Every business runs into the same wall eventually. Customer volume grows, requests come in from more directions, and the system that used to handle them starts to buckle. Spreadsheets multiply, requests get passed hand-to-hand across departments, and directors, admins, and frontline teams spend more of their day chasing status updates than doing the work that actually matters to the people they serve.
ServiceNow named a Leader in the Forrester Wave for customer service
In its Forrester Wave: Customer Service Solutions report, Forrester named ServiceNow a Leader and gave it the highest possible score across a set of core criteria: case management and contextual guidance, conversational AI, AI agents, knowledge management, process management, and automation.
The point Forrester's evaluation makes is one we see play out with clients constantly: capturing a request was never the hard part, resolving it is. It could be a billing dispute, a facilities repair, or a tuition invoice. These touch multiple teams and systems before they're actually closed out. Most CRM tools are built to track that work only. ServiceNow's platform is built to finish it, connecting the front office to the rest of the business so a request doesn't stall out the moment it leaves the first person who touched it.
That distinction, tracking versus resolving, is exactly where we've seen ServiceNow Customer Service Management (CSM) change how our clients operate.
What resolution looks like in practice
We've helped two very different organizations put this to work, and the results tell a consistent story.
One client, an early education provider supporting more than 1,070 schools, had a problem that had nothing to do with technology and everything to do with time. School directors, the people closest to children and families, were spending too much of their day on administrative requests that had no single place to land, get tracked, or get routed. Facilities repairs moved through manual steps and separate systems. Invoicing tied to tuition assistance was scattered across internal teams and outside partners with no repeatable process behind it.
We built a centralized service experience on ServiceNow CSM that gave the organization a single front door for school requests, a dedicated facilities repair case type connected directly to their maintenance platform, and a structured case type for third-party invoicing. Requests now route, get tracked, and get resolved in one place instead of landing on a director's desk. The organization's own platform team owns the solution today, and they've since renewed their engagement with Ondaro. As one client representative put it, "They function like a part of the team."
Another client, an omnichannel fashion retailer operating more than 670 stores across Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina, had already implemented ServiceNow back in 2019. However, it had stayed boxed into IT. Shared Services Centers across Finance, HR, Logistics, and Customer Relations remained dependent on IT to handle their own administrative routines, and service-level agreements were scattered with no governance behind them.
Ondaro led a wide-scale expansion of the platform across ITSM, CSM, and App Engine, restructuring more than 600 SLAs and shifting ownership of service routines from IT into the business units that actually run them. In eight months, the retailer automated more than 350 workflows, built out over 720 catalog items, and delivered more than 4,000 service hours. Business units gained the autonomy to manage their own service delivery, and the client's own words summed up the shift: "This initiative gave us the structure and visibility we needed to shift operational control into the hands of the business and scale digital efficiency."
Different industries, different starting points, same underlying pattern: when service requests have a real home on the platform, the people running the business get their time back.
What this means if you're evaluating your own CRM strategy
The CRM tools that win aren't the ones with the most intake channels. They're the ones that close the loop across every team a request touches. If your CRM setup still depends on manual handoffs between departments, or if your platform investment never made it past IT, that's not a sign you need a new tool. It's a sign the tool you have isn't being used to its full extent yet.
That's the work we do. We help teams clean up what's in place, connect it to the rest of the business, and build a service model that scales with them instead of against them.
