5 Ways to Create the Best Customer Service Management Strategy

Walt Disney is known for saying “Whatever you do, do it well. Do it so well that when people see you do it, they will want to come back . . . and they will want to bring others . . . ” Today we know two things: that this sentiment is very much true, and that it applies to more than just movies or theme parks.

In fact, a recent study by Salesforce found that 80% of customers believe the experience a company provides is as important as its products and services. This belief may be much more commonplace now than it was when Disney first brought the importance of CX to the world stage, but fortunately for business leaders today, the technology exists to help you build solutions, design workflows, and create processes that shape an outstanding experience for your customers.

Here are five ways to get started.

Select the Appropriate Technology Platform

Customer service management is not another Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool. While closely aligned to CRM, a Customer Service Management (CSM) solution emphasizes the word “service,” focusing on all the work associated with delivering continuous value to customers. Something like ServiceNow’s Customer Service Management platform provides a level of automation and workflow sophistication that makes delivering superior customer experiences easy.

Recommended Read: How one customer-service-centric organization leveraged ServiceNow Customer Service Management to deliver a high-end customer experience.

Don’t rely on your CRM system to drive your customer service management strategy. Choose a tool designed to manage the work essential to delivering world class customer service.

Take a Continuous Improvement Approach to the Customer Relationship Cycle

When you consider the rapid pace of change in technology and the business itself over time, even the best customer service organizations can deteriorate if they get complacent. To ensure you’re always working towards excellence, build a cadence of audits into your quarterly plans. A regular look at the data in your CSM platform will allow you to identify areas that have the largest impact on customer satisfaction and loyalty, and implement changes to internal processes that help to improve them. You can also use this data both to gain buy-in from leadership and to prove your success.

Design Superior Customer Experiences

Customer service is more than just handling complaints. It’s about providing customers with an experience that goes beyond their expectations. A recent post from the MIT Sloan Management Review put it best when they said, “As customer expectations evolve and technological advances create new possibilities, the foundations of an efficient, responsive, personalized customer experience in B2B transactions must take shape.” The emphasis on user experience as a key differentiator has driven the rising significance of design thinking aiming to make customer interactions with complex institutions as engaging and intuitive as possible. To stay ahead in the coming years, an organization must go beyond simply identifying and addressing customer pain points, and will need to intentionally design an end-to-end customer experience that is easy, automated, and proactive.

Measure for Success

Peter Drucker, a pioneering thinker that influenced the development of the modern business corporation, is often quoted as saying, “You can’t manage what you can’t measure”. Put measurement systems in place to track key performance indicators to ensure success. While many organizations realize the importance of retaining customers, few seem to understand what losing a single one can mean to their bottom line. ServiceNow Performance Analytics for Customer Service Management is an easy-to-use, integrated application designed for reporting and analyzing customer service management performance and effectiveness. It also comes with over 100 predefined best practice KPIs and out-of-the-box dashboards for monitoring customer service management processes so any organization can start measuring for success immediately.

Build Relationships at Scale

As a customer base becomes larger, it can become harder for an organization to have genuine interactions with customers. But with modern CSM technology, organizations have the ability to form and maintain relationships with customers at huge scale. Now they can capture and house data on each customer automatically, so that key players within the organization can understand the history, needs, and business drivers of a customer at any given time. This means that organizations need no longer rely on the internalized knowledge and experience of individual employees in order to maintain and grow the relationship with their customers.

Conclusion – How Crossfuze Can Help

Customers don’t want a transactional relationship; they want a positive experience with the organizations they engage with, on their own terms and time. The organization creating the customer experience that is making each of its customers feel special is realizing the key factor to standing out from its competitors.

Companies like ServiceNow are creating the technology that enables increased customer satisfaction with personalized self-service options and automated common customer requests, boosted efficiency by resolving issues faster and connecting customer service with other departments, and improved products and services by analyzing trends, identifying potential issues, and preemptively notifying customers. In other words, they’re enabling organizations to take a tedious or mundane customer service task and turn it into an exceptional customer service experience. As a ServiceNow Gold Partner, Crossfuze has helped hundreds of organizations quickly unlock the transformational power of the ServiceNow CSM platform with their unique understanding of how exceptional customer service drives satisfaction and loyalty.

With ServiceNow Customer Service Management (CSM), organizations can address their customer service challenges by solving issues faster. According to the Harvard Business Review, reducing the amount of work a customer must do to get their problem solved builds loyalty. Customers want organizations to invest in the tools that reduce the amount of time they have to spend speaking with a customer service representative. With ServiceNow CSM, you can deliver effortless service to increase customer satisfaction and it enables you to resolve underlying issues and automate services across your organization.