In the last few months, the COVID-19 pandemic has upended the world of work.
The pandemic has influenced and impacted customer interactions as well. The shift from the physical to the remote workplace has led to an increase in customer service requests. At the same time, the expectations of the customer on the manner of engagement have also changed.
As the business landscape is becoming more challenging than ever before, providing elevated customer service that leads to elevated customer experiences is not only a given, it is a business imperative to stay relevant.
With the customer established firmly in the driver’s seat, it becomes clear that by delivering superior customer service, your organization saves more costs.
Of course, this can only happen with a robust, well-thought-out, comprehensive, and agile customer service management strategy and right technology solutions.
In this blog, we take a look at how #ServiceNow Customer Service Management can help enterprises save costs on their customer service operations.
Make Support Channels more Efficient.
Increasing support channel efficiency can lead to significant cost savings. A Forrester study revealed that $1.8 million in cost savings could be achieved by making support channels more efficient.
Organizations thus have to identify which channels are most efficient and the simplest / easiest for their customers to use. Given that customers want to engage with organizations differently, enabling omni-channel support and providing web-enabled support become imperative.
ServiceNow CSM is a comprehensive solution that integrates telephony systems and supports customers across web, phone, chat, email, and social media. It thereby helps organizations manage their support channels, capably divert traffic to the most efficient channels, and respond to customers faster via their preferred communication channel. By doing this, it helps in driving down the costs per contact associated with each channel.
Enhance Self-Service
According to the Forrester study that evaluated the Total Economic Value of ServiceNow Customer Service Management, deflecting 15% of support contracts with self-service options led to support cost-saving amounting to $5.4 million.
ServiceNow CSM helps in driving fierce customer loyalty by enabling robust self-service options. With the out-of-the-box customer service portal, organizations can enable a customizable online service experience that allows customers to perform common requests, discover solutions by engaging with peers and experts, and find answers to common questions using the knowledge repository.
The Customer Service Portal and the Consumer Service Portal provide comprehensive self-service options and deliver information and assistance with Knowledge Management, Communities, and Service Catalog. A virtual agent further enhances the self-service experience by employing a chat-bot that provides conversational guidance and reduces customer service operations costs.
Facilitate Inter-Department Collaboration.
Great customer service is about engaging with customers with more authentic interactions and alleviating their issues faster. In today’s complex enterprise environment, this can only happen when the customer service teams are seamlessly connected with other teams and departments. It allows them to proactively solve issues and have complete and most updated customer information at all times.
The objective of customer service is to boost resolution efficiency to drive customer satisfaction. By connecting customer service to all relevant departments such as finance, engineering, marketing, etc., organizations enable customer service teams to solve issues faster.
Get 360-Degree View of the Customer.
With ServiceNow CSM, customer service teams get access to a 360-degree view of the customers, their cases, and support interactions. Armed with this information, they can resolve customer issues faster without the need for the customers to repeat their issues or provide any additional information. The vast repository of response templates and search tools to search the knowledge base and community allow customer service teams to provide timely and informative responses to customers.
The ServiceNow CSM solution also helps in increasing agent productivity and efficiency with its optimized layout that helps service agents manage customer interactions and visually track activities, case status, and SLAs.
Increase Efficiency and Productivity with AI-Powered Intelligence.
By leveraging AI-powered Advanced Work Assignment with Agent Workspace for CSM, organizations can automatically assign work items to agents based on their availability, skills, affinity, and capacity.
ServiceNow CSM also employs machine learning to predict fields during case creation, such as the category, priority, and assignment group thereby influencing customer service teams’ efficiency, saving time, and thereby improving costs.
Offer Proactive Service with Predictive Intelligence
ServiceNow CSM helps organizations to get real-time visibility into the health of customers’ products and systems. With this intelligence, organizations can proactively detect issues and prevent them before they occur. Organizations can then send pre-emptive alerts to their customers, thereby reducing the need to connect with customer service entirely.
As organizations grapple to absorb the economic impact of this pandemic, cost-saving has become a top-of-the-line concern. Along with this, it has become abundantly clear that customer service is no longer only about just solving customer problems and meeting SLAs. It is about providing elevated customer experiences and seamlessly solving customer pain points in the least possible time frame.
Poor customer service can lead to losses in billions of dollars. As poor customer service becomes a real business risk, it is time for organizations to address the shortcomings of their customer service management with urgency and use a robust and comprehensive technology solution like ServiceNow CSM.
