NICE breaks free from legacy CRM with award-winning CSM solution

When your mission is to perfect the customer experience, you take customer satisfaction seriously. That’s why NICE came to ServiceNow when it wanted to replace its aging customer support system.

NICE is the world leader in advanced analytics solutions that optimize the customer journey, ensure compliance, combat fraud, and safeguard citizens. The company’s cloud-based software turns big data from phone calls, mobile apps, emails, chat, social media, video, and transactions into actionable insights that drive better customer interactions and business results. More than 25,000 organizations around the world use NICE solutions, including 85% of the Fortune 100.

NICE had been using a traditional tiered support model for many years. This led to frequent reassignments as 100,000 cases a year wound their way to engineers with the appropriate skills. And, when a case finally arrived at the right place, engineers didn’t have a knowledgebase to help with resolution. As a result, mean time to resolution (MTTR) averaged 24 days.

Lack of customer self-service was also a major concern. Since NICE’s existing system was designed as an internal ticketing tool, the company could only provide its customers and partners a rudimentary portal. This resulted in low adoption and customer dissatisfaction, negatively affecting sales and customer retention. And, because there was no knowledgebase for customers, NICE lost the opportunity to deflect cases.

NICE decided it needed to transform its service delivery processes to provide a world-class customer experience.

Service delivery that’s “not stuck in the front office”

The company looked for a new customer service platform that would allow it to:

  • Dramatically enhance its self-service capabilities, giving customers and partners an intuitive portal where they could find answers, request services, and get their issues resolved
  • Transition from a tier-based to skill-based support model, where cases are automatically routed to the right engineer based on skills and availability
  • Accelerate case resolution by empowering their support staff with knowledge centered service (KCS®)[1] processes and collaboration tools
  • Automate processes to increase customer responsiveness and provide proactive support

After evaluating different options, NICE chose ServiceNow Customer Service Management (CSM).

Eyal Lubin, NICE’s director of global service operations, says, “By any measure, ServiceNow goes head-to-head with the leading CRM vendors out there. And, unlike these CRM solutions, it’s not stuck in the front office. It connects your entire organization. As a cloud-based solution provider, having CSM and ITSM on the same platform was critical so that we could link customer service directly to our operations environment.”

“One of the key advantages of ServiceNow is the strong connection between its CSM vision and the product. You can see it everywhere. The portal is really designed for the end customer, not just for internal users. And, they’ve made the flow easy for our support engineers, giving them help to find the right answer right away. This is a huge benefit, and it’s exactly what we want to achieve.”

Now, NICE’s customers and partners go to the ServiceNow-powered portal to ask questions, open cases, and request services using the online knowledgebase and service catalog. Within a week of going live, NICE saw a dramatic increase in the number of cases submitted via self-service, and 65% of cases are now submitted using the portal.

ServiceNow automatically routes these cases to the correct people, matching the case description to support engineers with the right skills and availability. ServiceNow then helps engineers resolve these cases by pointing them to specific and relevant information drawn from a library of 3,700 knowledge articles. Engineers also use ServiceNow’s social capabilities to discuss cases and get help from other engineers.

Problem solving gets proactive

NICE also offers monitoring services to its customers, using ServiceNow to watch for issues with customer equipment and software. One year from their initial launch, ServiceNow was automatically opening 200 cases a day to capture these issues, proactively alerting customers while providing support advanced warning if problems were detected.

With ServiceNow CSM, NICE has transformed customer service, creating a responsive, customer-centric support environment that enhances the customer experience, accelerates case resolution, and drives business growth. And, with ServiceNow Performance Analytics, NICE has the visibility it needs to continuously enhance customer service, making it a competitive differentiator far into the future.

But, don’t take our word for it. NICE’s ServiceNow CSM implementation has just won a 2018 Stevie Award for Innovation in Customer Service.

Congratulations!

[1] KCS® is a service mark of the Consortium for Service Innovation.