ORLANDO, Fla.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--KNOWLEDGE17 – ServiceNow (NYSE: NOW), today announced ServiceNow Communities, a major new application in its Customer Service Management solution. More than ever, companies rely on loyal customers for business growth. Yet many aren’t delivering the service customers expect – personalized, relevant, and always-on. ServiceNow Communities provides a personalized, self-service experience for every customer. Their profile, cases, products, services and notifications are there for real-time access. Customers get the information most relevant to them by engaging with peers and experts and from contextual search. A customer-specific activity stream ensures they only get desired updates. Now, companies can reduce case volumes, obtain new perspectives into product use or customer needs, and expand overall reach to new prospects.
Research shows that engaged customers are more loyal to businesses. Customers who engage in online communities have higher satisfaction and tend to buy more than those who do not.
“Communities are key to driving loyalty,” said Abhijit Mitra, general manager of the Customer Service Management Business Unit, ServiceNow. “But not all communities are equal in their ability to engage customers. With ServiceNow, every customer gets a community of experts and peers, and a personalized, integrated experience enabling companies to build much-desired, long-term relationships.”
ServiceNow Communities includes core capabilities such as managed forums, curated topics, support for multiple content types, moderation and granular permissions. Additional features include:
- Personalized self-service experience is delivered through the integration of Communities with the ServiceNow Customer Service Portal. Customers can see or edit their profile details, cases, products, services, and notifications in the same place where they can engage in the community.
- Seamless contextual searching enables customers to get information or answers faster with a single search that works across ServiceNow Knowledge Management and Communities.
- Customer-specific activity stream provides content and updates customers desire from the community to reduce information overload and to ensure relevant information is in the forefront.
According to Mary Wardley, program vice president, Customer Experience at IDC, “Providing a customer community is no longer optional for companies. By 2018, 50% of customer support interactions will be digitalized and occur in online communities. By integrating communities with customer service systems and data, companies can provide a seamless, self-help experience for customers while obtaining views into customer behavior.”
Global Brands Rely on ServiceNow for Customer Service
Growing faster than the customer service software market overall, ServiceNow Customer Service Management has been lauded as an innovative approach to customer service over CRM-based tools. While traditional CRM focuses on engaging with the customer when issues arise, ServiceNow’s approach goes beyond engagement to proactively prevent issues. With Customer Service Management, service teams can not only improve the customer experience with personalized self-service, but also drive accountability for issue resolution by other departments - product, operations, field service, finance, etc. The application also takes advantage of the Internet of Things (IoT) to proactively prevent issues before they affect customers.
Improving Customer Service Management with Field Service Management and Cost Transparency
In addition to Communities, ServiceNow is enhancing its Customer Service Management solution in two other strategic areas:
- Dynamic Scheduling for Field Service optimizes technician assignments to reduce travel times, cut costs, and to ensure the best utilization. Multiple tasks can be assigned to different agents at the same time, enabling prioritization while assigning and automatically moving work to an unassigned state due scheduling of a higher priority task.
- Cost Management helps customer service leaders to understand the true costs of the services their companies deliver. Customer Service Management is integrated with the ServiceNow ITBM Cost Transparency application enabling monitoring and analysis of service costs by customer account, channel, product version, product line, contracts and more.
This latest release further strengthens the ServiceNow Customer Service Management solution to enable companies to deliver effortless, connected, and proactive customer service. It’s built on a single platform that connects departments, workflows and systems, including field service, knowledge management and portals.
ServiceNow Communities will be available in the third quarter of 2017.
For More Information
- Learn more about how Customer Service Management helps resolve customer issues at lightspeed on the website.
- Run our demo to see how Customer Service Management can help.
About ServiceNow
Your enterprise needs to move faster, but lack of process and legacy tools hold you back. Every day, thousands of customer requests, IT incidents, and HR cases follow their own paths—moving back and forth between people, machines and departments. Unstructured. Undocumented. Unimproved for years. With the ServiceNow® System of Action™ you can replace these unstructured work patterns of the past with intelligent workflows of the future. Now every employee, customer and machine can make requests on a single cloud platform. Every department working on these requests can assign and prioritize, collaborate, get down to root cause issues, gain real-time insights and drive to action. Your employees are energized. Your service levels improve. And you realize game-changing economics. Work at Lightspeed™. To find out how, visit www.servicenow.com.
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