Since the pandemic hit, we’ve been overanalyzing its effect on the economy and how it changed businesses outside of IT. No matter where you were with your digitalization journey at the beginning of 2020, you suddenly had to go fully digital to stay operational. That proved challenging even for those most prepared like Amazon, Netflix, and Airbnb.
The truth is the global health crisis did not shift the trends in that area. It instead accelerated what was already happening. It pushed us over the top of the roller coaster ride that is the digitalization of all business processes. Especially our customer service management.
We are all in customer service
All businesses out there, no matter the industry, rely on connecting to their customers. The pandemic has made doing that in person almost impossible. Tendencies were already going in the direction of customevrs wanting to interact in person less and less. Yet, clients today expect you to be available to them all the time across all channels and be quick and efficient.
What happens in the frontend of this interaction is essential and you most definitely need trained and friendly staff. What’s more – a good website, app, email, social accounts, and whatnot, but, as they say, the best things in life are better left unseen. When your customers reach out to you, this often creates an incident or a service request somewhere down the line. It is how that is being handled once it’s in the pipeline that makes the difference.
Customer service is usually a separate team and function within the organization. But we must have learned by now that no matter the team, we’re all in customer service. To handle those service requests, often there is a collaboration between different teams and business functions. It comes down to technology to make that process seamless.
The pandemic made everything that is wrong with how we handle customer service requests painfully visible. There were so many more of them coming across all digital channels that the bottlenecks and disconnected parts became obvious.
Why is Customer Service Management important?
In a workflow-based platform like ServiceNow, Customer Service Management (CSM) is there to bridge the gap between customer service and IT service management. To make your backend look as shiny as your frontend.
Once into the CSM workflow, a case can be brought to your factory or even the research and development team. All within a seamless and fully trackable process, which then reverts the solution through the customer portal back to your customer. CSM links customer service and IT so that no precious time is wasted transferring requests between departments. In that way, the risk of errors and delays is brought to a minimum.
Less opportunity for face-to-face communication makes it challenging to work as a team. Having the right technology, we can bring even more value to our customers than ever before. Of course, even the most state-of-the-art technology is nothing without the right process behind it. One that is based on best practices but also perfectly fits the business goals of your company.
At BRIGHT, we start each implementation project by putting business goals first and looking for the most efficient and sustainable way to get there while bringing you maximum results. Making everything digital is no innovation nowadays. But the real value comes from seamless process integration, and ServiceNow Customer Service Management gives you a significant advantage in that direction
