The Paris release of the Now Platform® is now available! For the Customer Workflows portfolio, it delivers new functionality across Customer Service Management and Knowledge Management. (See here to learn what’s new in Field Service Management.) Note that some features are available in the Customer Service Management Professional package and are identified with an asterisk (*). Read on to learn what’s new!
Customer Service Management
When delivering customer service, activities can be categorized as customer engagement and service operations. As such, new capabilities in Customer Service Management fall into one of these two areas. Let’s explore what’s new for each in Paris.
Customer Engagement
Customer engagement can be further broken down into both the customer experience side and agent experience side. Paris adds new capabilities for both experiences.
Customer experience
The simplicity of SMS (text) messaging is now available with Messaging.* By using the Twilio conversational SMS adapter (available in the ServiceNow® Store), companies can provide customers with service via text messaging. Other mainstream channels will be supported in the future.
Auto-Responder* replies when cases are created by customers with recommended knowledge articles. Powered by machine learning, these suggestions give customers potential solutions as they wait for a response. It’s so intelligent, it won’t send articles customers have already viewed before submitting their case, only articles not yet viewed!
Customers rely on self-service to provide answers and fix problems, but it can be challenging to analyze the best way to improve these channels. Self-Service Analytics for Customer Service* is a new dashboard that helps to quantify the effectiveness of Knowledge Management, Communities, Service Catalog, and Virtual Agent. Unsuccessful searches are also surfaced to help identify content gaps to address. This complements Orlando’s Knowledge Demand Insights dashboard to help drive the best possible self-service experience for customers.
Not every customer interaction is via telephone or a digital channel. That’s why we’ve added Walk-Up Experience for Customer Service. This quickly-deployed, out-of-the-box option provides walk-in customers and in-store representatives with a means of managing queues and interactions face-to-face, improving the experience for both. A special ServiceNow® Store package–Guest Walk-up Experience for CSM–will support unauthenticated customers.
First made globally available in May 2020 as a ServiceNow store offering, the integration with Adobe® Experience Manager (AEM) has been included with the Paris release. With it, companies can extend Knowledge Management capabilities through ServiceNow components in AEM to deliver an integrated and consistent web experience for end users to access information when and where they need it.
Agent experience
Wouldn’t customers be happy if, after failing to find an answer using self-service, they didn’t need to rehash with an agent everything they explored and tried? In Paris, we are introducing Customer Central, an out-of-the-box Agent Workspace layout that incorporates customer portal history, such as knowledge article views and Virtual Agent conversations. It includes customer conversations across cases and contact channels. Beyond that, it can be easily modified to use custom components and bring in data from other sources, such as Product 360, customer health scores, churn risk, recent transactions, etc. The layout can be configured to support individual customers’ needs.
Workforce Optimization* (available as a Limited Access feature) provides real-time visibility across multiple channels. Customer service supervisors and managers can monitor agent productivity and workload from their own unique workspace. Managers can use Channel Management to track real-time information such as number of customers waiting and agent availability. Average handling times can be monitored and drill-downs deliver even greater detail. Scheduling delivers shift management and provides agents with a personal work schedule. Coaching offers coaching opportunities and assessments. Skill Recommendations uses machine learning to predict and recommend agent skills.
Various other enhancements have been added to Agent Workspace to support omni-channel customer interactions. With Agent Whisper, agents can request help from their chat supervisor and agents can send messages to each other without notifying the customer. Email authoring has been improved, with the ability to save drafts and send messages from Agent Workspace. Native Pre-Chat gathers the context of customers’ issues prior to the start of a chat, which helps route the chat to the appropriate chat queue or group and provides that context to the agent.
Service Operations
In the course of performing even the most common tasks for customers, agents are often confronted with many disconnected middle- and back-office systems, siloed teams, and manual processes. This slows their execution and impacts customer satisfaction. With Playbooks for Customer Service Management,* companies can define the data, tasks, and automation necessary to digitize even the most complex service processes. Agents use a visual guide to perform the various tasks in the proper sequence to resolve the customer issue. Agents can also monitor the progress of steps needed to resolve the issue with downstream teams. Pre-packaged playbooks will be released on the ServiceNow® Store, starting with Complaints, Onboarding, and Product Support.
In contact centers where tier 1 agents triage customers before escalating or routing the case to a specialist team, they ask the same questions of every customer. This is inefficient and negatively impacts the customer experience. Guided Decisions* addresses this, creating a standard set of instructions which surfaces contextual recommendations to direct customer service agents along the optimal path to resolve complex issues.
In some industries, companies’ relationships with their customers are, well, complex. It’s difficult to track all the parties involved in that relationship and their data access, be it family members allowed to view and change details of the shared mobile plan or employees at multiple business locations authorized to create new cases. Industry Data Models* enables companies to flexibly model households and business locations to support industry verticals using Customer Service Management and ServiceNow’s new industry solutions.
Ever needed to ramp up customer service quickly or regularly use a third-party to deliver customer service? This often means separate systems, making it difficult to share information and maintain data privacy. Outsourced Customer Service* reduces these challenges by enabling outsourcers to work in the same ServiceNow instance. Onboarding capabilities are included for managers and agents, and assignment groups can be created for outsourced teams. Cases can be routed between internal and outsourced teams. And criteria can be set to control the data accessible to outsourced agents.
It can be challenging to identify common factors driving increases in case volume if different terms or language are used to describe the customers’ question or issue. By tapping into Predictive Intelligence’s machine learning capabilities, Customer Service Trending Topics* enables companies to quickly pinpoint these issues and act to mitigate them.
The Customer Service Management and Service Portfolio Management integration in Paris makes the Common Services Data Model 2.0 available to customer service. With this integration, customer service agents can quickly view the service definition for sold products, customers can request services related to their purchased products, and service owners can quickly identify customers subscribed to underlying services.
Knowledge Management
Knowledge Management (KM) is the cornerstone of great customer service. It provides customers with a helpful self-service option and serves as a great reference for customer service agents. In Paris, we continue to enhance KM with several exciting new capabilities.
Now you will be able to use a familiar and powerful tool for creating and editing articles. Knowledge Authoring with Microsoft Word Online is deployed easily using an add-in for Word. Authors and contributors can create articles using Word, as well as search for and edit existing articles. Collaboration features in Word simplify review. Articles then flow through standard knowledge authoring workflow in ServiceNow, speeding the publication process.
Content to continue using KM’s built-in editor? Good news, Paris brings HTML Editor Enhancements sure to make knowledge article authors happy. New options include text formatting/styles, auto-generated table of contents from content headers, code insertion, find and replace, clear formatting, paste as text, word count, indenting, and text strikethrough.
The Knowledge API makes it possible to extend KM functionality to other websites outside of ServiceNow. Relevant articles can now be placed in other parts of the customer journey–most viewed, featured, or searched for–providing more contextual, in-the-moment assistance. The Knowledge API will be available in the ServiceNow® Store.
Author Knowledge Blocks in Agent Workspace makes it easier to work with reusable knowledge blocks. This includes such tasks as creating a block for a knowledge article, managing all unpublished and published blocks authored, adding blocks to an existing article, and retiring a block not used in any articles.
Learn more
These are just a few of the many new features coming to Customer Service Management and Knowledge Management in the Paris release. You can read more about these and other new capabilities in the Product Documentation or schedule a conversation and demo with your account team (and discuss the value of moving from Customer Service Management Standard to Professional, if appropriate). Also be sure to visit the Customer Success Center to review essential resources to assist you in planning your upgrade. Welcome to Paris!
P.S. Did you attend Knowledge 2020 Digital Experience? If not or if you want to check out content you might have missed, head for the Customer Workflows channel and binge watch sessions, demos, and other content. A ServiceNow ID is required to view content.
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