Customer service experience: Shifting your company into high gear

A focus on customer experience expands the traditional definition of customer service to encompass every aspect of a company’s offerings. It requires engaging employees and viewing
exceptional service as an asset. As a result, the gap is growing between companies committed to shifting their customer service experience into high gear and those stuck in neutral, still deciding
how and when to make their move.

The top three contact center priorities are all customer experience priorities:
• Improving value of customer interactions
• Increasing customer satisfaction
• Improving accuracy/consistency of customer interactions

Connected collaboration: Customer service in the fast lane

Connecting customer service with other parts of the business is critical for resolving the root cause of complex customer issues. In a ServiceNow research, 83% of contact center executives believe collaborating across an organization is key to driving permanent solutions.

Many customer service organizations are making inroads in this collaboration, but still rely on outdated technology. In fact, email and telephone are still the top-rated technologies used in contact centers today for these kinds of interactions.

As the focus on accountability and visibility grows, the use of program management and collaboration tools (25% and 40% respectively) is moving customer service into the fast lane.8 These tools provide the initial steps for proper tracking and management of customer issues,
but new approaches to managing customer service are uniquely designed to take this to the next level.

Modern customer service systems allow for issues identified in customer service to be directly assigned to other departments—such as field service, engineering, finance, and other departments—and then tracked as they move to resolution. By addressing the root cause
of a customer issue, future customers won’t encounter the same issue and the overall customer experience is improved.

Preventing and preempting service issues: Anticipating the road ahead

Companies want to provide the best customer experience—and likewise, customers prefer to avoid problems. Using advanced technology such as analytics, monitoring, automation, and
the internet of things (IoT), companies can improve customer satisfaction and loyalty by alerting customers to potential or actual issues. Better yet, these technologies can help companies proactively fix issues before customers know about them.

Anticipating customer needs leads to fewer support calls. It reflects positively on your company and contributes to an improved customer experience. 54% of the companies that
responded to a ServiceNow Customer Contact Week Onsite Survey have already begun the journey by using analytics to help identify trends that drive actionable improvement.

Modern customer service solutions take this further by using IoT to provide real-time visibility and drive continuous improvement in products, services, and processes. This includes identifying
trends and taking action to automate resolutions for frequently recurring problems. It also makes it possible to send preemptive alerts to notify customers of an issue and provide them with a
solution, effectively eliminating their need to contact customer service. With only 13% of contact center executives currently using analytics to identify problems before they occur, adopting
proactive technology is a smart way to outpace the competition.

Effortless service: Fueling an exceptional customer experience

A ServiceNow research shows that 4 out of 5 contact center execs say they are offering some form of self-service. This is a great start, but only 51% are offering personalized service1—even as customers increasingly expect a self-service experience with content and recommendations based on their specific product history and usage. From here, customers want the ability to perform common requests, engage with peers and experts, and find answers to common issues.

Advances in artificial intelligence are proving invaluable to improving customer interactions. Customer service systems are using chatbots to speed customer interactions, route cases, and
recommend next best actions. These technologies increase the quality of service and provide immediate, automated resolutions to common customer issues. Super-agents, who handle complex issues or exceptions, are made more productive by knowing what assistance was offered from the chatbot and by receiving intelligent recommendations from the system. Yet only 16% of contact center execs are currently using intelligent routing and only 12% are using chatbots for recommending next best steps.

The good news is that modern customer service systems deliver the tools needed to provide customers with an effortless and exceptional customer service experience, personalized to their specific needs.

The ServiceNow Customer Service Management solution

No matter where you are on the road to digital transformation, ServiceNow Customer Service Management can help you provide a seamless customer journey—and you’ll get there faster, more reliably, and with proven ROI. Customer Service Management will take you from traditional customer engagement to an exceptional customer experience by helping you:

• Increase efficiency and fix the root cause of complex issues by seamlessly connecting departments across your organization.
• Proactively anticipate and intelligently fix potential problems before customers experience them.

• Use personalized, self-service technology to drive actions to instantly take care of common customer requests.

• Retain existing customers by minimizing their frustration with traditional customer service roadblocks and preemptively notifying them of possible issues on the road ahead.

• Maximize upsell, cross-sell, and word-of-mouth opportunities to reach new customers.

With these and many other benefits on the horizon, we look forward to talking with you further about how Customer Service Management can help your company on the road to a speedy
transformation of your customer experience