Customer Portals

Harriet Frankli · 3 weeks ago

Overview

Customer portals provide fast, consistent service experiences across channels, with easy setup and configurable branding. Portals also enable customers to ask questions using AI with Now Assist in Virtual Agent, AI Search, and Virtual Agent with enhanced chat for Customer Service Management (CSM) and CRM and industry customers (including consumers, constituents, business organizations, partners and more).

Key personas:

Business Analyst or administrator - the setup and administration is designed to be configurable with low code/no code effort.

Customers

Business Value:

Better customer experience - The ServiceNow Customer Portal offers a centralized access point for information and self-service options, allowing users to resolve issues on their own and minimize wait times. It provides a personalized experience through tailored workflows and AI-driven recommendations, and ensures that content is displayed in the user's preferred language
Operational efficiency - Streamline processes automate tasks and workflows, accelerating service delivery. Integrated systems provide a consistent service experience, while real-time data access enables agents to resolve issues more efficiently when escalation is necessary
Reduce costs - Customer Portal self-service capabilities decrease the volume of support cases and associated costs, enable staff to concentrate on more complex tasks through automation, and allow the platform to scale according to business growth

Features:

Access Knowledge Base articles
Leverage AI Search or Zing Search or Now Assist search
Manage Cases
Manage Service Requests
Engage in Chat or Now Assist enhanced chat
Launch Virtual Agent
Engage with Now Assist (Gen AI)
Create and view Playbooks
Submit Callback Requests
View appointments, surveys, contact information, more

Avoid confusion with Customer Portal and Service Portal:

Service Portal is platform framework and foundation for customer portals for CSM. Customer Portals are built on the service portal framework, but are vary from other portals since they are built with specific capabilities, navigation and customer experiences for CSM.

Any implementor or partner should always start with a CSM or CRM portal and not an ITSM or employee center portal. While each portal is using the same platform, capabilities and navigation, each portal is designed for different user flows and personas and applications, so it’s important to understand the platform capabilities as well each portal and the differences.

NOTE: To further clarify, the service portal platform’s overall name and menu navigation, is referred to as “service portal”, however, this should not be confused with an individual portal also known as “service portal” using the portal suffix (/sp).

Reference Portals:

CRM ships out of the box portals referred to as reference portals. Make sure you use the correct CRM reference portal to start your implementation, as there are multiple options. Starting with the wrong portal or using a portal for employees will cause re-work.

Please see a sample list of reference portals.

Portal type	Suffix	Description
Business Portal (after Yokohama Q1)	/business_portal	New B2B business portal
B2B Customer Service Management Portal (prior to Yokohama Q1)	/csm	Old B2B portal
B2C Consumer Service Portal	/csp	Consumer Portal (B2C)
Business Location Service Portal	/blsp	Portal to manage internal and external business locations/and or organizations
Business Portal for Sales and Order Management	/business_portal	Portal to manage B2B Sales and Order Management
Retail Portal Service Portal	/rsp	Portal for store-level inquiries within a corporate/region/store hierarchy
Manufacturing Commercial Operations Dealer Portal	/mco	Manufacturing Commercial Operations Dealer portal
Government Service Portal - Public Sector Digital Services Constituent Services	/gsp	Portal for Constituent-facing services in public sector
Grants Management Portal		Constituents and business contacts can find, apply for, and track the status of their grant applications using the Grants Management Portal
Patient Support Portal Service Portal	/psp	Portal for patients to create cases and access information
Care team Portal Service Portal	/careteam	Portal for internal hospital staff managing patient-related Cases
Community Portal	/community	Portal for peer-to-peer engagement and brand interaction
Partner Portal		Portal for Partner Relationship manager or a channel partner

Portal Record:

The portal record contains the common confirmation information for a portal. It includes the configuration for the Mega Menu, Header/Footer, Taxonomy, Theme, Search Config, Common Entry points like Home page, login page, and more. If also contains the configuration for content sources such as knowledge and catalogs.

The portal URL suffix varies (/suffix) and is configurable and used to access the portal and portal pages.

Please see video below:

CSM Portals:

There are three reference portals that ship with Customer Service Management below:

For business to business organizations, the business portal (/business_portal) is the default B2B portal and new customer experience that leverages Configurable Portal Widgets. *Prior to the Yokohama release, the customer service management portal (/csm) was the default portal for B2B. There are customers still using the /csm portal, but it is recommended that they migrate to the new business portal.
For consumer organizations – the current Consumer Service Portal (/csp) is for B2C organizations.
For business organizations that will provide support for both internal and external locations, the business service location portal is the default (/blsp)

See below for more details:

CRM & Industry Portals:

Several reference portals ship with CRM & Industries:

Getting Started with Configurable Portal Widgets

Most of the reference portals leverage Configurable Portal Widgets (CPW). Configurable Portal Widgets are a library of widgets available for Customer Service Management and CRM portals that enable business analysts to configure widgets for a faster time to market with a low code/no code solution.

These widgets eliminate the need to clone and customize widgets to make changes.

Playbooks on portal offer step-by-step guidance for resolving specific types of cases.