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ServiceNow Outlines the "Now Platform" Solution for the Contact Center
At Enterprise Connect 2020, Terence Chesire (Senior Director, Product Management, ServiceNow) outlined ServiceNow’s “Now Platform” solution for the contact center. The Now Platform solution powers digital workflows for customer and field services. ServiceNow has found that organizations that digitize and automate their customer experiences achieve a 37% increase in customer profitability, with a 46% ROI from digital investment. However, only 14% of organizations are automating their customer service processes, which presents an opportunity for contact center as a service (CCaaS) vendors.
Key features of the Now Platform include:
- No/low code development, allowing non-IT developers to build apps to support workflow automation. (Now Platform comes with a suite of app development solutions for all types of developers.)
- Integration services, enabling data to be imported and exported between on-premises and cloud systems. Systems of record other than ServiceNow include Salesforce, SAP, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Azure, and Oracle, among others.
- “Now Intelligence” for predicting performance and detecting anomalies. This allows the contact center to plan for and prepare their schedules and budgets.
- Notification services for a mobile-first user experience. This includes self-service portals and a simplification of how customers are notified.
For further information, watch ServiceNow’s session The Collaborative Contact Center: A New Approach to Enterprise Customer Service (available online until December 31, 2020 at Enterprise Connect 2020).
Our Take
A common theme at Enterprise Connect 2020 was that many contact center providers are leading with customizable APIs, bringing communications platform as a service (CPaaS) solutions to the forefront. Rather than providing out-of-the-box solutions, vendors are allowing users to build apps and develop their platforms from the get-go – without requiring code-building skills. This goes not only for ServiceNow, but also for Twilio and Five9.
Alongside CPaaS options, market leaders in the CCaaS space are leveraging AI capabilities to improve customer experience wherever possible. It’s likely that the benefits of AI will be so great that AI-driven products will soon become a table-stakes offering. Now Intelligence is ServiceNow’s AI-driven entry and focuses on schedule planning. This is important for organizations structuring their annual budgets. Without knowing when call volumes may spike or decline, it becomes difficult to know where their largest costs will fall throughout the year.
Of course, AI-driven contact center solutions do not stop at schedule planning. AI-driven software might also include sentiment analysis and text-based action steps. However, while the Now Platform’s offerings are not entirely at the forefront of the CCaaS market, it’s still a competitive selection for organizations that do not need all of the bells and whistles but are after more than table-stakes offerings.
Source: SoftwareReviews CCaaS Data Quadrant. Accessed September 2, 2020.