During its 2025 Partner Kickoff, ServiceNow boldly declared: “We are in CRM.”
The announcement came as John Ball, SVP & GM CRM Workflows at ServiceNow, celebrated the vendor’s leader position in the 2024 Gartner Magic Quadrant for CRM Customer Engagement Center.
While ServiceNow has refrained from using the term “CRM” until now, over recent years, its Customer Service Management (CSM) platform has begun to look increasingly like such a solution.
Indeed, it now features omnichannel support, case management, self-service, knowledge management, proactive outreach, conversational intelligence, and a “360-degree customer view”.
As it has added these capabilities, the platform has won significant new business, with Bill McDermott, CEO of ServiceNow, revealing during the company’s latest earnings call:
[We’re] growing faster than markets, especially the customer service management market.
Yet, ServiceNow won’t challenge out-of-the-box CRM providers. Instead, its expertise lies in complex service delivery rooted in data from the ERP and other back-end systems.
In layering AI over the customer service workflows that enter these systems and leverage that data, ServiceNow will aim to deliver a much more data-rich CRM experience.
Martin Schneider, VP & Principal Analyst at Constellation Research, noted this last month after correctly predicting that ServiceNow would make a CRM push in 2025.
“Because of its history, knowledge, and deep data integration, ServiceNow can provide insights and capabilities that others can’t,” he told CX Today. “And their business relationships are also a huge advantage.
It has got detailed information about products, customers, and interactions, combined with unstructured data management. Add AI to that mix, and you’ve got a powerful platform that integrates seamlessly with workflows like order management, invoicing, and inventory.
With agentic AI offering an unprecedented opportunity to automate and enhance those workflows, ServiceNow is throwing its hat into the CRM ring at an incredibly exciting time.
However, the vendor will have to confront some challenges as it enters the CRM space.
Challenges ServiceNow May Face in the CRM Market
ServiceNow isn’t cheap or an easy plug-and-play platform, unlike Salesforce – for example – where small businesses and large enterprises alike can implement it with relative ease.
Instead, the businesses that have success with ServiceNow will do a lot of work to connect points of service and engagement across the enterprise.
As such, the vendor may need to reconsider its marketing approach for the CRM space.
Currently, ServiceNow focuses chiefly on high-level messaging around employees, customers, finance, and procurement. Now, it must enable partners and champions to take that message beyond IT to service and CX leaders.
While some may note that IT is playing an increasingly critical role in CRM buying decisions – thanks to the rise of AI – it’s these function leaders who typically have the final say.
So, ServiceNow will – hopefully – do more to engage with customer service teams, highlighting the value of pulling the contact center into the broader enterprise.
The vendor has started to do this, announcing co-innovation partnerships with various CCaaS vendors in 2024 – including Five9, Genesys, and Zoom – while speaking at their events.
By increasing these efforts, ServiceNow can justify its greater platform complexity.
However, that complexity also brings a critical AI education piece. As Rebecca Wetteman, CEO & Principal Analyst at Valoir, recently told CX Today:
In the short term, it’s also going to need skilled experts to help customers integrate these systems. Simply handing customers a bunch of AI tools and expecting them to figure it out hasn’t proven to be a winning strategy so far.
ServiceNow seems to recognize this and recently pledged to hire 3,000 new employees. Such moves will support its drive to win more CRM business.
The Brands That Should Consider ServiceNow for CRM
Brands looking for a broader enterprise service management solution or aiming to connect all aspects of service – not just the contact center but the entire business – should consider ServiceNow.
Indeed, in a popular LinkedIn post, Emil Lundvall, Head of the ServiceNow Practice Sweden for KPMG, makes a compelling argument.
“This evolution isn’t just a platform update; it’s a game-changer,” wrote Lundvall.
By integrating AI-driven agents and advanced automation, ServiceNow is set to revolutionize how businesses engage with their customers, driving efficiency and enhancing every step of the customer journey.
“From predictive insights to seamless interactions, this is next-level CRM that will empower organizations to deliver personalized, data-driven experiences at scale,” he concluded.
Of course, there are those challenges above. Yet, if an enterprise already has broader elements of ServiceNow installed, extending the platform to make it customer-facing isn’t a huge lift. Moreover, the vendor’s reputation for high customer loyalty is massive.
As such, do not discount ServiceNow from being the next big CRM provider, competing with the likes of Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, and Oracle.
Elsewhere at its 2025 Partner Kickoff, ServiceNow announced its acquisition of Cuein, the “copilot for customer experience teams”.
Discover more about ServiceNow’s position in the CRM space as Wetteman and other highly-regarded CX analysts share their takes during an upcoming episode of our BIG News Update.
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