John Donahoe’s (pictured) goal as the new president and chief executive officer of ServiceNow Inc. was to visit 100 new customers in 100 days. Forty-five days later, he’s already met that goal. So what’s in Donahoe’s playbook for winning and keeping customers with technology?

ServiceNow aims to help employers help employees help customers, and the interfaces for each are becoming more alike, Donahoe said at ServiceNow Knowledge17 in Orlando, Florida.

“Employees are consumers at home, and they are increasingly expecting the same kind of great experiences they have at home at work and as customers of enterprises,” he told Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Jeff Frick (@JeffFrick), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live streaming studio. (* Disclosure below.)

The consumer and enterprise realms are converging, and convenient tools such as PayPal are increasingly in demand on employee and enterprise interfaces, Donahoe said.

The easier the employee’s tools are, the more quickly he or she can satisfy (and thus retain) customers. Automating tasks for ServiceNow’s customers through to their customers’ employees and end-users is one of the best ways to keep everyone in that chain satisfied, Donohoe said. For example, “password reset is a perfect process that can be handled in an automated self-help way, which is ultimately what the customer wants,” he explained.

ServiceNow is increasingly pursuing machine learning tools to move more rote tasks to automation and human brains to innovation and profits. “The machine learning capability when applied in the ServiceNow platform applied to specific problems helps you fix problems before they happen in an automated fashion. Imagine that,” Donahoe said.

This is your brain on tech

With tech cutting across all departments and taking grunt work off the agenda, human roles are becoming more autonomous, Donahoe stated. Fittingly, as technology transforms the whole business, information technology folks are learning the language of bottom lines, stock prices and quarterly reports.

The chief information officer, in particular, is becoming a viable source for business strategy in an enterprise. “They couldn’t have done that before the cloud technologies that give them the ability to play offense,” Donahoe concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s independent editorial coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge17. (* Disclosure: ServiceNow Inc. sponsored this Knowledge17 segment on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE. Neither ServiceNow nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE