Why We Chose Salesforce vs. ServiceNow for Customer Service Management (CSM)

Last year, we got an unexpected phone call telling us that our 20-year-old customer service management (CSM) system for our technical support organization would be deprecated. This was a huge shock — but as my company’s VP of global technical support, I quickly saw an opportunity to improve our technology. 

We already had Sales Cloud as our customer relationship management (CRM) software, and ServiceNow as our IT service management (ITSM) solution. So both Salesforce and ServiceNow were potential vendors for our new CSM – especially since integration with our existing tech stack would be a key factor in our decision. We looked thoroughly at five customer support management technologies. After an in-depth analysis, and for a number of reasons I’ll expand on below, we ultimately chose Service Cloud.

Let me walk you through which vendors we evaluated, how we made our choice, where we are today, and what we’re excited about for the future.

What Crestron does

At Crestron, we manufacture technology that provides a seamlessly integrated experience for our customers when they host meetings from their offices or homes. We have global customers in commercial and residential real estate, hospitality, unified communications, the marine space, government, and financial services. 

Our customer support and technical support teams are paramount to our success. So that June 2023 phone call telling us our CSM was being deprecated as of February 2024 was a big deal. Deprecation meant our CSM would no longer be supported, opening us up to potential vulnerabilities. It also meant a dead end in terms of the future potential to transform our service operations with a robust CSM. And by the way, our CSM provider also managed our knowledge base, so that wouldn’t be supported anymore either. Ouch.

How we evaluated CSMs, including Salesforce vs. ServiceNow

But once we overcame the surprise, we recognized the opportunity to improve how we served our customers’ modern-day needs. And so the competitive evaluation process began. We looked seriously at five customer support management technologies: Zendesk, Oracle Service Cloud, ZohoDesk, ServiceNow, and Service Cloud. 

To keep our review process efficient within the short timeframe, we built a tiger team of representatives from each significant stakeholder business unit: IT, technical support (myself, obviously), and customer support. Of course, we knew we’d also have to get buy-in from the C-suite. We also brought in our implementation partner for Sales Cloud, because we knew they could help us think through what we wanted to do. We asked them what we could do today vs. what we could do in the future. And we also asked for their guidance on what would take a long time. 

Our tiger team created a competitive matrix with the requirements for our new platform:  

• Functionality. We took price out of the equation – functionality was our first priority. 
• Implementation. What solution was going to be easiest for us to implement? 
• Speed. Which provider would give us the fastest path to success, knowing that we had that February deadline? 
• Integrations. Which solution would integrate most effectively with our existing tech stack?
• Strategic roadmap. Which solution would help us deliver service today, transform our support operations, and continuously improve? 
• Customer experience. Which option would provide the best experience for all our customers?    

I should mention that by “customers,” I mean those who purchase from us and those who work in the impacted organizations. That meant minimal navigating between different windows and different systems while having access to valuable data we could act on to make data-driven business decisions.

Our security and integration requirements

In choosing a new CSM, we had to make sure that security was on par with the requirements of our customers who operate in the government, financial, medical and pharmaceutical industries – that was non-negotiable. We also wanted to provide a full 360-degree view of our customers. Additionally we wanted a solution that would help us proactively identify issues and notify customers before they encountered them.

Integration with our existing tech stack was another considerable consideration. The new CSM and knowledge base had to play nicely with our enterprise resource planning (ERP) from SAP, and our engineering platform, JIRA, so that we could link engineering and customer support. So, if a customer calls in a complaint that we identify as a bug with software, firmware, or hardware, we can publish that bug on the web. 

As I mentioned, we already had Sales Cloud in place for our sales team, and we had ServiceNow in place for our ITSM. So for us one of the big things was what does that integration look like into our sales ecosystem through Sales Cloud. And similarly, we thought we might find some synchronicity in using ServiceNow for both IT service management (ITSM) and customer support. However, I pretty quickly decided that I wanted to keep ITSM and CSM separate as a fail-safe. I did not want to risk anything internal leaking externally to customers, which made the benefits of a potential ServiceNow integration moot. It came down to the integration between the sales and service technology. 

In the world of APIs, many things can be brought in and out of the Salesforce ecosystem. But when we considered integrating ServiceNow and Sales Cloud, some things on the back end snuck up on us. 

For example, I might have X amount of dollars to implement ServiceNow, but then I need to connect that to Salesforce. We asked if that was possible. With ServiceNow, the answer I heard was always “yes,” and they could make the connection, but the “s” at the end of the word “yes” was a dollar sign. For us to make that connection, an additional cost was going to be tied to it. When we looked at the overall business value, the ROI with Salesforce was very clear.

Why we chose Salesforce vs. ServiceNow

At the end of the day, we wanted that one phone call to make if there were any questions or issues. We didn’t want to have to manage Salesforce for sales, ServiceNow for service, a different company for our knowledge base, and a different company for our phone system. Because when I have two separate vendors trying to communicate, the person in the middle is really me: the end customer. We wanted to avoid the hassle of “Their API doesn’t work properly” or “They’re not receiving the data properly.” It just made sense to go with one ecosystem. Plus, we knew that having a single platform would allow us to work closely with Salesforce on the future vision and how the technology would evolve.  

Ultimately, we chose Service Cloud because it gave us that single, integrated platform, with a unified approach to data security at the foundation. Plus Salesforce has a proven capability to offer trust-first incorporation of industry-leading AI. We chose Salesforce vs. ServiceNow and the other contenders because of the experience we were going to be able to provide with Service Cloud. And the data that we were going to be able to take action on.

How Salesforce Service Cloud is performing for us today

Since we made the decision to go with Service Cloud, we’ve implemented Service Cloud, Service Cloud Voice, Slack, Slack AI, and a new customer portal.

What we can do now with Service Cloud is amazing. As anyone who works in technical support knows, you rarely get a phone call that says “Everything’s going great.” The data from Service Cloud allows us to help our customers proactively and reduce the need for more service calls. We can take our sales data, our case data, our voice data, and combine it to get a single picture of the customer and where they are calling in from. Then, we use it to take corrective actions internally – on a customer level – for our training department and quality assurance department.. 

For example, if we have somebody calling in 10 times a week asking a question about something, we let our training department know. They communicate with sales, who goes back to the customer and says, “Hi. Joe has called in 10 times this week. We need to work on enabling him/her and getting him the training so he can be self-served.” 

That’s a high-level view of why we needed to do this. We needed a solution that moved us from merely executing service workflows, to actually providing better customer service. 

The 360 degree view of the customer we have with Salesforce reduces our time on hold and response time on emails. Slack has been a game-changer. We use the case swarming functionality, so instead of a service rep passing you off to another tier, they can collaborate on Slack and bring together all the subject matter experts to help. That’s something that was unique to Service Cloud and Slack that we really wouldn’t have gotten with any other platform. Salesforce has made our lives easier in so many ways. 

Service Cloud Voice has been another huge win for us. Now our phone calls – our top channel, used for 80% of our cases – are all transcribed. Calls are now tied to cases. Before, we literally had to find the time stamp the customer called in at, then look through all the calls that came in around that time. Painful. Now that we’re live and running on Service Cloud, we’re beginning to look at how we deflect some of that call volume.

Our future roadmap with AI

There’s even more exciting stuff that we’re getting into now, with AI. We did a full Greenfield deployment with Service Cloud, meaning we started fresh with a blank slate. So, AI wouldn’t have been beneficial from day one, because there was no data (or inaccurate data) in the system for AI to reference. 

Now that we’ve had time to build up some data, we’re bringing  AI to our service reps first, using Agentforce. We want our service reps to be able to ask the system conversational questions. We have 3,200 SKUs and our products can be quite complex. We’ve got lots of manuals, as well as our community data, and a ton of reference material on our website. So we’re bringing AI into the ecosystem to assist our service reps in their jobs. Ultimately, this will help improve our first call resolution, and reduce our time to resolution.. 

Next we want to expose conversational AI to our customers with Agentforce Service Agent. We’re incredibly excited about all the additional things we’ll be able to do with Service Cloud, taking advantage of the existing AI functionality now. Plus, we’re excited knowing so much more is on the product roadmap. 

Our chief sales officer can look at our pipeline, our sales that were closed, our open support cases, our time-to-resolution, and how much it costs to support. And he can do it all from one dashboard. 

We feel like the sky’s the limit with what we can do with Salesforce. No regrets.