Empowering service teams with omnichannel support and automation

White paper

THE NEW DIGITAL LANDSCAPE FOR CUSTOMER SERVICE

Empowering Service Teams with Omnichannel Support & Automation

Adapting business strategy to meet customer expectations

As the business world continues to adapt to the impact of COVID-19, the ways that companies and customers interact has been completely transformed.

With survival on the line, enterprises are completely rethinking their business strategies in order to meet their customer expectations. The new digital landscape means that customers now have dozens of communication options at their fingertips, but this is creating an entirely new set of complex challenges for service teams.

In addition to planning how to keep customers and staff safe, those on the front lines of customer service are asking important questions:

How do we meet our customers on their preferred channels of communication?

How do we keep up with the increased amount of inquiries?

continue to offer exceptional experience

How do we continue to offer our customers an exceptional experience so they keep coming back?

Leadership is also confronting new realities of managing teams remotely while ensuring that productivity remains high. Despite the upheaval in how we all communicate in the post-pandemic world, customers still demand fast, personalized service that exceeds their expectations.

In this white paper, we will go over some of the common challenges that services teams are grappling with, along with some potential solutions.

“Increasing your customer retention 5% can increase your profits by 25%-95%.” Source: Harvard Business Review

Keeping Productivity High for Remote Teams

With so many service teams working remotely these days, collaboration is often a slow and tedious process. To achieve faster query resolution and offer more personalized customer service, it’s essential for customer service agents to embrace quality case management software that allows for open communication across teams and a 360-degree view into the customer/business relationship.

Giving agents a complete view into valuable customer data helps to keep them informed, engaged, and ready to offer personalized service at a moment’s notice. In fact, the open transparency in communication history helps remote teams accomplish more than ever with fewer chances of falling into individual siloes.

These days, effective case management software utilizes an automation-centered customer service approach. Predictive service technology and artificial intelligence reduce the complexity of mundane tasks – freeing up valuable team resources in the process. For example, studies have shown that 15% of agent attrition occurs during training as roles become increasingly complex.

Automation Centered Customer Service

Notwithstanding the above, here are additional ways that an automation centered customer service approach can help keep productivity high for remote teams:

Simplify Views Across Systems

Leverage existing, legacy systems while minimizing technical debt
Reduce the wasted time agents speed navigating between applications

Push Information to Agents

Eliminate the need for agents to manually retrieve regularly used data
Leverage know context (e.g., billing inquiry) to drive presented data

Reduce the Need for Agents to Type

Pre-populate every possible field to minimize the need for agents to type
Use advanced techniques (e.g., auto documenting) to eliminate tedious tasks

Leverage Knowledge

Provide a knowledge base to address repetitive issues
Leverage the knowledge feedback to build better products and enable self-service

According to Fortune, engaged employees lead to happy customers. Employee engagement is the emotional commitment an employee has to their organization and its goals, resulting in the use of discretionary effort towards their job. Taking the time to build a company-wide culture of engaged employees is worth the effort because it has serious benefits for customers and the bottom line.

And, in the words of noted motivational speaker Kevin Kruse, “Companies with high employee engagement have lower turnover rates and more than twice the customer loyalty (referrals, repeat business) than companies with low employee engagement.”

More Ways to Connect with Customers

With new means of communication popping up on a regular basis, businesses have even more opportunities (and challenges) to connect with customers. It can be a juggling act sometimes for agents to manage incoming messages on all of the different platforms. Service teams need to know what their customers preferred channels of communication are and have a way to manage all queries through one central system.

Omnichannel support allows for this flexibility and helps to reduce the obstacles preventing seamless customer communications. Meeting your customers where they are is one of the easiest ways to build authentic relationships and improve customer experience. Having access to the right tools ensures that they will keep coming back – time and time again.

A recent study by the Harvard Business Review found that finding new customers can be anywhere from five to 25 times more expensive than retaining current customers. This cost is often overlooked, although when you think about the different touchpoints that need to be opened for effective customer communication, it is not hard to see why you need to have an omnichannel approach.

Companies are usually spinning numerous customer communication plates at the same time – mobile push notifications, website shopping, email blasts, social media, chats or SMS texts … the list is both extensive and filled with the potential for inadvertent errors.

Field Services Evolved

Organizations offering field services can benefit from digital automation tools to boost their productivity levels and increase their customer satisfaction. Field service teams often struggle with issues such as keeping everyone informed about the status of different orders/cases, scheduling field engineers to customer sites efficiently, tracking the location of personnel/vehicles, and organizing important documents.

Field service techs often find themselves without a stable internet connection so it’s crucial that they have access to customer records while offline. Thankfully, the days of paperwork orders and timesheets are over, and the new generation of Field Service software gives teams the flexibility to work from anywhere. Managing all of your customers’ accounts in one place is now easier than ever.

Data Driven Decisions

Data is no longer collected or unstructured information, it is a commodity that provides actionable insights and informs business optimization strategies.

Successful companies use data to power decision/next-best-action engines and increase customer intimacy. That engine has many moving parts, but the key element is that they must all work together – like an actual engine, basically – to create the sales opportunities required.

Create a Better Customer Experience

Now that you have the playbook, where are you in the process of delivering the best possible experience for your customers?

Creating happier customers starts with engaged employees that have access to the right set of customer centric support tools. Once you get that process nailed down, then you can start to not only move forward on your customer service journey but also reach the level of digital maturity required for an omnichannel approach.

To find out what Apexon can do to unify your service, support, and operations teams to digitally transform your approach to effortless Customer Service, contact us today.