ServiceNow San Diego: Order Management in the center of Customer Experience

ServiceNow defines Customer Service Management (CSM) as a coordinated effort between customers, customer service, and other groups to provide assistance and resolve issues. With the release of San Diego, the CSM offering is extended to include Order Management (OM). As part of this enhancement, CSM-enabled companies are now able to capture orders from customers in addition to issues and requests. 

While OM is new to CSM, it isn’t a new feature in ServiceNow. OM provides horizontal order management capabilities, and Order Management for Telecommunications and Media provides specialised content for the respective verticals. ServiceNow is introducing OM with San Diego as a central element of the overall customer experience.

The post-purchase experience is one of the most important factors that determine customer retention, and post-order workflows are an essential part of customer service, while services have increasingly become a channel for sales, promotions, and renewals.

Order Management Challenges

Companies lack transparency into customer orders today, especially when they rely on ERP or legacy order management systems, and ServiceNow is limited in its support for horizontal order management. Despite CSM providing a basic set of order/order line tables for importing simple orders and raising orders via order cases, it does not have the order workflows associated with Telecommunications and Media.

With this current limitation, customers across industries are unable to easily place orders based on available products or install base items, as well as track orders and request updates (especially when using ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) or legacy order management systems).

Changes, additions, and cancellations present a challenge to organizations, which negatively impacts the overall customer experience. Further challenges include the limited capability of requesting services on products, introducing new products and services, and impacting agents within the organization on completing assigned tasks and extending orders to third-party systems.

With the initial release of San Diego, the emphasis is on extending CSM OM capabilities to include the Manufacturing, Healthcare, Financial Services, and Technology vertical industries.

New to San Diego

Through the support of Order Management workflows, the new ServiceNow OM application allows customers to capture, manage, and fulfill orders.

Companies can now place orders from available products or Install Base items, capture, update, or cancel customer orders using the new OM capabilities. The Flow Designer is extended to allow the decomposition of orders and fulfillment of order tasks by adding appliances, which can be treated as product offerings and specifications. CPQ systems such as Salesforce can be utilized for bulk order placement with standard Order Capture APIs.

The CSM workspace now allows agents to create new orders, and view and manage existing orders from a centralized location, while customers have access to their order status and order lines through the portal and the Virtual Agent.

With the new CSM OM process, there are two main workflows for performing customer orders: B2B and B2C. Both emphasize a comprehensive approach to handling orders from customers. 

CSM Agents have an in-depth view of the order once it has been placed by a customer, including the line items, the line item characteristics, as well as the order tasks. As part of CSM’s client portal offering, these elements are also evident to the client, providing them with access to the current order status, as well as any additional details required for the agent to complete the order. This provides the client with the ability to monitor and update their orders through a centralized interface. Customers are able to interact with Virtual Agents based on their specific needs related to an individual order using pre-defined virtual agent flows.

The Virtual Agent also provides customers with the opportunity to update existing orders through pre-defined workflows. In the event that a Virtual Agent is not able to assist the customer with their specific concern, direct agent communication can be established to enable more rapid resolution. A customer service agent can easily adjust elements associated with an order in real-time to match customer requests, providing a seamless and effortless experience to customers, which results in increased customer satisfaction.

CSM OM enables organisations to reduce fulfillment time, succeed in meeting SLAs, and lower costs by automating order tasks and automating workflows. As ServiceNow imports orders from third-party systems and fulfills them, and the product catalog is used to specify product offerings, specifications, and attributes, the overall efficiencies of the agents are improved, as well as customer satisfaction.

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