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Paul Selby
ServiceNow Employee
ServiceNow Employee

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

 

New Packages

Starting with the London release, Customer Service Management will be sold in two packages: Customer Service Management Standard and Customer Service Management Professional.

Customer Service Management Standard is the new name for the bundle sold prior to the London release. It includes Customer Service Management, Field Service Management, Knowledge Management, and Communities.

Customer Service Management Professional is a new bundle. It includes everything in Customer Service Management Standard and adds Virtual Agent (see details below), Agent Intelligence (previously released as a standalone add-on in Kingston), and Performance Analytics.

For questions about pricing related to each package, please contact your account team.

 

Virtual Agent

Customers prefer to resolve issues themselves and will scour knowledge bases, communities, and other sources for answers. When a solution isn’t readily found, they will then turn to human assistance, but may have to wait on hold or in a chat queue to talk to a service representative. As a result, companies find themselves overloaded with repetitive customer interactions and are challenged to provide a great customer experience while holding the line on costs.

find_real_file.pngVirtual Agent provides a conversational interface directly from the customer service portal that dialogs with a customer, understands what they’re asking for, collects the appropriate details, and guides the customer to the correct answer or information. Customers enjoy a satisfying self-service experience while recurring work is offloaded from the contact center. If the Virtual Agent is unable to resolve the issue, all details are passed to a live agent or can be submitted as a new case.

Virtual Agent includes several out-of-box conversation topics, such as:

  • Check case status
  • Get help with a product
  • Get help with an order

In addition, the conversation designer allows companies to build their own conversations to support their most common types of inquiries, driving greater levels of self-service. 

 

Agent Workspace

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Customer service agents typically require access to a variety of data as they address customer issues. Consequently, when information is not well organized, agent efficiency is impacted, resulting in a poor experience for customers. In addition, agents often work on multiple customer issues simultaneously, further complicating matters. A complex case management interface makes it challenging for new agents to quickly become productive.

The new Agent Workspace user interface addresses these challenges with the following:

  1. A multi-tab display with contextual sub-tabs. Multiple records–interactions, cases, chats, etc.–can be open simultaneously. When a case (or other record) is open, contextually-relevant records such as accounts, contacts, or assets are available in sub-tabs.
  2. A heads-up ribbon gives agents a quick view of critical case information such as key customer details, the timeline, and SLA achievement.
  3. Agent Assist offers potential solutions from multiple locations–knowledge bases, communities, service catalog, and social Q&A–based upon text in the case’s short description field; agents can search using additional terms if needed.
  4. The workspace has been redesigned to bring all key information within easy reach, enabling agents to handle multiple chats simultaneously and reducing inefficient scrolling.
  5. The new interaction management framework provides a consistent experience for agents regardless of the channel. This framework will be used in future releases to better support additional channels and will enable better omni-channel reporting.

Please note: Agent Workspace will be available as part of a limited access program for select customers. It will be made widely available in a future release.

 

Major Issue Management

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When problems arise that are currently affecting a large number of customers (and may impact even more over time), contact centers can be flooded with inquiries, all about the same issue. This results in multiple cases created for the same issue, each requiring updates with the same information–notes, statuses, workarounds, resolution codes, etc.–which is repetitive, inefficient, and slow. By not communicating with customers currently impacted by the issue and proactively identifying those potentially affected, service organizations end up overloaded and working in a reactive mode.

Major Issue Management eliminates this disruptive cycle. Service becomes proactive and contact volume is reduced by automatically opening cases for impacted customers. Case updates and all communications to customers are driven from a single “parent” case, ensuring greater efficiency and consistency. Customers are better informed on the case progress up to its closure.

 

Other Customer Service Management Enhancements

That’s not all!

Resolution codes make it possible to capture information on how the case was resolved.

Special Handling Notes effective date feature makes it possible to set notes to display on a future date (as well as immediately) and then expire.

Follow the sun by marking open cases to be handed off as days end in one region to the next region. The check box can be manually selected or is automatically selected if a customer enters additional comments on a Priority 1 - Critical or a Priority 2 - High case, or if the case is escalated.

Contact time zone can now be tracked on a case form in situations where the customer is working in a different time zone for the case. It overrides the Contact form time zone.

 

Knowledge Management Enhancements

Knowledge Management is a cornerstone to customer self-service, and several enhancements are included in the London release.

find_real_file.pngKnowledge Feedback Management creates a closed loop feedback process for articles. End users can provide textual feedback on a knowledge article from the customer portal, creating a feedback task; similarly, agents can flag a knowledge gap on a case, also creating a feedback task. Feedback triggers can be configured, such as when an article gets a rating of 3 stars or less. Feedback tasks are assigned to content owners and SLAs are assigned and tracked for each task. Once content owners update and publish the article (resolving the feedback task), the customer is notified that the feedback has been resolved and can be asked to review the revised article and accept the feedback. Actionable feedback increases confidence in the knowledge base and ensures timely, relevant updates.

Out-of-box Knowledge SEO Support allows the knowledge administrator to configure which data is used and placed automatically into HTML metadata fields when knowledge articles are created. This results in improved search rankings and makes knowledge base content easier to find.

Reusable Content Blocks make it possible to reuse fragments of knowledge content in many articles. In addition, the blocks within articles can be restricted to specific roles via user criteria to control who sees the content. For example, an instruction may be applicable to one country but not another, or one team but not another. This results in fewer knowledge articles and more efficient authoring.

User Criteria Diagnostics makes troubleshooting knowledge access problems easier and faster. It allows the knowledge administrator to select a specific user and a specific knowledge base or knowledge base article, then determine what permissions the user has in relation to the article or knowledge base – i.e., read, contribute, no access, etc. If the user has no access, the diagnostics will tell the administrator which user criteria have permissions so the access can be changed.

 

Custom URLs

In prior releases, customers could accept the standard ‘service-now.com’ URL for their customer service portals or request a custom URL. The custom URL request process took time and was one more task to complete before going live.

In London, it is now much easier to change your support portal URL to something that better reflects your company and will be familiar to your customers. In addition, once this is completed, not only is the main portal URL customized, but all embedded URLs such as for knowledge articles, community posts, return URLs, etc. now point to the new custom URL.

 

Mandatory Skills

find_real_file.pngWork order or case assignment often involves manual processes to ensure certain conditions are considered. For example, work orders might require assignment to technicians with a specific language skill or cases require assignment to an agent with a specific security clearance. As a manual process, this is not only slower but also introduces possible errors, causing service to suffer.

Mandatory skills can now be defined for cases and work orders. Those skills can be enforced during work order auto-assignment and dynamic scheduling as well as during case assignment via the case assignment workbench, improving assignment accuracy and compliance.

 

Guided Setup

find_real_file.pngWhen setting up Customer Service Management, Field Service Management, or Communities, there are many options to consider. In addition, what has been completed and what remains?

Guided Setup to the rescue! With it, you are walked step-by-step through the essential steps for initial configuration. Track progress and see which steps have been completed and where work remains, allowing you to return at a later time to continue setup. 

           

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 London release. You can check out Virtual Agent, Agent Workspace, and Major Issue Management in action in the Customer Service Management keynote from the Knowledge18 conference, then contact your account team to schedule a deeper conversation and demo.

 


The London release broadcast on-demand

See the latest innovations from ServiceNow

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