Business sayings like “customer is always right” or “first impression is the last impression” sound nice but are difficult to put into practice. These ideas are often passed along with no tangible action plan to back them up. And that begs the question – what are the strategies to implement these ideas? Or how to develop a robust customer service process that ensures a positive experience for customers.
Let’s start with the six fundamental tenets of excellent customer service.
1. Responsiveness
Response time is one of the significant factors that impact customer service levels. Delivering a solution quickly helps the business in getting a customer back on track and retain them for a longer period of time. ServiceNow CSM helps with just that by routing empathy-driven or complex customer issues to the right customer service agents and accelerating the first-contact ratio.
Some of the factors influencing responsiveness include:
- Channels used for customer response
- Agent’s capabilities
- Knowledge of agents
- Decision-making process of agents
2. Know-how of Customer Service Agents
Knowledgeable agents are the key to achieving an excellent customer experience. To address customers’ concerns, a strong understanding of the product or service is required. It can minimize mistakes and result in confident service delivery.
Some of the factors influencing know-how include:
- Product or service training
- Access to information (for example, customer history, complaints, earlier resolutions, etc.)
3. Consistency
Inconsistent brand interactions can leave customers with negative impressions. It is vital to offer the same service quality across multiple communication channels. Whether the customer is gathering information or completing a sales transaction, they expect a consistent experience across various channels every time.
Some of the factors affecting consistency include:
- Consolidation of customer interactions
- Routing of customer cases from different support channels
- Alignment of inbound (when customers reach out to agents) and outbound (when agents reach out to customers) strategies
4. Openness
Maintaining openness with customers can help earn a lot of trust in the long term. A lack of transparency in the resolution process would only build further frustration and negatively impact the customer’s experience. The key here is to provide the answers to customers at each step and keep them in the loop.
Some of the factors influencing openness include:
- Case status updates
- Determination of the next steps for the case
- Customer feedback after the service
5. Human Touch
Some of the common human traits like personality, empathy, and politeness are valuable while serving customers. In fact, 73% of customers tend to stick with the brand because of memorable experiences and friendly employees. That’s because some customers don’t feel comfortable interacting with virtual chatbots, especially in cases that require emotional responses or complex inputs.
Some of the factors influencing the human touch include:
- Personalized interactions
- Empathy-driven responses
- Access to case history (if applicable)
6. Customer Autonomy
Most customers prefer troubleshooting the service issues themselves because it is easier and quicker. It also reduces the workload of customer service agents. Ideally, the customers should be able to resolve their issues through self-service options and escalate to agents only if required.
Some of the factors influencing customer autonomy include:
- Existence of a comprehensive knowledge base
- Presence of automation tools in the service
- Access to an internal ticketing system (to escalate issues or check status)
Explore: What Makes for an Exceptional Customer Experience and How You Can Provide That?
How Can ServiceNow CSM Help You Deliver Stellar Customer Service?
While the core customer service principles have not changed, customers’ expectations have changed dramatically with the proliferation of advanced technology and social media. Modern-day customers do not only expect helpful and friendly service but also expect it to be efficient and quick. Besides, they expect personalized service delivered across various channels.
Therefore, businesses need to see customer service from a strategic angle. The new face of customer service looks forward to a unified solution that listens to them everywhere.
To that end, ServiceNow Customer Service Management (CSM) offers a unified customer portal that helps businesses deliver an excellent self-service experience. It seamlessly connects people, processes, and workflows while facilitating engagement across departments.
With ServiceNow CSM, customer service agents can get complete visibility into customer health and tools to perform root cause analysis and deliver proactive services. More profoundly, it helps businesses to:
- Create customer cases
- Route cases intelligently to customer service agents
- Set up assignment and routing rules based on skills, availability, geography, and other relevant factors
- Enable self-service through the customer portal
- Track and analyze the cases
- Handle omnichannel communication (web, social media, phone, email, etc.)
- Integrate CSM with other ServiceNow applications like project and portfolio management, field service management, and external applications through web services.
Explore: How the Top 7 Products of ServiceNow Can Make Your Customer Service Management A Breeze
Ready To Take Your Customer Service to the Next Level?
Now that you know the key customer service principles, it’s critical to get started with a top-notch customer service solution for your business. Excellent customer service can unlock better customer feedback, loyalty, advocacy, and brand reputation.
Owing to the proliferating expectations of customers, ServiceNow CSM can be your one-stop solution. If you want to customize your CSM solution to your business’s unique needs, talk to our ServiceNow specialists today.
