Six ways to improve your clients' ServiceNow employee experience (and your client retention)
Research suggests the employee experience is directly related to client attrition for SaaS companies. Improve your clients’ ServiceNow employee experience–and your client retention rate–by leveraging and integrating OCM best practices.
It’s natural to spend time getting business from new clients. But don’t forget about your existing ones!
Client retention is critical for several reasons, not least because existing customers tend to buy more frequently and spend more money than new clients.
Research shows increasing client retention by just five percent can lead to at least 25 percent revenue growth. This means the average ServiceNow Partner could increase their revenue by over $1MM a year by improving their OCM offerings!
It might surprise you to learn the employee experience plays a considerable role in client retention.
Research suggests the employee experience–especially after deployment–is directly related to client attrition for SaaS companies. Often, ServiceNow partners focus exclusively on the technical aspects of implementation. They assume clients will perform their own organizational support to ensure successful engagement.
However, this is not always the case. That’s why incorporating basic organizational change management (OCM) activities into engagements can help partners improve their clients’ ServiceNow employee experience.
This article offers ServiceNow partners six ways to improve their clients’ ServiceNow employee experience by leveraging and integrating OCM best practices into their engagements. After reading this article, you’ll have a better idea of how to incorporate ServiceNow adoption best practices into your client timelines to set employees up for success and increase your client retention rates.
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How to improve the ServiceNow employee experience
These six ideas will help you understand how you can improve the ServiceNow employee experience for your clients to boost customer retention.
1. Create a structured OCM approach to align with product delivery activities
ServiceNow partners often struggle with aligning an organizational change roadmap to their Agile software development cycles. This can be particularly challenging for partners who lack an in-house OCM practice, although there are steps they can take to incorporate more change expertise.
To improve the client ServiceNow employee experience, project teams must develop and maintain a structured change management strategy. The challenge is this will be at odds with Scrum’s iterative and incremental style.
So, teams should develop and broadly socialize a change timeline incorporating all the activities planned for end users. These include workshops, communications, town halls, roadshows, training events, hypercare, etc.
We have found that incorporating OCM into integration activities can give ServiceNow partners an overall competitive advantage.
2. Build communication plans to engage key stakeholders throughout the project
Communication is critical for any project. Research suggests client attrition can be attributed to information asymmetry that makes customers uncomfortable. This is one reason open communication and information delivery are vital to client retention.
Research has also shown several key factors can lead to successful change adoption, including a clear understanding of the steps involved in the change implementation; transparent communication of how the change will benefit end-users; and an appointed change agent who will effectively lead the entire change management process from start to finish.
Here, it’s clear that perception is reality. Regarding retention, it doesn’t matter what Partners do, but what their clients believe the Partners are doing.
ServiceNow Partners need to build communication plans that thoroughly explain how stakeholders will benefit from the change being implemented. It should also entail a clear action plan for clients to reach their desired end states. This action plan should consider and communicate the impact of any changes on project timelines, budgets, and employee experience so clients are not unpleasantly surprised by the changes.
3. Consider change impacts during testing
According to research, the most significant factor for client attrition is not the project experience but the perceived value delivery from the end product. That means it doesn’t matter what you deliver if nobody uses it and no value is derived from it.
By paying attention to change impacts during functional testing and UAT, ServiceNow partners and their clients are more likely to understand organizational considerations. As a result, their clients are more likely to understand organizational concerns and develop change plans to address these issues.
This will improve the employee experience around go-live events and increase clients’ chance of value derived from the product.
Need help developing internal change impact management processes? An OCM partner can help you develop and roll out the tools you need to make your teams successful.
4. Ensure the client has secured leadership commitment to the initiative
As a ServiceNow Partner, letting your project sponsor handle the “family drama” of securing cross-functional executive commitment can be tempting. After all, they’re responsible for managing the reputation of their team and the project, right?
Well, yes and no. Leadership commitment is indeed critical to ensuring your project’s success. But by playing a passive role in gaining stakeholder commitment, ServiceNow partners increase the chances of lowered engagement which may negatively impact the employee experience.
Additionally, many project sponsors are operational managers who don’t have experience driving cultural transformations. They may need some support from ServiceNow partners, who should offer engagement and communication plans that help internal leadership “climb the commitment curve.”
5. Create Change Agent Networks to support development and go-live
Change agent networks are critical to driving successful organizational change. Change agents provide two-way information to manage end-user expectations of the solution and communicate project and business risks to the project team for mitigation.
Change agents are also helpful during UAT. They can identify critical systems issues standing in the way of user adoption and provide post-deployment on-the-ground support for their teams in a way siloed teams cannot.
ServiceNow Partners should incorporate the identification, onboarding, and management of change agent networks into their deployment plans.
6. Help clients identify, measure, and communicate performance benchmarks
Finally, we need to talk about benchmarking. Benchmarking is critical for gaining stakeholder agreement on the definition of success before go-live. It sets external standards for setting achievable, but challenging, goals all responsible parties accept.
Setting goals and benchmarks and showing progress against them throughout the project empowers ServiceNow partners to improve their client’s perception of engagement and ensure they deliver the agreed-upon value.
In addition, socializing the team’s performance against agreed-upon project goals builds organizational commitment by helping everyone involved buy into the solution and believe in its success.
Conclusion
By incorporating valuable OCM strategies such as leadership engagement, change agent networks, structured communication plans, and benchmarking into project timelines and product delivery activities, ServiceNow partners can improve their clients’ experiences and increase customer retention rates.
Want to learn more about implementing an OCM practice as a ServiceNow Partner? Download our white paper to learn more about how your firm could increase your revenue by over $1MM a year, as well a case study of a successful OCM Center of Excellence implementation!
If you’re ready to boost your client retention, schedule a call to discuss how SkyPhi can help.
