What's new in Customer Service Management, Field Service Management, Knowledge Management, and Communities in the Madrid release

[Paul Selby]

ServiceNow’s entire Customer Service Management portfolio–Customer Service Management, Field Service Management, Communities, and Knowledge Management–has some exciting new features in the Madrid release. Read on to learn what’s new!

Advanced Work Assignment

As work in the contact center like chats and cases rolls in, agents are required to monitor multiple queues or lists to address it, negatively impacting their productivity. Additionally, they may be required to prioritize the work, which takes more time and isn’t always accurately performed.

Setting up routing rules that take into account agent knowledge, language, and other skills to assign work is one solution, but it can be complex and time consuming to setup and maintain. As a result, management is forced to manually assign work to agents. Lacking any real-time visibility into agent capacity and workload, they are challenged by competing priorities. 

Advanced Work Assignment allows work items like chats and cases to be assigned to queues. Each queue’s priorities and timers assist in routing the work to agents based on their availability, capacity, and skills using an omni-channel ‘Inbox.’ Agents can set their availability status and channels for their Inbox and accept or reject work. Rejected work requires a reason code, which can be reviewed analyzed on the new Contact Center Manager Dashboard.

Agent Workspace–now available and further enhanced

Agent Workspace was available in a limited access form in London (read more here).

It offers an improved agent experience with an optimized workspace layout, allowing agents to quickly view key customer details and to multi-task efficiently with tabs and child tabs. In Madrid, we are pleased to announce Agent Workspace is now available to all customers!

Case Management enhancements

Case management is the center of agents’ work. With Madrid, several additions will make agents more productive and help them deliver a better customer experience by simplifying common steps and making information more readily available.

Lookup & Verify improves agent productivity by streamlining one of the most common steps at the start of their calls: verifying the customer’s identity and eligibility for service.

Sometimes cases require ongoing collaboration with the customer or other internal teams. With Action Status, a visual indicator notifies agents when cases need their attention and can move forward and which cases are blocked, awaiting input from customers or work colleagues.

Agents aren’t always familiar with the latest solutions to issues, and knowledge articles might not yet be available for them. For these situations, Similar Cases leverages search and machine learning to help agents solve cases more quickly using the context from the case they are working on. It can also suggest, based on configured rules, when a major case (using Major Incident Management) should be created. In Customer Service Standard, standard search is used to suggest cases, major issues, and problems that might contain the solution; Customer Service Management Professional takes advantage of Agent Intelligence (machine learning) to power the similarity matching.

Service Management Best Practices speeds the time to value in implementing Service Management principles with Customer Service Management. Now incidents, problems, changes, and requests can be easily created directly from the case. Updates to those objects are then sync’d automatically back to the case as work notes, providing the agent with visibility to downstream processes from within the case itself. 

Keep agents in-the-know about their cases and not reviewing lists and email notifications for changes in case status with Workspace Notifications. Updates to cases can now be found in one convenient location, allowing agents to remain in the workspace instead of toggling to email to read their notifications.

New mobile experience with offline capabilities for Field Service

In the Madrid release, Field Service Management for mobile devices has been completely rebuilt using the new ServiceNow® Mobile Studio, with technology replatformed from ServiceNow’s SkyGiraffe acquisition. This provides a modern, native-mobile experience, incorporating maps, geo-location tracking, and form actions. Offline mobile use is also available for scenarios when field service staff work in basements, subway tunnels, elevator shafts and other environments with poor internet connectivity.

The result is an app that allows field service staff to complete all of their work via their mobile device, whether online or offline. If additional functionality is needed, the application can be further customized to meet any unique requirements. Now field service technicians can be productive anywhere they work!

Field Service Management user experience enhancements

Users of Field Service Management can also look forward to several improvements to simplify product use and increase productivity.

Actions can now be taken directly from the Team Calendar, including:

• Creating events for team members such as time off, training, vacation, etc.
• Managers can specify a default group and also search across their groups, eliminating the need to scroll through lists.
• Colors can be specified for different types of events.
• Hovering over team members displays a configurable summary for them, and Connect can be launched from the summary to send direct messages. The full user profile can also be opened, allowing a manager to see a technician’s detailed status, tasks, skills, and schedule, as well as make updates such as creating a new schedule for the technician. 

When the dispatch map is displayed for a technician having 15 or fewer tasks for the day, a new Route Optimization option is available. It uses estimated times from Google Maps to further optimize the route and can improve efficiency by 20-30%.

Knowledge Management enhancements

The last several releases have included many additions to Knowledge Management. These set the stage for ServiceNow® Knowledge Management being Knowledge-Centered Service (KCS®^[1]) v6 Verified by the Consortium for Service Innovation soon after the London release. That doesn’t mean we’re slowing down, though!

In Madrid, Group Ownership allows articles to specify a group as an owner instead of an individual, which enables team content management. This means a group of subject matter experts can maintain articles, reducing the time between initial publication and updates since multiple editors can work on articles. It also improves article quality by expanding the number of experts associated to articles.

Guided Setup is now available for Knowledge Management. Now administrators can easily navigate tasks related to service portal configuration, KCS configuration, knowledge analytics and metrics, knowledge search, and knowledge integration, speeding time to deployment and productive use. 

Does your knowledge base have articles in different languages? Searching through multiple-language knowledge bases is now easier with Multi-language search.

In ServiceNow, Glide Lists are fields that allow multiple values. An example is the User Criteria field. In Madrid, Glide Lists can now be used as a search facet.

Communities enhancements

Communities added some security and user experience improvements in this release. Attachments are now scanned for viruses. Sub-forum configuration and navigation has been improved. More formatting options were also added to the text editor, allowing users to create more rich content.

Learn more

These are just a few of the many new features coming to Customer Service Management, Field Service Management, Knowledge Management, and Communities in the Madrid release. If you’d like to see these features up-close, don’t forget to register for ServiceNow’s Knowledge 2019 conference coming up in May where they will be on display. (That’s not all–you’ll get a preview of what’s coming and hear fellow customers’ stories about using ServiceNow® solutions, too!) Your account team is also standing by to share more information, so be sure to schedule a deeper conversation and demo. Start planning your upgrade today!

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[1]KCS® is a service mark of the Consortium for Service Innovation™.