Non-Profit Organization CSM
A leading not-for-profit organization partnered with Pathways to modernize its fragmented customer support model.
Non-Profit CSM Challenges & Solutions
One of the largest not-for-profit organizations in the U.S. partnered with Pathways Consulting Group to streamline and modernize service delivery across internal and external channels.
With fragmented customer support spread across Zendesk, email, and non-CSM ServiceNow modules, the organization needed a unified, scalable solution. This initiative transitioned customer-facing support from Zendesk and ITSM into ServiceNow CSM, bridged customer-supporting IT services, and enhanced their existing Employee Center with ESC Pro. By aligning workflows, Knowledge, and search with ServiceNow best practices and Gen AI readiness, the organization is now positioned for scalable, cross-functional service delivery and future Now Assist adoption, as planned for Phase 2.
Challenges
Fragmented Service Channels: Customer support was divided across Zendesk, email, phone, and non-CSM areas of ServiceNow. Without a licensed CSM application, teams were using ad hoc modules for intake and tracking in addition to manual customer support, resulting in inconsistent service, manual routing, and limited visibility across B2B and B2C operations.
Poor Search, Visibility & Tracking: Users struggled to find relevant content or check request status. Search limitations, lack of self-service visibility, and a lack of unified experience led to inefficiencies and frustration.
Limited Self-Service Capabilities and Poor UX: The existing portal lacked dynamic content delivery, segmentation, and personalization, limiting user engagement and self-resolution effectiveness.
Disconnected Internal Support: IT and back-end teams lacked integration with customer-facing services, making support disjointed and siloed.
Unstructured Knowledge Management: Knowledge articles were inconsistently maintained, lacked taxonomy, and were not aligned to user roles or delivery channels, making them difficult to find, maintain, and scale.
Solutions
ServiceNow CSM Implementation: Deployed and configured core CSM features across two lines of business, including CSM Workspace, SLAs, assignment rules, and escalations, built for long-term AI-readiness and Now Assist expansion.
Employee Center Pro Enablement: Configured targeted content exposure, persona-based visibility, and integrated CSM visibility. Enhanced the existing Employee Center with ESC Pro to serve both employees and external users, upgraded theming, and streamlined navigation to serve both employees and external users through a unified interface.
Knowledge Management Redesign: Delivered a strategic blueprint and structured approach to knowledge management: building/refining knowledge bases, aligning content with personas, and improving findability through taxonomy, governance, and publishing workflows.
AI Search & External Search Source Integration: Enabled AI Search across the platform with natural language queries, relevance tuning, and permissions-based filtering. Integrated SharePoint search via External Source Search Spoke to surface relevant external knowledge within ServiceNow.
Virtual Agent Foundation: Deployed foundational Virtual Agent conversations for ticket creation, status checks, and escalation to provide immediate value while avoiding an over-investment in configuration and ensuring alignment with ServiceNow’s Gen AI roadmap.
Platform-Wide AI-Readiness Enablement: This phase established AI-readiness across the following core areas:
- Deployed AI Search to support future Genius Results.
- Structuring knowledge content for summarization and intelligent surfacing.
- Configured ESC Pro and Workspace for GenAI compatibility.
- Implemented Virtual Agent Foundation with baseline conversations to enable quick value and support future flexibility for features like dynamic intent routing and AI-authored responses.
- Aligned roles and data models to support predictive and GenAI capabilities with minimal rework.
Targeted Knowledge Transfer & Training: Provided technical Q&A, walkthroughs, and quick reference guides across ESC, Virtual Agent, Knowledge, and CSM, ensuring the client’s team could confidently manage and scale the solution.
Outcome
Centralized & Formalized Service Intake: Zendesk and fragmented service modules were replaced with a unified, purpose-built CSM foundation for improved consistency and visibility.
Improved Efficiency & Operational Insight: Automation, structured workflows, and real-time reporting standardization. This resulted in reduced resolution times and defined clearer service ownership.
Scalable, Personalized Self-Service: ESC Pro delivered a clean, personalized user experience that drives engagement and scales with business needs by allowing direct access to their customers and consumers.
Governed, Searchable Knowledge: Knowledge bases are now cleanly structured, role-aware, search-optimized, and ready for AI-powered consumption, proactive delivery, and efficient and effective governance.
AI-Readiness Platform Alignment: With the architecture, data structures, Workspace implementation, and search capabilities aligned with ServiceNow’s AI roadmap, the organization is now prepared to activate Now Assist features in Phase 2, without additional platform refactoring.
With a unified platform, modern self-service, and AI-ready architecture, one of the largest non-profit organizations in the US is now equipped to scale smarter, serve faster, and move ahead into the next phase of digital service delivery.
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