When the parameters of your customer service environment change suddenly, make sure everyone is available and ready to do their part. If you can solve the high-impact problems your customers are facing, you will be able to deliver consistently good experiences that could create loyal customers for life.

This requires fixing broken, manual processes and information silos between your frontline agents and your middle office, back office, and field teams. If your customer service processes weren’t digital before, they need to be now, with an emphasis on rolling out capabilities that:

Break down silos and automate processes across teams

If customer service agents have to rely on a mixture of internal emails, phone calls, and chat apps to get information or implore action from middle and back office teams, things will never be done fast or even well.
The only way to solve issues quickly and permanently is to break down information silos and automate processes across teams.

When everyone is working together and can track the progress of an issue, from its inception to resolution, you can make sure everything gets done efficiently and correctly. This requires effective:
• Workflows and task assignments.
• Service management that integrates incident, problem, change, and request processes into case management to ensure the right workflow can be initiated.
• Customer project management that enables organizations to manage the entire project lifecycle for their customer accounts, including complex projects with multiple tasks.

Proactively monitor products and services to detect and prevent potential issues

The saying goes, ‘an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure’ – that’s certainly true for customer service. If you can prevent downtime altogether, you will avoid inbound customer calls and potential customer dissatisfaction and frustration. Telling customers about a problem and letting them know you have fixed it or are working on the solution before they detect it themselves can go a long way towards building up trust and fostering loyalty.
To help you get ahead of problems, look for:

• Proactive customer service operations.
• A service-aware install base.
• Major issue management that enables similar cases to be managed as a single case, so they only have to be solved once.

Identify opportunities for automation and efficiency

Getting results out of your service operations is often not about having employees work faster, but smarter. If you can analyze current and past performance across teams, you can identify bottlenecks and inefficiencies holding your service delivery back and increasing work volumes. You can take action to improve experiences and outcomes. To identify opportunities for automation and efficiency within your service operations, look for ways to apply:

• Analytics
• Predictive intelligence

We know that delivering predictable customer service when the world is anything but predictable requires bringing the front, middle, and back offices and field teams together to fix customer issues. It takes tools and processes that can span the entire organization to ensure everyone and everything can work in concert to meet changing customer challenges and needs. ServiceNow gives you a customer service platform that empowers your extended team, so you can handle whatever comes your way.