Stop guessing why cases take too long. Start knowing.
ServiceNow Process Mining gives Customer Service leaders and process owners complete visibility into how cases actually move through your organization — from the moment they open to the moment they close. By analyzing the audit log data already captured in your ServiceNow instance, Process Mining surfaces the bottlenecks, reassignment loops, and approval delays silently eroding case resolution performance and customer satisfaction — and uncovers the AI agent and automation opportunities that can eliminate them.
No data extraction. No external tools. No weeks of preparation. Analysis begins in minutes, and the loop from insight to action closes without ever leaving the platform.
Process Mining project focused on how cases are moving from group to group and the volume an velocity of that movement.
KEY CAPABILITIES
What Process Mining does for Customer Service
Process Mining provides a complete solution purpose-built for understanding and improving complex, multi-team customer service workflows.
Visualized Process Map
Generate an accurate map of how customer service cases actually flow — across agents, groups, and states. Instantly identify which paths are creating delays, which routes are non-conformant, and where rework is happening.
Improvement Opportunities
Rule-based and automated detectors surface inefficiencies without requiring manual analysis. The rework detector identifies cases cycling backward through states. The ping-pong detector flags cases bouncing between assignment groups. The slow transition detector pinpoints transitions that take significantly longer than the norm — exactly the type of issue that is easy to miss in aggregate KPIs but damaging to customer experience at scale.
Bottleneck Analysis
Isolate which specific transitions are causing delays — whether a case moving from a first-tier group to a specialist team, or a case waiting for customer information before agents can progress. Drill into the exact transitions creating the most total lost time, not just the longest average.
Process Variation Analysis
See every path a case can take, ranked by volume and average duration. Identify which routes are high-frequency and high-cost, and compare case journeys across channels, regions, or customer segments to find where your best-performing teams are doing things differently.
Work Notes Analysis
Apply machine learning clustering and Now Assist summarization directly to the work notes captured at the moment of an inefficient transfer or escalation. Understand why slow handoffs are happening — without reading through thousands of individual records — and surface the most common themes driving delay.
Root Cause Analysis
Identify hidden correlations between case attributes — category, channel, assignment group, priority — and poor performance outcomes. Use these connections to filter down to the records most likely to explain a systemic pattern, then act with precision.
Advanced Filtering and Comparison
Filter the process map by any combination of case attributes, time ranges, or custom conditions. Save filter sets and compare models side-by-side to measure the before-and-after impact of any process change — or compare performance across regions, teams, or intake channels.
Demonstrations and Overviews
Move the needle on your KPIs that matter most demo
Quick Process Mining for Customer Service Demo
USE CASES
How customer service teams use Process Mining
These some high-impact analyses available to CSM teams today. Each can be set up and producing insights within minutes using your existing ServiceNow case data.
Case Resolution Bottleneck Analysis
Understand exactly where time is being lost in the case lifecycle. Surface which states, transitions, and assignment groups are creating the longest delays — and why. Move beyond average handle time to see the distribution of duration across all case variants, and identify the outliers that are pulling your MTTR in the wrong direction.
Learn more about Bottleneck Analysis
Multi-hop and Reassignment Analysis
Identify cases being routed through multiple assignment groups before reaching resolution. Quantify the total time lost to unnecessary transfers, flag ping-pong patterns between specific team pairs, and use Now Assist work notes summarization to understand the root cause of each pattern — skill gaps, miscategorization, or routing logic failures.
Learn more about Multi-hop Analysis
Approval Bottleneck Analysis
For case types with embedded approval steps, identify where approval delays are the primary driver of extended cycle times. Use breakdowns to determine which approvers, groups, or communication channels are contributing most to delay — then decide where approvals can be streamlined, automated, or removed without sacrificing compliance.
Learn more about Approval Bottleneck Analysis
Automation and AI Agent Discovery
Find the manual work that AI agents should own. Filter for case activities taking 2–30 minutes — the ideal range for AI-powered automation or self-service deflection — then use AI powered highlights and summarization to confirm the pattern and push validated opportunities into Automation Center or the AI Control Tower to capture, track, and prioritize the acting on them.
Learn more about fining Automation and AI Agent opportunities
Before/After Process Change Analysis
Prove that a process change worked — or catch unintended adverse effects before they become systemic. Create filter sets isolating cases closed before and after any change, compare them side-by-side, and get objective evidence of whether resolution times improved, routing became more efficient, or new bottlenecks emerged elsewhere.
Learn more about analyzing the impact of a process change
SLA Breach Analysis
Go beyond knowing what percentage of cases missed SLA and understand exactly why. Isolate SLA-breached cases, trace their paths through the process map, and identify the specific transitions, groups, and case types most responsible — so SLA improvement efforts are targeted at root cause rather than symptoms.
Learn more about SLA Breach analysis
IMPLEMENTATION
Getting started with Process Mining for CSM
Because Process Mining is native to the ServiceNow platform, there is no data extraction, ETL preparation, or external tooling required. All CSM case data is already captured in the audit logs of your instance.
- Step 1: Explore the Process Mining Evaluation Project for Customer Service Cases available in the Process Mining Workspace on your production instance as of the Yokohama release. Learn more about the Process Mining Evaluation Project for Customer Service Cases here.
- Step 2: Explore the Guide to Getting Started with Process Mining content available on the ServiceNow Community. Here you will find demonstrations, how-to's, and common use cases.
- Step 3: Activate the Process Mining for CSM Content Pack — Install the CSM Process Mining Content Pack from the ServiceNow Store. This provides pre-built improvement opportunity configurations, activity definitions, and project templates optimized for customer service case workflows. Learn more about Process Mining Content Packs and process configuration records here.
- Step 4: Create your first project — From the Process Mining Workspace, create a new project on the Case table of your choice. Select State and/or Assignment Group as your Activity Definition. Learn more about creating your first Process Mining project here.
Deeper Dive Sessions
Process Mining Academy session for Customer Service Management
Process Mining for Sales and Order Management recording
KEY BEST PRACTICES
Getting the most from Process Mining in Customer Service
Start with Assignment Group as your Activity Definition
While State-based analysis is the default starting point, customer service workflows often reveal their most impactful inefficiencies through group movement analysis. Switching to Assignment Group as the Activity Definition immediately surfaces reassignment patterns, ping-pong scenarios, and the true cost of miscategorized or misdirected cases.
Use the Improvement Opportunities page before the process map
The automated detectors on the Summary and Insights page will surface the most statistically significant patterns in your data — often identifying issues you did not know to look for. Let the detectors guide your initial investigation before using the visual workbench for confirmation and deeper analysis.
Learn more about the Summary and Insights page and Improvement Opportunities.
Scope initial projects to closed cases
For first-time analysis, filter to cases closed in the last 30 days. This ensures complete process paths and avoids the noise of in-flight cases that have not yet reached resolution. Once you understand the patterns, you can broaden the scope or create separate projects for more specific analysis.
Leverage Work Notes Analysis for high-volume transfer paths
When you identify a high-frequency, slow transfer between two groups, do not attempt to read individual records to understand the cause. Apply Work Notes Analysis to cluster the notes from cases on that transition and use Now Assist summarization to get the key themes in seconds — not hours.
Learn more about Work notes analysis.
Process mining is not a one-time activity
After making a process change, return to the workbench and create a before/after comparison using saved filter sets. This validates that the improvement is working, catches unintended consequences early, and builds the evidence base for continuous improvement conversations with stakeholders.
Check out this 5 Building Blocks of a Successful Process Mining Program session.
Embed insights in the flow of work
Surface improvement opportunities for managers and team leads who may never open the Process Mining Workspace directly. Improvement opportunities linked to KPIs can also be surfaced on existing Platform Analytics dashboards — extending the reach of process intelligence without requiring new workflows.
Learn more about this capability here.
FORMAL LEARNING
Build your Process Mining skills
ServiceNow provides structured learning resources to help administrators, analysts, and process owners get productive with Process Mining quickly.
- Process Mining Academy — The Process Mining Academy is a monthly webinar series where we do deep dives into specific areas of the solution.
- Process Mining for Agentic Workflows — Learn how to mine AI agent execution plan audit logs to continuously improve agentic workflow performance. Covers improvement opportunity identification, bottleneck analysis for agents, and pushing fixes directly to AI Agent Studio.
- ServiceNow University — Foundational and practitioner-level courses on Process Mining capabilities, configuration, and the broader closed-loop process intelligence framework. Recommended for process owners setting up their first production projects.
- Process Mining Getting Started Guide — Step-by-step curriculum for those who are just starting on their Process Mining journey.
- Process Mining Use Case Series — A series of short recordings highlighting the most common types of analysis that customers use Process Mining for.
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
How quickly can we start analyzing our customer service data?
Because Process Mining is native to the ServiceNow platform, your CSM case data is already captured in the platform audit logs. From plugin activation to your first visualized process map takes minutes — not weeks. The evaluation project available in Xanadu and beyond provides a limited project out of the box so teams can experience process mining with their own data before any configuration work begins. Learn more about Process Mining Evaluation Projects here.
How is this different from our existing Platform Analytics dashboards?
Platform Analytics answers what happened — how many cases, what types, how long they took. Process Mining answers why — where is the process stuck, where is unnecessary rework happening, which cases have too many hops, who is holding cases the longest, and what is contributing to SLA breaches. The two solutions are designed to work together: when a KPI misses target in your analytics dashboard, you can click directly through to a process map of the cases behind that KPI in a single click. Analytics tells you the score; Process Mining tells you what to fix. Learn more about the connection between Platform Analytics and Process Mining here.
Can we use Process Mining to identify opportunities for AI agents in our CSM workflow?
Yes — this is one of the highest-value use cases for customer service teams actively deploying AI agents. Process Mining identifies work taking between 2 and 30 minutes to complete (the ideal window for AI-powered automation), uses cluster analysis and Now Assist highlights to confirm patterns. Once these opportunities are validated they can be submitted to the AI Control Tower. Learn more about how to use Process Mining to support your AI initiatives here.
Do we need specialized process mining analysts to operate this?
No. Process Mining is designed to be accessible to process owners, service desk managers, and other process stakeholders — not just administrators or specialized analysts. The automated Improvement Opportunities surface the most significant patterns without requiring manual hypothesis-building. The Summary and Insights page provides guided starting points. And because Process Mining is embedded in the ServiceNow Workspaces that teams already use, process insights reach the people who can act on them without requiring a separate tool or workflow. Learn more about how we make process insights available to everyone here.
Can Process Mining analyze cross-workflow or cross-department case journeys?
Yes. The Multidimensional Map capability allows you to mine across multiple related tables simultaneously — for example, linking a Customer Service Case table with approval records or fulfillment tasks to get a complete end-to-end view of complex case workflows. Learn more about Multidimensional Maps here.
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