In the Washington DC release, we are launching several exciting new features to enable technology providers to accelerate speed to market for new solutions and reduce costs while delivering seamless experiences to consumer and enterprise customers alike.
In the ever-changing tech landscape, rapid changes are now the norm. As budgets tighten and demands rise, tech providers face undeniable challenges and cost pressures. Amidst this dynamic environment, the focus shifts to delivering the best-of-breed solution, avoiding the complexity and additional cost requirements. This strategic shift aims at driving efficiency, tackling financial strains, ensuring seamless customer experiences, and consistently delivering maximum value. The dual pursuit of growth and cost savings poses unique challenges for both tech providers and their leaders.
In the latest release, we bring several exciting new capabilities to our products Technology Provider Service Management (TPSM), and the newly re-named Sales and Order Management for Technology Providers (SOMTP). TPSM excels in diagnostics, introducing enhanced troubleshooting capabilities that help provide faster issue resolution and reduce errors. We are excited to showcase SOMTP’s new capabilities that manage the entire product sales lifecycle. Integrating systems and teams across the ecosystem accelerates order fulfilment, boosts revenue, and increases overall organisational efficiency, promising a seamless sales and order experience that grows revenue and builds customer loyalty.
Let's deep dive into the key features introduced in each module:
Technology Provider Service Management (TPSM) Enhancements
In the Washington DC release, Technology Provider Service Management (TPSM) undergoes significant enhancements that support continual modernization for seamless customer experiences.
TPSM Service Bridge introduces enhanced troubleshooting capabilities and support for variable sets in remote catalogs. Troubleshooting diagnostics provide insights into the state of the transport system and recent connection-related communications, speeding up issue resolution. Variable sets simplify catalog variables management, enhancing efficiency and reducing errors.
Additionally, TPSM introduced automated outbound streaming notification for trouble ticketing via Kafka-based Hermes capability, enhancing case and incident event update times with third-party ticketing applications.
- Enhanced Service Bridge – Transport Diagnostics provides feedback about the state of the transport system and recent communications for each connection, allowing the admin to recognize, test, and recover from errors easily. This feature will enable proactive Service Bridge support and reduce issue resolution time.
Monitoring the connection between ServiceNow instances
- Enhanced Service Bridge - Assigning variables to each catalog item individually is tedious, time-consuming, and susceptible to errors. Remote catalog variable set support enables creating a reusable collection of variables applicable to multiple catalog items. This approach helps save time by reducing redundant variable creation and streamlines updates, as changes in variable sets are automatically reflected across associated items.
Reusable variable sets
- Trouble ticket outbound notifications enable automated streaming (outbound) notification support for trouble ticketing, providing timely updates of cases and incidents to third-party ticketing applications, improving the efficiency of business operations, and reducing delays. Our approach leverages the Hermes capability and utilizes Kafka as the underlying transport mechanism between the two applications. We follow TM Forum's guidelines to maintain compatibility and align with industry standards, particularly TMF621 for trouble tickets and TMF666 for events.
Streaming event notifications
Sales and Order Management for Technology Providers (SOMTP) Enhancements
In the Washington DC release, Order Management for Technology Providers (OMTP) is re-named to Sales and Order Management for Technology Providers (SOMTP) and introduces several exciting new capabilities. SOMTP provides a set of applications to manage the product sales lifecycle, including pre-sales opportunities, offer configuration and pricing, sales quote generation, order capture, order fulfillment, and post-sales engagement. It enables organizations to create one continuous value stream by managing the opportunity to renew the lifecycle on one platform. It fuses front, middle, and back office teams with one system of engagement and action. SOMTP connects with an organization's existing applications and augments them with ServiceNow workflows, helping increase organizational efficiency, speed up order fulfillment, and accelerate and boost revenue.
- Opportunity Management allows sales agents to track and manage potential opportunities. At the appropriate point, they can seamlessly transition an opportunity to the next phases, like quote creation and generation, order creation, and order fulfillment, all on the unified ServiceNow platform. Opportunities can be imported from third-party systems or created in ServiceNow and pushed to third-party systems. Opportunity Management includes needs analysis, a Kanban view to drag and drop opportunities between stages, opportunity activity tracking, and the ability to easily create quotes from opportunities, helping to improve both efficiency and the customer experience.
Opportunity details
- Quote Management is a new application within SOMTP that enables organizations to configure and price quotes, manage the quote lifecycle, and automatically create orders from quotes upon customer acceptance. Quotes can be imported from third-party systems to streamline quote-to-order processes and workflows.
Quote creation using Product Configurator
- Order Capture allows organizations to capture orders faster to help increase customer satisfaction and accelerate revenue collection. The order capture experience improved with easier catalog navigation and a new product configurator user interface (UI). It allows minimal order details to be collected upfront and triggers order enrichment tasks to be created and assigned after order capture. Post-sale commercial change order workflows are also available to manage move, add, change, and disconnect orders (MACD), and the same product catalog and configurator are available to provide more upsell and cross-sell opportunities.
Order capture with Product Catalog
- Order Fulfillment helps order agents monitor the progress of complex orders with multiple products and fulfillment tasks. Complex orders can take several days to complete and involve different teams. Delays at one step can have cascading effects and put the whole order status at risk. Instead of navigating through multiple related lists and tabs to view the complete order status, now order agents can see everything in one place with a chart highlighting any risks. This helps agents ensure orders are on track, helps identify delays and fallouts, and keeps customers happy by giving them a more accurate order status.
Order timeline view
- Customer Contracts & Entitlements enables contract data to be available in a standardized format to support both post-sale workflows and sync with contracts in third-party systems to give agents a consistent view of contracts. Entitlements have been expanded to support several support hours, hourly rates for extra support, SLAs, extended warranty, and more. A standard API is now available to allow customers to automate entitlement verifications. Entitlement offers can be configured in the product catalog and added to orders, products, and services. Using the commercial MACD workflows (see Order Capture and Fulfillment slide), support agents can now easily modify contract entitlements for customers.
Contract workspace
- Product Catalog Management has been enhanced in this release to provide agents with a better configuration and pricing experience, allowing them to configure quotes or orders faster and more accurately. The catalog is available anywhere quotes or orders are accessible during sales or support engagements.
Product Catalog
As a rapidly expanding technology provider in the dynamic cloud-based industry, ServiceNow recognizes the significance of providing exceptional experiences across all services and swiftly adapting to changing market demands. Explore further by visiting our webpage dedicated to Technology Provider Service Management.
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