[Music] [Applause] welcome everyone i am karen glazier senior marketing director here at crossviews and today i have the pleasure on speaking with ash townsend our head of pre-sales in our uk division and we're going to be chatting a bit about servicenow orlando csm hey ash how are you today yeah very good thanks how you doing i'm doing great i'm doing great i'm uh i know this is like our second conversation so i'm really excited i know right so to dive into a specific area of orlando i think is really going to help folks understand about csm how it's different from the previous version and with this new release you know what that really entails and actually that's my first question for you yeah so what's the big so what about orlando csm as compared to the previous version yes so the i think there's probably no one so what there's a number of um features in csm that have come out in orlando so servicenow bit of backstory servicenow have been building on uh their csm offerings they were fairly late to the game compared to other csm solutions um but the platform now does have a true sort of omni-channel csm solution available to people and the orlando release has been um largely focused on csm improvements and enhancements and some new features as well so there's things like agent affinity for workload assignment knowledge insights [Music] operational service health so that you get a view of your your customer service base uh there's a feature called customer project management which is all about actually the combination of csm and ppm for people familiar with project portfolio management and there's a ton more but probably best we focus in on a few of those for today great uh why don't we jump into agent affinity for work assignment which i know pretty much allows the users to assign work to the best agent based on intelligent contacts what does it actually mean and what value does that provide it's exactly that so it's it's um its sole purpose is um tackling that challenge where as a consumer or a user of a service when i phone up it would clearly be more valuable for me to speak to an agent or interact with an agent that i was previously working with who has a historical knowledge of my customer case and that's the purpose of this agent affinity functionality it's designed for automatic routing of those issues to effectively the most qualified and available agent and that will work for sort of chats cases phone calls any particular task that gets raised from any you know csm is typically omni-channel so any channel that your communication is coming in from it's it's going to pick up on that context and it will use history related other tasks um account team responsibilities to automatically assign that that case and that interaction so hopefully that makes sense and then for an example of that would would be sort of what i alluded to if if i was a an end user and having some sort of interaction let's say with servicenow's virtual agent about a particular case about a problem i'm having and at some point i decide that actually this needs to be escalated to a live agent it would make sense and be reasonable that the most knowledgeable agent is going to be the one that was already working on that case and so agent affinity would link it to that that individual and that agent could pick up on the tasks effectively helping you know large organizations filter through quicker and enable better and faster customer service oh my gosh i that's like the utopia of for a consumer to call up a company and be able to talk to someone they've talked to before and have the one view and they have all that history i mean that's that's just an amazing feature it sounds like i think it's not just for the agent and and the ease of use and their ability to get closer and engage better with that that customer but the customers experience it they would have a great one if they had all that that background already presented to him versus having to restate everything all over again precisely excellent so moving on to our next feature in the orlando csm knowledge demand insight which as i understand is a feature that's meant to improve self-service and case resolution i think by automatically identifying and visualizing knowledge gaps now that's a mouthful so can you kind of clarify that a little bit for us and talk about what that really means in the value it delivers yes so the i think you've stolen my thunder on exactly what it does but you're absolutely right it's um it's identifying so automatically the platform will help identify gaps in your knowledge base so a knowledge base isn't new it's something that's been around for a long time in the platform um servicenow have released this functionality to effectively help um self-service so that the the knowledge base is relevant and up-to-date to to through sort of creating articles and helping the the process through creation of those articles so your knowledge base admins can go to this dashboard and see that there are gaps in your knowledge and this would be an opportune time and place to put new knowledge in into your knowledge base um and as we all know right the if your end users attempt to go to some sort of self-service portal and self-serve their issue and that knowledge base doesn't have the information available to them that will probably be the last time they go to that knowledge base so it's critical that that you keep up to date and keep your articles relevant and that's exactly what this is designed for and the value really lies in that sort of repeat business getting people to come back incident deflection if i'm able to solve my issue myself through a knowledge article i'm not contacting the service desk or raising a case i'm not absorbing any time of my agents or the service desk teams yep get in get out get your problem resolved and really deliver that frictionless customer experience that we we really need today especially with online and mobile so talk a little bit about real-time service health what is that what's the value it provides the customer service teams that sort of thing yeah so the the real time service health is and a lot of the orlando release has been about visibility and transparency as you you've probably picked up on this is very much the same it's allowing um your teams your service agents to track the real-time status of a customer's installed services and so the value there is really the opportunity to provide improved customer experience right so proactively detect and respond to customer-wide outages it shows a level of maturity and that that proactive nature in that i'm reaching out and saying look fully aware that dear mr customer you're experiencing some outage or perhaps you're not aware yet but but we are and we're working to resolve it it builds a level of trust and confidence in your service that you can offer to your customer base ideally that's then going to feed into reducing the number of inbound calls because you won't need so many people complaining that there are outages you're being proactive about it presenting it on a on a portal of of your customers kind of access that's going to free up your customer service teams allow them to work on delivering value elsewhere and you know likewise the customer is still kept up to date they're not in the dark about anything they have a status of their services and they can see the real-time service excellent that sounds like a wonderful feature so we have customer project management which makes it possible for customers to track the progress of complex projects and we all know we have a lot of those in our organization so what does that really mean what value does that really give the customer tell us a little bit about that one so a great way to look at the customer project management is from a consumer perspective and something that we should all be familiar with sort of if i'm trying to get some new internet at home or you know order something off amazon my experience there through consuming a service is very much the minute i've ordered that that item or service as an end user i'm immediately presented with a transparent view of order progress the actions available to me to to act on that item or service the areas that i can seek help on that particular order and you can imagine that the sort of access you get from a mobile app or a portal right everything's in one place there's no need to chase anyone over the phone or send in an email and things like that and so for a complex project where let's say i did need some new internet um and you're working with an internet service provider well they've got to do a lot of things to provide that service probably there's provision and request some hardware some routers and network gear need to go out they need to get some lease lines they need to work across some software and that that project really works well in a sort of project management space but as a customer i still expect to be able to see the state of that and i'd love to be able to see where we're at in delivery of that service and that's exactly what this customer project management solution is designed to do excellent excellent so if if somebody has an itsm instance does that grant them access to these same csm features or is that something different that they would have to have to get yeah good question so um largely no so itsm and csm are separate so you wouldn't be granted the same sort of access um and it's important to consider actually what fits your needs so we're talking about csm today and clearly that's sort of customer external consumer focused it could be b2b btc but it's it's engaging entities outside of probably your internal service now and standard operating procedures kind of processes whereas itsm is very much focused on that itil internal workflow processes this is how i operate my business or my it units this is how i raise change requests for new work to get done so there can easily be an amalgamation of them both csm probably will leverage a lot of itsm but you absolutely need to look at your use case there may be a world in which you don't need csm but if you do have that external engagement it's likely that itsm wouldn't be suitable we have a load of customers ask about whether they can use their incidents problems and changes for external customers and um you know while the processes might trivially seem similar that they really aren't and the engagement across them is very different an omni-channel approach being able to provide things like agent affinity and customer project management it's very different in reality and as we've seen in implementations that we've run it's key that you identify your requirements and your use cases and then make the call on whether itsm or csm is right for you great great well ash it's always a pleasure to chat with you you always allow me uh to fill my head with more information about servicenow in general and in this case servicenow orlando because there's really a lot of great features as you just went through so i'm excited that we're able to cover this today i hope the viewers got a lot of value out of this and uh but if anybody wants to continue this discussion and dive deeper maybe even see a demo of orlando we're happy to do that so just reach out at let's talk at crossfuse.com thank you ash and stay well thanks karen you too thank you