The word on the street for a while has been that customer service is broken. Every company will have to become an IT company to survive, and they will need support that goes well beyond the familiar call center experience. How are IT providers going to serve the rapidly expanding needs of their customers?

Abhijit Mitra, GM of the customer service management application suite at ServiceNow, Inc., said it’s not so much about customer service management as customer service-management. He told Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Jeff Frick (@JeffFrick), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, that the digital transformation currently underway has customers expecting instant gratification and service that is automatic and “always on.”

“What we’re really talking about is customer service as a team sport,” he said. He went into an example of a typical phone call from a customer to a help desk operator. “I can’t solve that problem myself, but you want a solution.” He went on, “So what we’re allowing you to do is connect customer service to the rest of the company — whether it’s engineering, whether it’s operations, whether it’s finance, whether it’s legal.”

A holistic approach

Mitra stressed the importance of getting the problem solved in a one-shot, streamlined fashion. “This is not chats and collaboration and emails and phone calls,” he said. “You’re tracking it in a single system of record and solving it.”

Farah Remtulla, CIO advisory director at KPMG, LLP (a ServiceNow user), who also joined the interview with Mitra and theCUBE, agreed with Mitra that customer service has to become a team sport to grow into what it needs to be.

“I don’t think IT would be successful without understanding marketing, without understanding relationship management. And those things often come from other parts of the business,” she said.

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge16.

Photo by  SiliconANGLE