Market Perspectives

We are happy to share some insights about ServiceNow drawn from our latest Value Index research, the 2023 Ventana Research Value Index: Customer Experience Management, which assesses how well vendors’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements.

In all of our Value Indexes, we utilize a structured research methodology built on evaluation categories designed to reflect real-world criteria and derived from RFP responses and a vendor selection process for analytics and business intelligence. We evaluated ServiceNow and 21 other vendors in seven categories, five relevant to the product — Adaptability, Capability, Manageability, Reliability and Usability — and two related to the vendor — TCO/ROI and Vendor Validation. To arrive at the Value Index rating for a given vendor, we weighted each category to reflect its relative importance in an RFP process, with the weightings based on our experience and on data derived from our Benchmark Research on Customer Experience (CX).

ServiceNow develops customer support and internal IT service management systems. The company has used those applications as a jumping off point to build a series of workflow platforms for IT, employee and customer processes. ServiceNow was categorized as a Vendor of Merit, ranking 15th overall in this Value Index evaluation. ServiceNow performed best in TCO/ROI, ranking eighth.

ServiceNow’s broad focus is to manage digital workflows for enterprise operations across functions. That includes case tracking and ticketing, which are the core components of its platform, as well as field-service capabilities. It has developed applications that leverage artificial intelligence (AI) and other innovations to provide necessary, relevant resources for handling an issue. By making complex processes repeatable, workflows generally speed up case handling and guarantee a consistent level of quality and timeliness.

ServiceNow’s applications contain most of the elements necessary to be considered a fully functional customer experience management (CXM or CEM) platform, but to improve in the rankings, the company should focus attention on business professionals who engage with customers outside the service and IT environments. Analytics that reflect customer value and interaction outcomes, and those that are tuned to the needs of marketing and C-level personas, would boost its Capability ranking. More documentation and information about its application and process integration features would improve its ranking in Adaptability.

This assessment was based on ServiceNow’s CXM products available in September of 2022.

ServiceNow, like all vendors in this space, should continue working towards a holistic, integrated CX platform that addresses the needs of users across the enterprise. Connecting workflows from marketing, sales and service teams should be a key priority.

This research-based index is the most comprehensive assessment of the value of CXM software in the industry. Technology buyers can learn more about how to use our Value Index by clicking here and included vendors that wish to learn more can click here. Read the report here.