This year’s Knowledge Conference had no shortage of exciting ServiceNow-related announcements. But amid a flurry of eye-catching news about the AI Control Tower, NVIDIA collaboration, and AI Agent Fabric, there were also headlines in a place you wouldn’t normally associate with ServiceNow: The CRM market.
But if you’ve been paying attention to ServiceNow over the past few years, its sudden entry into the CRM market won’t be a surprise. In fact, the company has been steadily creeping in this direction for several years. So why the big change now? What does ServiceNow hope to achieve with its new CRM offering? And can it really disrupt a market dominated by a few big-name competitors?
Here’s what you need to know.
ServiceNow and CRM: A Brave New World?
“At Knowledge 2025, [ServiceNow] unveiled the next milestone in its groundbreaking CRM, designed to disrupt an industry long dominated by outdated, overbuilt systems. In a bold move to challenge the status quo, ServiceNow reimagines CRM for the AI era to sell, fulfill, and service on one unified platform to drive exceptional end‑to‑end experiences.”
– ServiceNow, via Press Release
At Knowledge 2025, ServiceNow rolled out its new ‘ServiceNow CRM’: A brand-new product combining three existing ServiceNow offerings:
- Customer Service Management (CSM)
- Sales and Order Management
- Field Service Management
At this stage, most of the functionality available in the CRM isn’t new. But nonetheless, this still represents a bold step forward for a company that hasn’t historically been active in the CRM space. In fact, this is the first time the company has actively used the term in connection with one of its products.
The new ServiceNow CRM is also being positioned as a key part of the new ‘ServiceNow AI Platform’. Clearly, the company’s goal is to present a single, unified CRM offering with AI built in by design.
ServiceNow and the Journey to CRM
Despite the headline, the truth is that ServiceNow has been building a CRM platform to rival the industry leaders for some time now. In fact, the Customer Service Management product has been steadily increasing its functionality to include tools like Omnichannel Support, Case Management, Knowledge Management, Proactive Outreach, and Conversational Intelligence.
In practice, therefore, it’s already a CRM in all but name. But until this year, the company was cautious not to explicitly position the offering against market leaders like Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, and Oracle. Now, ServiceNow has clearly decided it’s time to call a spade a spade. The big change in strategy and messaging came in January 2025, when company spokesperson John Ball declared, “We are in CRM”.
This came just a few short weeks after ServiceNow’s considerable success in the 2024 Gartner Magic Quadrant for the CRM Customer Engagement Center. In fact, this wasn’t even the first time they’ve been included – but it was the first time they were ranked a ‘Leader’, alongside Salesforce, Microsoft, Oracle, and Pegasystems.
If it’s good enough for Gartner, it’s good enough for ServiceNow. Long story short: The ServiceNow CRM rebrand is clearly long overdue.
But it’s not just Gartner that’s given ServiceNow’s CRM offering a seal of approval: The UK’s public revenue collection organization, HMRC, is reportedly considering the vendor for its upcoming CRM mega-contract, reportedly worth around $2.7B. Nonetheless, the other contenders (Microsoft and Salesforce) have significant CRM brand recognition and a long heritage in the public sector. For now, therefore, ServiceNow remains the underdog.
ServiceNow and CRM: Challenges and Opportunities
“Customer relationship management (CRM) is no longer just about tracking records in a database with process flows.
At ServiceNow, we’re helping customers move beyond disconnected tools to an intelligent, unified platform that connects every team in the revenue engine – from first touch to final invoice. It’s a complete CRM reinvention.”
– Emily Rust, CRM and Industry Expert Services Practices Leader, ServiceNow
Since January this year, ServiceNow spokespeople have been pretty clear about the issues they see in the current market and the unique value they expect the new ServiceNow CRM to provide.
After the announcement at Knowledge 2025, a ServiceNow spokesperson criticized industry stalwarts that reportedly sold a “360-degree view and omnichannel as the ‘holy grail’ rather than focusing on real customer pain points”.
A few weeks later, ServiceNow’s Emily Rust (see above) made a more explicit criticism of the current CRM market. Customers of existing vendors, she writes, suffer from “data silos between marketing and sales systems, challenges with order fulfillment, and complex mid-contract changes”.
It doesn’t take a genius to work out what they’re talking about. Salesforce is the market’s biggest player by quite some distance – and any criticism of the market’s industry incumbents is almost certainly an implicit attack on Salesforce. Though, to a lesser extent, it can also apply to other industry players like Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP.
ServiceNow vs. Salesforce: Who Will Come Out on Top?
To a certain extent, much of this thinly-veiled Salesforce bashing can be written off as good-natured competition. ServiceNow is making an explicit bid for market share in a sector dominated by Salesforce: Of course, they’re going to criticize the incumbents.
But if you read between the lines of what criticisms are being made, we can reveal something potentially more insightful. The crux of ServiceNow’s criticism is this: A siloed, self-contained CRM platform can never deliver entirely automated workflows for complex processes like resolution or fulfillment. By design, they are uniquely difficult to resolve through automation because they involve so many different departments, systems, and tasks.
This is where ServiceNow does have something genuinely unique to bring to the table. After all, there are few other tech companies that are already so deeply embedded into the back-end technology and workflows of many large organizations. In practice, this means ServiceNow already has visibility over aspects of these processes that other CRM vendors simply don’t.
In this context, the expansion into the CRM market doesn’t seem like such a bold and transformative step. Instead, it’s a much more natural evolution of the workflow-based technology that ServiceNow has long since dominated.
Nonetheless, there are reasons to be cautious. First: An organization already needs to be using ServiceNow products to take advantage of these benefits. In practice, therefore, most market growth is likely to come from existing customers. At the same time, Salesforce’s strong brand recognition in this space will take time and hard work for ServiceNow to overcome.
Final Thoughts: What’s Next for ServiceNow CRM?
For ServiceNow enthusiasts, there are plenty of reasons to be optimistic about the company’s new CRM offering. In terms of functionality, it clearly ranks among the best in the market. But it’s important to take ServiceNow’s criticisms of industry incumbents with a grain of salt.
In the near future, it’s likely that the product will continue to make waves in the CRM market and will be increasingly discussed in the same breath as Salesforce, Microsoft, and Oracle. But for now, most growth in this space is likely to come from existing customers, meaning there’s probably a limit to how much Salesforce can disrupt this market.
For now, at least…