Here is Why We Are Excited About the ServiceNow Quebec Release
Trusted by almost 7,000 enterprise customers, ServiceNow has a reputation for excellence in ITSM (IT Service Management) and Customer Service Management (CSM).
In ITSM, ServiceNow has performed consistently well, as evidenced by its leadership position in Gartner’s ITSM Magic Quadrant for 7 years. Its ITSM product enables organizations – particularly those with intermediate to advanced I&O maturity – to deliver ITSM from a single cloud platform.
CSM is another strong area for ServiceNow. By leveraging ServiceNow’s CSM suite, customer service organizations can integrate front, middle, and back offices to create a single view of the customer and deliver stellar customer service experiences. They can also better engage customers with digital workflows, proactively address issues, and expand self-service to improve customer service productivity. In fact, a recent Forrester Consulting study found proof of many of these benefits, with many CSM organizations achieving tangible operational improvements, including:
- Up to 20% improvement in first contact resolution
- 40% reduction in cases initiated over the phone
- Increased revenue retention by $5.2 million from support contract renewals
Undoubtedly, ServiceNow’s value in the ITSM/CSM sectors is indisputable. And now, with the new Quebec release, we expect ServiceNow to further cement its position in these areas.
ServiceNow Quebec Release: Supporting Organizations in a Post-COVID World
The Quebec release includes several new features in existing ServiceNow products and also new products that expand existing offerings. With Quebec innovations, ServiceNow aims to help organizations better cope with the ravages of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Innovations like ITOM Predictive AIOps, AI Search, and Virtual Agent, are all geared towards empowering companies to work smarter, innovate at scale, enhance customer engagement, and thrive, even in an era of uncertainty and chaos.
What’s New in the Quebec Release
Virtual Agent
Virtual agents can be a game-changer in a world where service organizations have to address increasing customer demands and a growing remote team. Powered by Artificial Intelligent (AI), a virtual agent provides automated customer service. The technology can easily answer customers’ common issues, guide them through questions with an easy workflow and pre-set answers, and even reroute complex conversations to actual human agents. All in all, virtual agents provide quick issue resolutions and reduce the burden on real agents.
ServiceNow Quebec includes an AI-powered conversational chatbot that yields all these benefits and more. With the chatbot, service organizations can automate common requests, reduce call volumes, and even provide self-service. Thanks to Natural language (NLU), virtual agents can carry on smart, meaningful conversations using the full context of the Now Platform. This helps deliver personalized experiences, speed up incident resolution, and accelerate time to value.
CSM: Engagement Messenger
The Engagement Messenger is another important enhancement to ServiceNow’s CSM suite. It powers advanced customer engagement on third-party sites such as service catalogs, knowledge bases, case management, etc. to engage customers at scale.
Through Engagement Messenger’s low-code/no-code configuration, service organizations can easily extend self-service across all the service options they support. They can also extend self-service via Knowledge Management, Virtual Agents, and Intelligent AI Search to other points on the customer journey to reduce self-service time to value and increase its ROI. By embedding service options in desktop and mobile web pages, customers get easy answers and a smoother journey as they interact with the brand.
For customers who still prefer to talk to agents, Engagement Messenger supports both Live Chat (with human agents) and Messaging (with automated chatbots). Engagement Messenger also supports other capabilities like:
- Case management: Customers can open and manage their cases
- Appointment booking: Customers can schedule time with an agent or technician
- Service Catalog: Simple forms deliver solutions to common issues by bypassing customer service and routing directly to relevant departments
Other key CSM capabilities in Quebec include:
- Agent workspace
- Advanced work assignments
- Playbooks and guided decisions for agents
- Communities
- Customer Central
ITOM & ITSM: Predictive AIOps
Quebec’s powerful new AI capabilities cover numerous use cases, including:
- Providing personalized, relevant search results (to customers and employees)
- Simplifying workflows to help employees work smarter from anywhere
- Detecting and predicting IT issues to avoid critical service outages
This last use case is of particular interest to ITOM and ITSM leaders and managers. One key reason is that AIOps technology brings a higher level of proactivity into the ITOM ecosystem. Organizations can gain insights to effectively detect, and, therefore, avoid anomalies. This allows them to minimize the possibility of service outages that could potentially impact their operations, output, and customer commitments. They can also get straight to the root cause of issues, initiate automatic remediations, and view resolution insights in plain language. Simplified data collection means they can automatically parse data from any source, and classify log files for later review. Predictive intelligence cuts event noise and minimizes “alert fatigue” so teams can focus on the issues that truly matter.
ITOM & ITSM: Site Reliability Operations
Site Reliability Operations is a new ITOM feature in Quebec to help IT professionals respond to incidents faster, manage risk better, and boost resilience. DevOps and Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) get improved microservice visibility across teams in one workspace and just a few minutes. This translates into better observability and faster incident response. This, in turn, helps deliver modern DevOps and creates a powerful performance-driven culture across the organization.
IT managers get a range of reliability metrics at their fingertips so they can seamlessly manage the entire digital lifecycle. Connecting data into a single configuration management database (CMDB) simplifies planning and enables them to embrace modern operations practices to improve IT efficiency, reliability, and profitability.
Other key ITSM/ITOM capabilities in Quebec include:
- Service mapping
- Certificate management
- Firewall audits and visibility
- Service graph connectors
Conclusion
Quebec is one of the most exciting releases to come out of the growing ServiceNow stable in recent times. Quebec’s features address everything from predictive issue management and improved ITOM/ITSM visibility, to personalized customer experiences, and AI-powered automated conversations. Organizations that effectively leverage these capabilities will definitely experience benefits across their IT management and customer service operations and create a strong competitive position for themselves.
