ServiceNow's entire Customer Service Management portfolio—Customer Service Management, Field Service Management, and Knowledge Management—have some exciting new features in the Jakarta release. Read on for a summary of the new capabilities.
NEW! Introducing Communities
Announced at Knowledge17 and launching in Jakarta is Customer Service Management's newest application, Communities. Communities are personalized, online spaces that give your customers a personalized destination to engage with peers and experts to solve issues. Through these interactions, your company gains new insights, as well as provides a new low-cost, self-service option.
Communities require the use of the Customer Service Portal and will be tightly integrated with Knowledge Management, as well, creating a very cohesive experience for your online customers. The initial release will include the following features:
- Forums, which will include fine-grained access controls to manage the users who can participate in them.
- Topics, which are curated areas of interest within Forums.
- Various content types will be supported, starting with questions, blogs, and videos. More will be added in the future.
- Configurable types of feedback, including comments, up/downvotes, mark as helpful, like, ratings, and views.
- Content posted in Communities is included in searches from the Customer Service Portal.
See a brief demo of Communities from the Knowledge17 conference here.
Field Service Management Enhancements
The Team Calendar gives the manager a single place to see their team members' planned activities.
Scheduling assignments with technicians takes a leap forward with Dynamic Scheduling, which enables:
- Optimizing assignments within the available time windows for technicians, minimizing travel times.
- Permitting multiple tasks to be assigned to different agents at the same time, with the ability to prioritize tasks while assigning.
- Allowing already-assigned tasks to be automatically un-assigned to make time for a higher priority task.
- Enabling tasks to be automatically reassigned when a technician is incapable of completing the task on time (e.g. when a technician running late, is sick, or decides to take time off).
While performing field service, technicians are often required to collect information as they work, follow procedures step-by-step, or confirm tasks such as safety checks. Questionnaires make this possible, allowing entire Questionnaires or questions within them to be mandatory or optional and enforcing when and what actions can be taken as a result. Questionnaires are designed to work on technicians' mobile devices, making completion in-the-moment easy.
Knowledge Management Enhancements
In the Jakarta release, Knowledge Management will be more tightly integrated with the Customer Service Portal, providing a more cohesive experience. This unified approach will help customers quickly set up their Customer Service Portal with Knowledge Management on day one. This also means users can search for both knowledge base and Communities content from one location without any additional customization. Also, by integrating with Communities, collaboration and crowdsourcing now drives the development of information customers need to solve their issues.
The user interface for Knowledge Management search will now be configurable. It will allow better control over the filtering behavior, sorting, as well as adding custom queries.
Finally, two highly-requested features are being added to Knowledge Management. They are available to all Knowledge Management customers (not limited to Customer Service Management):
- Article versioning, which supports ongoing lifecycle management of documents.
- Subscriptions, permitting users to elect to receive notifications of updates to a knowledge base, such as new articles, or updates to specific articles.
Integration with ServiceNow ® IT Business Management's Cost Transparency
Because driving down costs and maximizing revenue opportunities is important and often a requirement in service organizations, customers who have licensed IT Business Management Cost Transparency may now choose to integrate it with Customer Service Management and Field Service Management. Going beyond profit and loss analysis in the service center, this will raise visibility to different cost drivers, and make it possible to answer such questions as "which products, product versions, or product lines cost the most to support?", "what is the cost allocation to support groups, products, or staffing?", and "what are the costs of labor, expenses, and parts for field service?" In addition to costs, it will be easy to determine where the service organization is driving value; for example, is service contract and billable project work profitable? Now, customer service leaders will have more visibility into the different financial aspects of their business to better understand and drive change affecting both the top and bottom line.
Learn More
Sound interesting? These are just some highlights. You can see some of these features in the Knowledge17 keynote demo, and for a more in-depth look at the new capabilities in Customer Service Management, Field Service Management, and Knowledge Management be sure to contact your account team today to schedule a conversation and demo.
