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Customer Central

ServiceNow CRM Workspace
Project Details

Company ServiceNow

Role Product Design, Research & Strategy

Users Customer Support Agents

Timeframe: Apr 2019–Oct 2019

Impact Adopted across multiple industries

Problem
Low adoption — only a dozen of 6K customers adopted Agent Workspace.

Agents struggled to resolve customer issues efficiently because information was fragmented across multiple tools, lacked context, and offered limited customization.
Solution
A single place for customer service agents to access holistic customer information, including their journey and data from third-party apps.

Persona

Amy — Customer Service Agent

As a support agent, Amy answers questions or requests from customers by different channels, such as phone, email or chat.

Jobs and Responsibilities

  • Resolves (external) customer issues and inquiries
  • Escalates and assigns cases to (next level) agents
  • Documents solutions in the KB
  • Collaborates with others

Pain Points (Hypothesis)

  • Swivel chair syndrome
  • Too many apps and resources
  • Missing context
  • Limited customization

Research

Customers

  • 3 customer companies
  • Industries: Telco, Tech & Automotive
  • 2 countries: Sweden & Germany
  • 27 research participants

Research Team

  • 1 Design Lead (me)
  • 1 UX Researcher
  • 4 Product Managers
Shadowing
Observed agents in their work environment to understand real-world workflows, behaviors, and pain points.
Journey Mapping
Mapped the end-to-end agent journey to identify key tasks, challenges, and opportunities for improvement.
Concept Provocation
Engaged customer executives and leadership with early concepts to challenge assumptions, spark discussion, and uncover strategic needs.

Key Findings

"I want us to be able to do more with less!"

— Amy, Customer Service Agent

Pain Points

  • Copy and paste between different apps is a pain!
  • Found multiple workarounds for accessing customer information
  • Need better visualization of customer's view (overview instead of lists)
  • Agents are in a continuous decision making mode
  • Determining signals from noise

Ideation

Design Principles

  • Empathy + Context = Contextual empathy
  • Bird's eye view + Worm's eye view = Holistic overview
  • Less [swiveling] is more [done]

Concept Ideas

  • All customer information in one place
  • Zoom into customer activity to understand what happened and why

Design Ideas

Bird's-Eye View — Customer Information
An overview of the customer plus the products/services they own, all in one place.
Worm's-Eye View — Customer Journey
A chronological view of the customer's interactions and history.

Old Way

A system of record built to capture data, not optimize the Support Agent experience.

New Way

A true CRM that brings customer context and workflows together to help agents get work done.

Adopted Across Industries

Healthcare, Finance, Telco, and more

Outcomes

  • From system of record to true CRM
  • First research into Support Agent personas
  • More UXs followed: case summary, sentiment analysis, AI recommendations, Playbooks, and Next Best Action
  • Highly customizable UI
  • Adopted across industries: Healthcare, Finance, Telco, and more
  • Helped win deals with Disney, SAP, & AT&T.

Learnings

  • There is no substitute for direct interaction with customers
  • Simplifying complexity goes a long way
  • Involve stakeholders early — the more complex the problem, the earlier the involvement
  • Think both horizontally and vertically to drive greater scale and adoption
 All works