Last month, ServiceNow announced its entry into the CRM space.
The move left some scratching their heads, as they had already considered ServiceNow a CRM provider.
However, it had previously swerved the CRM label.
So, why has it suddenly decided to embrace the term?
In a conversation with CX Today, Michael Ramsey, GVP of Product Management for Customer Workflows at ServiceNow, spilled the tea.
ServiceNow’s CRM Platform
In 2016, ServiceNow launched its Customer Service Management (CSM) solution.
Since then, the vendor has sunk significant funds into the platform, adding features such as case management, knowledge management, a single customer view, proactive outreach, conversational analytics, etc.
“We have aggressively invested in it and seen a lot of market validation,” confirmed Ramsey.
While making this point, Ramsey spotlighted various analyst reports, including the latest Gartner Magic Quadrant for CRM Customer Engagement Center (CEC).
That study underscores how ServiceNow has achieved significant “market momentum” in customer service and tags the vendor as one of four leaders.
As it has developed this momentum, ServiceNow has also put forward a field service management product, which falls under the CRM umbrella.
Yet, the prelude to its CRM announcement came with the launch of ServiceNow’s Sales and Order Management products in Q1, 2024.
By pulling all these solutions together, Ramsey states:
This makes us the only platform that handles sales, fulfillment, and service on a single, unified platform.
"This moment feels like the right time to align our terminology with what the market and our customers already call it, including buyer personas," he concluded.
ServiceNow’s CRM Differentiator
Many competitors have focused on enabling customer engagement through front-office functionality.
However, ServiceNow aims to differentiate with an end-to-end solution, claims Ramsey. He noted:
It’s not just about handling commercial requests - buying, returning, or seeking service - but also about ensuring we can fulfill those requests effectively to drive a superior customer experience.
In large enterprises, the necessary insight to handle many of these queries effectively sprawls across back-end systems.
ServiceNow connects its CRM application with invoicing, inventory, order management, and various other workflows. That end-to-end approach enables a more data-rich CRM experience.
Moreover, the vendor layers AI over those workflows to derive more insight.
