An efficient, personalized, fast customer service is the key to a satisfied customer and therefore for a successful company.
With the increase in the power and influence of customers, investing in technologies that increase their satisfaction has become a primary commitment for all those companies that aim to digitally transform their businesses.However, there is still a strong gap between those who are transforming their Customer Service into a Customer Experience tout court and those who, on the other hand, are stuck in a stalemate, unable to make decisions.
Customers today expect fast, relevant answers and direct contact with operators, but customer satisfaction can be compromised by the same company structures, where customer service is usually disconnected from the rest of the organization. It follows, therefore, the need for a rapid and radical change to achieve success in the customer journey.
Improving the customer journey
The connection between customer service and other areas of the company is essential to truly solve customer problems. However, entrusting this connection to outdated technologies such as telephone and e-mail is not enough. Modern CRM systems allow to assign the identified problems directly to other departments and to monitor them up to the resolution phase.
Furthermore, to improve the customer experience, each company department should maximize the convenience and speed of the customer journey and work as much as possible on its personalization. In fact, these are key factors for differentiating oneself within an increasingly competitive environment: a recent study shows that among the companies that have improved the customer experience, more than 84% reported an increase in revenue and 79% cost savings.
Prevent problems by anticipating solutions
Advanced technologies such as monitoring, analysis, automation and the Internet of Things (IoT) are powerful allies for companies committed to increasing the satisfaction and loyalty of their customers, by providing insights and solutions to real or potential problems. Anticipating customer needs improves the customer experience and leads to a decrease in support requests.
Adopting proactive technologies proves to be an excellent strategy to beat competitors. The IoT, for example, can be used by modern customer service solutions to ensure real-time visibility and promote the continuous improvement of services, processes and products.
The Internet of Things can also be used to identify trends and facilitate the automation of the processes of solving recurring problems. The customer experience thus becomes more and more autonomous: by warning and informing of any problem in advance, providing ad hoc solutions, the need to contact customer service is reduced, but its effectiveness is increased. However, despite the obvious benefits, today only 13% of contact center executives use analytics to identify problems before they occur.
Customer Service: the benefits of the self-service model
Providing a personalized self-service method and using artificial intelligence to speed up processes means optimizing time, giving value to the needs of its customers in terms of satisfaction and time-saving.
According to recent research conducted by ServiceNow, 4 out of 5 contact center executives say they offer some kind of self-service, but only 51% of them offer personalized service.
Nonetheless, more and more customers expect a self-service customer experience, with content based on history and specific indications on the use of the product, and that allows them to make requests, interact with experts and find answers to common problems.
To ensure customer satisfaction, therefore, AI tools such as chatbots are making their way into customer service. These allow to speed up interactions, route cases and provide immediate and automatic resolutions to the most common problems. At the same time, super-agents who manage complex problems or exceptions optimize their results thanks to the insight into the information already provided and received by the chatbot and the intelligent advice of the system.
Despite the benefits, however, only 16% of contact center executives currently use intelligent routing, and only 12% use chatbots to recommend the best steps.
Precisely for this reason, adopting modern customer service systems can guarantee a positive differentiation from the competition and favor advantages in terms of costs, efficiency and customer loyalty.
ServiceNow Customer Service Management
Among these we find the ServiceNow Customer Service Management®, which thanks to omnichannel case management with machine learning offers a personalized experience to customers, automatically assigning cases to the most qualified operators and speeding up problem resolution. Customer Service Management also allows you to assign tasks to other departments and track them until resolution, thus promoting teamwork. This approach has the advantage of allowing permanent problem resolution and the transition from reactive to proactive support.
By monitoring the health of products and services, in fact, it is possible to provide the information necessary to solve problems, before the customer finds any feedback.
This results in a faster resolution process, reduced costs and a significant increase in terms of customer satisfaction.