Customer workflow: tomorrow’s customer service

For any company, managing extensive customer service is a complex challenge. This will become more difficult when multiple CRM platforms come into play. Most of these platforms cannot effectively exchange information with each other. This makes it difficult for service agents to provide an excellent customer experience.

How does ServiceNow handle this complexity? How does Now Platform help service agents get faster and better customer experience with fewer resources? To find out, we interviewed Farrell Hough, Senior Vice President of Customer Workflow Products at ServiceNow.

Commercial CRM solutions have been around for 20 years. What is special about ServiceNow?

Farrell Hoff: The CRM market consists of four parts-sales, retail, marketing and service. ServiceNow is mainly located in the service field, which is the fastest growing CRM field. However, 60% of this market is still made up of separately developed solutions. The other 20% are traditional solutions, and the rest are from our competitors in the market.

The high proportion of individual solutions is particularly interesting. Because these usually cause big troubles for customers. This is where ServiceNow customer service management can bring huge benefits.

In the service area, the products of most CRM vendors rarely go beyond the scope of collecting simple case logs. I call it response management. Instead, ServiceNow bundles core functions such as omnichannel or case management and combines them with operational functions such as service management and service operations. This makes it possible to provide a true end-to-end experience that goes deep into the root cause and truly solves the customer’s problem.

What is ServiceNow’s vision for customer service management?

Farrell Hoff: We bring together the operational excellence of the entire company. We provide end-to-end active self-service by connecting the service clerks with the back-end operations team or technical team responsible for the product. These teams can help case workers identify the problem and determine the cause of the problem in order to finally solve the problem. Today, companies that use ServiceNow CSM have the huge advantage of being able to solve problems once and for all.

How does Now Platform provide a great customer experience?

Farrell Hoff: Now Platform is unique because it provides a unified data model for the company. Therefore, you don’t have to integrate countless data models from different platforms into your customer service workflow. This allows you to make the best use of our core features: machine learning, local mobile experience, service catalog for generating self-service requests, local knowledge database, and the option to create a self-service portal.

I want to add: Now Platform has a long-standing reputation for best supporting the IT structure of global companies at the operational level. Companies can continue to benefit from investments already made for other use cases, such as customer service. Therefore, you do not need to add other platforms or point solutions. Instead, they are expanding existing investments in order to create added value through another channel.

ServiceNow is part of a larger IT infrastructure platform and tool ecosystem. How does ServiceNow adapt to this ecosystem?

Farrell Hoff: We are one of four or five large platforms that the company invests to support the entire organization. These platforms continue to evolve as the company grows.

We can also add third-party systems or integrate different data sources to meet individual business needs. And our New York version can use virtual data sources. This allows customer service agents to access external information, such as account records that are not the native part of other CSM tools.

IntegrationHub also enables our core platform to integrate third-party systems. Then, you can use our Flow Designer application to set up the workflow of the system. These platform features allow us to study the entire ecosystem and develop more comprehensive solutions to suit every company we serve.

Do you have a specific company example that uses ServiceNow CSM for workflow transformation in customer service?

Farrell Hoff: My favorite example is NICE, a leading analysis software company based in Israel. NICE is part of our ecosystem and shares the same vision with us, which is to improve the customer experience, but it can be used with the phone.

NICE processes approximately 70,000 customer transactions each year, of which 1,000 must be processed individually each month. These cases cannot be automatically assigned to experts with appropriate expertise, so they often end up with the wrong people. When the case finally reaches an experienced technician, the technician usually does not realize the problem. And he cannot access the knowledge base to quickly find a solution. As a result, it takes an average of 24 days to resolve a case.

The implementation of ServiceNow CSM enables NICE to automate and accelerate case management. After only one week of implementation, NICE was able to reduce the number of case assignments through skill-based routing. Now, the necessary skills are determined when the case is created. ServiceNow CSM then automatically forwards the case to available personnel with appropriate knowledge. By combining intuitive processes and a more interactive user interface, NICE can reduce the number of back-end-related cases by 72%-thereby saving $450,000 per year. This shows the power of Now Platform.