6 ways to deliver great customer service with automation & intelligence

In a competitive market, delivering great customer service is critical to maintaining relevance and exceeding expectations. However, many organisations struggle to manage fragmented systems, front and back offices that don’t “talk” to each other, and clunky workflows that tap into far too many systems and applications.

In fact, according to the ServiceNow Customer Experience Trends report, “44% of agents say their biggest challenges are difficulty communicating with other departments and delays resolving customer issues”.

ServiceNow is dedicated to helping organisations across industries make it easier for customers to self-serve, empower agents with automation and intelligence, and streamline front-, middle- and back-office workflows in six key ways.

1. Supercharge with generative AI

AI is transforming businesses more than anything that came before it. But the real game-changer is the scale and speed that result when it’s built on a single, unified platform such as the Now Platform.

Now Assist, the generative AI (GenAI) solution embedded directly into the Now Platform, provides out-of-the-box intelligence that can drive immediate value by boosting customer self-service and supercharging agent productivity.

With Now Assist in Virtual Agent, organisations can deliver more direct, relevant and conversational responses to questions—and take action on requests. This can enable customers to resolve issues on their own without escalating inquiries to agents.

At the same time, Now Assist empowers agents to serve customers more effectively:

• Chat summarisation allows agents to quickly learn the details of a chat and save customers from having to repeat the same information they’ve already provided to Virtual Agent.
• Case summarisation uses GenAI to swiftly read and distil case history information and automate the creation of case summary notes for quicker handoffs between teams, shaving minutes off the close of every case.
• Post-call summarisation uses GenAI to summarise voice transcripts when a call ends, enabling agents to accelerate wrap-up time, reduce handle time and serve more customers.
• Knowledge article generation uses GenAI to draft knowledge base articles from case records and work notes, accelerating companywide information sharing, boosting case deflection and improving agent productivity.

Simplifying and streamlining manual processes with GenAI helps organisations improve the quality and speed of service delivered to customers. This allows agents to focus on more complex assignments and highly empathetic human interactions.

2. Unify the agent experience

The front office is littered with point solutions, resulting in inconsistent service across channels, frustrated customers and unproductive agents. Siloed technologies, multiple agent desktops and routing systems that don’t talk to each other require agents to swivel-chair across applications to field customer inquiries.

Agents and middle- and back-office workers spend time chasing things down, which delays resolution time. Customers grow weary repeating their story and waiting for the outcome they want. ​

To address these persistent challenges once and for all, and to improve customer and employee experiences, ServiceNow and Genesys have partnered to deliver a turnkey, AI-powered solution for organisations worldwide.

Unified Experience from Genesys and ServiceNow brings together the strengths of each platform to unify the agent experience in a single workspace. By centralising routing across channels and departments and optimising workforce engagement, organisations can increase productivity, accelerate resolution and boost loyalty.

3. Sell, fulfil and serve on one platform

An organisation’s livelihood depends on its ability to capture sales and deliver orders. But once an order occurs, the front, middle, and back offices must come together flawlessly.

Too many organisations are struggling to work across disparate systems to manage product catalogues, deliver quotes, fulfil complex orders, manage renewals and upgrades and more.

ServiceNow Sales and Order Management helps organisations increase revenue by uniting the sales and order lifecycles across front-, middle- and back-office teams on the ServiceNow platform. Sales and fulfilment agents can easily manage opportunities, configure and price quotes, and capture and fulfil orders.

The product empowers customer service agents to complete post-sale commercial changes and renewals. This helps drive upsell and cross-sell opportunities—on the same platform agents use to manage customer service requests.

Improving the customer lifecycle is a core need for businesses in industries such as telecommunications, manufacturing and technology. Sales and Order Management can help organisations orchestrate a more connected and coherent sales-fulfilment-service experience on a single platform to simplify processes, improve customer experiences and accelerate results.

4. Simplify manufacturing operations

ServiceNow has long recognised the unique customer service needs across industries and has delivered industry-specific applications to help organisations better meet customer needs while speeding time to value. This certainly holds true for manufacturing.

The manufacturing industry faces a complex set of challenges, including supply chain disruption, long order fulfilment times, ever-changing customer requests, a lack of self-service tools, invoice disputes, high turnover and labour shortages. At the same time, manual processes and siloed systems often result in high costs, inefficient operations and poor customer and employee experiences.

Manufacturing Commercial Operations puts the power of the Now Platform to work for manufacturers with purpose-built solutions that simplify operations across sales, support and service, and order-to-cash processes. ‑‑

Built on top of ServiceNow Customer Service Management and Sales and Order Management, Manufacturing Commercial Operations offers a single, AI-powered solution for:

• Order exceptions
• Dealer operations
• Customer service and support
• Order-to-cash operations
• Product and quality management

It seamlessly integrates with manufacturers’ existing systems to help make work easier, faster and more transparent.

This is just one of the many ways we’re supporting customers across industries with purpose-built solutions. We continue to introduce new vertical solutions that address the distinct digital needs of industry customers across telecommunications and media, technology, retail, financial services, the public sector, healthcare and life sciences, and more.

5. Automate access to field service talent

One of the top limitations to great service is the unavailability of skilled field service workers. In this uncertain economic landscape, it can be challenging to find, train and deploy talent. Furthermore, field service organisations often lack visibility into the “who, what, when, where, and why” of working with third-party contractors, which creates friction and lack of transparency.

Field Service Marketplace, a feature in ServiceNow Field Service Management, can transform the way field service organisations collaborate with external workforces, allowing them to quickly scale their talent needs.

Field service organisations can set custom criteria for the type of work they need to accomplish and their request will automatically get sent to contractors who opt in to the marketplace to get new job alerts—a win-win.

This is skilled labour at scale. Field Service Marketplace works for workers of all types: installers, technicians, home healthcare aides and more. Organisations can securely discover scalable talent—thousands of workers, if necessary—in these private, secure marketplaces.

6. Use an AI-powered platform for transformation

As the AI platform for business transformation, ServiceNow allows customer service leaders to bridge silos and automate tasks, helping their service teams resolve issues proactively and enabling employees to handle requests swiftly and consistently.

Customers can experience faster resolution with smart self-service and support through any channel. At the same time, agents can resolve cases efficiently—with empathy—from a single intelligent workspace.

“What we believe sets us apart”, notes Michael Ramsey, group vice president of customer workflow products at ServiceNow, “is ServiceNow’s single, AI-powered platform, which operates on one data model and one architecture”.

With this single data model and architecture—and prebuilt connectors to common applications—organisations can deploy ServiceNow to fit their unique needs in days or weeks, speeding process innovation and reducing time to value.

Built on AI-powered workflows, ServiceNow connects people, data, and systems across departments to help deliver superior service from first contact to resolution. In doing so, ServiceNow empowers organisations to help accelerate, automate and enhance every aspect of the customer lifecycle, orchestrating frictionless resolutions, enabling end-to-end visibility and driving operational excellence.

As a result of this unique approach, continued innovation, and focus on delivering great customer experiences, ServiceNow customer and industry workflows recently topped $1 billion in revenue. In addition, its Customer Service Management solution was named a Leader in the Forrester Wave™: Customer Service Solutions, Q1 2024 for the first time.

According to the Forrester Wave report, “ServiceNow's unique vision is to orchestrate customer workflows that are not solely contained in the front office, measuring results to continually improve customer experience and costs”.

Find out more about how ServiceNow helps fuel frictionless customer experience.