What's New in Customer Service Management, Field Service Management, Knowledge Management, and Communities in the Kingston 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 Kingston release. Read on for a summary of the new capabilities!

Agent Intelligence for Customer Service Management

Simplified case creation form—possible because Agent Intelligence uses machine       learning to categorize, prioritize, and assign the case

Categorizing, prioritizing, and assigning cases can be slow, tedious work, taking costly agent resources away from customer-serving activities. Agents' unavailability to assist customers due to the need to manually sort cases can have multiple impacts on customer service, including slower response times and reduced service levels.

What if there was a way to improve customer satisfaction while reducing costs and manual work, shifting agents to higher level problem-solving and strategic work that drives higher customer satisfaction?

ServiceNow Agent Intelligence for Customer Service Management utilizes machine learning to create finely-tuned models based on prior human-based work. Once the learning (unique to your company and ServiceNow instance) is complete, case sorting—categorization, prioritization, and assignment—is accelerated. This helps shorten response times, which can positively impact customer satisfaction … not to mention eliminate manual agent work. By analyzing historical data, errors are also reduced as cases can be automatically routed to the best agent to solve a problem. Additionally, end customers no longer need to select from long lists of categories when making requests.

Agent Intelligence is a part of ServiceNow's Intelligence Automation Engine. Watch Dave Wright, Chief Strategy Officer, go into further detail in this Knowledge17 keynote video.

Customer Service Management - Escalation Management

At times, it may be necessary to escalate to another agent or management a customer's issue due to the complexity, lack of progress, or the customer's emotional state. Without a formal, tracked process, escalations might be lost, causing additional customer frustration.

Escalation Management makes it possible for agents and other employees to put focus on problematic cases and accounts to reduce customer frustration. Using customizable workflow, the issue can be directed to approvers for review and then to agents or others with the skills to resolve the issue, recording internal communication (but with no direct visibility to the associated customer) through to its de-escalation and closure.

Field Service Management - Appointment Booking

Available time slots are displayed based on work required

A challenge your customers requiring field service often face is finding a date and time that fits their schedule as well as matches availability of the appropriately skilled technician. Appointment Booking is a self-service option permitting customers to select, based on the work required, a suitable appointment date and time from available time slots.

Setup on the ServiceNow side allows the field service organization to define the work types that are eligible for self-service appointments. When Central Dispatch is used to assign the task, the appointment window selected by the customer is honored, preventing accidental changes in date or time outside the customer's availability. Appointment booking leverages Dynamic Scheduling to allow for tasks with appointments to be prioritized accordingly.

FlowDesigner for Customer Service Management and Field Service Management

Set up tasks with triggers and corresponding actions

Companies want to automate frequent tasks but struggle with easily creating and customizing workflow. An easier means for employees of all skill levels to automate common business processes is needed.

The ServiceNow platform's Flow Designer takes a codeless, user-friendly approach, allowing both coders and non-coders alike to automate the business. In Kingston, Customer Service Management and Field Service Management will begin to take advantage of it by simplifying the automation of creating, updating, and assignment of Cases, Work Orders, Work Order Tasks, and Work Order Notes. More out-of-box automation and additional support for the Flow Designer will come in future releases.

Communities — Multiple Enhancements

With online communities, companies enjoy many benefits, including reduced costs, new customer insights, and turning one-time answers into long-term solutions. Keeping customers engaged and active in communities, though, can be challenging. Barriers to community use must be reduced and participation incentives help keep customers interested and engaged.

In Kingston, Communities adds gamification with points and badges, encouraging greater customer involvement. Self-registration allows users to register themselves without requiring an administrator to set-up access. Forum membership adds a sign-up and approval process to access non-public forums. The ability to add documents and events has been added, increasing the number of types of content that can be shared. When problems are solved in Communities, they can now be harvested into knowledge articles, simplifying the ability to reuse solutions. Also, cases can be created directly from questions, in situations such as a question has gone unanswered for several days.

Knowledge Management - Multiple Enhancements

Some companies struggle to build and maintain a quality, knowledge practice for the benefit of their customers. Others may have fully embraced knowledge and are moving towards Knowledge Centered Support ^® and require the capabilities to support those efforts.[1] Regardless of a company's knowledge maturity, methods to easily create, categorize, and find quality, relevant knowledge articles regardless of location are needed.

The Kingston release adds article types, offering a templated approach to structure and organize knowledge content. With the new ability to search external content sources, results can be unified and displayed from both external and internal knowledge content. In-context knowledge capture will allow creating knowledge during work processes, such as when an agent is creating a case. With the new Article Quality Index, the quality of an article, its author, and even groups of authors can be measured. And finally, search engine optimization support allows knowledge articles to be indexed and located using popular search engines.

Role-Based Dashboards

Customer service is a dynamic part of the business. Unfortunately, employees from the individual contributor level to the executive level typically lack the real-time insights necessary to drive aligned, meaningful service improvements. No longer. Now you'll be able to identify and address service issues promptly with job-specific insights.

The executive dashboard for Customer Service Management

Several new dashboards and KPIs available to use out-of-the-box are coming to Customer Service Management, Field Service Management, Knowledge Management, and Communities in Kingston. Of note are the new role-based dashboards that align metrics to an individual's position in the company. For example, with Customer Service Management:

• The Executive dashboard includes % first call resolution, % re-open rate, # of times case reassigned; costs (using integration with Financial Modeling); and at-risk accounts, using a combination of CSATs, average time to resolve, and open case backlog
• The Manager dashboard includes open case backlog, case age over time, case spotlight (customizable ranking by company, priority, etc.), agent analysis (new cases, open case backlog, closed cases, and CSATs)
• The Agent dashboard includes open cases, cases with problems, new cases, the agent group's P1 cases and open cases, and KBs created

This new content can be used as-is or customized to fit your specific needs. Performance Analytics is required.

Learn More

These are just a few of the great new features coming to Customer Service Management, Field Service Management, Communities and Knowledge Management in the Kingston release. With Knowledge18 right around the corner, consider attending for opportunities to learn about fellow customers' successes, go hands-on with these capabilities, and more! Alternatively, contact your account team today to schedule a conversation and demo.

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[1] Knowledge Centered Support ^® or KCS is a service mark of the Consortium for Service Innovation^TM.

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Going Live - The Kingston Release Webinar

Thursday, February 8, 2018
8:00am — 9:30am PST | 11:00am — 12:30pm EST  

Unveiling the Latest Innovations from ServiceNow