Part 4: 5 essential tips for using ServiceNow to deliver high-quality Customer Service experiences
Businesses are increasingly turning to Customer Service as a marketing strategy that can help differentiate their products in a crowded marketplace. Customer Service is more than just working to resolve customer inquiries one at a time. In fact, modern Customer Service Management (CSM) is all about aggregating Customer Service data to understand relationships among customer inquiries and service loads, and to develop best-practices workflows for resolving customer problems and other challenges. With ServiceNow’s CSM application, businesses can harness this business intelligence to optimize customer satisfaction and drive sales. CSM also enables businesses to be proactive about providing Customer Service, as we discussed in our previous blog post.
ServiceNow CSM has the potential to serve as the nerve center for Customer Service across your organization, helping you to deliver consistent, higher-quality service experiences. But how can businesses focus their strategic planning for CSM and configure it in a way that will optimize outcomes? Let’s explore five essential tips for using ServiceNow CSM to enhance your Customer Service experience:
- Diversify your Customer Service metrics: Many businesses define Customer Service success in terms of metrics like average hold time and resolution time. But these are efficiency-based metrics that don’t reveal the quality of the customer engagement experience. That’s why you want to diversify your performance measurements and focus on the quality of the connections that your Customer Service reps are making with your customers. For example, you could implement an emotional intelligence scale that measures your reps’ ability to project genuine positive emotions. Your goal should be to start thinking more broadly about which metrics truly reflect the Customer Service experience you want to build.
- Align Customer Service metrics with strategic business goals: Effective Customer Service can support and advance strategic business goals, so it’s important that you align your metrics of Customer Service success to enterprise-wide goals. You should be looking to tie every Customer Service metric to specific goals such as increasing customer engagement, raising your CSAT score, or increasing customer retention. When you think in these terms, you’re ensuring that implementation of ServiceNow CSM will achieve the types of outcomes that will resonate with—and be fully supported by—your C-suite.
- Decide where you’re headed with an implementation roadmap: ServiceNow CSM will unlock a world of possibilities for automating, connecting, and streamlining all of your Customer Service-related operations. That said, to get the most out of CSM, you need to know how to prioritize which elements you develop and when. A ServiceNow CSM implementation roadmap will help you focus all of your competing priorities around a big-picture vision of how CSM will enhance your Customer Service experience. Everyone in your organization will gain clarity around which CSM projects come first and why, making every team across the organization more likely to buy into your long-term CSM implementation goals.
- Connect all of your marketing and sales channels to CSM: A key place where your customers already routinely hear from you is marketing and sales. Often, marketing uses tools like social media and email to communicate directly with customers. And sales is even more direct, often picking up the phone and communicating one-on-one with customers. To deliver effective Customer Service, you need to understand and track how and when sales and marketing are communicating with your customers. This process starts with connecting all of your marketing and sales channels to your CSM platform. When you can get a 360-degree view of all of the key channels you’re using to communicate with your customers, you can use these insights to inform and even drive marketing and sales strategies going forward.
- Get as many service units on the CSM platform as possible: In addition to integrating marketing and sales with CSM, you want to pull as many of your service units onto the CSM platform as possible. These are departments as varied as engineering, IT, field services, operations, R&D, and finance. And the knowledge and information that each of these units can offer customers is instrumental in improving the customer experience. Unfortunately, in most organizations, the customer’s ability to connect with these departments is ad-hoc and one-off, with Customer Service reps often encouraged to figure out on their own how to make the necessary connections. ServiceNow CSM was expressly designed to streamline the creation of an interconnected, customer-focused ecosystem, where every department works together to systematically resolve customer inquiries and optimize the overall customer experience.
ServiceNow CSM has the potential to rapidly and measurably improve your ability to deliver a consistent, high-quality Customer Service experience. To unlock CSM’s full potential, you want to diversify your metrics of Customer Service success, align all of these metrics to your strategic business goals, develop an implementation roadmap to set priorities and provide transparency for CSM implementation, and connect all units that can help resolve customer inquiries to the CSM platform.
Helpful Resources:
Other posts in this Customer Experience blog series: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3
eBook: 10 Pillars of Customer Service Management Success
eBook: 10 Pillars of ServiceNow Digital Transformation for the Non-IT Leader (Note: Pay particular attention to Pillar 2 of this book.)
On-demand webinar: ServiceNow & CSM: Raising CSAT while Reducing Costs
Crossfuze has over 25 years’ experience in the Contact Center Management space. If you would like to discuss your CSM needs, letstalk@crossfuze.com.
For more ServiceNow resources, visit the Crossfuze ServiceNow Resource Center
