Meet Ben Spaunhorst, Manager of the Digital Workspace Automation team at World Wide Technology (WWT). With over a decade at the company—and roots at the service desk—Ben has played a key role in transforming employee support at scale.“My name is Ben Spaunhorst, I'm the manager of our digital workspace automation team at World Wide Technology... My background actually came from our service desk. I worked at the service desk probably for eight years before moving into my current role. But that's where we actually first implemented Moveworks.”Since joining, WWT’s workforce has more than doubled, growing from 5,000 to nearly 12,000 employees. But instead of growing the service desk team at the same pace, Ben and his team turned to AI.“We're continuing to grow rapidly, quickly. And so we need IT support that can help out with all of that.”“A lot of what we face is just continued growth of IT support issues... and a lot of them had just been kind of easy, repeatable tasks. And so as our user base is growing, our service desk is not.”WWT implemented Moveworks in 2020—right before the pandemic—and quickly saw the value of scalable, intelligent automation.“When we implemented Moveworks, it was in the year 2020. So it was right before the pandemic hit, for all of us... Moveworks stood out as constantly being that one that was just ahead of its class.”“They were kind of farther in their technology, within their AI solutions and even the machine learning solutions. And to me, that really spoke to what we needed, because we weren't then just getting a bot in our environment to have somebody manage and maintain 100%... it was able to do all of those things, have all those resolutions and employee satisfaction without bringing on any additional headcount to the team.”When a major security issue locked users out of their laptops, the team used Moveworks and Creator Studio to deliver a self-service workaround at scale.“We had a kind of something that was impacting all users and blocked them out of their computer... But we also built out an automation on the back end using Creator Studio to provide a full service, self-service solution for all of our employees, which saved a lot of user time, a lot of service desk time for manual fixes.”“We probably saved around 120 hours of support calls through everything... we had about 150 successful runs of that Creator Studio use case. So people were able to get in and get their solution and get back up and running without needing manual intervention from someone on our IT team.”They didn’t stop there—Ben and his team rapidly deployed automations across ServiceNow approvals, account notifications, and onboarding workflows.“We just kind of brainstorm on a lot of quick, easy wins, like we had ServiceNow change approvals go through there. We alerted managers when they had a new hire form to fill out. We notified employees if their Active Directory account got locked out.”“Within like two days, we were able to really pull together just bringing in some engineers and developers across our IT department.”The results speak for themselves.“When we rolled out Moveworks, we saw a 30% reduction in our phone calls to our service desk team.”“So we need to continue to find a way where we're able to scale the support we're offering without scaling the human impact. So it opens up our service desk team to focus on more kind of impactful user issues, rather than kind of like the basic password resets or application access and things like that.”Now, the team is expanding automation beyond IT—into HR and Finance.“We're actually in the middle of a project right now, rolling in our HR department... So this year we're moving into or integrating into our HR department, and our finance team as well.”While the journey has been impactful, Ben emphasizes the importance of knowledge readiness.“I think the best advice to give to anybody is really focus on making sure that you have quality knowledge. And I'd say even kind of easy to consume knowledge... they weren't as easily consumed by the bot. So finding a new way to approach that, to be able to get those answers and those resolutions in the hands of people that they can consume, they can understand.”“We're a ServiceNow customer as well... be able to take those back to see where we can have Service Bot come in and really optimize those solutions for people.”And when asked to sum it all up?“Oh, it's a good question. Let's say I would say helpful, intuitive and fantastic. There you go!”
