ServiceNow hit the headlines in 2024 for its high-profile partnerships with stalwart contact center providers, including Five9, Genesys, and Zoom.
These collaborations go beyond integrating technologies. Instead, they involve co-innovation between ServiceNow and its CCaaS partners.
Take its Five9 announcement as an example. Here, ServiceNow is pulling Five9’s unified routing and real-time transcription solutions into its Customer Service Management (CSM) platform.
With Genesys, it goes further, embedding its voice, journey orchestration, and workforce engagement management (WEM) capabilities into CSM.
Yet, ServiceNow started its CCaaS co-innovation journey with Zoom, launching the Zoom Contact Center for ServiceNow, which allows CSM customers to embed Zoom voice. There’s also a ServiceNow ticket collaboration feature within Team Chat.
In October, that partnership expanded, with the vendors enabling mutual customers to action workflows in ServiceNow through the Zoom AI Companion.
Nonetheless, without honing in on one particular partnership, all these announcements serve end-users. How? By bringing more data into ServiceNow CSM, lowering management burden, and improving agent experiences, as they switch between fewer platforms.
Beyond these immediate benefits, however, ServiceNow is also thinking about the bigger picture.
ServiceNow Is Pulling the Contact Center Into the Enterprise Ecosystem
Some may consider ServiceNow’s blossoming partnerships with contact center vendors as a step forward in unifying CRM and CCaaS solutions.
However, the vendor doesn’t classify CSM as a CRM solution. Why? Because it’s thinking beyond what most consider "CRM" today. "We see ourselves as a platform of action and work," confirmed Simon Morris, VP of Solution Consulting at ServiceNow, in conversation with CX Today.
As such, ServiceNow is developing workflows for complex service delivery, where a lot of ERP data and other enterprise systems are at play.
Yet, through its CCaaS collaborations, ServiceNow is now pulling the contact center closer to that enterprise ecosystem and enabling new workflows.
"Our view of customer service experiences goes beyond the initial interaction," explained Morris. "It extends into customer care teams, contract management, fulfillment, and other areas where the experience often breaks down.
These partnerships are exciting because they create a more seamless and joined-up experience for customers and the businesses that serve them.
Soon, businesses may apply agentic AI to these joined-up experiences and automate more of their enterprise operations, making ServiceNow even more attractive to enterprise buyers.
ServiceNow Is Benefiting from the Rise of Contact Center AI
The growing significance of AI across the contact center industry has resulted in IT teams often taking more of a lead on CCaaS buying decisions.
That IT involvement changes how organizations approach governance, create RFPs, and integrate contact center solutions. It’s a more complex conversation.
As Keith Dawson, Director of Research for Customer Experience at ISG, recently told CX Today:
Traditional CCaaS vendors will face challenges in having these deeper, enterprise-wide conversations during purchasing periods compared to vendors with broader capabilities or legacy foundations.
Yet, by co-innovating with ServiceNow, which also offers a widely utilized IT service management (ITSM) platform, the likes of Five9, Genesys, and Zoom can better engage in these discussions.
Meanwhile, ServiceNow benefits as IT teams actively prioritize integrating contact center solutions with its ecosystem.
ServiceNow Is Making CCaaS Friends, Not Enemies
Many predict that CRM – and CSM - platforms will eventually swallow up CCaaS providers or reduce them to voice plug-in providers.
