The challenges facing customer service organizations have never been greater. Many contact centers have been shifting to a remote workforce while at the same time facing increased call volumes. To add to the challenge, customer expectations for good customer service continue to increase – they want fast, personalized service delivered with minimal effort on their part.
To solve these challenges, contact centers are looking to scale using digital-first, AI-driven tools and applications so they can service more customers without ramping up staffing levels in tandem. This has been the age-old balancing act for customer service: increase customer satisfaction and reduce effort, while boosting internal efficiency and reducing costs!
The best of both worlds to reimagine the voice channel
ServiceNow launched our innovative Voice solution earlier this year, initially released for IT Service Management. Now we’ve released Voice for Customer Service Management (CSM) to provide CSM customers with the same AI-driven approach that allows them to reimagine the voice channel. The solution performs upfront sentiment analysis that gets passed to agents and managers to provide actionable customer insights. And it integrates voice channel data with ServiceNow’s Workforce Optimization to unite performance management across native digital channels and the voice channel.
ServiceNow Voice for CSM is architected as an open platform that allows ServiceNow customers to natively integrate with a variety of telephony vendors, such as our initial pre-built integration with Amazon Connect. This best-of-both-worlds approach capitalizes on advanced capabilities from Amazon Connect and ServiceNow. Organizations can meet escalating contact center demands by quickly deploying a contact center—at a lower cost and with greater efficiency than traditional solutions. Let’s explain in a bit more detail.
ServiceNow Voice with Amazon Connect leverages the power of both Amazon Connect and ServiceNow CSM (or ITSM). It takes advantage of the Amazon Connect global cloud telephony infrastructure, Amazon Lex natural language AI speech recognition, and Amazon Lambda serverless computing. It then seamlessly integrates it with workflows, data, and customer service capabilities from ServiceNow, to provide richer experiences via voice.
Natural language access to the service catalog bypasses traditional frustrating call trees and provides a more streamlined customer experience. This empowers users to help themselves and solve common customer service issues, such as checking case status, updating addresses, and updating case comments, without ever having to speak to an agent. And for calls requiring human assistance, the solution provides agents with critical detail and context to accelerate resolution times.
Amazon Lex’s voice recognition and transcription services feed directly into ServiceNow, triggering the appropriate actions to enable intelligent conversations.
An example
Let’s consider an example, illustrated in the diagram below, to show how ServiceNow workflows can be kicked off directly from voice interactions.
A customer, Zeke, calls because a service he subscribes to is unavailable. When greeted, Amazon Connect checks for the caller's identity in ServiceNow and and also checks if there are any issues impacting the caller based on his location. If a major issue is found, Amazon Connect will explain the issue and ask if that's why he's calling. That’s exactly why he’s calling! He then asks, in natural language, to get the status. The bot updates him with a status and expected time for service to be back up. The time is too long, so he asks to speak to an agent. His call is routed with the full interaction context to exactly the right agent to address his issue.
This is how customer service organizations can scale – by expanding self-service within the voice channel, through natural language processing feeding service catalog, workflow and automation.
Key features and benefits of ServiceNow Voice for CSM include:
- A natural language experience: Customers can interact in the voice channel with conversational bots using everyday language.
- More self-service: By automating the most frequent customer support requests, the solution helps lower support costs while maintaining the highest service standards.
- Integrated with Workforce Optimization*: The solution incorporates voice channel data into Workforce Optimization to augment native digital channels, giving managers clear visibility into contact center performance within ServiceNow:
- View queue stats for phone queues
- View in progress phone interactions and click to listen in
- View completed phone interactions and coach agents using recordings, transcripts and sentiment analysis
- Process flexibility: Customer service organizations can deliver flexible, dynamic call flows and service processes. As business needs evolve, they can rapidly modify these flows and processes without disrupting business continuity or the customer experience.
ServiceNow Voice with Amazon Connect is available as a free download from the ServiceNow Store. Downloading this will bring along the relevant apps, including ServiceNow Voice for CSM. For CSM Standard customers, the app can be downloaded and installed in sub-prod environments for evaluation purposes only. Customers with CSM Professional entitlements can use the app in a production environment. Both apps are certified for ServiceNow’s Orlando and Paris releases (as of October 2020).
* Workforce Optimization is available under Limited Access for the Paris release of CSM Professional and is Generally Available (GA) in the Quebec release and later.
