Top 5 Strategies to Drive Customer Service Innovation

Customers’ buying decisions in the current hyper-connected world are driven by the information they’re obtaining from various online sources such as websites, blogs, videos, discussion forums, and social networking platforms. By the time they enter the buying funnel, they already know what they want and how much they want to pay for it. And, it does not stop there. After buying a product or a service, customers use those same platforms to share their feedback, on public forums, mentioning the brands that satisfy or disappoint them. Hence, enterprises need to be careful about what they deliver to their customers and how they make them feel by investing in customer service innovation strategies. However, enterprises are facing certain challenges in delivering an effective customer experience.

Let us take a look at the three major customer service challenges:
customer service innovation

1. Incoherent, Disconnected Business Systems

In the current digital era, every enterprise adopts some kind of digital technology and tools in its journey toward digital transformation. Often, these digital processes may not work in sync with each other, creating data silos that may negatively impact customer service efforts, and customers might not receive what they are looking for. Also, addressing issues to enhance customer service delivery becomes a challenge with incoherent business processes that fail to determine the origin of such issues.

2. Manual, Time-consuming Processes

In cases where the workforce, especially customer service representatives, are engaged in tedious and manual processes, they may not get enough time to focus on the end business goals – to deliver a great customer experience through customer service innovation for higher ROI. Also, manual processes are prone to errors and inconsistencies, and often lack the necessary transparency that helps gain customer trust and confidence.

3. Not-in-Sync Multiple Engagement Channels

Customers do not use just one channel when interacting with a company. They might first write an email, and if that goes unanswered or there is not sufficient or relevant information, they might even call the service center teams or chat with a virtual customer service representative on the website. This means that service requests come via different engagement channels. If these channels are not aligned properly, the customer will get inconsistent information, resulting in bad customer experiences.

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How to Drive Customer Service Innovation?

Digital transformation has drastically redefined customer expectations and the way businesses deliver customer service. Today’s customers are facing unprecedented service challenges due to which they have new and increased expectations. Enterprises have now realized that they cannot sustain and succeed without upscaling their customer service game with real-time connectivity and engagement practices. Hence, there’s a dire need to adopt new approaches and technologies to boost customer service innovation. Customer support teams rely on IT to streamline and automate responses to customers’ needs and offer innovative, personalized services. Here are the top 5 strategies that enterprises can adopt for customer service innovation –

customer service innovation

1. Deliver Personalized, Omnichannel Customer Experiences

It is vital for enterprises to embrace robust omnichannel customer service that integrates every customer communication touchpoint across all channels including text, email, social, and phone/mobile to deliver a seamless customer experience. Such a move helps enterprises bring personalized interactions and contextual engagement into play, offering a unified and consistent brand experience across the entire customer journey.

2. Integrate Workflows Across Departments, Breaking Silos

Workflow integration across tools, systems and processes enables smooth customer data flow across all departments of the organization. It helps enterprises analyze and understand customer behavior across all channels and deliver customized experiences at every customer touchpoint.

3. Accelerate Customer Service with Intelligent Process Automation

Customer-facing teams deal with huge volumes of data. Leveraging intelligent automation enables these teams to sort the data, route customer issues to the concerned departments or the subject matter experts and devise a solution. With this, the customer service teams will be able to make informed decisions and resolve issues faster.

4. Enhance Customer Support Operations with a Reliable IT Platform

The accuracy of an enterprise’s customer service can make or break its reputation. If customers do not get the required support or information at the right time, there is a high possibility that they will move on to another brand/company. Therefore, every enterprise today requires a reliable, securely connected, and scalable IT platform that can support customer service operations efficiently and handle many requests smoothly and quickly.

5. Adopt Data Analytics and AI Capabilities to Assess and Predict Customer Behavior

The huge amount of data collected at various stages of the customer journey is the ‘lifeblood’ of an enterprise. With data analytics and AI, such data can be analyzed to predict customer behavior concerning various products and services. This helps enterprises offer the right products and services to their customers. Additionally, by using AI, businesses can track the origin of issues, alert customers about impending issues and advise resolution even before they occur.

Looking to revolutionize your customer service? Contact us to devise a customer service innovation strategy that will differentiate your brand.

The Way Forward

Moving forward, enterprises must be open to adopting newer methods and technologies to bring about customer service innovation. This will help them connect with the customers better and stand out amongst competitors. With that, the focus at all times should be on learning from past data, improvising, and evolving the entire customer service operations to respond to fluctuating consumer behaviors.
So how do you enhance your customer service operations? It’s by adopting a robust, end-to-end customer service platform like ServiceNow CSM. ServiceNow CSM goes beyond traditional customer service solutions. You can delight your customers with a preemptive service from problem escalation to resolution. It automates service requests and integrates the request resolution process across numerous channels such as chatbots, mobile applications, voice assistants, site portals, etc. This allows wider scope for consumers to engage through their preferred channel for issue resolution.
Reach out to us to drive customer service innovation and overcome your challenges with our ServiceNow implementation services. Click here to connect!
Author

Joshua Smith

Joshua is a process improvement thought leader and digital transformation expert at KANINI. Over the past 15 years, his focus has always been on achieving organizational maturity and enhancing business processes through implementing tools and workflows to drive transformation initiatives. With experience in multiple verticals from – manufacturing to healthcare, Joshua brings a practitioner’s perspective when working on business solutions and goals to allow him to advise and guide on industry and process best practices.

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