Create a great end-to-end customer experience with Rome release

During the pandemic, companies that weren’t digitally enabled had great difficulty dealing with the massive disruption that hit them overnight. For me, this reinforced the lesson that great customer experience goes beyond simply boosting engagement or providing multiple touch points. Instead, customer-centric companies outperform by realigning operations and processes for better customer outcomes.

The Now Platform® Rome release features multiple Customer Workflows innovations that help companies deliver great end-to-end customer experiences, improve employee productivity and satisfaction, and realize significant cost savings. The result: happier customers and employees and improved bottom lines.

Create impactful customer engagement

With the new LIKE.TG® Messaging Service launched in Rome, it’s easier than ever to deliver great customer experience on the most widely adopted messaging platforms, turning your alerts and notifications into opportunities to engage with your customers.

Companies can now purchase SMS and WhatsApp messaging services directly from LIKE.TG, benefiting from favorable, pre-negotiated messaging rates globally and assist in reducing friction in the sales cycle. We added Rich Messaging to elevate tasks such as appointment booking that require more than simple text to deliver a great customer experience.

We also made several enhancements to Engagement Messenger that enable companies to embed service directly in a website or a mobile device to offer service at their customer’s point of need. Another really cool feature is Deep Linking, which takes user context into account. Depending on the page or the user behavior on the page or website where the Engagement Messenger is embedded, one can deep-link to a specific article, filtered search, service catalog item, or case.

For example, when a customer makes an e-commerce purchase, a company can launch Engagement Messenger to immediately open a specific knowledge article, catalog item, or Virtual Agent topic relevant to the task at hand. Customers don't always need to speak to a human agent.

Today, when customers are engaged in a live chat with a customer service agent and they need to accomplish common tasks such as creating a case or booking an appointment, the agent needs to ask questions and guide the customer through the steps. This is inefficient and ties down the agent to this repetitive task.​

In Rome, we introduced Conversation Autopilot, a massive productivity booster that allows an agent to transfer a chat to a virtual agent for repetitive tasks such as collecting information or answering screening questions.

Solve issues quickly, proactively, and consistently

Service agents are often a customer’s first point of contact with a company. Fulfillment of many service requests involves a complex set of tasks that span systems, teams, and processes. With Customer Service Playbooks: Focused layout, agents don’t need to remember this complexity.

Instead, this feature pairs agents with a virtual coach who can guide them through each step. The easy-to-use format enables agents, especially newer ones, to be productive and confident. This makes it easy for agents to focus on their current activity while maintaining visibility into the full process lifecycle.

Customers get fast service and a consistent experience. Supervisors can easily track agents' service-level agreement performance. And agents don’t need to be reskilled each time a process changes.

However, not every case has a clear-cut path to resolution. With the new Guided Decisions, agents receive two types of next-best actions for customer cases in their workspace:

• Questions to lead the agent to a solution
• Direct guidance relevant to the case, such as proposing a resolution or an offer

The feature dynamically ranks next-best actions based on the business context and displays the optimal recommendations relevant to the issue being addressed.

Guided Decisions help agents resolve cases fast and reduce the time for training and retraining. Companies can use the Now Platform to provide agents with the latest, best advice, thereby reducing the amount of time they spend researching solutions for customer issues.

Finally, the no-code and low-code configuration speeds the creation and deployment of new guidance for agents.

Increase field service efficiency

Field service workers are crucial to maintaining operations and delivering customer-facing products and services.

Intelligent Task Recommendations help maximize the number of tasks a technician can complete per day by reducing gaps in their schedule. It’s time-consuming and inefficient for dispatchers to fill schedule gaps manually, especially when customers cancel at the last minute or technician availability changes. Instead, Intelligent Task Recommendations help identify the best available tasks when there are openings in a technician’s schedule.

Many field service organizations support complex projects that require a team of technicians to complete the work order. For example, a wellhead repair crew might include a hydrologist, a mechanical engineer, and an electrician. With Field Service Crew Operations, field service dispatchers can manage and assign tasks to crews made up of multiple technicians.

Dispatchers can easily assemble fixed crews in advance for planned work and ad hoc crews for task-specific work. Assigning a work order to a crew automatically assigns it to each crew member, streamlining the assignment process.

Resolve issues proactively with the IoT

Companies today collect reams of real-time data from IoT devices and sensors in the field. This often results in siloed, reactive operations. The Connected Operations releases on the LIKE.TG Store in June and September 2021, part of our journey to the Rome release, help companies take proactive action.

They can interpret data, see how many customers are impacted, identify what action if any needs to be taken, and automate best practice processes through workflows without the customer having to engage.

Historical Asset Performance Analysis provides a visual history of your equipment data, so you can detect trends, perform root cause analyses, optimize equipment performance, and—most importantly—react proactively to IoT data streams.

This enhancement allows you to use the Digital Twin Dashboard more strategically. That’s especially critical if an asset or equipment is not performing as expected. Now you can compare connected attributes on an asset—such as wind speed, motor temperature, and revolutions on a wind turbine—to uncover issues, perform proactive maintenance, and increase asset uptime.

We also introduced a new rule type to the IoT Rule Engine in Connected Operations: time-based rules. It runs prebuilt rules against IoT data to detect issues. This enables fast issue detection and response.

Let’s say an IoT device registers a refrigerator with an abnormally high temperature. This could be a false positive, making it wasteful to roll a truck without further investigation. Evaluating temperature trends over time provides greater precision and control.

Once an issue is detected by time-based rules, the rule triggers automated remediation workflows, such as automatically dispatching a technician to fix the overheated refrigerator.

There are a lot more Customer Workflows innovations in the Rome release than we were able to mention here. Learn more at Now at Work.