ServiceNow has introduced ServiceNow Communities as part of its Customer Service Management solution.
ServiceNow Communities provides a personalized, self-service experience that allows customers to access their profiles, cases, products, services, and notifications in real time and get relevant nformation by engaging with peers and experts and from contextual search. A customer-specific activity stream ensures they only get desired updates.
"Communities are key to driving loyalty," said Abhijit Mitra, general manager of the Customer Service Management Business Unit at ServiceNow, in a statement. "But not all communities are equal in their ability to engage customers. With ServiceNow, every customer gets a community of experts and peers and a personalized, integrated experience, enabling companies to build much-desired, long-term relationships."
ServiceNow Communities includes core capabilities such as managed forums, curated topics, support for multiple content types, moderation, and granular permissions. Additonal features include the following:
- Integration with the ServiceNow Customer Service Portal, allowing users to see or edit their profile details, cases, products, services, and notifications in the same place where they engage in the community.
- Seamless contextual searching, enabling users to get information or answers with a single search that works across ServiceNow Knowledge Management and Communities.
- A customer-specific activity stream, which provides content and updates from the community.
In addition to Communities, ServiceNow is enhancing its Customer Service Management solution in two other areas. They are the following:
- Dynamic Scheduling for Field Service, allowing multiple tasks to be assigned to different agents at the same time, enabling prioritization while assigning and automatically moving work to an unassigned state due scheduling of a higher-priority task; and
- Cost Management, which helps customer service leaders understand the true costs of the services their companies deliver. Customer Service Management is integrated with the ServiceNow ITBM Cost Transparency application, enabling monitoring and analysis of service costs by customer account, channel, product version, product line, contracts, and more.
This latest release is built on a single platform that connects departments, workflows, and systems, including field service, knowledge management, and portals.
ServiceNow Communities will be available in the third quarter of this year.