For any organization today, customer service needs to lie at the heart of the business.
Unfortunately, with customer service teams having to carry out day-to-day customer service-related tasks manually, improving service operations and engaging customers via modern digital workflows becomes a challenge. Manual work means teams find it difficult to bring front, middle, and back offices together to proactively address issues and automate common requests – which impacts the overall customer service experience.
Read: Customer Experience – The Top Investment Priority for Enterprises Post COVID-19
Learn why automation plays a big role in customer service operations today and how you can achieve successful automation with ServiceNow.
Challenges that necessitate the need for Customer Service Automation
Businesses today are under immense pressure to meet customer service-related expectations. But the presence of several manual processes means they end up with several challenges that negatively impact the service experience.
These challenges include:
- Incoherent business processes that make it difficult to locate the origin of an issue or track its path through closure.
- Not having access to the right data to resolve a specific customer issue at the right time.
- Getting end-to-end visibility into service requests coming in from multiple, disjointed channels.
- Not knowing to what agent or department a specific customer issue should be transferred or routed to.
- Spending a significant amount of time and effort each day in manually dealing with customer service issues.
- Each agent resorting to a different way of handling issues leading to inconsistent customer experiences.
- Having to address the same issues day-after-day leading to customer and agent frustration and dissatisfaction.
- Insufficient self-service options that impact response and resolution times – and thus customer experience.
The Customer Service Automation capabilities of ServiceNow CSM
ServiceNow Customer Service Management goes beyond traditional customer service approaches to delight customers, and meet (or even exceed) their expectations.
Read: From Customer Service to Customer Delight – with ServiceNow CSM
With several built-in automation capabilities, it allows agents to deal with issues proactively, find root causes, and streamline how they are routed to different departments.
Here’s looking at some of the top Customer Service Automation capabilities of ServiceNow:
- Seamless integration of issue logging and resolution across multiple channels: Given the various channels customers use to log issues, ServiceNow automates service requests, and integrates the request logging and resolution process across multiple channels. So, whether customers have raised an issue through a mobile app, via chat, using the phone, or via email, ServiceNow ensures all issues are automatically routed to a single, unified location for end-to-end visibility.
- Automatic routing of issues to respective departments and subsequent closure: For customer issues that require information from many departments, ServiceNow uses Intelligent Automation to automatically coordinate with different departments, trace root causes, and even find the right solution. By correlating real-time events, it helps predict future events and initiates structured workflows to accurately route tasks, prevent issues, and achieve performance goals. Since the platform eliminates silos that traditionally exist between different departments, neither the customer nor the agent needs to worry about the routing process. It helps in greatly minimizing the time and effort needed for closure.
- Integrated AI capabilities that make understand customer trends a breeze: Integrated AI capabilities help in unearthing deep insight into customer behavior and trends, elevating the entire ServiceNow experience. Automated reporting capabilities mean agents always have access to intelligent dashboards that use predictive intelligence to study consumer behavior, identify issues, and recommend resolutions even prior to their occurrence. Such operational intelligence allows agents to proactively detect issues and learn how to handle potential risks in advance. It provides a deeper awareness of service trends and aids in identifying common issues that can be automated for quicker resolution.
- Self-service options that are customized across preferred channels: Given that no two customers (and no two requests) are the same across different channels, ServiceNow ensures services and experiences are tailor-made to each customer and channel. By automating the customer request resolution process, it increases the business’s ability to offer a more tailored customer service experience. The various self-service options offered via portals, virtual agents, or chatbots allow executives as well as customers to find answers to common problems – without having to spend time reaching out to an expert.
Ensuring a seamless customer service experience every time
The disruptive number of customer requests that service organizations today are bombarded with are not easy to handle – especially if each customer has to be manually catered to and each request manually resolved.
But given the growing expectations of customers, responding to and resolving customer issues quickly and efficiently is the need of the hour. ServiceNow, through its various automation capabilities, helps in proactively addressing customer issues and routing of tasks to the respective department for streamlined resolution. By automating processes from the front office to back, it helps analyze workflow trends to increase automation and efficiency, fix issues faster, and ensure the customer service experience is effortless, seamless, and always automated.