and that's really what is it you know in in your hands as part of uh you know being a customer of the platform is to go solve problems and the number of problems you can solve with the platform i would contend is limitless um but understanding who your customer is and what problem you're truly trying to solve i think is the first place to start for any uh solution of this sort so with that uh kevin i kind of covered everything that i wanted to cover i don't know if you want to close whether we want to get some questions out on the table i don't know if anything's coming to the chat while we've been rambling for 45 minutes um and you're on mute i think not that anybody's ever done that in the coveter yeah great great story doug thank you so much for for sharing um the the great story about arma and and the success that you guys are enabling the army to realize for its customer base so at this time um we're opening up the lines you can either unmute yourself if you want to ask a question you're among friends or you can chat you can do a live chat i do have one question doug that i received um while you were finishing up the question was can you talk about how the um the servicenow instance uh is where is it is it on premises is it running in the cloud can you talk a little bit about the back end technology uh sure we are running in the service now gcc uh in the fedramp high section of that if you're not familiar you've got both fedramp high what they call pod 101 and there is the il4 side if you will which is pod 102. we are currently running in pod 101 and the the onus for that was needing to be publicly facing so having that availability there um full transparency we may be moving not on premises but to the other side to the pod 102 but that's a to be determined as it stands now but that's we are a full cloud publicly available instance today good stuff good stuff so with that ashley if you've got any questions from folks on your side or anyone else want to unmute yourself we're here to answer questions or if you prefer to contact us directly doug's email address is below his picture on the screen in front of you as is mine and we're here to answer questions and help help with anything you've seen today doug it looks like we've answered all the questions we've done a great job so uh with that thank you all very much for your time uh we will be sharing the replay available after after this session is done recording and the presentation will be available for future consumption have a great afternoon and again thank you all very much for your interest in service now and soft tech solutions have a great afternoon thank you you