ServiceNow: Our cornerstone system
September 18, 2015
ServiceNow: Our cornerstone system
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
Fuji
Overall Satisfaction with ServiceNow
Currently we use ServiceNow for a number of organizations/uses. ServiceNow is used to manage customer interactions (cases) as well as device interactions (incidents) for our internet systems. We also use it to house site information as a sort of network management system for the physical locations and details of our infrastructure. Further, we also use this as a tool to help with project management when building/acquiring new sites.
On the customer side of things, we use ServiceNow to create cases for each customer interaction, as well as to provide tools for our CSRs to help troubleshoot through customer issues. If unable to do so, the CSR may create a work order within ServiceNow and schedule it (through ClickSoftware). Currently, we have the following systems either integrated with ServiceNow or in the process of integrating with ServiceNow:
On the customer side of things, we use ServiceNow to create cases for each customer interaction, as well as to provide tools for our CSRs to help troubleshoot through customer issues. If unable to do so, the CSR may create a work order within ServiceNow and schedule it (through ClickSoftware). Currently, we have the following systems either integrated with ServiceNow or in the process of integrating with ServiceNow:
- ClickSoftware
- ScienceLogic
- EliteCom
- Yonyx
- Twilio
- "Discovery" (This is an in-house built data store for all of our devices and relationships)
- The best thing it does is incident management. It has easy-to-use workflows and form-builders that allow a hierarchy of incidents to interact with one another that help for an overall better ticketing queue and customer experience.
- It is fairly malleable. We currently use it for a myriad of different functions and are able to have our own development team do all of the coding/scripting to make the changes required by our business.
- While the workflows and templates are nice for basic use, once you go deep into coding, there are always surprises come release time. It seems that no matter how deep we go into testing and QA, ServiceNow surprises us with some unforeseen blip that wasn't experienced in our development or testing environments. This can cause the product to seem more unstable as we are having to fix more bugs in production than anticipated.
- Although ServiceNow is fairly malleable, there are still some blockers in terms of getting the product to do what your business needs. There are minor frustrations in bypassing set rules and requirements in the standard templates that cause development some grief.
- Training could definitely be improved. Our company is very new to using ServiceNow (only 1 year in), and our training didn't prepare us for our coding needs. After attending the ServiceNow conference and seeing the vast array of interfaces, we realized just how little we knew and understood the system. Had we better understood things like CMS, we would have developed many of our features differently and thus provided a better experience to its users.
- We have a much better idea of why customers are calling in and why systems are failing due to the incidents we have created and the easy way it integrates with our troubleshooting trees for our CSRs. This has lead to improvements on our technology and products to deliver a better customer experience.
- Because we have been able to integrate our NMS tools with ServiceNow, we are able to have shorter calls with our customers as we are able to provide our CSRs with more troubleshooting tools.
ServiceNow far outweighs Salesforce in its case management and has easy forms for work order creation. It's much easier to integrate with and has better workflows and troubleshooting tree guides. However, it's not ideal to be used for a CRM nor does it have anywhere near the scheduling capabilities of ClickSoftware in terms of routing and field service management. We have also found that building troubleshooting guides is much easier in Yonyx than in that of ServiceNow's wizard feature.