What's new in Customer Service Management in the San Diego Release

[kathyneff]

What's New in Customer Service Management in the San Diego release

The latest release of the Now Platform® brings us to San Diego! For Customer Experience solutions, it means several exciting new capabilities in Customer Service Management (CSM). While this blog summarizes the most notable, be sure to review the release notes to get all the details. Be sure to check out the Field Service Management release blog to learn about additions there as well. 

Before we begin, please note: 

• Customer Service Management is licensed in three packages: Standard, Professional, and Enterprise. Each new feature highlighted here indicates which package includes it. You can compare the major features available in each by visiting the “Packages” section of the Customer Service Management product page.  
• Order Management is a new product that can be added onto any CSM package.

Drive agent productivity

The top innovation in this release is the Next Experience. The CSM Configurable Workspace incorporates two significant updates that come with Next Experience for ServiceNow: a modernized user experience, and unified navigation across interfaces.

Customer service organizations are always seeking a more modern and efficient agent experience.  Along with higher productivity, this helps them deliver better agent experiences, and as a result, more personalized and empathic customer experiences.  We know our customers have been eager to move to the Configurable Workspace, but they also still use the ‘UI16’ list and forms interfaces – and they want an easy way to switch between these experiences while maintaining productivity levels.  We also know customers want to personalize and brand their applications: for example, telecoms with different product areas such as wireless, internet, and TV. Or financial services companies with different divisions for insurance, wealth management, and retirement.

The San Diego release helps solve these challenges! With the announcement of Next Experience, the look and feel of the CSM Configurable Workspace has been improved. Agents can use ‘compact mode’ to reduce scrolling and be more productive. For agents who use the workspace all day, theming allows them to switch to ‘dark mode’ to reduce eye strain.  Theming also allows workspaces and platform UIs to be visually similar, making it easier for users who switch back and forth across UIs. There is also component-level styling for buttons, borders, shadows, colors, and fonts, empowering customers to build applications that reflect their corporate branding.

Additionally, unified navigation allows users to navigate seamlessly between platform UIs and workspaces with one unified top-level menu structure. Workspaces can be accessed from the menu, and users can switch back and forth easily between workspace and platform UIs. Favorites and history are also available in the top-level menu, helping ensure productivity levels are maintained.

The net results are improved ease of use for agents, reduced learning time for agents as they learn a new interface, and better, more brand-aligned user experiences. CSM Configurable Workspace on Next Experience is included with CSM Standard.

In addition to all the great improvements coming with Next Experience, we’ve also released User Experience (UX) Analytics for CSM Configurable Workspace, which allows organizations to monitor workspace behavior and usage. User Experience Analytics gives administrators component-level insight into feature usage, highlighting the most frequently used steps for completing tasks. They can monitor metrics such as page views and average duration, allowing them to identify bottlenecks of configurable workspaces on one platform, without leveraging third-party software or complex integrations. The ultimate outcomes are continual improvement of the workspace experience, increased productivity, and better feature adoption.  UX Analytics for CSM Configurable Workspace comes with CSM Professional.

To provide greater intelligence in case routing, language detection is a new AI capability that enables companies to identify language more accurately, reducing resolution time by routing cases to the correct user the first time. 

Email is still one of the top two channels for our customers. When emails are converted to cases—often times referred to as ‘Email to Case’—it’s essential that those cases get routed correctly. Companies often maintain multiple mailboxes or portals for different languages and route cases to assignment groups based on the language associated with each mailbox or portal. Unfortunately, customers often use a different language than the default, causing cases to be routed to teams who may not understand the customer’s language. This causes cases to be reassigned, delaying resolution.

In San Diego, companies no longer need to guess the language based on the portal or mailbox used!  Language detection can identify the customer’s language using AI. With an out of the box pre-trained machine learning model that can detect 31 languages and integration to Advanced Work Assignment, the detected language can be used to route cases to assignment groups with the right language skills. This reduces the ping pong of reassignments and improves resolution times. And with a bit of configuration, companies can trigger additional actions based on language, such as business rules to show agents similar knowledge base articles in the language used in the case.

Language detection enables companies to improve the customer experience and helps resolve issues faster by reducing case reassignments. It is part of Predictive Intelligence and requires CSM Professional.

Streamline operations

Next, we’re excited to announce Order Management, which lays the foundation to support Order Management across verticals. 

Order management is a common use case across industries. However, there are many challenges companies face managing the end-to-end order process.  For instance, customers lack visibility into their orders, and it’s hard for them to track status, and to add, update or cancel orders. There’s no easy way to manage post-sale requests related to orders – things like complaints, returns, or inquiries. This results in increased contact volume as customers reach out for help. 

Internally, orders need to be decomposed and the end-to-end fulfillment orchestrated by middle office teams. Consider the example of a consumer who orders a home security system. It’s a bundle that includes 5 door sensors and 3 cameras with a one-time cost, home monitoring service with 2-year commitment billed monthly for $50, and a video replay capability that stores up to 30 days of video, with video replay chargeable at a different rate.  Fulfilling orders like this one is hard for companies to do – and this is a relatively simple example!  

To help solve these challenges we created Order Management, and the San Diego release is just the start!  We deliver three main things that produce great outcomes for our customers. First, companies can increase their operational efficiency by capturing orders from third party systems directly into ServiceNow. Second, agents can capture, monitor, and fulfill orders using the workspace, increasing their efficiency. And finally, customers can track orders via the customer portal, giving them immediate visibility into their order status. This not only boosts satisfaction, but also reduces contact volume.  

Order Management is a new SKU that can be added onto CSM and will be available on the ServiceNow Store. 

Improve customer experience

Customer access management is a new capability that enables easier case tracking for customers. 

Companies often need to allow related parties to access and track cases. For example, when applying for a mortgage, the head of household might want their spouse to also view that case and track its progress. Or a business customer might designate a colleague to be a co-owner of a new business checking account and therefore have access to track the progress of the new account being setup. In addition, customers who have business responsibility for certain products need to track all cases for those products.

With the San Diego release, customer access management enables contacts or consumers related to a case to track case details and collaborate with the primary requestor. Customer service agents can add related parties to a case or a sold product and specify their access level. When added to a sold product, both contacts and consumers can then view the sold product and track all cases for those sold products automatically via the portal. Related party access can be set up by administrators via configuration, not coding –reducing the need to customize, and enabling faster deployment.

These enhancements help improve the customer experience and increase operational efficiency and automation. Customer access management comes with CSM Standard. 

We continue to add capabilities to improve customers’ self-service experiences on third party web sites using Engagement Messenger. Asynchronous Chat now allows customers and agents to continue chat conversations asynchronously over time, enabling chat to work more like conversational messaging apps. Both guests and authenticated users can continue conversations over a number of days, at their convenience. Agents can respond asynchronously without losing the context of earlier messages. And when agents respond, customers are notified of the unread messages, along with a message preview and count.

These enhancements help increase CSAT and improve the customer experience, while also boosting agent productivity. Engagement Messenger is included in CSM Standard. 

Another important capability introduced in the San Diego release is sensitive data handling, which protects customers by masking sensitive data in their conversations.  During an agent chat or Virtual Agent conversation, the agent or customer may accidentally enter sensitive data. The Sensitive Data Handler detects and masks the sensitive data so it is not viewable.

We use an automated, configuration-based approach allowing administrators to define sensitive data (credit card or account numbers, HIPAA info, etc.) and how it should be handled. The system then masks sensitive data in messages originating from the customer in live agent and virtual agent conversations. It also blocks messages originating from agents that contain sensitive data. The end results: increased compliance, improved customer experience, and increased agent effectiveness.

Additionally, profanity filtering capabilities have been enhanced.  Now, supervisors are alerted automatically when agents use inappropriate language in customer interactions.  Keyword lists and supervisor alerts can be easily configured. And profane language can be blocked in real time. 

Sensitive data handling and profanity filtering both come with CSM Standard.

Learn more

With these great enhancements, Customer Service Management helps our customers harness the power of their whole organization to serve their customers, driving agent productivity, streamlining operations, and improving the customer experience.

For more information, review the CSM release notes and product documentation to get additional detail. Attend the San Diego Release Broadcast to see some of these features demonstrated. And attend Knowledge 2022, coming in May. Then, schedule a conversation and demo with your account team or contact us here. Don’t forget, the Customer Success Center is also available with essential resources to assist you in planning your upgrade. Onward to the May, 2022 Store release and Tokyo! 

Please note: other company names, product names, and logos may be trademarks of the respective companies with which they are associated.  

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Join us for the The Now Platform San Diego event.

Mark your calendar for the Now Platform San Diego release broadcast  

Join us for the San Diego release broadcast —a global digital experience where we’ll be unveiling exciting, new innovations in the San Diego release across different markets.  

The broadcast digital event is April 6 and is part of the Knowledge Digital Experience. Your registration for this broadcast provides free access to all that the Digital Experience has to offer, including 200+ sessions beginning in May.

Make sure to watch the San Diego release introduction session with Dave Wright, chief innovation officer, as well as 21 sessions on demand, where we’ll highlight different ServiceNow^® products, innovations, demos, and the Now Platform. The times of the broadcasts are:

• AMS: April 6 at 9:00 am PT/12:00 pm ET,
• EMEA: 7 April at 8:00 am GMT/9:00 am CET
• APJ: 7 April at 9:00 am SGT /11:00 am AEST

Register now

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