In a customer-centric world, the key to growing your business and retaining customers is providing prompt and innovative customer support. The challenge, however, for business owners, is figuring out the right Customer Service Management (CSM) channels and efficient communication strategy.
When COVID-19 hit the world like a wrecking ball and shut everything down, the business world shifted to remote work and had to create digital interfaces with customers almost overnight.
According to ‘The Work Survey by ServiceNow,’ the changes were both surprising and welcome. Around 92% of executives out of the 9,000 respondents said that the pandemic had compelled their company to rethink how work is done.
Why should CSM be a part of your business strategy?
More and more companies are recognizing the need to digitize their processes. Digitalization is no more limited to creating a web presence or rolling out software. There is a need to rethink value propositions and create seamless experiences for all stakeholders, which includes customers and employees.
In this experience-first era, CSM can assign customer workflow across the entire organization, delivering a great experience for customers and employees alike. It is crucial to manage and analyze customer interactions and data throughout the customer lifecycle to improve business relationships with customers, increase customer retention, and drive sales growth.
Choosing the right CSM software
Personalized customer experiences created by the stalwarts like Amazon or Uber have substantially raised the standards of customer service. Customers today expect a multi-channel, seamless, self-service customer experience, and will choose service providers who are willing to comply. That’s why it is important for organizations to pay attention to customer service while keeping their operational costs low. This is where CSM software can make a difference.
Organizations approach CSM software in different ways. While CSM software enables some organizations with exceptional customer service experience, it may not work as well for others because it’s not able to do what they thought or hoped it would. It is essential to know your strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities before deciding on implementing new processes.
Here are three things to consider before choosing your CSM / Helpdesk software.
1. Make sure your software is right for your industry
Too often, organizations are taken by brand names and end up investing in software that doesn’t quite serve their purpose. For example, if you’re a B2B organization, there’s no point investing in solutions built for the B2C industry.
Choosing the right tools for customer service will help you create effortless experiences for your customers. For instance, ServiceNow is one of the fastest-growing Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solutions that has a proven capability to transform IT. Created to manage everything as a service, ServiceNow makes modern enterprises operate faster and deliver desired outcomes with minimal configuration.
ServiceNow enables organizations to define services, provide an intuitive service experience, deliver services, ensure service availability, and evaluate critical service metrics. From quickly building, testing, and publishing applications and simplifying field service to generating detailed financial reports and automating service management processes through ITSM, ServiceNow provides an exceedingly powerful platform for enterprise service.
2. Customers should be able to communicate how they want
Another important point to keep in mind is the flexibility of your CSM platform. Gone are the days of offering only phone and email support. Customers now seek self-service options such as live chat, knowledge base support, and more. Keeping up with the trends of changing times, some major enterprises are also offering visual support solutions such as screen sharing.
For such elaborate systems, you need a solution that can withstand the pressures of enterprise IT. With open architecture and cloud-based solutions, ServiceNow CSM provides this much-needed flexibility for enterprises. ServiceNow offers a variety of ITSM products such as incident management, knowledge management, change and release management, and so on, which helps improve business service delivery efficiency at optimized costs.
The cloud-based solutions offered by ServiceNow are easily scalable across multiple networks. It has been designed to withstand the pressures of the IT industry, scalability, and changing customer requirements. ServiceNow CSM also eliminates the need for manual case opening, routing, checking progress, and more. Its intelligent case routing system sends the case to the right place and its visual workflow capabilities transfer the case to all the parts of a company, thereby involving the right resources to ensure the case is resolved or escalated in time.
3. A platform that grows with you
Your customer demands and expectations are not going to remain the same a year from now. Therefore, you’ll have to keep changing strategies and technologies to keep in sync with those evolving expectations and demands. Major companies today are facing the challenge of moving to a cloud that cannot scale for at least the next 10 years or so. But ServiceNow provides the reassurance of scalability, unlike any other platform. It is interesting to note that ServiceNow handles over 20 billion application queries each hour and operates thousands of individual database processes that can automate over 20,000 operational workflows every day.
ServiceNow’s Advanced High Availability (AHA) architecture is a major element in delivering an enterprise-grade cloud service. It comes with a unique, multi-instance architecture that not just meets but exceeds stringent requirements around data sovereignty, availability, and performance. It allows you to take advantage of the enterprise cloud’s scalability, agility, and advanced capabilities and gives you complete visibility and control of your processes and resources.
Working through a pandemic has emphasized the need of bringing agility and business continuity to customer service. Perhaps, the biggest lesson this pandemic has taught is how businesses need to move to a more effortless system by bringing together people, processes, and technology.
ServiceNow seems to understand this necessity and has the solutions to ensure higher satisfaction and loyalty among customers. To know more about ServiceNow CSM offerings, talk to the experts at NOUS Infosystems.
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