CSM Reference Architecture

Best practices to digitize and automate customer service workflows and deliver a seamless user
experience.

INTRODUCTION 2
SOLUTION OVERVIEW 3
SALES MANAGEMENT 3
ERP 3
CUSTOMER SERVICE MANAGEMENT 4
REFERENCE ARCHITECTURE FOR CUSTOMER SERVICE WORKFLOWS 5
DIGITAL FLOWS 6
SALES MANAGEMENT 6
Direct Sales 6
E-Commerce 7
CUSTOMER SERVICE MANAGEMENT 7
Customer Onboarding 7
Service Request Fulfillment 8
Non-Standard Request Fulfilment 10
E-Commerce Purchases 10
Issue Resolution 11
Proactive Service Operations 12
CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE 13
SAMPLE SCENARIOS 13
SUMMARY 14

Table of Figures
Figure 1: Key Solution Components 3
Figure 2: Reference Architecture for Customer Service Workflows 5
Figure 3: End-to-end Digital Flows 6
Figure 4: Customer Onboarding 8
Figure 5: Fulfil Service Requests 9
Figure 6: Fulfil Non-Standard Requests by Existing Customers 10
Figure 7: E-Commerce Purchase by Existing Customers 11
Figure 8: Resolve Support Issues and Questions 12
Figure 9: Proactive Service Operations 12

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Introduction
Global technology providers are currently in the process of digitizing and automating their end-to-end
workflows to more effectively and efficiently serve their external customers and partners. The digital
transformation spans both business support systems that enable prospective customers to procure
products and operational support systems where existing customers can request services and get help.
The breadth and complexity of the transformation requires integrations with multiple solutions involved
in delivering the end-to-end digital flow, such as sales management, customer service management, ERP,
and more.

Implementing a digital transformation that digitizes and automates end-to-end flows poses a dilemma:

How do you deliver a seamless customer experience that spans multiple best of breed
solutions needed to meet the breadth of critical business needs?

This document describes a reference architecture that global technology providers can implement to
enable their digital transformation while providing a seamless customer experience. It leverages our
experience in working with leading companies and is intended to help teams adopt best practices while
digitizing and automating end-to-end workflows that encompass sales, service, and order management.

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Solution Overview
Digitizing and automating end to end workflows requires three 3 key systems:

1. Sales Management
2. ERP
3. Customer Service Management

Figure 1: Key Solution Components

Sales Management
Sales Management enables global technology providers to engage prospects and guide them through the
sales process (direct sales and/or e-commerce) to arrive at an agreed quote and signed contract.

Typically, they deploy sales management to engage new and existing customers to:
• Generate new opportunities via marketing campaigns.
• Display the sales catalog (product catalog) of available offerings.
• Configure the offering / solution per the needs of the customer.
• Request and agree on a quote for products and services of interest.
• Review and accept the signed sales contract.

The sales contract is the first step to enable customers to place orders against the contract and consume
the said products and services.

ERP
ERP is the system of record for sales contracts, orders, fulfilment, billing, and invoices. Sales and Customer
Service Management systems interface with ERP.

Typically, global technology providers deploy ERP to:

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 • Create and manage Products.
• Create and manage Sales Contracts.
• Create, manage, and fulfil Orders.
• Manage Billing.
• Generate and manage Invoices.

Customer Service Management

Customer Service Management enables global technology providers to onboard customers, service their
requests and resolve their issues.

Typically, global technology providers deploy service management specialists like ServiceNow to enable
existing customers to:
• Onboard customer contacts.
• View a catalog of services agreed upon in the sales contract.
• Request contracted services.
• Monitor deployed services and products.
• Manage install base of products and services, support contracts, and entitlements.
• Get help / manage cases for issues related to ordered and deployed products and services.

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Reference Architecture for Customer Service Workflows
The figure below describes key components of the overall solution, clearly delineating what happens in
each of the sales, ERP, and customer service management systems.

Figure 2: Reference Architecture for Customer Service Workflows

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Digital Flows
The figure below describes the end to end digital flow – from a prospect expressing interest to a customer
being invoiced.

Figure 3: End-to-end Digital Flows

Sales Management
The sales management system can adopt a direct sales and/or an online ecommerce model.

Direct Sales
The sales management system displays the Sales Catalog to the customers. The sales catalog lists all the
offerings available to B2B customers. An offering can include hardware products, licensable software,
SaaS software, data center services, infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS)
offerings, professional services, etc. The Sales Catalog can be many levels deep – up to 6 levels is not
uncommon.

The customer can select the products, services and support plans that they would like to purchase. This
configured service offering represents the collection of products and services that the customer is
procuring. The customer then requests a quote for the selected products and services. After negotiating
with the direct sales team, the customer receives a pricing proposal along with other relevant terms.

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Example: Customer signs a sales contract for the following cloud services
• Cloud hosting in German data centers with a fixed price per data center.
• Application Instances with a fixed cost per instance activation up to 100 instances.
o Development, Test, and Production instances.
• Smart data analytics services with tiered pricing based on compute hours used.
• Storage measured in GB with tiered pricing.
• Real-time condition monitoring with tiered pricing based on millions of events analyzed.
• Over the air updates priced by size of update image
• Implementation support up to 100,000 hours
• SLA with a 4-hour response time for P1 issues
• …and many others

Once the customer accepts the quote, the global technology provider generates a contract that specifies
the offering that the customer has agreed to procure, along with the terms and conditions of the contract.
The contract information is sent to the ERP systems where a sales contract is setup for billing and invoicing.

E-Commerce
Some companies enable their customers to purchase products using an online e-commerce sales flow in
addition to the traditional direct sales model.

In the e-commerce flow, an anonymous user views the online sales catalog and initiates the checkout
process. Before the anonymous user is allowed to sign up and place orders, the ecommerce system
should confirm with the customer master that the user does not violate any business rules. For example,
users from a restricted location should not be allowed to place orders.

An authorized customer navigates to the e-commerce portal, selects the products and services from the
e-commerce catalog that they would like to purchase, and completes the checkout process using online
payment methods. Standard terms and conditions may be autogenerated, but the details of the
purchased items are directly in the order. Their online order represents the products and services that
the customer is procuring.

While the e-commerce flow typically provides less flexibility in configuring the products and services
procured and the associated pricing, it significantly speeds up the sales process.

Customer Service Management

Customer Service Management enables global technology providers to onboard customers, fulfil their
requests, and resolve their issues.

Customer Onboarding
Customer onboarding is a series of actions that you take to introduce new customers to your company.
After successful onboarding, customer can request services, ask questions, and seek additional help.

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Typically, customer master data is synced with Customer Service Management, which requires data
import and integration with other customer master systems. 3rd party Identity Access Management
systems can also be used to authenticate customer contacts during the onboarding flow.

Figure 4: Customer Onboarding

Once a new contract is signed (or an e-commerce order is placed), the contract information is sent to
Customer Service Management to set up the accounts, service contracts, and entitlements for the
customer. This enables the customer to use the purchased products and get support over the life of the
contract. A service contract stores information about the type of support that is provided to the customer.
An entitlement defines the various thresholds for the service as well as the supported communication
channels.

Example: For Real Time Condition Monitoring - Tier 1, customer can monitor a max of 100M events each
month (Entitlement), and they can create new event feed, stop event feed, and pause event feed (Service
Contract).

Customer Service Management also keeps a record of the products and services purchased by the
customer.

Service Request Fulfillment

The Service Offering determines the service catalog items visible to the customer. When a customer logs
into the service portal, they can place requests against the service offering.

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Figure 5: Fulfil Service Requests

The catalog items are further governed by the stage of the deployment of the service offering. For
example, when a customer logs into the service portal they can see the service offerings awaiting
deployment, and an option to initiate deployment.

Once the service offering is active, the customer can see additional items related to the offering and can
place requests against the deployed instances. For example, they can activate additional instances, add
more storage, etc.

The customer’s request is routed to the right group or system for processing and fulfillment and can be
tracked via the portal. An integration with Sales or ERP systems may be required to fulfill the request.

As the requests are fulfilled, the configuration information for each component of the deployed service
offering is fed back into Customer Service Management, where it is maintained as Install Base. The Install
Base records connect the deployed product and service to the downstream infrastructure that operates
the service.

Customer Service Management provides additional modes of self-service through Knowledge and
Community. For example, they can view the knowledge article explaining how to access the development
instance. If the KB article doesn’t meet their needs, they can ask the Community or interact with the
Chatbot or Live Agent.

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Non-Standard Request Fulfilment
When an existing customer seeks to order products and services that are not part of the service catalog
(non-standard request), Customer Service Management captures the customer's request. The request
attributes are then shared with Sales Management or ERP to capture the opportunity and fulfil the order.
Customer Service Management updates usage tracking systems to facilitate billing and invoice workflows.

Figure 6: Fulfil Non-Standard Requests by Existing Customers

E-Commerce Purchases
Existing customers looking to purchase additional products log in to the customer portal and navigate to
the e-commerce portal to complete the online purchase.

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Figure 7: E-Commerce Purchase by Existing Customers

Issue Resolution
When the customer reaches out for support, Customer Service Management triggers sophisticated
Workflows based on business rules to create Incidents, Problems, or Change requests with other internal
groups. This complete service management process connects the customer service agent with service
owners to more effectively resolve issues.

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Figure 8: Resolve Support Issues and Questions

For example, when a customer reports a critical issue the customer service agent creates a P1 Incident on
the Tier 2 Engineering Support team. The workflow triggers a group chat session with key available Tier 2
engineering managers, enhancing collaboration.

Proactive Service Operations

Customer Service Management can also initiate case workflows that enable customer service agents to
connect with operations center engineers to proactively resolve issues and notify customers.

Figure 9: Proactive Service Operations

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Customer Experience
Customer experience scenarios refer existing customers requesting services or needing help. Customer
Service Management provides the common interface to users to raise cases to address questions and
issues related to the solution, product, service, or contract. However, questions during sales contract
process would follow the sales management guidelines.

Sample Scenarios

Customer has a question about They will contact the global technology provider through the
how their fulfilment is progressing. Service Portal and create a case against their Service Offering.

Customer wants to report an They will contact the global technology provider through the
intermittent performance issue on Service Portal and create a case against their Install Base item.
their development instance.

Customer wants to increase the They will contact the global technology provider though the
memory of their test instance. Service Portal and issue a request through a service catalog item
against their Install Base item.

Customer wants to know the
service status
Customer wants to view the list of
services they are entitled to as part
of their contract.
They can monitor the service status through the service portal.
They visit the service portal where they see the service contracts
and the list of services available under each contract.

Customer wants to determine how
many database licenses remain
unused.
Global technology provider notices
that the customer has used 90% of
its allocated storage.
They contact the global technology provider through the Service
Portal and view this information self-service or create a case.
The global technology provider can recommend the next tier of
storage to the customer on the customer portal. The portal
would redirect them to the sales management (or eCommerce)
to upgrade to the next tier.

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Summary
As we’ve seen in this document, the key lies in recognizing that:

1. Actions performed in sales, service, and order management processes are distinct.
2. Complex needs of large enterprises require deep expertise in each process area.
3. Information is shared between sales, service, and order management to help the other processes
stay in sync with the customer.

All throughout the customer journey, it’s important that the service management processes are aware of
contract details, so the customer has context on what services remain unused or underused per their
contract terms (for example, how many additional instances can be deployed). It’s also important that the
order management system is aware of the work done so they can invoice the customer appropriately.
And it’s important that the sales management system is aware of the work done and of billing, so it can
generate new up-sell and cross-sell offers.

With this approach, the customer experience is seamless as the necessary information is available to them
at each step to get work done.

With a clear framework of the role of sales, service, and order management systems, and the right data
sharing between them, it is possible to deliver both a seamless customer experience and the broad set of
best-of-breed capabilities needed to successfully execute a digital transformation.

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