What's new in Customer Service Management, Knowledge Management, and Communities in the Orlando release

Omni-channel enhancements

Contact center supervisors and managers are responsible for the quality of customer service offered by their agents. To monitor that quality, they monitor and coach staff. With Conversation Monitoring, supervisors and managers can silently monitor or join the conversation.

Self-service continues to be a popular channel. No surprise, since end customers’ expectation is that they should be able to do anything themselves. This release adds the ability for them to manage and approve change requests through the Customer Service Portal.

Companies often have other employees (such as sales people) who do not work in Customer Service Management but instead rely on Microsoft Outlook® to communicate with customers. The problem? Copy-and-pasting between Outlook and Customer Service Management is tedious and slows the agent’s work and can lead to inconsistent or lost information. The Outlook Add-in for Customer Service Management makes it possible to add a contact, create a case, and update cases directly from Outlook.

Knowledge Management

There are several enhancements to Knowledge Management in the Orlando release to help drive the easier creation and consumption of knowledge.

Knowledge Demand Insights helps increase the effectiveness of self-service and speeds customer case resolution by identifying which topics are missing knowledge articles. Using Predictive Intelligence, knowledge gaps are identified in a dashboard. Directly from the dashboard, knowledge administrators can view the case details for the gap, and then create and assign those gaps to authors. The regular knowledge creation process tracks the tasks associated with creating the article to address the gap.

Agent Workspace can now be used in several Knowledge Management scenarios. These include:

Authoring: create, edit, and publish knowledge articles in Agent Workspace, including using an article template. Agent Assist helps eliminate duplicate knowledge articles, aids in researching article content, and mapping related articles and related catalog items to a knowledge article.
Comparing knowledge article versions: identify and track changes between two versions of an article.
Previewing in Agent Assist: resize the panel to get a glimpse (rather than requiring the article be opened in full view) when deciding whether to attach or flag a knowledge article.
Addressing article feedback: create and resolve tasks created in Feedback Management.
Managing translations: support for Translation Management actions such as requesting article translation and addressing assigned translation tasks.

Knowledge Blocks are useful to maintain a set of text across multiple existing knowledge articles: update the block, and all linked articles reflect the change. Initially, limited to a single template, they can now be used in more than one HTML field of any article template (including custom templates).

Note: Knowledge Demand Insights require Customer Service Management Professional.

Communities

When customers want to find answers fast, browsing the community isn’t the best option. In this release, search has been improved in several ways to connect customers to solutions faster. Customers can now search for content within a forum. Search has also been enhanced to display the forums, topics, and profiles that match the search terms. Results can then be filtered based on these additional categories.

In a community, sometimes announcements or other content don't require comments. In other cases, comments may have taken a negative turn. Now comments can be disabled on a blog, document, video, event, or question.

Drafting community content in advance–like writing a blog or planning an event–is helpful. What’s not helpful? Forgetting to post it! Now, both blogs and events can be scheduled for publishing at a future date and time.

Learn more

These are just a few of the many new features coming to Customer Service Management, Knowledge Management, and Communities in the New York release. You can read more about these and other new capabilities in the Product Documentation or schedule a conversation and demo with your account team (and discuss the value of moving from Customer Service Management Standard to Professional, if appropriate). Also be sure to visit the Customer Success Center to review essential resources to assist you in planning your upgrade. Welcome to Orlando!

P.S. Knowledge 2020 is coming! This is a great opportunity to learn from and network with fellow ServiceNow customers, see demos of the Orlando release, and learn what’s coming in future releases. If you haven’t already registered to attend, do it today!

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On Demand

The Now Platform Orlando release broadcast.

ServiceNow is proud to introduce and walk you through the Now Platform Orlando release with Now Intelligence.

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