What's new in Customer Service Management in the May '22 Store Release

[kathyneff]

What’s New in Customer Service Management in the May 2022 Store Release?

The May Store release for the Now Platform® brings us several exciting new capabilities in Customer Service Management (CSM). These new features help organizations improve customer and agent experiences and make it fast and easy for process owners to identify and remove inefficiencies! Be sure to review the store release notes for CSM to get all the details. Note that for the May, 2022 Store release, there are no updates for Field Service Management. 

Before we begin, please note: 

• Customer Service Management is licensed in three packages: Standard, Professional, and Enterprise. Each new feature highlighted here indicates which package includes it. You can compare the major features available in each by visiting the “Packages” section of the Customer Service Management product page.  
• Order Management is a new product that can be added onto any CSM package. It was introduced with the San Diego release and is being enhanced in the May store release.

Increase customer engagement with Engagement Messenger

We continue to enhance Engagement Messenger – which, if you recall, embeds self-service on third-party web sites. The first capability being introduced for Engagement Messenger in May is Proactive Recommendations. When customers come to a web site looking for help, we know that often they don’t know what to search for.  And getting help is largely reactive – customers must initiate the process and find where to get support. 

To help solve these challenges, we are releasing Proactive Recommendations. First, it’s proactive. It will pop Engagement Messenger based on a time threshold. Second, it’s contextual. It will automatically perform AI Search for the customer, dynamically using the context of the page the customer is on to populate suggested actions, such as knowledge articles or service catalog items.

The net results are increased customer engagement through a more relevant, proactive experience, and improved productivity for administrators. 

That brings us to the second Engagement Messenger enhancement!

Engagement Messenger can now be easily extended through Configurable Cards. We added this new capability because we heard loud and clear that you want Engagement Messenger to provide a more complete customer experience, not just limited to the self-service information currently available from CSM and field service. 

In this release, Configurable Cards can be created to access any information within ServiceNow tables – beyond customer service and field service. Cards can contain links to other sites, links to portal pages, and lists of data from any table in ServiceNow. Administrators can set up new cards via configuration for fast time to value. They can configure the card title, description, a thumbnail image to display, the page to embed and additional parameters to be passed to the page, or the list of records to be shown. The net result is a more complete customer experience. 

Use AI to highlight inefficiencies and discover process optimization opportunities 

Process Optimization is also being enhanced in the May store release. The purpose of these enhancements is to reduce the effort – the manual work – and thus, the time required, to find process inefficiencies within Process Optimization data. In other words, we are helping you find the proverbial needle in the haystack! 

We are doing this by, first, introducing a Summary and Insights Dashboard within the Analyst Workbench. This helps analysts visualize insights on speed of case resolution, quality metrics, and other KPIs. Additionally, they can configure rules, shown as improvement opportunities on the dashboard, to highlight common inefficiencies: cases sitting unassigned for more than 4 hours; cases rejected by customers and going back to open status; cases that took longer than 8 hours to resolve, and so on. 

From the Improvement Opportunities tiles, analysts can then launch the second enhancement: Automated Root Cause Analysis, or RCA. Automated RCA is a huge productivity booster. It uses AI to discover and highlight case attributes that are most likely drivers of process inefficiency, which are very hard to uncover manually.  For instance, which assignment group is most likely to have slow resolution? Which channel? Which resolution code?  From here, analysts can drill into specific case data to help guide them to the root cause so they can investigate and address it. And then a third additional capability, cluster analysis, is being introduced to help identify groups of similar cases that likely share an inefficiency. 

These three capabilities help make it fast and easy for you to automatically surface insights from Process Optimization to streamline your processes, reduce costs, and improve customer experiences. 

Empower agents to place orders efficiently with Price Lists

Finally, we come to Price Lists, a new capability within Order Management. Order Management was just released in San Diego. We’re adding Price Lists to help improve agent productivity when capturing orders. 

We know that businesses need to support different price lists: a default that’s always valid, Manufacturer’s Suggested Retail Price (Or MSRP), Seasonal price lists, price lists for different currencies, and so on. You also need to plan pricing changes, configuring prices upfront and setting them to go live on a specific date.

With the May release, Price Lists enable you to create multiple price lists, set header details like name, description, effective date and currency; add product offerings as line items, set the unit of measure and price, and optionally set a line-item effective date range that's smaller…in other words, the Easter sale is for the whole week, but the microwave is only for Easter weekend.  You can also work on price lists in a draft state and publish them when ready.  These price lists become available to agents only during the effective dates. Agents can assign a default price list for the whole order, and optionally override specific order line items with different price lists.

In summary, with Order Management price lists, businesses can price their products to meet the needs of a global, diverse customer base and improve efficiency with price list planning. And agents can place orders efficiently, improving productivity and increasing customer satisfaction. 

Learn more

With these great enhancements, Customer Service Management helps you harness the power of your whole organization to serve your customers, boosting agent productivity, streamlining operations, and improving the customer experience.

For more information, review the CSM store release notes and product documentation. Then, schedule a conversation and demo with your account team or contact us here. Don’t forget, the Customer Success Center is also available with essential resources to assist you in planning your upgrade. Onward to Tokyo! 

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