I'm always excited to see what new or improved features are included in each ServiceNow Release. I've

been working a lot in Customer Service Management (CSM) recently and have had to find various solutions for my client that just aren't handled in the baseline features. Glancing through the prodigious release notes for ServiceNow's upcoming Quebec release (O Canada!) I found an exciting new feature in CSM.

One of the great things that CSM inherently has is explicit roles. There are internal users (members of your organization) and external users (members of your customer's organization, or your customer's customers). Baseline CSM allows cases to be submitted on behalf of external parties only. Each case can be associated with an account (customer entry on the core_company table), and an external contact (a extension of the user table of users associated with an account). This means that if an internal user wants to submit something via CSM, they couldn't be the contact user without customization, because they don't have a record in the contact table.

Enter the Contributor Roles feature introduced in Quebec! An expanded view of who might be submitting a case, and for whom they might be submitting it. These all apply to internal users aka employees of the service organization. ServiceNow lays it out like this on the doc site:

Of course the release notes have more features than just this one, so check out at least the highlights page to catch up on all of the happenings with the Quebec release. For my CSM friends, here's the whole highlights section content for Customer Workflows:

Customer workflows

Connect your customer operations to boost loyalty.

Customer Service Management

• Engagement Messenger: Extend customer self-service experience to web or mobile web. Deploy quickly with no/low code configuration to empower customers with Virtual Agent, AI Search, chat, cases, and service catalog.
• Mobile messaging channels: Enable branded, interactive mobile experiences directly in customer messaging apps including Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp (requires a Twilio contract), and LINE.
• Workforce Optimization: Manage real-time progress of work done across teams. Take action to improve visibility of agent workload, performance, and overall operations.
• Process Optimization content pack for CSM: Analyze and improve customer service processes using ServiceNow audit log data. Identify bottlenecks, redundancies and automation opportunities.
• Contributor user: Deliver unified support for internal and external customers. Enable employees to request support for self, customer, or location using the case object.
• CSM Configurable Workspace: Configure page layouts and components in UI Builder. Provide flexible configuration to suit varied customer requirements.
• Guided decision enhancements: Empower agents to solve complex issues faster by recommending decision trees as next best actions. Nest decision trees to improve reuse.

Field Service Management

• Dispatcher Workspace: Improve the dispatcher experience with a modern user interface. Dispatch faster with all vital data displayed in a single configurable screen.
• Field Service capacity and reservations management: Define capacity and task types of internal or external groups. Schedule work automatically based on defined capacity.
• Predictive Intelligence: Use machine learning to discover trends and issues with work order clustering. Identify similar work orders or relevant knowledge articles to resolve issues quickly.
• Offline knowledge articles on mobile: Access information from remote locations. See knowledge articles in a native mobile format. View attachments such as images and videos.

(ServiceNow Release Notes: Highlights, copied 09 March 2021)