Your customer has changed. Why hasn’t your CRM?

The customer service market is going through a generational transformation driven by three big catalysts:

1. Customers increasingly interact with AI-powered virtual agents using natural language. This enables them to resolve issues entirely through self-service.
2. The contact centre is moving from on premises to the cloud. This is a long-term trend that has accelerated in recent years, enabling a rethink of how customer relationship management (CRM) and the contact centre work together.
3. Organisations are tired of using bloated, legacy CRM apps that were cobbled together through acquisitions.

ServiceNow is in a better position than ever before to help organisations reduce costs and deliver awesome experiences to their customers. Those are the priorities for every chief customer officer and head of customer care I’ve ever met.

ServiceNow's approach to CRM

At ServiceNow, we go after the real pain points in customer experience, whether they’re in service, in sales, or in driving customer success and renewals. We’re reinventing CRM to help companies deliver better end-to-end sales and customer service, from frontline intake to middle-office servicing and fulfilment.

The first challenge is meeting each customer in the channel of their choice through omnichannel experiences—web, email, chat, phone, and messaging. And that’s where traditional CRM has focused almost all its efforts.

While great omnichannel support is important, it’s only half the story. The other half is how the work gets done to resolve and fulfil each customer’s request. Previously, that required what I call swivel-chairing human middleware to glue everything together with shared inboxes, spreadsheets, sticky notes, and tribal knowledge. That proved slow and inconsistent for customers and expensive for providers.

In many cases—disputing a credit card charge, ordering a new telecom service, or managing the warranty claims process in manufacturing—the work starts in the front office but extends across systems and departments. This requires both a system of record and a system of action, because the data will never be in a single system.

At ServiceNow, we solved this problem using workflows with automations, integrations, and dedicated experiences to orchestrate the end-to-end customer service process.  Fundamentally, we make it easier for companies to model the products and services they support and the types of requests customers can make.

 Contact centre integrations

We’ve been on a journey to systematically expand our functional footprint, starting with service in the middle office and adding omnichannel for great frontline service in contact centres. As we expand further into frontline service in contact centres, we’re improving agent experiences and making deployments faster and easier.

Contact centre integration is crucial for many front-office scenarios, but it’s often overly complicated to set up and maintain. We're working to deliver a turnkey integration that combines the best of contact centre as a service (CCaaS) and the best of ServiceNow® Customer Relationship Management. And we’re making it faster and easier to deploy.

Human agents get a unified desktop experience in the ServiceNow workspace for all channels, with native call controls and native chat. Our CCaaS partners deliver centralised and unified routing for all channels, providing one place to define and maintain routing logic and rules for best-in-class workforce engagement management with all the right metrics.

AI agents for CRM

Because we have structured workflows, we can enable richer customer experiences via agentic workflows. AI agents can reason on the best approach to fulfil a request and then execute it, in either a supervised or unsupervised mode. Not only does this provide great conversational experiences, but it also empowers customers or agents to take action, fully automating customer requests.

We can truly reduce costs and improve experiences for customers by driving better self-service with AI-powered search and virtual agents—without the painful setup of dialog flow design, intent model training, slot filling, and so on.

AI is already increasing productivity with chat summarisation, case summarisation, case wrap-up generation, and knowledge base article generation.  Customers such as BT are seeing dramatic results: The telecom company realised a one-third decrease in mean time to resolution (MTTR).

Field service

AI is relevant for field service as well, which is all about delivering service at the point of physical need, such as installing machinery, fulfilling an order in telecom, or delivering in-home medical care.

ServiceNow Field Service Management is built on the same stack as Customer Service Management, with a common CRM data model foundation and prebuilt integrations. This enables automatic work order creation, intelligent scheduling and dispatch, proactive service, and AI-driven process mining.

Schedule optimisation takes our intelligent scheduling to the next level, helping to minimise truck rolls, mitigate service-level agreement violations, and meet business constraints, such as requiring mandatory parts or skills.

Now Assist for Field Service Management helps field techs get to their next jobs faster. It summarises the work performed and generates a draft of closure notes, helping to speed up the entire process. And mobile playbooks provide step-by-step guidance for troubleshooting and completing jobs.

Additionally, Field Service Marketplace enables outsourcing tasks to contractors in a structured and efficient way. When you consider that much of field service work is done through contractors, we think this will be a game changer.

Expansion to sales

Customers told us they had the same human middleware and inefficiency problems on the sales and commercial side of the house as they did on the customer service and support side. We introduced Sales and Order Management to address these challenges. It allows us to help solve even more use cases for the end-to-end customer experience, enabling organisations to:

• Create and manage opportunities
• Define commercial catalogues with dynamic pricing
• Use configure, price, quote (CPQ) along with guided selling for order capture

These are all done in one consistent, configurable platform—no assembly required.  It just works. We primarily focused on exceptions in the order-to-cash process and on service to sales, such as renewals and expansions.

CPQ

CPQ is where the rubber meets the road in sales. It’s where buyers express their needs and sellers establish quotes, configuring the products being sold so they adhere to all the compatibility rules—such as what must be included or excluded and pricing rules with bundling and discounts. This is a critical step in many industries, including manufacturing, B2B telecom, high tech, and medical devices.

Today, everyone wants online self-service. That simply cannot work if the CPQ solution is not speed-of-thought fast.

For that reason, we pursued accelerating and reinforcing our CPQ engine. We were lucky to have had the foresight to invest in and get to know a ServiceNow partner whose sole mission was to solve all that complexity. In March, we announced our intent to acquire Logik.ai. The deal is subject to customary regulatory approvals and is expected to close in the second half of the year.

We believe that combining Logik.ai’s lightning-fast configuration engine with ServiceNow’s ability to drive the end-to-end sell, fulfil, and service process will result in a unified offering that’s highly differentiated.

Industry products

Our industry products are explicitly designed to deliver faster time to value for our customers. Each one is built on our core CRM foundation extended with vertical-specific capabilities. Industry products include:

• An industry-centric data model, such as store hierarchy for retail
• Industry-specific integrations, such as Visa and Mastercard for banking or TM Forum-compliant APIs in telecom
• Industry-specific workflows delivered out of the box (Examples include licensing and permitting for public sector or warranty claims in manufacturing.)

With agentic AI, we can take those industry-specific processes and build agentic workflows for them, such as the service test and repair AI agent for telecom or the warranty claims resolution AI agent for manufacturing.

Every industry solution inherits our latest platform enhancement so that you don’t have, for example, six different ways to book appointments. That allows our customers to get faster time to value.

Validation of our approach

We have incredible momentum in front-office service. We’ve been recognised as a leader by Gartner, Forrester, and ISG. And we have great partnerships with the leading CCaaS vendors, including Genesys, Five9, and 3CLogic.

Last year, we became the fastest player in the history of the CRM market to cross $1 billion in revenue. We continued that momentum, growing 30% and ending the year with more than $1.4 billion in cumulative annual contract value (CACV).¹

ServiceNow makes it possible to sell, service, and fulfil on one platform, the ServiceNow AI Platform for business transformation. We’ve been maniacal in building CRM capabilities the right way so that organisations have one consistent method for modelling their business processes and one consistent experience.

Find out more about how ServiceNow helps organisations transform customer experiences with CRM AI agents, data, and workflows.

¹ ServiceNow Financial Analyst Day, May 5, 2025