The Road to "No Service": How to Deliver Best-in-Class Customer Service with Automation

Holly Simmons
Learn more about ServiceNow

Some say "the best service is no service," yet getting to the nirvana of eliminating the reasons why customers call is a challenge. Today's customer service teams are buried under manual workloads, and the volume of incoming cases is increasing, leaving little time for redesigning processes, anticipating customer issues, or driving strategic projects. One of the quickest ways to reduce caseloads and make measurable improvements to the bottom line is with self-service and automation.

Yet, according to a recent ServiceNow report, almost 60% of customer service leaders stated that lack of self-service was an extremely or somewhat large challenge and another 53% said they offer no automation today of service processes.

Why Haven't More Companies Embraced Automation?

To provide an effortless experience for customers as well as for the agents serving them, businesses need to move beyond siloed approaches to embrace a modern cloud-based customer service system with an end-to-end workflow that connects departments, processes, and systems. Imagine taking your most frequently recurring requests, such as a customer asking for an upgrade or password reset, and enabling them to help themselves while having the entire process completed without agent or technician involvement. Not only is the service faster, but errors are reduced, and agents can spend time-solving the less familiar and more challenging problems.

Best-In-Class Customer Service Requires Focus on Automation and Self-Service

ServiceNow's recent survey of 200 customer service leaders reveals practices of best-in-class customer service organizations, and according to the findings, these companies are 36% more likely than their lower performing counterparts to offer self-service to their customers. This substantial gap translates into cost savings, higher quality service delivery, and improved customer satisfaction.

Getting Started with Automation

A modern customer service management system should provide the following capabilities to take full advantage of self-service and automation opportunities:

Self-service portal and catalog– Many companies have websites or portals to initiate a request for service, but the winning combination is to have not only a delightful entry point for customers, but to complement that with end-to-end automation on the back end that drives the process to completion. Additionally, your portal should enable customers to make typical requests from a catalog, file cases directly for less common issues, view details of their products and services, including operational status, as well as receive proactive updates regarding issues or opportunities to improve their use of the product they purchased.

Knowledgebase and collaborative forums– Company and customer-generated content provide the quickest way for customers to help themselves before generating a call or case. Additionally, being able to drive continuous improvement with knowledge management performance analytics helps you to know which content is being read, whether it's serving customer needs, or if it needs to be improved. Make sure your customer service system provides a knowledge base, question and answer capabilities, as well as collaborative capabilities like forums.

Publications or notifications– To truly deliver proactive service, customer support teams need to be able to provide information to customers via newsletters or notifications. These should be readily available from your self-service portal.

Chat– While many users will take advantage of the knowledge base, Q&A, collaboration, or filing their own cases, chat provides a quick way for customers to engage quickly.

Automated case assignment– Get the most appropriate agents assigned to cases based on skills, location, or availability. This works for both customer service and field service whether the case is from a call or other self-service channels such as the service catalog or chat.

Flexible workflow and business rules– Not traditionally part of customer service systems, a modern approach to serving customer requires a flexible workflow capability that is part of a single platform that works across all of the people, processes, and systems needed to support a customer.

Performance analytics– The only way to continuously reduce the number of recurring requests, know what is helping customers, and know where improvements are needed is to proactively monitor real-time performance so that you can take action.

With the power of the cloud and a modern customer service system, any organization can become best-in-class by taking advantage of self-service and automation. Take advantage of these capabilities to begin your journey becoming a proactive customer service organization.

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The Road to "No Service": How to Deliver Best-in-Class Customer Service with Automation

Holly Simmons
Learn more about ServiceNow

Some say "the best service is no service," yet getting to the nirvana of eliminating the reasons why customers call is a challenge. Today's customer service teams are buried under manual workloads, and the volume of incoming cases is increasing, leaving little time for redesigning processes, anticipating customer issues, or driving strategic projects. One of the quickest ways to reduce caseloads and make measurable improvements to the bottom line is with self-service and automation.

Yet, according to a recent ServiceNow report, almost 60% of customer service leaders stated that lack of self-service was an extremely or somewhat large challenge and another 53% said they offer no automation today of service processes.

Why Haven't More Companies Embraced Automation?

To provide an effortless experience for customers as well as for the agents serving them, businesses need to move beyond siloed approaches to embrace a modern cloud-based customer service system with an end-to-end workflow that connects departments, processes, and systems. Imagine taking your most frequently recurring requests, such as a customer asking for an upgrade or password reset, and enabling them to help themselves while having the entire process completed without agent or technician involvement. Not only is the service faster, but errors are reduced, and agents can spend time-solving the less familiar and more challenging problems.

Best-In-Class Customer Service Requires Focus on Automation and Self-Service

ServiceNow's recent survey of 200 customer service leaders reveals practices of best-in-class customer service organizations, and according to the findings, these companies are 36% more likely than their lower performing counterparts to offer self-service to their customers. This substantial gap translates into cost savings, higher quality service delivery, and improved customer satisfaction.

Getting Started with Automation

A modern customer service management system should provide the following capabilities to take full advantage of self-service and automation opportunities:

Self-service portal and catalog– Many companies have websites or portals to initiate a request for service, but the winning combination is to have not only a delightful entry point for customers, but to complement that with end-to-end automation on the back end that drives the process to completion. Additionally, your portal should enable customers to make typical requests from a catalog, file cases directly for less common issues, view details of their products and services, including operational status, as well as receive proactive updates regarding issues or opportunities to improve their use of the product they purchased.

Knowledgebase and collaborative forums– Company and customer-generated content provide the quickest way for customers to help themselves before generating a call or case. Additionally, being able to drive continuous improvement with knowledge management performance analytics helps you to know which content is being read, whether it's serving customer needs, or if it needs to be improved. Make sure your customer service system provides a knowledge base, question and answer capabilities, as well as collaborative capabilities like forums.

Publications or notifications– To truly deliver proactive service, customer support teams need to be able to provide information to customers via newsletters or notifications. These should be readily available from your self-service portal.

Chat– While many users will take advantage of the knowledge base, Q&A, collaboration, or filing their own cases, chat provides a quick way for customers to engage quickly.

Automated case assignment– Get the most appropriate agents assigned to cases based on skills, location, or availability. This works for both customer service and field service whether the case is from a call or other self-service channels such as the service catalog or chat.

Flexible workflow and business rules– Not traditionally part of customer service systems, a modern approach to serving customer requires a flexible workflow capability that is part of a single platform that works across all of the people, processes, and systems needed to support a customer.

Performance analytics– The only way to continuously reduce the number of recurring requests, know what is helping customers, and know where improvements are needed is to proactively monitor real-time performance so that you can take action.

With the power of the cloud and a modern customer service system, any organization can become best-in-class by taking advantage of self-service and automation. Take advantage of these capabilities to begin your journey becoming a proactive customer service organization.

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In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...

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Many organizations assumed their infrastructure strategy was settled. It had been implemented, optimized and built into long-term plans. Recent changes in technology and vendor consolidation are forcing a second look. Cloud outages and licensing changes have exposed how much dependency exists on a small number of platforms. As a result, organizations are reevaluating whether those decisions still hold up under current conditions ...

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Edge AI is strategically embedded in core IT and infrastructure spending across industries, according to the 2026 Edge AI Survey from ZEDEDA. The research shows that 83% of C-suite and IT executive respondents say edge AI is important to their core business strategy ...

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For years, production operations teams have treated alert fatigue as a quality-of-life problem: something that makes on-call rotations miserable but isn't considered a direct contributor to outages. That framing doesn't capture how these systems fail, and we now have data to show why. More importantly, it's now clear alert fatigue is a symptom of a deeper issue: production systems have outgrown the current operational approaches ...

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Ask any senior SRE or platform engineer what keeps them up at night, and the answer probably isn't the monitoring tool — it's the data feeding it. The proliferation of APM, observability, and AIOps platforms has created a telemetry sprawl problem that most teams manage reactively rather than architect proactively. Metrics are going to one platform. Traces routed somewhere else. Logs duplicated across multiple backends because nobody wants to be caught without them when something breaks. Every redundant stream costs money ...

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