In today's environment, customer service organizations are looking to make the most of their valuable resources, while striving to stay competitive by delivering differentiated customer experiences. That means giving managers visibility and control over agent workloads, improving customers’ digital experiences, and finding cost effective ways to remove mundane, repetitive tasks to increase productivity.
We’re pleased to say that the latest Customer Service Management (CSM) innovations in the November 2023 store release can help you meet these imperatives!
Here are the top innovations we’ll discuss:
- Workforce Optimization: Work scheduler for cases
- New and enhanced Configurable Portal Widgets
- Product catalog import/export
Workforce Optimization: Work scheduler for cases
New with Workforce Optimization in the November 2023 store release is the ability to view, manage and assign cases to agents using the work scheduler. For organizations that have Advanced Work Assignment (AWA) or a Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) integration, activities will be combined with the Workforce Optimization team calendar.
Contact center managers need an easy way to monitor workload and agent presence in real time. Many organizations must manage a hybrid workforce where people are working from home or not present in the same room. They need a single view to track real-time agent status, as well as cases and interactions assigned to agents. This applies as well when they have a CCaaS integration or AWA.
These challenges are solved with the Workforce Optimization work scheduler for cases. Managers can now view, manage, and assign case workload, improving agent productivity and customer service. They can reduce resolution time by assigning their team case work based on skills, capability, availability, and work complexity. The work scheduler provides managers with better insights, allowing them to view team availability, recommendations, and assignments in a single comprehensive view.
Workforce Optimization: Work scheduler for cases
Work scheduler provides:
- A real time view of agents’ logged in status and their current work items (cases or interactions) for organizations who are not using Workforce Optimization.
- Real-time agent presence status monitoring for organizations who are using CCaaS integrations or AWA presence.
- The ability to monitor scheduled vs. actual activity and schedule adherence for organizations who are using CCaaS integration or AWA combined with Workforce Optimization team calendar.
Managers can manually allocate work directly from the team calendar view based on agent availability and shift timings, view recommended agents for a task based on skill match, and filter the list of cases visible on sidebar.
New and enhanced Configurable Portal Widgets
The Q4 ’23 store release also includes several updates to Configurable Portal Widgets. These were originally developed to help prevent duplication of effort across teams who work on separate portals, unify user experiences across portals, expedite development using configuration instead of coding, and automatically incorporate common requirements such as accessibility.
Configurable Portal Widgets enable administrators to leverage a library of reusable, configurable widgets for faster time to market for customer and industry solutions. Each widget has configuration options to control behavior and visual appearance, such as, title, description, alignment on page, and search capabilities and behavior. Examples of previously released widgets include Banner, Banner Carousel, Mega Menu, Data List, Case Cards, Quick Links, and others.
This release includes new widgets as well as enhancements to existing widgets:
- Header Search – Provides ability to place a search bar on the top of portal pages, making search easily accessible on every page. The search bar will be part of the header (black bar at the top) and is enabled by using the header shipping with this release.
- Mega Menu (mobile) – Improves mobile experiences with the Mega Menu’s hierarchical menu now available on mobile sites.
- Unified Taxonomy/Browse – Reduces resolution time by making information easier to find with unified taxonomy and browsing.
- Theming Enhancements – Improves customer experience by managing and adding registered users and configuring branding and theming.
- Quick Links Configuration Enhancements – Improves productivity for admins or developers by delivering the ability to configure links in the Quick Links table, eliminating the need to write JSON code.
Configurable Portal Widgets: Header widget example at run time
Configurable Portal Widgets: Quick Links Configuration
In summary, Configurable Portal Widgets enable organizations to reduce implementation and maintenance effort and achieve visual and behavior variations with a modern look and feel to deliver better customer experiences.
Product catalog import/export
Product catalog import/export allows administrators to move catalog data more easily from one Service Now instance to another Service Now instance, or to or from third party systems.
The product catalog is part of CSM and is used when creating and managing orders. Product offerings in the catalog are created with several related entities, such as specifications, characteristics, and characteristic options. These each reside in different database tables. The export/import of a product offering needs to include all related product detail information as well as the hierarchy relationships. As an example, a mobile product offering would include a cellular plan and SIM card as child product offerings. The phone itself would have characteristics such as ‘color ‘with options like blue, gray, or red, and ‘storage’ with options such as 64GB or 128GB. Until now, there was no way to export product catalog data from these multiple tables, or import the data, in a single step. This negatively impacted productivity and opened the door to errors such as incomplete data transfer.
Organizations typically do not use ServiceNow as the master system of record for product data. But they need a way to reliably import product data into ServiceNow. Additionally, customers often test the product catalog entities in a staging area, such as a ServiceNow development instance, before publishing the data into a production instance for customer and agent use. So, they need to synchronize the data from external systems into ServiceNow, and ensure the data is consistent between different systems and ServiceNow instances to ensure customer orders are placed accurately.
Product Catalog Import/Export
The November 2023 store release solves these challenges! Now, administrators can quickly import and export catalog data, including the hierarchy and all related data. They can easily move product data from staging to production, or to and from third-party systems, using JSON. This ensures that catalog data can be regularly updated and stay consistent across multiple systems. And update times are reduced as only changed data is imported or exported.
All the administrator needs to do is select the catalog entities they want to move to another system, then create and submit an export job. Once the job completes, the file is then imported into the destination instance. All relevant product hierarchy and details are automatically included.
Product catalog import/export enables organizations to introduce products faster, improve accuracy, and increase efficiency.
Additional enhancements
In addition to these top innovations, there are two other enhancements worth noting that improve both manager and agent productivity.
Workforce Optimization has been enhanced with an integration to Amazon Connect, enabling the Channel Management page to display Amazon Connect metrics and queue data in real-time for easier workload management. For organizations not using Amazon Connect, we provide APIs to allow you to connect to other CCaaS vendors.
Finally, Playbooks horizontal and vertical process templates have been enhanced to include case summaries, allowing agents to respond to customers more quickly and focus on providing a great customer experience.
These new and enhanced capabilities empower your organization to streamline operations, boost agent productivity, and improve the customer experience. By leveraging these features, businesses can deliver the top-tier customer service that today's customers demand while simultaneously increasing efficiency and reducing operational costs. For more information, review the November 2023 store release notes, then schedule a meeting and demo with your account team, or contact us here.
