The “Design for CRM foundation” project focuses on enhancing the Customer Operations function in ServiceNow, by building unified horizontal & extensible product frameworks and experience templates to support middle & back-office operations - thus becoming the foundation for Customer Relationship Management (CRM). Customer Operations & CRM is the foundation for industry solutions at ServiceNow, and there is a need to support: Complex organization structures (accounts, business locations), different customer types (contacts, consumers, households), their 360 information, products & services purchased and used, relationships between people, organizations, and groups, to deliver a great customer experience. It also becomes necessary to scale across various business model complexities - from simple B2C to B2B to B2B2C setups. This gives rise to an inherent need to support the customers through end-to-end journeys right from marketing, sales, purchase, service, and post-sales support through renewal, expansion, and upgrade strategies. But in most cases, business enterprises build, sell, fulfill orders, and extend service support to customers through different applications at every aforementioned stage. However, while the customer journey & lifecycle seem continuous, the service experience received by them is very disconnected since the middle/back-office operations are carried out through different applications which are disconnected and have their management systems - thus forcing personas to jump across multiple platforms to gather context about the customer & issues they are facing, thereby decreasing agent productivity. This ultimately leads to longer resolution time resulting in poor customer experiences. Because of the siloed application management systems involved in the product & customer service lifecycle - the customer’s information, customer operations, and respective product experiences are scattered across these systems which creates an overall disconnected experience for both - customers & agents. This is the core problem that the project addresses in its discourse.
