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.
