One month into the pandemic in April 2020, organizations worldwide found themselves swamped by inquiries, complaints, and service requests. Even the experienced customer service agents with the highest success ratings, usually in the face of chaos, suffered from the lack of infrastructure, tools, and technologies at their disposal when they were working remotely.
Soon, the hold times rose by 34% – an eternity in the customers’ eyes; cases started elongating, so much so that Harvard Business Review reported a 64% increase in case escalation. These numbers were a red flag for the organizations that had been relying on manual processes and legacy solutions for service management.
A decade or two ago, the impact of the pandemic wouldn’t have been this taxing on the customer service and the associated customer experience (CX) front. But today, the narrative around customer service effectiveness is inextricably linked to omnichannel digital engagement and transformation.
Amidst stories of chaos in customer service back offices, ServiceNow has been developing and advancing forward-thinking solutions for differentiated customer service that fosters greater levels of personalization.
Digital Engagement at the Forefront
As per Forrester’s analysis, more than 51% of customers prefer order management, identification, and verification service requests to be automated. Likewise, more than 31% expect to be catered through an automated workflow for general service requests.
What does this mean for businesses?
- For one, the business case for the older, manual processes is no longer sustainable.
- Secondly, investing in a new omnichannel front end is imperative.
- And thirdly, the underlying core infrastructure needs to be rebuilt and reimagined from the ground up.
ServiceNow Helps Develop an “Engagement Layer”
From asking for an appointment to submitting a request for a new account, ServiceNow functions as the customer’s digital “engagement layer” across all digital touchpoints. In essence, ServiceNow CSM helps an enterprise (as well as the customer) to:
- Facilitate omnichannel support with options such as chat, email, or phone. The idea is to provide an excellent end-to-end user experience across all channels while delivering on the promise of being available at all hours.
- Enable Self-service and on-demand engagement with the help of interactive and easy-to-use self-help portals. ServiceNow CSM provides the enterprise to configure two portal types: customer service portal for B2B and consumer service portal for B2C. These portals come equipped with service catalogs, knowledge base, etc., and enable agent-customer interaction as and when required.
- Empower agents to address the requests, view the case history, and access relevant customer-related information from the comfort of a mobile application. For instance, the mobile app helps categorize fields such as “active critical cases,” “new cases,” and “active cases.” It also expedites case resolution, not to mention the facility of push notifications.
- Be at the helm of digital engagement by seamlessly aiding user experience on the Engagement Messenger app explicitly designed to let customers leverage self-service on both internal and third-party applications.
Altogether, the digital engagement layer constitutes a comprehensive set of integrated, scalable, and automated applications that reduce the effort to manage service requests. Pre-built customizable workflows and form templates helping streamline request routing would be a good example to mention.
Going Beyond the Customer-facing Engagement
Digital engagement drives multiple strategic, operational, and technological decisions that underpin customer service management in the modern-day enterprise. With ServiceNow, enterprises can leverage a set of pre-built best practices and guidelines, employ automation and knowledge discovery, and support every aspect focused on downright 24/7 customer interaction.
However, it’s noteworthy that the engagement layer is just one aspect that ServiceNow has in store for its customers. At its core, ServiceNow follows a unified approach to customer service management that enables enterprises to:
- Create, manage, and innovate digital interactions during all stages of the service processes.
- Integrate, automate, and personalize all types of customer interactions across all channels, right from a single platform.
- Route and schedule the service requests based on priority and policies.
- Orchestrate processes using message-oriented workflows.
- Analyze, report, and measure the efficiency of the service operations for continuous improvement.
- Create a level playing field for all CSM agents with ServiceNow’s built-in analytics, productivity tools, and training resources.
Example: How ServiceNow Advances CSM Beyond “Just” Engagement
ServiceNow CSM constitutes a Vaccine Administration Management application that predominantly focuses on assisting the user in registering for the vaccine appointment via virtual agents, equipping the healthcare providers with the vaccine data and virtual agent conversations, and clinicians with the ability to administer (create, read, update) vaccine-specific details. Certainly, the real-time analysis of records and the ability to automate the process help improve workflows, reduce errors, and advance self-service options.
To Sum Up
ServiceNow offerings are technology enablers for collaborative and coordinated digital engagement that delivers on the promise of seamless, sophisticated, yet personalized user experience across all channels.
Considering that the customer service landscape is morphing at a rapid pace, being agile, nimble, and scalable is the way forward. Gone are the days when CX was seen as a one-off event; today, businesses are driven by proactive engagement and experience that spans all touchpoints.
This is why Xceltrait’s customers, through the use of ServiceNow, have been able to innovate at a much quicker pace, make evidence-based decisions, and scale rapidly. To learn more about ServiceNow and how it can enhance your customer service operations, leave us a message.
