Even during a challenging economic environment where budget cuts are common, digitizing the customer experience remains a critical initiative for many organizations. An integrated approach to customer service can be produced by investing in technologies that connect people, processes, and systems. This strategy improves efficiency, empowers your staff, fosters customer loyalty, and lowers the cost of providing service. Whether your objective is to ensure that front, middle, and back-office workers collaborate using a single system of record or to save downtime and avoid bottlenecks in the customer experience, digitization can bring tremendous value.
Eliminate Departmental Silos
Although it may seem like an issue only within your company, interdepartmental inefficiencies have a significant impact on your clients. Customers may be required to switch agents because of the organization’s fragmented systems, siloed teams, and lack of interconnection. For instance, a customer may choose to voice a grievance about inadequacy of a particular product or service on social media before contacting the service center. When they do not hear back or are not satisfied on social media, they phone the service center again. Once they finally reach an agent, they must reiterate their service request because the person who answered may be unaware of the prior contact attempts as they might belong to a different department. If that is the case, the customer must then explain their case all over again once they have finally been connected to the proper department to handle their inquiry. There is also the possibility of the customer’s issue being misidentified leading to the customer getting frustrated with the delay and switch to a different service or product.
However, by digitalizing your customer service solutions, teams can be united with a single system of records to lessen issues like that. Customers may not have to repeat their issues if all customer-facing staff have access to the same case history. It may also improve the likelihood that a field technician will solve the problem on the first visit. The implementation of a central knowledge store can facilitate issue resolution more efficiently. Agents are given a tested plan of action that incorporates knowledge gained from prior engagements. Additionally, customers get access to a library of articles to help with smaller problems.
According to a ServiceNow-commissioned 2022 Forrester Total Economic Impact research, the implementation of a knowledge base platform can foster a collaborative environment among staff members and give them the confidence to share information with one another and deliver enhanced customer service.
Continuous Customer Engagement
Modern customers want issues resolved swiftly and may disengage if kept waiting for a long time. Customer service that is proactive can remedy problems before the customers even know about them. To do this, analytics can be used to identify possible network bottlenecks and outages, and automation will be used to warn customers. This approach assists businesses in providing quick service, which is necessary for client retention. The goal is to integrate your front, middle, and back offices. Seamless integration of the front, middle and back offices is the key to delivering exceptional customer experience even if the integration is not visible to the customers.
Enhance Employee and Customer Experience
The human effort required to manage multiple teams and their varied systems and processes is one of the biggest challenges that organizations must tackle. Automating time-consuming, repetitive operations can be made simpler by utilizing a platform that is integrated and based on a single data model. With automation, the employees are freed from labor-intensive but repetitive tasks and can instead focus on more strategic work. This can lead to increased employee retention and enhanced customer satisfaction.
Summary
As a cost-effective long-term investment, a digital customer service solution like ServiceNow CSM makes a lot of business sense. According to data from the Forrester study, the organization can have a return on investment in customer service management of up to 170% over a three-year period. An Elite ServiceNow partner like V-Soft can help successfully implement ServiceNow CSM in your organization.
