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

[Paul Selby]

The Orlando release of the Now Platform® is now available! It delivers new functionality across Customer Workflows, including Customer Service Management, Knowledge Management, and Communities. (See here to learn what’s new in Field Service Management.) Some features are only available in the Customer Service Management Professional version and have been noted. Read on to learn what’s new!

Customer Service Management

Over the last several releases, Customer Service Management has added many new, large-scale capabilities. ServiceNow continues to refine these capabilities as customers use them and provide feedback as well as add features to improve other use cases.

Agent Workspace enhancements

Agent Workspace was introduced in limited access in the London release and became available  to all in Madrid. It provides a modern and productive interface for customer service agents and ServiceNow continues to add functionality to make agents’ work easy and to speed issue resolution. Coming to Agent Workspace in this release are the following features:

• Ribbon configuration: ribbons help agents quickly scan and identify relevant record details. Ribbons can be configured for different workspaces and for tables that extend the Case table.
• Response templates: agents can quickly add content to cases and case tasks.
• Agent Assist contextual search: from the Interaction form, agents can search for information in knowledge articles, the Service Catalog, and Communities.
• Interaction form related lists: agents can quickly access recent Interactions and open cases for the customer they are assisting.
• Highlight list fields: agents' attention can be directed to important fields by highlighting key fields in lists of records. 

Agent Workspace now makes it easy for agents to understand what products and services an end customer has purchased and is using. Previously, though the information might be available in ServiceNow, it could be challenging for an agent to quickly identify. That changes in Orlando with Service-aware Install Base Visualization​. Agents will be able to quickly determine products and services sold and installed and their operational status (to help speed service), as well as products and services not yet purchased or deployed by customers (to drive up-sell, cross-sell, and onboarding conversations).

But that’s not all! Learn how the  Agent Workspace experience is now available in Knowledge Management below.

Note: Service-aware Install Base Visualization is a part of Proactive Customer Service Operations and requires Customer Service Management Professional.

Advanced Work Assignment enhancements

Advanced Work Assignment (AWA) was introduced in the Madrid release. It allows work items like chats and cases to be assigned to queues and routed to agents based on their availability, capacity, and skills using an omni-channel ‘Inbox.’ In the New York release, we have further enhanced it in two ways.

First, Agent Affinity for Work Assignment helps to reduce repeat contacts, shorten resolution time, and improve the customer experience by intelligently assigning chats, cases, and phone calls to the most qualified agent. Beyond what AWA already offers, it uses context like the customer and agent’s history, related tasks, or a primary agent designation. These rules further enhance existing AWA rules, so agents’ availability, capacity, and skills are also considered. All of this ensures the agent who is most knowledgeable is assigned the work and interaction continuity is maintained, resulting in a better customer experience and faster resolution.

The new Advanced Work Assignment Operations Dashboard is all about creating a more comprehensive view of operations for management staff and simplifying the supervision of frontline staff. It does this by improving the ability to monitor and modify staffing levels as well as changing work assignments in real-time​. This helps lead to more effective agents and more delightful customer interactions​.

Note: Agent Affinity for Work Assignment and the Advanced Work Assignment Operations Dashboard require Customer Service Management Professional.

Case management enhancements

Many companies have complex and ongoing projects with their customers. An example is installing or replacing equipment. There might be questions or issues that arise through long-term engagements like this that go well beyond the occasional customer service interaction. For these scenarios, Customer Project Management is the answer. In Orlando, these longer-term projects can be associated with accounts, bringing alignment to both project management and customer service. Project issues and change requests can be created from cases, and status and comment updates are synchronized back to the case.  On top of that, project managers can designate which customer contacts can use self-service to manage their projects in the Customer Service Portal. Authorized contacts can view projects project tasks. Customer Project Management also provides visibility into costs like on-boarding and serving customers on complex projects.

Next up, we recognize not all customer cases are created equal. One might be an actual problem requiring research and response, while another is feedback requiring no action. With Case Types, different kinds of cases can be created and managed from a single repository​.  Each of those case types can then represent the processes and data needed to resolve a specific type of customer issue. Each case type can be configured with its own fields (that extend the Case table), UI actions, UI policies, business rules, record producers, SLAs, and so on. A guided setup process makes it easy to add them.

Note: Customer Project Management requires Customer Service Management Professional and IT Business Management (Standard or Professional). 

Proactive Customer Service Operations enhancements

Outages. Not something you want your end customer to experience. Be they planned, unplanned, or a service degradation, they create hassles and frustrations for your end customer. And when they occur, they can quickly overrun the contact center with calls, emails, etc. In Orlando, Proactive Customer Service Operations (introduced in the New York release) has been extended to make it even easier to act in these situations.

Real-time Service Health allows customers to track the current status of their products and services in the Customer Service Portal.​ Likewise, the customer service agent can view that same status. If either is seeing a disruption, a major case workflow can be automatically triggered to begin work on the issue. By associating the outage to a case, that workflow will keep affected customers informed of ongoing status and eventual resolution. With planned outages, customers can similarly see them in advance in the portal and be notified and kept in the loop of their status.

KPIs and dashboards have been added with the Outage Dashboard. They help identify opportunities to be more proactive. New reports include ​Active Outages on Case, Average Outage Duration, Outages & Affected Customers, Outage Types, and Top Impacted Customers.

Omni-channel enhancements

Contact center supervisors and managers are responsible for the quality of customer service offered by their agents. To monitor that quality, they monitor and coach staff. With Conversation Monitoring, supervisors and managers can silently monitor or join the conversation​.​

Self-service continues to be a popular channel. No surprise, since end customers’ expectation is that they should be able to do anything themselves. This release adds the ability for them to manage and approve change requests through the Customer Service Portal.  

Companies often have other employees (such as sales people) who do not work in Customer Service Management but instead rely on Microsoft Outlook® to communicate with customers. The problem? Copy-and-pasting between Outlook and Customer Service Management is tedious and slows the agent’s work and can lead to inconsistent or lost information. The Outlook Add-in for Customer Service Management makes it possible to add a contact, create a case, and update cases directly from Outlook.​ 

Knowledge Management

There are several enhancements to Knowledge Management in the Orlando release to help drive the easier creation and consumption of knowledge.

Knowledge Demand Insights helps increase the effectiveness of self-service and speeds customer case resolution by identifying which topics are missing knowledge articles. Using Predictive Intelligence, knowledge gaps are identified in a dashboard. Directly from the dashboard, knowledge administrators can view the case details for the gap, and then create and assign those gaps to authors. The regular knowledge creation process tracks the tasks associated with creating the article to address the gap.

Agent Workspace can now be used in several Knowledge Management scenarios. These include: 

• Authoring: create, edit, and publish knowledge articles in Agent Workspace, including using an article template. Agent Assist helps eliminate duplicate knowledge articles, aids in researching article content, and mapping related articles and related catalog items to a knowledge article.
• Comparing knowledge article versions: identify and track changes between two versions of an article.
• Previewing in Agent Assist: resize the panel to get a glimpse (rather than requiring the article be opened in full view) when deciding whether to attach or flag a knowledge article.
• Addressing article feedback: create and resolve tasks created in Feedback Management.
• Managing translations: support for Translation Management actions such as requesting article translation and addressing assigned translation tasks.

Knowledge Blocks are useful to maintain a set of text across multiple existing knowledge articles: update the block, and all linked articles reflect the change. Initially, limited to a single template, they can now be used in more than one HTML field of any article template (including custom templates).

Note: Knowledge Demand Insights require Customer Service Management Professional.

Communities

When customers want to find answers fast, browsing the community isn’t the best option. In this release, search has been improved in several ways to connect customers to solutions faster. Customers can now search for content within a forum. Search has also been enhanced to display the forums, topics, and profiles that match the search terms. Results can then be filtered based on these additional categories.

In a community, sometimes announcements or other content don't require comments. In other cases, comments may have taken a negative turn. Now comments can be disabled on a blog, document, video, event, or question.

Drafting community content in advance–like writing a blog or planning an event–is helpful. What’s not helpful? Forgetting to post it! Now, both blogs and events can be scheduled for publishing at a future date and time. 

Learn more

These are just a few of the many new features coming to Customer Service Management, Knowledge Management, and Communities in the New York release. You can read more about these and other new capabilities in the Product Documentation or schedule a conversation and demo with your account team (and discuss the value of moving from Customer Service Management Standard to Professional, if appropriate). Also be sure to visit the Customer Success Center to review essential resources to assist you in planning your upgrade. Welcome to Orlando!

P.S. Knowledge 2020 is coming! This is a great opportunity to learn from and network with fellow ServiceNow customers, see demos of the Orlando release, and learn what’s coming in future releases. If you haven’t already registered to attend, do it today!

..................................................................................................................................................................................................

On Demand
The Now Platform Orlando release broadcast.

ServiceNow is proud to introduce and walk you through the Now Platform Orlando release with Now Intelligence.

..................................................................................................................................................................................................

© 2020 ServiceNow, Inc. All rights reserved. ServiceNow, the ServiceNow logo, Now, Now Platform, and other ServiceNow marks are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of ServiceNow, Inc. in the United States and/or other countries. Other company names, product names, and logos may be trademarks of the respective companies with which they are associated.