Beachbody builds operational excellence and elevates its employee experience

Integrating ServiceNow and Slack in less than a day

Fitness solutions leader Beachbody always looks for creative ways to do things faster and better
Beachbody is a worldwide leader in fitness, nutrition, and weight-loss solutions. The company was founded in 1998 with the mission of helping people enjoy healthy, fulfilling lives. Since then, Beachbody has empowered more than 23 million customers, growing to more than 1,000 employees and $1 billion in annual revenues.

In the past, Beachbody relied on physical channels–such as infomercials and DVDs–to deliver its content. Now, the company is aggressively moving to a digital delivery model. Because of this, Beachbody’s applications and IT infrastructure are mission-critical, providing on-demand, subscription-based workouts that customers stream to their televisions.

To drive IT operations, Beachbody relied on 100s of emails a day that were often missed or ignored
Until recently, Beachbody relied on emails to drive IT operations. While they were already a ServiceNow customer, they still used emails for “last mile” communications. According to Eric Landsness, Beachbody’s Director of Network Operations, “When everyone is dealing with hundreds of emails a day, things are missed. Change requests are key examples–ServiceNow was sending notification emails, but these were often ignored. As a result, many changes were never approved. Because of this, our people gave up entering change requests, and just went ahead with undocumented changes.”

Beachbody integrated Slack in less than a day to give easy access to ServiceNow capabilities
Beachbody’s IT team knew that they needed a different approach. They decided to combine the power of ServiceNow and Slack to eliminate the email burden. Eric says that, “We were already starting to use Slack as our overall messaging and collaboration platform. By integrating ServiceNow with Slack, we could give approvers easy access to ServiceNow capabilities within their familiar Slack environment.” To do this, Beachbody created a Slack bot to interact with ServiceNow. Astonishingly, this took less than one day to complete. 

Now, approvers receive a Slack notification whenever they need to approve a change request. They can pull up all of the change details directly in Slack, approving or denying the request right on the spot. All the underlying logic is still managed within ServiceNow–ensuring complete process integrity and compliance.

As soon as Beachbody went live with ServiceNow, approved changes increased by almost 800%
According to Eric, the results have been tremendous. He says that, “As soon as we went live, we saw a radical improvement. In just one month, our number of approved changes increased by almost 800%–proof that approvers were now reviewing changes. And, we saw about a 250% increase in documented changes, which means that our people now see the value of entering change requests into ServiceNow.”

Since deploying ServiceNow, Beachbody increases service quality by reducing outages by 90%
Beachbody has also seen a corresponding increase in service quality. Ericsays that, “When you don’t document and review changes, things go wrong. It’s not just the change itself, it’s the lack of visibility. For instance, there’s no easy way to know if a change has caused an outage, or whether there’s a problem with colliding maintenance windows. Before, we were having four or five outages every week. Now, that’s down to about one a month–more than a 90% decrease.”

Beachbody’s IT operations team sees “remarkable benefits” after integrating ServiceNow and Slack
For Eric, it’s all about working smarter. He says that, “We only have a small IT operations team, so we’re constantly looking for creative ways to get things done faster and better. Integrating ServiceNow and Slack was easy–and we’re seeing remarkable benefits. And, we haven’t stopped at change management. For instance, we can raise ServiceNow incidents directly from Slack, including automatically gathering information from our monitoring systems. That reduces effort, and means that we resolve issues more quickly.”