Customer Service Management (CSM) Welcome Guide

ServiceNow · ‎10-03-2022

Welcome to ServiceNow CSM!

Are you ready to start your Customer Service Management (CSM) implementation journey? With ServiceNow CSM, you’ll empower employees to address customer needs quickly and proactively, connecting your entire organization to deliver a friction-free customer experience. This guide gives you the information you need to get going fast, including proven guidance and links to valuable resources—all designed to set you on the path to success. While this guide is primarily designed for ServiceNow platform owners, it also contains useful information if you have a different role in your organization.

Let’s get started!

Guide Overview

Here’s an overview of the topics we will cover in the guide:

Familiarize yourself with CSM
Decide on business outcomes
Chart your implementation path
Prepare for organization change
Bookmark resources

Start by familiarizing yourself with CSM

CSM comes with many capabilities that help you deliver extraordinary customer service. You can get an high-level overview of these capabilities on the CSM product page and in the CSM datasheet. You’ll find links to product documentation for selected capabilities in the box on the right. This short video also provides a high-level overview of CSM capabilities.

However, you don’t need to implement everything at the start. Here are the key CSM capabilities to focus on first:

CSM Data Management: Organize and manage data for both internal users and external customers, including account and contact information, products, assets, contracts, and entitlements. (product documentation)
Case Management: Use a variety of features available with Customer Service Management to manage cases for your customers. (product documentation)
CSM Configurable Workspace: Provide customer service agents with the tools they need to help answer customer questions and resolve customer issues. (product documentation)

The Customer Service Management Essentials on-demand course will also help you to understand key CSM applications and how they work. If you are new to ServiceNow, we also recommend that you take the Welcome to ServiceNow course to learn the platform basics. If you want a deeper dive into the Now Platform, a longer ServiceNow Administration Fundamentals course is also available.

CSM Packages

CSM Standard package includes:

CSM Professional package adds:

CSM Enterprise package adds:

Now Assist for CSM is available as an add-on (Professional Plus or Enterprise Plus).

Chart a path to implementation

Work with ServiceNow experts

Many ServiceNow customers work with a ServiceNow partner or ServiceNow Expert Services for their CSM implementation since this accelerates rollout and helps them achieve their goals faster.

If you have chosen to work with a ServiceNow partner or ServiceNow Expert Services for your implementation, it’s important to clearly communicate the business outcomes you want to achieve and agree on a well-structured roadmap to attain these goals. If you need guidance on successfully engaging with an implementation partner, see this article as an excellent starting point.

To accelerate time to value and reduce risk, make sure that your partner uses Now Create, ServiceNow’s library of more than 1000 leading implementation practices. We also recommend you use Now Create if you are self-implementing, as it provides a wealth of assets designed to guide you to success.

If you want to work with a partner but haven’t selected one yet, check out our Partner Finder or talk to your ServiceNow account representative about ServiceNow Expert Services. We can also work with your chosen partner to infuse our expertise into your implementation through our ServiceNow Co-Delivery service offering.

For those of you who have purchased ServiceNow Impact services, ServiceNow experts and resources are at your fingertips to help you implement CSM and achieve your goals. If you don’t have a ServiceNow Impact package, consider how having dedicated resources, discounted training, and jumpstart services can help you get the most out of your ServiceNow investment. Read more here.

Pro Tip!

Stick to out-of-the-box ServiceNow functionality wherever possible when self-implementing. The process guides below provide detailed descriptions of “as designed” ServiceNow functionality for key CSM capabilities.

Choose Self-implementation

Build your team’s skills

If you do plan to self-implement, you’ll need to build your platform team’s knowledge and skills before you begin. This is another reason many CSM customers choose to work a partner instead of self-implementing. The following certification paths are a good starting point for building these skills, but we do strongly recommend that you also engage resources who have previous CSM implementation experience.

Make your implementation smooth and easy

For a comprehensive implementation process framework that is proven to scale to the largest, most complex global deployments, take a look at our Success Packs on Now Create. Success Packs tailor our core Now Create methodology of more than 700 leading practices to deliver business outcomes aligned with specific product sets. There are a number of Success Packs for CSM, including the following:

Modernize Customer Service is a starter success pack for adopting ServiceNow CSM.
Maximize Agent Productivity focuses on helping agents to deliver exceptional customer service by optimizing the agent experience.

This implementation checklist can also help you get ready for implementation.

Understand ServiceNow releases and upgrades

If you’re not already on the latest ServiceNow release, we strongly recommend that you upgrade before you go live. By upgrading, you get new ServiceNow innovations into the hands of your users faster, gain access to the latest performance and security enhancements, and ensure that support is there when you need it. To make your upgrade smooth and successful, check out these upgrade resources.

Prepare for organizational change

To successfully deploy CSM, you need your business to understand and use CSM, and to recognize its benefits. To do this, you need to communicate what’s changing and why, both to your end users and to your service desk agents. If you need help creating a winning communications plan, this communications plan template also provides useful advice. Also, the Welcome to ServiceNow course is a great starting point.

Wrap-up

You can now embark on your ServiceNow CSM journey with confidence, leveraging this guide to swiftly and effectively implement CSM, ensuring the seamless and proactive customer experience across your organization!

Helpful Bookmarks

Now Create - Offers step-by-step delivery guidance based on real-world experiences and proven leading practices, to perform digital transformations relying on the expertise of thousands of successful implementations. It provides a prescriptive methodology, tailored to the current need, addressed by role.
Now Support - You can get technical issues resolved quickly by contacting our team of ServiceNow employees with deep product knowledge and real-world experience. Read more here on how to use support.
Join the ServiceNow Community! You'll find the best practices and other useful resources for CSM, Industry, and other ServiceNow products. It's a great place to discuss with ServiceNow experts to get your questions answered and connect with other community members.

DHarris1 · ‎03-12-2025

Hi Neil,

Although this is an excellent guide, I am not able to find any information regarding Customer Project Management, and the link provided cannot be accessed. Could you please provide some information and use cases on how it is used?

Customer Project Management

Thanks

Denee

Neil Kostecki · ‎03-14-2025

Hi @DHarris1, thanks for letting us know. I've updated the link. Have a read and let us know if you have any other questions.