Royal Bank of Scotland invests in ServiceNow to elevate the service experience

Transforming employee and customer experiences

Royal Bank of Scotland sets goal to become the top bank in customer service by 2020
More than 20 million customers around the world rely on Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) to provide them with financial products and services they can trust. With a focus on transforming customer experiences by 2020, RBS hopes to become the top bank in the United Kingdom for customer service, trust, and advocacy.

Technology will play a leading role in RBS’ journey by giving employees the tools they need to do business with colleagues, customers, and regulators as efficiently as possible.

First step toward accomplishing goal is to simplify IT
With 14,000 users utilizing 13 different ITSM tools and multiple configuration management databases (CMDBs), RBS was spending too much administrative time on change management. Raising a change took an employee an average of seven hours using five or more different tools. The manual approval processes then caused further delays. Regulatory compliance was a challenge as well—with 56 controls monitored by regulators, the risk of service failures can be high for financial institutions like RBS.

 “We needed the flexibility and speed to deliver incremental changes with contained risk and improve the way we deliver technology services to our businesses, enabling them to deliver the best service to our customers,” says Pete Coleman, Head of Service Delivery at Royal Bank of Scotland.

To achieve this, RBS needed to recreate its IT environment, which had become increasingly complex and difficult to manage following the bank’s rapid growth through acquisitions. Specifically, simplifying IT service management (ITSM) would help RBS deliver great customer experiences while reducing costs and meeting compliance requirements.

“We needed a single integrated toolset to automate the delivery and control of incident, problem, change, and configuration management,” says Pete.

ServiceNow provides the platform and services to meet RBS’ needs and lead the change to simpler IT and better customer service
Instead of spending more time administering changes for 14,000 users across 13 different ITSM tools and management databases, RBS decided on a single, integrated toolset to automate the delivery and control of incident, problem, change, and configuration management. The bank chose the ServiceNow^® IT Service Management solution, built on Now Platform^®, to unify IT planning, delivery, and operations. RBS partnered with ServiceNow^® Professional Services to assist with the implementation. 

“ServiceNow appealed to us because it is cloud-based and easy to use,” says Pete. “ServiceNow gave us a sandbox environment to experiment with for six months before we actually signed the deal, so we were confident that the solution would meet our needs.”

With ServiceNow, RBS saves time and money, and responds to customer demands faster, and improves employee morale
Success came quickly: within 10 months, RBS integrated ServiceNow with 15 data sources and delivered the solution to all 14,000 users. The average time to raise a change and incident improved by 76% and 60% respectively.

By automating more than 50% of the controls associated with critical IT processes, RBS saved the equivalent of 46,000 employee hours, as well as realizing savings by decommissioning 10 legacy systems. Most importantly, more than 75% of users say ServiceNow has improved their work day.

“The ServiceNow team listened well, gave us good direction, and helped drive quality and efficiency throughout the process,” says Pete. “The result was a successful and collaborative implementation.”