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How to transition customer service from good to great
A new executive survey reveals where companies stand nowWhen you get customer service right, the dividends can be fantastic. Regularly cited benefits include increased customer satisfaction, repeat customers, increased sales and profit margins.But anyone who has been involved in the underlying service operations or front-end customer engagement knows that achieving great customer service to maximize its benefits is no easy task.To learn what it takes, LIKE.TG worked with Corinium Global Intelligence to interview 100 C-level executives who oversee customer service strategies to understand what they are doing and seeing in the marketplace. This blog shares some of the key insights, with the full, detailed report found here.The personal payoff of great customer serviceFor those executives leading the charge, being able to deliver a superior, end-to-end customer experience can lead to significant personal payoffs. When C-level executives were asked what the impact of achieving good customer service would mean for them:
55% said they would be “seen as a strategic business leader within [their] company”
50% indicated they would “have more opportunities for leading impactful initiatives within [their] company”
This is because great customer service is foundational to business success. It only makes sense that the executives responsible for establishing effective customer service strategies are rewarded for their accomplishments.Service operations hold the keyYou might be surprised to learn that most businesses only consider external engagement processes when they map their customer’s journey. Internal service operations, which include triaging, problem solving, service delivery, and the proactive prevention of issues are not as rigorously tracked or documented.Only 28% of respondents said they had “full documentation of the internal service processes” they use to deliver an end-to-end experience. This can lead to issues getting stalled, detoured, and potentially never resolved which can have a huge impact on the customer experience. Capturing each and every component of a customer’s experience and mapping it to their journey can help organizations identify gaps and opportunities to intervene to ensure service can not only meet, but exceed, expectations.The first stepWant to know where most organizations can start improving? The short answer is with customer self-service. Empowering customers to quickly and efficiently address their needs and concerns–on their own timetable, not yours, is often the most visible and impactful way to enhance the customer experience. Plus, it has the added benefit of improving the productivity of your customer service agents, freeing up time for them to focus on more challenging service assignments.Despite being an effective way to offer customers a better experience, most organizations admit they need to improve their offerings:
59% said they had “some room for improvement”
24% of respondents said they offered self-service options, but still had “a significant amount of work to do”
Only 13% were satisfied that their self-service capabilities were “fully optimized.”
(Check out the report to get the details on what self-service features customers have indicated are most and least helpful.)Other considerations for delivering great customer serviceAnother way organizations can improve service delivery is to solve the root cause of customer issues—61% of respondents believed that they could eliminate between 21% and 40% of their recurring cases if they were able to solve the root cause of customer issues. Solving those requires making the right connections between teams and technologies. This ensures expertise and knowledge is captured and codified, making it possible to automate processes and deliver proactive customer service.When done right, organizations can garner obvious, tangible results that can make a big difference for their business. Survey respondents acknowledged that if they were able to connect their customer experience end-to-end and eliminate service gaps, it could improve their customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores – with many believing it could result in improvements of 11-20% (39%), 21-30% (38%) and 31-40% (17%).All the insightsThese are just a few of the valuable insights available in the survey. To see what organizations are doing to proactively mitigate customer service issues and close these gaps, get the full report.
Six trends driving customer service transformation
Customer service is changing. As we mentioned in our last blog post, channels don’t matter as much—the focus has shifted to customer service effectiveness instead of efficiency.ThinkJar’s Esteban Kolsky recently spoke to customer service practitioners as part of his annual research project about the state of customer service.According to Esteban, practitioners identified six critical trends fueling customer service innovation:1. Budgeting. Growing budgets are shifting from maintenance to improvement aided by digital transformation initiatives bringing customer service in alignment with the rest of the enterprise.2. Spending priorities. There are three areas where customer service will be spending over the next two years: customer experience and customer engagement; automation and self-service; and a new operational excellence model aligning these needs with corporate digital and business transformation.3. Technology adoption. Technology is slowly deployed in customer service, usually following lengthy and painful pilots. We are seeing a slight shift in this model supported by the comfort of customer service practitioners with platform-based operations and artificial intelligence following years of use. There is also an increase in the use of technology to train better agents.
4. Data. Data-based decision making is rising. Virtually all customer service practitioners we talked to are investing in data analytics and predictive operational enhancements and are less concerned with cost savings. Expect to see an effectiveness-focused metrics model emerge.5. Channels. Disconnected channels became cumbersome to support and impossible to tend to separate from everything else. Channels are becoming the communication medium for customer service operations, irrelevant as separate entities. And with platforms becoming the prevalent solution in customer service, channel management is now commoditized.6. Cloud and platforms and ecosystems. Large service organizations are still running on-premises for critical functions, but virtually all organizations are being forced to consider cloud-adoption strategies. Smaller and modern organizations have taken to the cloud quite well, showcasing the realities of this transition; expect larger cloud adoption to happen soon.Customer-centric customer serviceAccording to Esteban, these six trends, combined with a shift toward enterprises becoming digital businesses, is resulting in a new model for customer service that emphasizes customer-centric effectiveness rather than company-centric cost efficiency.You can also check out the full ThinkJar white paper, Six Transformational Customer Trends, and hear what Esteban has to say in this this webinar, 5 Critical Steps for Outcomes-First Customer Service.This blog post is part of a four-part blog series highlighting trends and how you can apply valuable insights to fuel your customer service transformation.In the Customer Service is Digitally Transforming – Series, you'll find the following posts:Part 1 - Customer service is digitally transforming—Are you ready?Part 2 - Six trends driving customer service (this blog post)Part 3 - The new customer-centric customer service modelPart 4 - How to translate CSM trends to business value
Better customer experience starts where CRM ends
I had the pleasure of presenting at Gartner’s 2019 Customer Experience and Technologies Summit in London recently and thought I would share some of the main themes that I picked up from attending the various sessions, plus discussions with event attendees:(NB - Please note these are my personal thoughts and impressions)1. A better customer experience starts where CRM endsIt’s no coincidence that this was the title of my presentation at the Gartner CX event. My summary view on this is that CRM is a broad set of solutions covering sales, marketing, e-commerce and customer service.In customer service, traditional CRM really stands for Call Reaction Management, and that is simply not good enough to deliver great outcomes for either the customer or the organisation providing the service. At LIKE.TG, we believe there’s a better way, and we call it Customer Service Management. LIKE.TG® Customer Service Management effectively brings together 4 key components on a single, cloud-based platform:
Omni-channel customer partner engagement; drive action with self-service
Connect the back-office to the front-office; resolve complex issues end-to-end
Connected devices and IoT; provide proactive service
Use Enterprise Service Management principles
It was great to see the level of interest in Customer Service Management at the event – both from happy existing customers of the solution, and prospects who were really interested in its differentiated proposition. Exciting times ahead!2. An increased focus on business outcomesCustomer experience (“CX”) is beginning to come of age, and as a result, organisations are asking more and more questions about how the CX directly impacts on a company’s performance, or putting it another way, what is the return from making additional investments into CX.Time and again, my discussions with organisations are about 5 broad categories of business outcomes or business drivers that are driving CX activities:
Improving customer satisfaction
Improving employee engagement and satisfaction
Cost and efficiency improvements
Innovation and business agility
Compliance (both regulatory and operational)
But the challenge for everyone is to link these broad areas of focus into tangible KPIs and metrics, and then to directly link them to a business case and financial performance.Gartner’s analysis shows that 50% of organisations are already using financial metrics to measure ROI on CX improvement projects, with a further 24% using (non-financial) business metrics, and the trend for both categories is increasing.1 If you’re not using either of these to measure the effectiveness and impact of your CX activities, you need to think again, and quickly.3. What you do next in CX depends on where you are starting fromI call this ‘where are you on your Stairway to Heaven?’:
In the opening keynote Gartner presented ‘nine strategies for CX victory’ which I liked a lot2:
3 proven practices
Move from chaos to co-ordination
Make individuals accountable
Set one direction
3 surprising successes
Don’t delight but be effortless. We take this as drive for an effortless customer experience
Don’t innovate but imitate
Don’t correlate but help jobs to be done
3 bold behaviours
Radically reduce the number of products being sold/supported
Select 1 or more processes to be an order of magnitude faster
Invest to enable employees to have more digital dexterity
4. Self-service is going mainstreamSelf-service solutions are not new, but in the past they have typically been ‘add-ons’ to customer interaction channels like voice, chat and e-mail. But Gartner’s analysis3 seems to me to indicate that self-service is starting to be the primary channel for a number of organisations:
8% of customer service leaders believe that at least 20% of current ‘live’ customer service volumes can be handled by self-service. 15% of these same leaders believe that 60%+ of the volume can move to self-service.
38% of customer service resources are already being applied to self-service channels (e.g. implementing things like Knowledge Centered Service®)
Gartner says there are 3 eras of the service function:
Era 1: Live service-dominant strategy
Era 2: Self-service as an add-on
Era 3: Self-service dominant strategy
5. As a CX vendor, on which personas/functions in an organisation should I focus on?Gartner’s analysis shows that CX measures can occur in almost all areas of a typical organisation, but that the ranking is as follows4:
i. Customer satisfaction @ >95%ii. Loyalty churn retention @ >90%iii. Advocacy brand reputation @ >70%iv. Quality operations @ <50%v. Employee engagement @ <10%
In addition, Gartner’s research shows that CX’s position in the overall business priorities amongst different classes of executives is as follows5:
CX is the number 1 business priority: Customer Service, Marketing
CX is 1 of the Top 3 business priorities: CEO, Operations, Sales, Strategy
CX is 1 of the Top 5 business priorities: IT
In order to be successful selling CX solutions, vendors need to go ‘broad’ across departments/functions, but go especially ‘deep’ in the areas of Customer Service/customer satisfaction and Marketing.6. How important is CX to organisations?A variety of surveys undertaken by Gartner, covering different functions/roles, highlight the overall importance of the Customer Experience to most organisations.From the Gartner CIO survey6:
CX is the heart of 55% of business model changes
75% of ‘top performers’ report having changed or are actively changing their business model
73% of these changes are driven by customer centricity
From a Gartner survey of CEOs, 63% say that their companies are likely to make changes to the business model in the next 2 years.And finally, Gartner’s survey of CMOs showed the following:
60% 2 years ago, 67% today, and 81% in 2 years, of marketers responsible for CX say their companies compete mostly or completely on the basis of CX
7. What’s this AI thing? Is it important or relevant?AI – Artificial Intelligence – is undergoing rapid growth and being deployed in more and more areas of customer service and the overall customer experience.And the folks at Gartner have some other predictions about AI over the next few years: which I think are bold about just how much of an impact AI is going to have on both businesses and consumers:
By 2020, 30% of all B2B companies will employ AI to augment at least one of their primary sales processes. 7
By 2021 15% of all customer service interactions will be completely handled by AI, an increase of 400% from 2017. 8
By 2022, 40% of customer-facing employees and government workers will consult an AI virtual support agent daily for decision or process support. 8
By 2023, 80% of organisations using AI for digital commerce will achieve at least 25% improvement in customer satisfaction, revenue or cost reduction. 9
By 2025, customer service organisations that embed AI in their multi-channel customer engagement platform will elevate operational efficiency by 25%. 9
Summary:Fascinating to see the whole topic of CX mature, and the discussions focusing more on more on business outcomes and driving real value for both customers and organisations. I am sure many of us will be keenly watching to see if Gartner’s predictions about the rise of AI will pan out.And of course, it was great to meet so many existing LIKE.TG customers at the event, whether currently using our other solutions (predominantly IT and HR workflows) or already using Customer Service Management.Looking forward to attending again next year!
Gartner Event Presentation, How to Measure and Build the Business Case for Customer Experience, Ed Thompson, Gartner Customer Experience Technologies Summit, 22-23 May, London, UK.
Gartner Event Presentation, Gartner Keynote: Three Bold Strategies for Customer Experience Victory, Don Scheibenreif, Ed Thompson, Michael Chiu, Gartner Customer Experience Technologies Summit, 22-23 May, London, UK.
Gartner Event Presentation, Delivering on the Digital Experience: Building Customer Confidence to Resolve Without You, Richard DeLisi, Gartner Customer Experience Technologies Summit, 22-23 May, London, UK.
Gartner Event Presentation, How to Measure and Build the Business Case for Customer Experience, Ed Thompson, Gartner Customer Experience Technologies Summit, 22-23 May, London, UK.
Gartner Event Presentation, Gartner Keynote: Three Bold Strategies for Customer Experience Victory, Don Scheibenreif, Ed Thompson, Michael Chiu, Gartner Customer Experience Technologies Summit, 22-23 May, London, UK.
Gartner Event Presentation, Gartner Keynote: Three Bold Strategies for Customer Experience Victory, Don Scheibenreif, Ed Thompson, Michael Chiu, Gartner Customer Experience Technologies Summit, 22-23 May, London, UK.
Gartner Event Presentation, Top Technology Trends and Their Impact on Customer Experience, Don Scheibenreif, Gartner Customer Experience Technologies Summit, 22-23 May, London, UK.
Gartner Event Presentation, Leverage the AI Capabilities in CRM for Better Business Outcomes, Brian Manusama, Gartner Customer Experience Technologies Summit, 22-23 May, London, UK.
Gartner Event Presentation, Plan for the Digital Future — The Revolution in CRM Technologies and Their Impact on Your Customer Strategy, Olive Huang, Gartner Customer Experience Technologies Summit, 22-23 May, London, UK.
The Value of Customer Service Management for Service Providers
A Closer Look at the Commissioned Forrester TEI Study on the Cost Savings and Benefits of Using Customer Service Management at a Communication Service ProviderSolving customer problems, making it easy for everyone to find the information they need, and meeting SLAs: These capabilities might seem like table stakes for a service provider’s customer service program. Yet for many providers, they’re out of reach because of fractured platforms, siloed knowledge bases, and costly legacy systems.Service providers looking to improve customer service delivery have turned to LIKE.TG Customer Service Management to centralize support systems, reduce costs, and boost productivity. But what is the return on investment (ROI) of the solution? How can a service provider quantify what deploying Customer Service Management might mean in financial terms to their organization?LIKE.TG commissioned Forrester Consulting to find out and conducted a Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study at a communication service provider on the ROI realized by standardizing on LIKE.TG Customer Service Management.Guest speaker Sean Owens, Principal Consultant, Total Economic Impact Practice, Forrester Consulting, presented the study’s key findings in a recent webinar. Here are some of the key takeaways from the ensuing QA:The study found that one provider saved $15.6 million in support costs by reducing support calls and increasing self-service. How do we achieve these kinds of benefits?First, you need to look at all the support channels in place at your organization and determine what each one costs. For example, before deploying LIKE.TG, the provider had a mix of support calls coming in from phone, web (or portal), and email. The phone made up 60% of the calls, the web was 35%, and email was 5%; a phone call cost $30, while the web cost $23, and email cost $27.Next, you need to identify which channels are the most efficient for your business and which are the simplest and most convenient for your customers. Ideally, they will be one and the same. Then, you need to employ strategies that help move usage away from the most expensive channels, to the ones that are the simplest to use and maintain, such as the web. The provider was able to shift a number of contacts from phone to a customer service portal, essentially saving $7 (the difference in phone and web contact costs) per contact, which ultimately added up to a significant savings.While you may not have email in the mix, you may have chat and social media channels. Any changes — including a new customer service management solution that can now manage all your support channels — should help you divert traffic to more efficient channels and drive down costs per contact for each channel.My organization is not a telecommunications provider, do the findings still apply?Yes, because everyone deals with customer support. The content of those contacts and the volume of more complicated contacts that require escalation will differ, but all organizations should strive to provide efficient and useful support to their customers. Any process changes or technology solutions that enable customer service agents to resolve issues more accurately and quickly mean that customers are happier (or at least less likely to be angry or frustrated). They may be more likely to purchase again or less likely to leave for a competitor.So, if you are in IT services, the retail industry, in another commercial business, or perhaps even in the public sector, the themes addressed in the TEI study can help. For some, it may be a matter of simply adjusting some of the input metrics: the cost per contact, the amount sold per transaction, or the cost of service-level agreement upkeep. For those in the public sector, there are probably a few more steps that will depend on your situation. For example, there may not be upsell opportunities here, but there are opportunities to complete more service contact requests and avoid other costs.How do you measure success with Net Present Value (NPV) and Return on Investment (ROI)?The short answer is any NPV over $0 usually indicates a good (successful) investment and any ROI over 0% a positive return. The explanation of why requires a little more detail:NPV takes a series of cash flow values over time and summarizes them in a single number that reflects “today’s dollars.” It assumes a dollar you earn today is worth more to you than a dollar earned in a year, because you can spend or invest it now. Similarly, a dollar spent today is more costly than a dollar you spend next year, because you can use or invest that money for an extra year.
The NPV equation uses a discount rate, as a percentage, to account for how much more today’s dollar is worth than next year’s dollar. Forrester Consulting TEI projects use a 10% rate. Ultimate, an NPV of more than $0 is a positive investment. Note, any decisions on whether or not to invest in a project with a lower or higher NPV is subjective. You may need to consider additional factors, such as the size of the project, your business, and other strategic or unquantified benefits.
ROI is the ratio of net benefits and total costs. So, anything over 0% reflects a positive return on your investment, and higher ROIs indicate a project that will likely be more successful. There is no exact ROI value to decide whether or not to invest in a project or not — it depends on a variety of factors including the project scope, your industry, and your organization’s appetite for risk. But any ROI with three digits should be a strong contender.
To learn more about how service providers can improve customer satisfaction, reduce SLA penalties, increase agent productivity, and reduce reliance on costly legacy systems with LIKE.TG, check out the full Forrester TEI study and the webinar.
The new customer-centric customer service model
The new customer-centric customer service model—it’s all about resolving customer issues not efficiency and savingsAre your customer service strategies shifting to align with enterprise digital transformation efforts across the business? If you’re still measuring customer service success based on how efficient and cheap it is to meet the needs of your customers, the answer likely is no.In part two of our series on how customer service is evolving, we presented findings from ThinkJar founder Esteban Kolsky, who tracks trends in an annual customer research project. Esteban indicates that there are six critical trends fueling customer service modernization: budgeting, spending priorities, technology adoption, data, channels, and cloud and platform ecosystems (to explore these trends in detail, you can read the entire white paper, Six Transformational Customer Trends).Today, we’re going to explore a new customer-centric customer service model taking center stage thanks to the impact of these transformational trends. This model focuses on customer service effectiveness instead of efficiency where customer service is treated solely as a cost center.
According to Esteban, customers want accurate, fast, and simple answers to their questions or resolutions to their problems. They don’t really care about a company’s customer service costs and whether customer service providers are more productive, which are the metrics organizations have traditionally used to gauge operational excellence.So how do you begin to evolve customer service to truly address customer requirements to retain—and gain—new business, while also calibrating with enterprise-wide digital transformation?Building a model of customer service effectivenessEsteban suggests that this new model of customer service operational excellence is built around five tenets: outcomes-first, customer-centricity, data-driven, automation-focused, and ecosystem-based. The recent rapid and successful adoptions of chatbots, self-service, and artificial intelligence are deeply aligned with these trends. The focus on customers and outcomes, leveraging cloud and ecosystems, and a deeper understanding of how data improves customer service are all aligned with the corporate initiatives for digital and business transformation.In addition to these five areas there is one important underlying concept: work collaboratively with customers (and other stakeholders) to co-create value at each interaction, with the long-term goal of achieving engagement.The objective for this new model of customer service is to change from doing more with less (company-centric efficiency and cost-cutting) to doing better with more (customer-centric effectiveness and value co-creation). Ultimately, as your customer service budget shifts and grows, you and other customer service practitioners on your team will be more empowered to support digital transformation.Coming up tomorrow in the final post of our four-part series, we’re going to highlight the steps you can take to embrace this new customer-centric model of customer service in your organization and translate it into real business value.You can also get a more complete picture of the new customer service model by checking out ThinkJar’s publication: Customer Service 2019-2024: a Framework to Adopt the New Model of Operational Excellence for Your Service Team and hear more about what Esteban had to say on the topic in this in this webinar.In the Customer Service is Digitally Transforming – Series, you'll find the following posts:Part 1 - Customer service is digitally transforming—Are you ready?Part 2 - Six trends driving customer servicePart 3 - The new customer-centric customer service modelPart 4 - How to translate CSM trends to business value
10 mind-blowing customer service stats
What they tell us about the state of customer service, now and in the futureAre you a glass half empty or a glass half full kind of person? Depending on your answer, you will either see the new infographic, “10 mind-blowing customer service stats,” as an indicator of doom or a precursor to what’s possible.Take the $75 billion lost by US companies annually because of poor customer service. A pessimist could see this stat as evidence that not much has changed over the past few decades–demonstrating quick, valuable, easy-to-engage customer service remains elusive for many companies. But an optimist could see this loss as a wake up call–representing an opportunity to make changes to the customer experience that can directly contribute to the bottom line.We've seen firsthand how transforming the customer experience can pay off big. Take Vodafone, who was able to streamline their processes to gain a “360 degree view of the customer,” which led to a 45% increase in productivity and a 25 point increase in customer satisfaction. It’s why we are optimistic about the future.But, we don’t want to put rose colored glasses on you. Take a look at these stats from the past few years and decide for yourself whether you think the current state of customer service is dire or full of possibilities.
Adobe and LIKE.TG announce global availability of integration
Adobe and LIKE.TG announced the availability of its partnership integration, to deliver an industry-first solution connecting data from Adobe Experience Platform and LIKE.TG’s Customer Service Management workflow product to enable more seamless, connected customer experiences. In today’s experience economy, where digital-only is our reality, marketing and customer service organizations must be aligned around a data-driven, customer-first approach. Connecting the Adobe Experience Platform, the industry’s first purpose-built Customer Experience Management (CXM) platform, and LIKE.TG’s Customer Service Management product empowers brands with a more complete view of the customer.“Today’s customer service teams are faced with unprecedented levels of customer inquiries, which has created urgency for omnichannel, end-to-end customer service solutions that provide a complete view of every customer,” said Farrell Hope, Senior Vice President of Customer Workflows at ServiceNow. “Together with Adobe, LIKE.TG is enabling organizations to have greater access to important customer information and build deeper loyalty with their customers.”This integration leads to seamless workflows between Adobe Experience Platform and LIKE.TG, enhancing Adobe’s Real-time Customer Profiles with rich customer data and improving personalization of customer experiences across all touchpoints. Additionally, leveraging this LIKE.TG and Adobe Experience Manager integration, brands can now deliver enhanced customer service capabilities.“As the leader in intelligent transformation, Lenovo understands that it needs to be a cross-organizational effort,” said Paul Walsh, global chief digital officer, Lenovo. “Leveraging Adobe and LIKE.TG, we are looking forward to aligning our marketing and customer service organizations even more closely to engage customers with more intelligent, data-driven and contextual interactions.”
The ways that businesses support their customers now will define their brand and relationships for years to come. Today organizations fall short of serving customers as they are reliant on outdated and siloed systems that fail to deliver relevant data to customers. Through this integration, Adobe and LIKE.TG joint customers can:
Establish Context to Drive Brand Loyalty: Enterprises are often challenged by navigating internal silos of data pertaining to interactions with their customers. This integration creates seamless data workflows that removes those barriers and connect marketing and customer service organizations. Now, when a customer reaches out with a concern or inquiry, the organization can see the full view of that customer’s engagement with the brand, from the products or services the customer has purchased to its most recent interaction with the company. This perspective leads to a more personalized and connected experience.
Gain Deeper Insights for Personalization: Great experiences are built on the understanding of a customer’s journey. Through Adobe Experience Platform and the LIKE.TG Customer Service Management workflow product, customers can streamline work between teams by aggregating data during the “evaluate” and “purchase” touchpoints, capturing service interactions to ultimately build rich, real-time customer profiles in Adobe Experience Platform.
Improve Customer Experiences: A seamless customer experience equates to anticipating needs before they arise. With LIKE.TG, organizations will understand which products or services the customer owns and uses, allowing organizations to drive towards greater personalization. By integrating Adobe Experience Manager and LIKE.TG Customer Service Management, end customers receive a web experience and content that is truly tailored and relevant to their stage in the journey.
“Adobe’s mission to change the world through digital experiences has never been more relevant or powerful,” said Amit Ahuja, vice president, ecosystem development, Adobe. “Adobe and LIKE.TG are partnering to empower enterprises with a more complete view of each customer, so they can provide an experience that will drive better engagement and ultimately business success.”
Zoom and LIKE.TG partner to make the best work-anywhere experiences even better
Zoom Video Communications, Inc. and LIKE.TG today announced a commitment to each other’s technology solutions to make work-anywhere experiences work even better.With the ongoing pandemic and shelter in place orders Zoom’s usage rocketed to 300 million daily meeting participants in April 2020. Zoom deployed LIKE.TG’s Customer Service Management (CSM) to scale its customer service operations and enable critical communications capabilities for its global community. LIKE.TG CSM also provides proactive case management and personalized self-service options to help manage the influx of customer requests. In addition, Zoom will deploy the Now Platform, including new AIOps capabilities, to enable its new Hardware as a Service (HaaS) business model. Zoom will also expand its implementation of LIKE.TG’s CSM to provide HaaS customer support.LIKE.TG has been a Zoom customer since 2018, using Zoom Enterprise for its 11,000+ global employees to host video meetings across desktop, mobile, and conference rooms. Since the global pandemic, LIKE.TG employees working from home have relied heavily on Zoom to stay productive. LIKE.TG plans to displace its legacy hardware phone system with Zoom Phone, providing a connected and seamless unified communications experience for its employees.“Since March, we’ve scaled to meet the incredible increase in business and consumer demand for our solutions,” said Ryan Azus, Zoom’s chief revenue officer. “LIKE.TG has enabled us to deliver exceptional customer experiences during this period of growth. With the deployment of LIKE.TG Customer Service Management, we expect to significantly increase productivity and reduce case volume.”“Zoom has enabled employees across industries around the world to stay connected, and it’s also a core piece of our own technology ecosystem,” said Chris Bedi, LIKE.TG’s chief information officer. “Zoom’s capabilities and easy-to-use interface have helped our employees stay productive, supporting seamless digital conversations with our customers. Going forward, with the addition of Zoom Phone, we’re getting a head start on an even more robust experience with Zoom – one-touch communication and collaboration features, plus Zoom-connected conference rooms, giving our teams the best work-anywhere experience.”Zoom chose LIKE.TG’s CSM Workflow product to help unite its front-, middle- and back-office teams to solve issues, fix problems before customers notice them, and simplify engagement to quickly take care of customer requests. As a LIKE.TG Now Platform customer, Zoom has deployed its IT and Employee Workflows and is in the process of deploying additional LIKE.TG Workflow products, including ITOM Health, Field Service Management, and ITBM. Zoom is also leveraging out- of-the-box capabilities, including LIKE.TG’s Virtual Agent, to help facilitate conversations with customers, the LIKE.TG Integration Hub to integrate with its existing legacy systems, and the LIKE.TG Service Catalog to provide self-service remediation.LIKE.TG and Zoom offer multiple tech integrations that allow their joint customers to tailor the Zoom and LIKE.TG experience for their employees. For example, LIKE.TG can be configured to provide employees with extensive Bot; by using LIKE.TG Virtual Agent, dozens of the most frequently asked questions can be easily and quickly resolved. With Zoom Meeting Anomaly detection, Zoom can identify latency, jitter, and average packet loss, which LIKE.TG will use to automatically create an incident on behalf of the user. And, with LIKE.TG’s AI Ops, Zoom can be enabled to proactively provide users the option to rate their meeting with a thumbs-up or -down icon. If a user clicks the thumbs down icon at the end of a Zoom meeting, the user’s IT department will be notified of the issue and LIKE.TG Virtual Agent will reach out to the employee to address and resolve their problem.About LIKE.TGLIKE.TG (NYSE: NOW) is making the world of work, work better for people. Our cloud‑based platform and solutions deliver digital workflows that create great experiences and unlock productivity for employees and the enterprise. For more information, visit: www.servicenow.com.About ZoomZoom Video Communications, Inc. (NASDAQ: ZM) brings teams together to get more done in a frictionless and secure video environment. Our easy, reliable, and innovative video-first unified communications platform provides video meetings, voice, webinars, and chat across desktops, phones, mobile devices, and conference room systems. Zoom helps enterprises create elevated experiences with leading business app integrations and developer tools to create customized workflows. Founded in 2011, Zoom is headquartered in San Jose, California, with offices around the world. Visit zoom.com and follow @zoom_us.
The future of the workplace—predictions for 2020 and beyond
What major trends are shaping the future of the digital enterprise?LIKE.TG polled some of its leading technologists to get their take on this big question. Their insights, surprisingly, tended to revolve around a common theme: Some of the biggest tech advances and innovations for the workplace will focus on the design and delivery of employee services. Here are a few highlights.
Your ultimate goal should be to incorporate transformation customer service trends to create strategies for the next two years aligned with the new customer service model. It’s also important to collaborate with your providers and partners to determine how to better achieve a truly effective customer service platform for everyone, not just customers, to have better experiences.To get a more complete picture of the new customer service model, check out ThinkJar’s publication: Customer Service 2019-2024: a Framework to Adopt the New Model of Operational Excellence for Your Service Team and hear more about what Esteban had to say on the topic in this webinar.In the Customer Service is Digitally Transforming – Series, you'll find the following posts:Part 1 - Customer service is digitally transforming—Are you ready?Part 2 - Six trends driving customer servicePart 3 - The new customer-centric customer service modelPart 4 - How to translate CSM trends to business value
A Forrester Report sneak peak: our three key takeaways from Customer Service Megatrends in 2020
It’s a new report from Forrester: “The Three Customer Service Megatrends In 2020: Fuse AI and Agents to Drive Better Experiences.” We won't reveal all the details in this blog – you’ll need to download the complete report for that, but we will preview one takeaway of growing interest: “Your organization needs Superagents, and they need AI.”
Welcome to the new age of the SuperagentThink Ironman... but helping out customers. These new hybrid helpers must be a flawless melding of the human touch and computer omniscient. Customer don’t care who assists them, man or machine, they just want satisfaction. That will require dynamically-adaptive experiences (think easy toggling from self-serve to full-serve), cross-departmental collaboration, and cross-database synchronization, all driven by enhanced context as to what the customer wants and needs – which often start as different things.Superagents will need workspaces that facilitate collaboration and knowledge.Besides the rockets, lasers, and titanium suit, Ironman’s power comes from his heads-up display, giving him immediate access to the latest vital information. Same can be said for the new breed of Superagent. Single views of and instant access portals to key back-office workers, engineers, and product experts is a must. This functionality is not restricted to the desktop computer. Just like the always-on, tech savvy customer, superagents need and expect empowerment via mobile devices, as well.
But, be mindful of this game-changing fact: Agents will no longer be essential to scale customer service.The days of simply throwing more headcount at growing demand are over. Companies must remove repetitive agent tasks from a worker’s day, as well as automatically routing the complex, high-touch interactions to a live person to deliver empathy and personalization.That’s all we’ll say about this new report. But don’t fret.You can easily and quickly learn more about Forrester’s findings. How customer service organizations must rethink their culture, and the new developments prescriptive AI, robotic process automation, and adaptive agent desktops.Download the full report:The Three Customer Service Megatrends In 2020: Fuse AI and Agents To Drive Better ExperiencesAttend the live Webinar featuring guest speaker and Forrester Analyst Kate Leggett“Three customer service megatrends for 2020”Date: Wednesday, April 8, 2020 Time: 10:00am - 11:00am PT | 1:00pm - 2:00pm ETHow AI and automation are changing the game in customer service.
New ways to think about efficient customer service
How efficient is your customer service? Conventional wisdom says that reducing the time required to solve customer problems and increasing the number of customers served each day would indicate a rather efficient operation.Even so, you may be missing a huge opportunity to give your organization a competitive advantage.A recent report by Aberdeen suggests that the most savvy organizations are changing the focus of their customer service strategies to emphasize efficiency moves that benefit the customer and directly impact the bottom line.It’s all about convenienceStanding out in the marketplace – and reaping significant return on investment – requires making service interactions more efficient and convenient for customers across all channels. According to Aberdeen, firms that deliver effortless service experiences see as much as a four-fold annual increase in customer retention rates.But what exactly is convenience? The definition is subjective and depends on a customer’s expectations. While challenging to measure, what influences convenience can be measured by tracking the effort required to achieve a happy customer.Measuring customer efforts to get serviceCompanies typically measure customer effort by:
Monitoring direct customer feedback
Gathering customer behavioral data such as a decrease in product or service usage
Harvesting operational data such as average wait time or handle time
The goal, of course, is to reduce the amount of friction the customer encounters. Naturally, customers’ opinions of the service they receive tend to rise and fall with the amount of effort they had to expend to get their needs met.An example of what Aberdeen calls a “high effort”—i.e., inconvenient—customer service interaction is a website chatbot that is unable to resolve a customer issue, forcing the customer to call customer service and speak with a human.Making customer service convenient doesn’t happen by chanceAberdeen’s research shows companies that implement formal processes to reduce customer effort across all channels achieve significantly greater increases in annual customer satisfaction rates compared to organizations that don’t.And we all know what happy customers do: stay loyal. It’s never too late to start these customer-effort programs; Aberdeen also found that improving customer effort increases the chances that companies can win back customers who’ve left.Empowered customer service reps help customers to get service more easilyDon’t underestimate the power that fully enabled customer service reps have on customer loyalty. Aberdeen found companies that create formal programs, empower their employees to work efficiently, and give them the information they need to solve customer problems reported a 13% decrease in annual customer-service costs.How to start enabling effortless customer serviceTo create an effortless customer service program, first establish a unified view of customer insights across all channels and empower your employees with the tools and data they need to mine customer insights.Learn more about tools and solutions that can help you enable effortless customer service. In this on-demand webinar, you’ll learn how: convenience can drive customer service.
LIKE.TG named a Leader in the 2020 Gartner Magic Quadrant for the CRM Customer Engagement Center
Customer experience (CX) is made up of all the interactions you have with your customers. Good experiences can boost the bottom line while generating loyalty, brand preference, and premium pricing.On the other hand, just one bad experience can drive that customer away for good. That’s why customer experience has become a strategic priority for most organizations. So, what does it really take to deliver great customer experiences, and what does that mean for a business?To get some perspective on LIKE.TG® Customer Service Management (CSM), we sat down with Michael Ramsey, VP of product management for customer workflows at ServiceNow. Here’s what he had to say:Customer Service Management is one of LIKE.TG’s fastest growing workflow products. What’s driving this growth? Almost every organization is at some phase of their digital transformation. Part of that journey is the digitization of the customer experience, which is now broadly viewed as strategic to the success of the business. We’ve been able to help our customers make this transition and capitalize on disruptions that are taking place in their markets, so they can build new products and services supported by the customer experience they need to deliver to win.What do you see as the key features of the LIKE.TG Customer Service Management solution?LIKE.TG CSM enables organizations to engage customers on their channel of choice, including voice, web, mobile, and chat. It provides self-service and assisted service capabilities that ensure the right level of support is available for every request.Self-service enables customers to leverage service catalogs, knowledge libraries, and virtual agents, sometimes referred to as chatbots, to quickly find answers or complete service requests without involving a human agent. When human assistance is needed, the requests can be seamlessly routed to the agent best able to address the issue and ensure it is resolved quickly and permanently.What makes all this possible is that LIKE.TG CSM automates the workflows behind every customer request. Every time a customer engages with the organization, whether they are disputing a bill, opening a new account, or returning a product, a workflow is triggered to complete that request. Sometimes this workflow requires involvement from the front, middle and back offices. LIKE.TG CSM handles it all, end-to-end, taking the customer engagement and driving that workflow across the organization to complete the customer’s request.The other piece to note is that LIKE.TG Customer Service Management is built on the Now Platform®, one of the most secure, flexible, modern cloud platforms available. This means we have artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), task-based workflows, and the robust ability to model all the products and services that a customer is entitled to, so we can provide truly proactive service to customers.Can you give some examples of how AI and machine learning play into Customer Service Management?We are using AI to solve problems for our customers. Some examples include our use of machine learning to identify common issues that affect multiple customers, so organizations can proactively take action and resolve them before they impact more customers or before a customer even knows there is a problem.We also automatically look at customer engagement data and cases to identify underlying trending topics or issues and then surface them for action. For example, LIKE.TG CSM might initiate a workflow to resolve an issue that impacts many customers or initiate the development of an FAQ or knowledge-based article that could help customers help themselves, via a virtual agent. In addition, Customer Service Management can predict how to classify a case, so it can be routed to the person best qualified to resolve that request accurately and efficiently.LIKE.TG claims to be the only company that connects customer engagement and service operations with digital workflows. What does that mean? We can support the entire customer experience, end-to-end. We have the ability to model the products and services an organization offers to their customers, which could be digital products and services or digital assets that are bound to physical products and services, and engage customers to support them around those products and services. We can also drive the workflows needed to complete those requests across the organization’s front, middle, and back offices.By combining engagement and service operations, we deliver proactive customer service. That’s how we were able to introduce industry workflows for telecommunications, financial services, and healthcare that will provide a single system of action with insights across systems of record. This allows organizations to manage processes such as onboarding a new customer or managing a complaint from end-to-end while collaborating in real time across departments.LIKE.TG bills itself as “the platform of platforms.” What does that mean?Every customer is going to have a complex IT landscape, which means they need a solution that works elegantly across that landscape. For example, a customer request may involve the company’s front, middle, and back offices. As a result, some steps and tasks needed to resolve that request need to be done in a back-office system that isn’t a LIKE.TG system.We can automate these workflows across the enterprise and talk to all these systems, like a billing, order management, or marketing system, to drive the workflow to completion. We can orchestrate workflows across people, across teams, and across systems. That’s the power of the Now Platform and why we say it is the platform of platforms.Has the pandemic impacted how LIKE.TG and its customers approach customer service management?There were a few new trends that came out of the pandemic, like the use of video chat for telehealth scenarios, but for the most part I think it simply accelerated two trends that already existed. The first trend was the adoption of more automated self-service solutions to handle customer requests. The second was empowering a distributed workforce to engage with customers from anywhere in the world.Suddenly, with shelter-in-place mandates, organizations found they needed both capabilities, immediately, in order to keep servicing customers. Overnight, organizations that might have only enabled 10% of their workforce to work remotely and resolve customer requests now had everyone working from home.Demand didn’t drop. In fact, it spiked for many organizations, including those in financial services, the public sector, and healthcare. Yet resources were more constrained than ever. So, we saw increasing demand for self-service, automation, and the ability to support a work from home workforce, including those in customer service.. Why do you think LIKE.TG moved into the Leaders Quadrant?LIKE.TG was recently named a Leader in the2020 Gartner Magic Quadrant for the CRM Customer Engagement CenterI think it really comes down to our customers. We are delivering a solution that solves real problems and delivers real value to our customers. I think being in the Leaders Quadrant is validation that we are helping our customers succeed.*Gartner, Inc., "Magic Quadrant for the CRM Customer Engagement Center," Brian Manusama, Nadine LeBlanc, 4 June 2020.Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in our research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner's research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
LIKE.TG and Zoom prove that great customer experiences matter
As the world transitioned to shelter-in-place mode this spring, businesses that were digitally enabled fared better than those that had not fully embraced digital transformation. Companies inevery industry, including tech, manufacturing, telco, and healthcare, are creating digital services to protect revenue in the COVID era. To scale and succeed in the current environment, however, these services need to provide a great customer experience.Many organizations—including Zoom, Disney+, 7-Eleven, State of Tennessee, Verizon and Vodaphone—have turned to LIKE.TG to help scale their customer operations and enable growth through digital services.The recent partnership announcement between LIKE.TG and Zoom put a big smile on my face. As we all navigate the messiness of working from home during a pandemic, Zoom has revealed our collective humanity, blending formal business conversations with personal connections. Call it mutually assured empathy, as kids, pets and grandparents (or in my case, goats) fill the backgrounds of our work calls. At a time when there is more competition than ever to provide enterprise-level digital services, those personal connections have only improved the customer experience.Like many other enterprises, LIKE.TG relies on Zoom to keep our employees connected and productive. Zoom’s usage rocketed to 300 million daily meeting participants in April 2020, up from 10 million in December. With that massive increase in customers, the company adopted LIKE.TG’s Customer Service Management (CSM) solution to scale its customer service operations and enable critical communications capabilities for its global community. CSM also provided proactive case management and personalized self-service options to help manage the influx of customer requests.Zoom has become a trusted pillar of LIKE.TG’s infrastructure, one we use to serve our employees and our customers efficiently and collaboratively. Zoom hardware will also replace LIKE.TG’s legacy phone system and provide a connected and seamless experience for its employees, whenever and wherever they may be connected.I’m thrilled that Zoom is not only standardizing on the Now Platform to power its customer service for its new Hardware as a Service business model, but also using LIKE.TG’s IT and Employee Workflows to help power its internal business processes.Zoom will soon broaden its deployment of LIKE.TG solutions to couple its existing deployment of ITSM to include ITOM Health, Field Service Management, HRSD, and ITBM, which will allow the company to resolve issues faster and, as a result, be more responsive to customers.The Now Platform will also enable Zoom to proactively monitor its worldwide infrastructure. When issues arise, Zoom can either provide customers with an immediate workaround or, in some instances, resolve a potential issue before it even occurs.I’m proud that Zoom chose LIKE.TG as the platform to help manage its exponential growth while keeping the world connected and productive. And because my global customer support team depends on Zoom to be always on and ready to perform, I’ll also rest easier knowing Zoom is using our technology to enhance its customer service.I know we’ll rise to the challenge. Great customer service breeds customer loyalty, which in turn drives revenue protection and growth. That’s something every business can get behind.
Modern service leaders win by focusing on customer convenience
New study: Customer convenience is a winning strategyDriving efficiency gains has long been a top objective of customer service leaders. Traditionally, this has meant reducing issue resolution times and increasing employee productivity while reducing operational costs.Efficiency remains a key objective for many service leaders. However, successful service leaders increasingly focus on driving efficiency to make it easier for customers to do business with them.Managing customer effort generates real resultsConvenience is subjective. It depends on the personal assessment of each customer. However, the amount of effort a client must put in to get their needs addressed has a direct impact on their convenience assessment. For example, if a customer uses a company website for self-service and is unsuccessful, and then uses live chat where the agent also can’t assist them, they are then forced to call the contact center and explain the issue for a third time. This interaction can be classified as “high effort,” and hence inconvenient for the customer.Findings from the Aberdeen Group’s February 2020 study, “The return on managing customer convenience in modern service programs, shows that firms with dedicated programs to minimize customer effort achieve far superior annual performance improvements, compared to service organizations without such programs.
Our study found that firms with a formal program to manage customer effort across all channels enjoy a 3.9X greater annual increase in customer satisfaction rates, compared to those without it (All Others).Besides improving customer satisfaction at a rapid pace, firms monitoring and managing service activities, with an eye to minimize client effort, decrease customer effort scores by 16.8X more than All Others. When combined, improvement across these two key performance indicators shows that minimizing effort to ensure customer convenience ultimately leads to happy clients.It’s not surprising that monitoring customer effort is becoming a priority for many forward-thinking service leaders.Empowering employees creates happy customersOne of the most common mistakes many service organizations make, when managing customer experience programs, is overlooking the impact employees have on customer satisfaction and loyalty. Happy employees create happy customers. Employee satisfaction is often intertwined with a company’s ability to empower employees with the tools and information they need to do their jobs.When employees are empowered, they can drive the efficiency gains that have long been top-of-mind for service leaders. Specifically, findings from our study reveal that firms with a formal program to deliver effortless service experiences reduce average handle times by 2.3X more than All Others. They also report a 13.0% annual decrease in customer service costs, compared to a 3.7% decrease for the All Others category.To put cost reduction improvements into perspective, let’s assume a service organization incurs $15 million in annual customer service costs. Adopting a formal program to minimize customer effort and taking the related steps to accomplish this goal would help this firm trim nearly $1.4 million more in service costs each year, compared to the same firm without such a program.
Customer convenience yields better customer experiencesIt’s harder for companies in many industries to compete based on price, products, or services alone. Competitors can grab market share by lowering prices or launching new products and services. However, it’s much harder for competitors to replicate the advantage that comes from minimizing the effort required for customers to get their needs met across all channels.To learn how service leaders across various industries are using best practices to enable customer convenience and become more customer-centric watch this webinar: The secret sauce helping CX leaders create loyal clients: convenience.You can also read a summary of the webinar here.
Translate CSM Trends to Business Value
Six key trends are transforming customer service—Here’s how to translate them into real business valueToday, digital transformation across the enterprise is impacting customer service. The most successful companies are evolving customer service from single-channel or non-integrated multichannel into a dynamic platform for customer experience. These organizations are embracing a new model of customer service where channels are irrelevant and customer service operational excellence is measured by effectiveness rather than efficiency and cost-savings.ThinkJar’s Esteban Kolsky recently spoke to customer service practitioners as part of his annual research project about the state of customer service. He identified six critical trends fueling this customer service transformation, including budgeting, spending priorities, technology adoption, data, channels, and cloud and platform ecosystems (to read more about the trends, check out this blog post or the full ThinkJar white paper.But how do you begin to translate these trends into real business value so you can embrace this new customer-centric model of customer service in your organization?Collaboration: the foundation of the new customer service modelAccording to Esteban, it’s critical to talk to peers and colleagues because customer service strategies must follow corporate investment priorities. If your organization has a chief customer officer, or someone who oversees experiences and engagement, this is the first person you need to engage with to make sure your initiatives align with what they are doing. Some of the investment priorities detailed in ThinkJar’s latest study are end-to-end experiences, customer engagement, and a better use of data.Finding other people in your organization who are undergoing similar modernization efforts is also crucial. While, it’s unlikely you will have to completely replace existing customer service solutions, you will likely combine efforts and resources between departments. The truth is, actions that were formerly privy to sales or marketing or even accounting are no longer isolated from customer service given the focus on end-to-end experiences.As you work to adopt trends to fuel customer service transformation, make sure to have conversations with operations, IT, marketing, and even sales because customers will require more than what customer service can provide. For example, as new customer service technology is adopted, 60-90% of customer service interactions are likely to be automated. The remaining interactions will be exceptions, one-off cases, and previously unknown issues. All will need to be resolved along the entire customer continuum—with help from other departments and subject matter experts—and not just from a simple interaction with customer service.Personalized, ad hoc experiences are what customers are after, requiring access to more IT resources than ever before. Access will be required not only to other departments and their processes, but also access to data and information previously unavailable to customer service. Talking to IT and architecture teams about making this simpler is also essential.Leveraging cloud to create innovative customer service solutionsFinally, understand the enterprise’s cloud strategy. While customer service continues to lag in cloud adoption, solutions that are ecosystem-based must be run from a cloud infrastructure to be effective. Whoever oversees cloud-migration and adoption in your organization must understand this new customer service model. They can plan the necessary integration points, technology needs, and how to better leverage data tools existing in the enterprise, as well as what customer service platforms bring to the table and how they can be used to improve operations in other areas of the enterprise.Ecosystems are about leveraging cloud properties and components to create innovative solutions for the enterprise. Working together, collaboratively, is the essence of the new customer service model.
Your ultimate goal should be to incorporate transformation customer service trends to create strategies for the next two years aligned with the new customer service model. It’s also important to collaborate with your providers and partners to determine how to better achieve a truly effective customer service platform for everyone, not just customers, to have better experiences.To get a more complete picture of the new customer service model, check out ThinkJar’s publication: Customer Service 2019-2024: a Framework to Adopt the New Model of Operational Excellence for Your Service Team and hear more about what Esteban had to say on the topic in this webinar.In the Customer Service is Digitally Transforming – Series, you'll find the following posts:Part 1 - Customer service is digitally transforming—Are you ready?Part 2 - Six trends driving customer servicePart 3 - The new customer-centric customer service modelPart 4 - How to translate CSM trends to business value (this blog post)
The 7 building blocks of customer service
Efficient and productive customer service representatives are a baseline, not a gold standard.A recent Aberdeen report reveals that forward-thinking customer service organizations have developed strategies to directly benefit customers by making engaging with brands more convenient. These companies understand that effortless service experiences create a competitive advantage.The building blocks of convenient, customer-focused serviceAberdeen suggests that seven building blocks help companies minimize customer effort.1. Understand your customers’ journeys clearlyIt’s important to capture customer feedback across all channels, to monitor sentiment and feedback. Analytics help you understand how customer sentiment and feedback change throughout a customer’s journey and then identify areas to improve.2. Ensure all interactions are consistentInteraction consistency is critical across channels and departments, to avoid frustrating and confusing customers. Integrating disparate systems is essential to this consistency.3. Be a consistent, authentic communicatorDon’t rely on customers to initiate the engagement process. Be proactive and use alerts, reminders, and notifications to help them anticipate potential issues and to understand that you’re addressing them. Become not just a responder but also a trusted partner.4. Analyze self-service data to identify common issuesUnderstand the problems that customers are trying to solve themselves. Chatbots and automated apps can resolve issues that otherwise vex customers.5. Enrich customer journey management activitiesTake advantage of tailored workflows to better manage customer journeys, including workflows to provide personalized self-service options or automate customer requests.6. Give your customer reps the tools to winThe right tools include the training, technology, processes, and data—as well as the authority to use them to full advantage—to satisfy customer needs and solve problems. Without the right tools, your customer service will be a source of customer frustration.7. Align organizational cultureProvide your employees with the training required to understand how greatly they influence the customer experience. Allow them to suggest improvements to the business of client management.Business benefits of customer-focused convenience: by the numbersAberdeen reports that companies who create formal programs to optimize effortless customer service enjoy significant business benefits.
96% greater year-over-year growth in annual company revenue
4.1x greater improvement in the annual customer retention rate
3.5x greater annual improvement in average customer spend
3.9x greater annual improvement in customer satisfaction rate
Customer retention is good businessHappy customers tend to be loyal customers, so enabling effortless customer experiences is worth the investment. Aberdeen also found that focusing on customer convenience also increases the chances that a company can win back former customers.Learn more about tools and solutions that can help you enable effortless: customer service.
5 fixes for the customer experience quandary
Customers expect products and services to work. When they don’t, customers want fast, permanent solutions. But delivering against that expectation is easier said than done. Multiple barriers stand in the way of your organization delivering the seamless experiences customers expect. Let’s explore five ways to improve customer service.1. Resolve issues the first time, fastCustomer service has been, by tradition, reactive: A problem occurs and, in response, a customer sends an SOS by phone, email, or messaging app, or seeks help online. It’s important to get the response right because a poor customer experience can have a far-reaching negative impact on the business.Digitally transforming the customer experience can help ensure issues are resolved fast and effectively. It’s one of the reasons why digital transformation reigns as a top customer contact priority, according to a Customer Contact Week study, with 85% of businesses saying “increasing the use of digital channels” will become more important going into 2025.Artificial intelligence (AI) has greatly improved the outcomes of reactive customer service. Conversational chatbots, for instance, use AI algorithms to contextualize an issue before offering suggestions. If the customer then escalates to an agent, AI categorizes and prioritizes the issue. It also puts the most appropriate information for solving the problem in front of the agent to speed resolution.Proactive customer service holds even more promise. At LIKE.TG, we use AI to help customers avoid costly service disruptions by predicting and helping prevent issues. As AI technology matures, we continually explore new ways it can be applied for seamless, successful customer experiences.
When you look for fast ways to resolve issues, make sure you consider customer self-service options beyond chatbots. You can reduce customer effort by providing personalized search results and suggested solutions—especially automated solutions—based on the customer’s history and purchased services or products.A searchable knowledge base helps customers get answers to common questions and problems fast, with more details than can be provided in a FAQ. An online community facilitating the sharing of ideas, experiences, and solutions between peers can also provide insightful guidance.2. Keep contact center volume under controlThere are many indicators that a problem is brewing. Some might be obvious; others might be subtle. In a digitally connected world, customers expect no disruptions when they use products and services. Yet, disruptions happen. How the customer feels afterward is heavily influenced by how you react. According to a Qualtrics XM Institute report, only one in five customers will forgive a bad experience if they rate a company as “very poor.”That’s why it’s critical to optimize operational and customer service processes across the organization. By unifying these processes on a single platform, you can monitor for and circumvent potential problems.You can also track device and service health, automatically schedule preventive maintenance, and analyze trends to reduce disruptions. That yields great customer service, which in turn leads to business growth. As Qualtrics reports, customers who rate a company’s service as “good” are 38% more likely to recommend that company.When a problem does occur and it affects multiple customers, connected processes between customer service and operations can limit spikes in contact volume and impairment of customer experience. Ideally, you’ve discovered the problem first by monitoring digital services, noticing a service trend early, or being informed by an internal team. The next step is to proactively notify customers affected by the issue and provide an estimated time to resolution, if known.
By seeing you take the lead, customers are less likely to contact customer service—and have a better experience because they know you’re actively working on the issue.In its efforts to create a more streamlined and satisfying experience for customers, Proximus, Belgium’s largest telecommunications company, added personalization and timeliness with ServiceNow. The payoff includes the company’s ability to detect the failure of a component and understand which customer it may affect, enabling Proximus to proactively create an incident on the customer’s behalf.Surges in contact volume are also mitigated by proactive communications with customers. In the case of planned engineering works, automated notifications are sent to customers in advance, and customer service agents have full visibility of incoming calls related to the issue.3. Reduce omni-channel complexityWhen fielding even simple customer requests, disconnected communication channels force agents to switch between systems to see previous interactions in other channels. It’s easier to ask the customer for the information again. This has a negative effect on agent productivity, slows service delivery, and ultimately impacts customer satisfaction.To avoid losing customers, organizations need to consolidate interaction information across systems into a single location rather than rely on multiple point solutions. Centralized customer activity history simplifies work for agents and frees them to focus on assisting customers.
It’s good for customers too. They want to move conversations between their preferred channels, which can be different depending on the time of day or the situation. Companies that adopt this single-location strategy have seen up to a 35% annual increase in customer retention, according to Aberdeen.Telecom company Vodafone wanted to provide its customer service agents with a simple, intuitive, and streamlined system that would allow clear insight into a customer’s journey. After implementing LIKE.TG Customer Service Management, Vodafone increased agent productivity by 45%, gained a 360-degree view of customers, and achieved a 25-point increase in customer satisfaction.4. Connect all teams resolving customer issuesBusiness model changes or rapid company growth, either organically or by acquisition, can create disconnected processes, departments, and systems. Hybrid workplaces, with some employees in the office and others working remotely, add to the challenge.Relying on emails, spreadsheets, and departmental systems with manual processes between groups can impact a company’s ability to deliver quality customer service. Fragmented customer operations negatively affect customer experience, yet only 7% of companies recognize the need to seamlessly manage end-to-end service delivery activities from the front office to the back office, Aberdeen reports.By implementing end-to-end, orchestrated workflows, an organization can:
Automate and accelerate processes.
Connect teams for better visibility and accountability.
Help ensure employees have the information they need to resolve issues quickly.
When you connect all teams involved in customer issue resolution, you optimize the speed and efficiency of your operations. You also create great experiences for front, middle, and back-office agents, partners, and end customers.
At one point, Tennessee’s Department of Human Services (DHS) faced a customer service crisis caused by limited staff and rising citizen case volumes. Due to siloed channels and manual processes, the organization struggled to deliver responsive customer service.With LIKE.TG Customer Service Management, Tennessee DHS decreased inquiry assignment times by 99% and inquiry resolution times by 70%. “We immediately saw dramatic improvements in quality and efficiency,” said the agency’s then-director of customer service operations. “Instead of taking 36 hours to assign an inquiry, it now takes less than two minutes.”5. Enable field techs to quickly resolve issuesField service can be tough, with diverse and broad products, reliance on past job experience, and customers expecting work to be done quickly and correctly the first time. Limited access to effective solutions and experts, along with manual processes, can lead to repeat service visits, missed maintenance windows, asset downtime, and reduced customer loyalty and revenue.Providing easy access through a mobile app to available solutions, along with the ability to collaborate with other employees, makes technicians more effective—especially newly hired employees with less experience.
Still, field service is typically reactive. Until a customer reports a problem, the organization doesn’t know someone is having issues with their machine or device or needs replacement equipment earlier than scheduled. Before the rise of the Internet of Things (IoT), this was a problem with no viable, cost-effective solution.IoT data can mean the difference between gaining or losing a lifetime customer. By monitoring IoT-enabled devices, you can proactively alert field service and customer service to irregularities.You can improve service levels and speed by dispatching technicians equipped with all of the issue details and necessary parts and skills to resolve the problem quickly. Customer service will be ready to answer questions if the customer contacts the company. You identify problems sooner, and the data provides additional insights for reducing truck rolls and increasing first-time fix rates.Traffic and parking safety solution provider TAPCO struggled with limited visibility into equipment status, tedious manual processes, and slow time to repair. Now it continuously monitors its intelligent traffic systems with LIKE.TG Connected Operations. IoT rules trigger remediation workflows automatically when exceptional readings are detected. Affected customers get notified proactively.Integration with LIKE.TG Field Service Management means a work order is also automatically created, dispatching a technician to complete maintenance. Before LIKE.TG, this process was manual and slow. Now it’s automated, traceable, and connected. TAPCO has a clearer understanding of activity in the field, its technicians arrive on-site armed with both historical and near-real-time customer data, and there’s a transparent audit trail of issues and resolution.Delivering seamless customer experiencesThere’s no magical incantation or trick that can turn your customers into diehard fans of your brand. Improving customer service is about:
Optimizing and empowering customers with personalized self-service backed by automation
Reducing disruptions when customers use your product or service—and notifying them quickly if you learn about a problem before they do
Accelerating processes through digital workflows and connecting teams for fast resolutions and better visibility
Unifying your approaches to customer service with a single digital platform
Learn more about LIKE.TG Customer Service Management.LIKE.TG, the LIKE.TG logo, Now, and other LIKE.TG marks are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of LIKE.TG, Inc. in the United States and/or other countries. Other company names, product names, and logos may be trademarks of the respective companies with which they are associated.
3 ways to digitally transform the customer experience
Updated Feb. 14, 2023In an age when customers voice their dissatisfaction by ranting on social media or quietly taking their business to a competitor, it’s more important than ever to keep them engaged with—and coming back to—your brand. That requires a concerted effort to:
Create an experience that meets customers where they are
Provide solutions to their challenges
Deliver quick and timely responses
Personalize the experience for each individual
At LIKE.TG, we’re committed to making work better for everyone. Let’s explore three practical, attainable ways to digitally transform the customer experience:1. Proactive supportHelping customers stay loyal to your brand is no easy feat. But a proactive support strategy can make the challenge easier. Acting on issues before they affect customers can completely transform customer experience. Other proactive support benefits include:
The ability to scale your customer cloud operations and customer support efforts
Decreased case resolution times
Increased productivity
Watch our Adopt a proactive support strategy to learn how LIKE.TG streamlined our own customer experience through artificial intelligence monitoring.2. One system of actionWhen people, processes, technology, and data are siloed, it can be difficult to get work done, let alone keep your customers happy. Adequately addressing customers’ changing needs and growing expectations requires integrating your front, middle, and back offices to deliver a seamless experience.LIKE.TG provides one platform, one architecture, and one data model to help that ideal become reality. Get tips to optimize processes and workflows in Create effortless experiences that build long-term loyalty.Frost Sullivan Analyst Michael DeSalles joins Ajda LaPrad, product marketing director at LIKE.TG, for a thought-provoking conversation. Discover ways to accelerate issue resolution, provide transparency and, ultimately, boost customer loyalty.3. AI-powered self-serviceWhen it comes to delivering frictionless customer service, there’s no silver bullet. But there are ways to optimize the process. Empowering customers to get quick answers to common questions is one of them.Adopting an everything-as-a-service business model with AI-powered self-service, personalization, and integrated support and operations can help you cut costs and position your business for growth. Watch Powering your everything-as-a-service business for details.
Enhanced customer experience: A conversation with Rogers Communications
The success of a modern business starts with recognizing the value of the customer and committing to provide a great experience. The best companies do this by putting respect and empathy at the core of every interaction.In today’s new era of work, delivering an enhanced customer experience has become increasingly connected with the employee experience. This creates new opportunities for organizations to drive stronger satisfaction for both parties simultaneously.A new customer experience approachRogers Communications grew from a humble beginning 60 years ago to become the largest communications and media company in Canada, servicing more than 10.8 million subscribers today. In our fourth episode of the Canadian Leadership Exchange, we spoke with Scott Thomson, vice president of business customer service at Rogers, to learn how the company measures satisfaction and friction levels for both customers and employees in fulfilling ongoing service requests.Rogers employees take pride in the legacy of founder Ted Rogers, who “believed in the power of communication to enlighten, embolden, and entertain.” But to stay competitive, the company needed to re-evaluate the design of its business units and modernize a changing corporate structure. Rogers Communications rose to the challenge by making enhancements to its products and services to keep up with the company’s accelerated growth.Watch the video to learn how Rogers’ transformation using digital workflows can help other organizations improve the customer and employee experiences.
Workflow Guides offer curated content for business leaders
Organizations are facing an unprecedented challenge adjusting their businesses to operate in a time where resiliency and continuity are suddenly top priorities. As a result, digital transformation, once a vision for the future, has now become a business imperative.While there’s a lot of content out there about digital transformation, it can be daunting to understand what’s credible and where to start. We are here to help.Introducing Workflow Guides. These are theme-based content hubs that curate ideas and quality resources in one place. From inspirational thought leadership content to solutions relevant to wherever you are in your digital transformation journey. Workflow Guides make navigating ideas and resources easy. Here’s a snapshot of what’s available now.Returning to the workplace. This Guide shares a collection of articles and solutions to help get your business running again. Check out advice from LIKE.TG CIO Chris Bedi and other leaders. Read HR guru Josh Bersin on the future of employee experience. Download new safe workplace apps to provide a safe, employee-ready workplace.Digitize customer experiences. This Guide contains perspectives from Gartner, IDC and other industry thought leaders, including Dean Robison, LIKE.TG’s head of customer support. You can also dive into a LIKE.TG demo and estimate the business value you can achieve with the LIKE.TG value calculator.Customer experience in the new normal. Across Europe, the Middle East and Africa, organizations are looking to digital workflow solutions that are simple and affordable. Learn how companies in these regions are adapting to the post-Covid world Check out insights from EMEA business leaders and podcasts featuring experts from Deloitte and Accenture.The new banking landscape. The banking industry faces distinctive challenges in the Covid era. This Guide features incisive reporting by independent journalists, and case studies about financial services companies reaping the benefits of digital transformation.Personalize patient experiences. Healthcare delivery is more important than ever in these challenging times. This Guide provides a glimpse into the future of AI, original research, and case studies of healthcare organizations that are creating the future of patient care.Digitize government workflows. Governments get real with digital transformation. This Guide shares perspectives, insights, expert resources, and solutions to improve the citizen experience of government. It covers topics ranging from how to secure citizen data to techniques for fostering public sector innovation.
Top 3 priorities to enhance customer experience
The retail, banking, telecom, and tech sectors have been trying to prove their love of customer experience (CX) for years. But the COVID-19 pandemic has underscored the need to elevate those vital customer relationships.German shoemaker Adidas is a case in point. In November 2020, it reported strong quarter-over-quarter performance. CEO Kasper Rørsted told Seeking Alpha that a great deal of the company’s success stemmed from using digital channels to woo people into enrolling in its membership program, which had tripled from 50 million to 150 million during the prior 12 months. Members shop more and spend more on each transaction, resulting in a lifetime value 2.5 times greater than non-members.[Ready to enhance customer experience? Read IDC’s Spotlight, sponsored by ServiceNow.]Digital has changed the CX tuneThe COVID-19 pandemic has turbocharged the migration from physical to digital channels. And expectations are high. The "app for everything" mentality is rampant. If one app—or product or service—doesn't work, we can easily switch to another.The pressure is on for customer success leaders to set priorities that turn things up to 11. According to an IDC-LIKE.TG survey conducted in Europe in late 2020, these are the top three priorities for customer leaders:1. Workflow optimizationCustomer experience and engagement are like a streaming channel with hundreds of songs on shuffle play united by a theme. At a basic level, customer success leaders must ensure digital touchpoints (websites, self-service portals, apps, etc.) are consistent with each other and with traditional ones, such as contact centers, products, and physical locations.UK-based Cheshire Datasystems Ltd. (CDL) is a tech supplier to the insurance industry. CDL deployed workflow automation tools to streamline its customer service desk. Customer requests that once took hours to resolve now take minutes. Calls and emails to service staff plunged by 50%, and service-level agreement achievements soared to 97%.2. Digital trust and securityAccording to a 2020 survey by IDC, approximately two-thirds of European enterprises have implemented trust programs.1 Of those, only about a third say a program goal is to establish trust agreements with partners. And just 28% say a goal is to help improve perception of the enterprise.This suggests a missed opportunity to burnish brands. Security must always be a priority to ensure regulatory compliance, but a brand’s commitment to trust is a song that needs to be in heavy rotation. The more it's played, the more loyal customers and partners are likely to be.Trust and privacy must also include efficient data exchange and respect for customer preferences. It’s about timing offers and promotions for when they’ll be welcome and soliciting customer feedback proactively.3. Business model innovationOnce you’ve had a smooth digital experience, it’s hard to tolerate old-school, analog processes. For example, we can hail rides using apps that allow us to choose a vehicle type and track our driver’s progress to the pickup point. The app provides the expected drive time, fee, and driver ratings. After that experience, going back to hailing cabs by hand and paying in cash would feel like playing music on an eight-track cassette.Similarly, during the pandemic, many restaurants have shifted to a pickup and delivery model, leveraging Uber-like ordering apps that integrate with point-of-sale systems—and sometimes inventory management systems. While we all look forward to dining in physical restaurants when health conditions permit, these new apps have permanently changed how we order takeout.B2C manufacturers are also creating digital customer experiences. Well before the pandemic, French skin care and cosmetics manufacturer L'Oréal had been laying the groundwork for engaging customers online.In addition to optimizing its own sites, L'Oréal solidified relationships with partner sites. This included getting them to use the AI-powered ModiFace, an application that allows customers to try on makeup virtually. Though sales through shops and to professionals suffered in 2020, the company saw its e-commerce revenue soar by 64% year over year in the first half of the year.Cross-functional compositionCustomer success comes from harmonizing experiences across the organization. For that reason, customer success officers need to break out of their functional silos in sales and marketing. Siloed performance metrics won’t cut it either. If you want your work to resonate across the enterprise, you need to blend traditional front-office metrics with technology, operations, and finance metrics.Every function has its part to play. The CIO needs to be a partner to link in the right systems. The human resources department is critical to drive employee experiences that foster exceptional service. Operations can automate and optimize supply chains to simplify ordering, delivery, invoicing, and payments. And so forth.The good news: Implementing customer-centric solutions often sparks discussions about technical, data, and operational silos that eventually contribute to their elimination. This paves the way for everyone to play to the same customer-focused beat.Enhance customer experience with help from LIKE.TG and IDC.1 Trott, D., Brown, D., and Child M. (October 2020). The future of trust in Europe: Moving beyond technology deployment to support business outcomes. IDC.
Empowering customers and employees through digital experience
The pandemic has made clear that businesses can’t work in silos anymore. That reality extends to customer experience (CX) and employee experience (EX). The path to success is integration between the two to create a total digital experience, because happy employees produce happy customers.“The employee and customer experience are like a mobius strip or infinite loop. They are interconnected,” explains Dean Robison, senior vice president of customer service and support at LIKE.TG, in a recent Workflow article.Benefits of total experienceThe benefits of a total experience approach fall in three key areas, according to LIKE.TG-sponsored research by ESI ThoughtLab and reported in the Workflow Quarterly Summer 2021 issue: financial, organizational, and customer/employee. Of the 900 senior-level executives surveyed:
45% reported higher revenue from merging CX and EX.
36% noted better organizational decision-making.
22% found a combined approach attracts customers.
Further benefits include increased market share and lower capital costs, improved organizational health and safety, and better products and services.Perhaps that’s why half of the survey respondents are making large or very large investments in total experience, linking CX and EX. “Creating a cohesive total experience reduces the drag, cost, and redundancy of serving both internal and external stakeholders,” according to ESI ThoughtLab’s analysis of the results.The need for improved IT platformsGetting your company to embrace total experience isn’t necessarily easy. Survey respondents agreed modern, improved IT platforms are a prerequisite. In fact, more than half of the companies represented named modernizing IT platforms their top priority in the next two years.Digital platforms such as the Now Platform enable digital workflows that connect front, middle, and back-office functions, eradicating silos.Other ways companies are investing in the total experience include digitizing CX, providing staff with technology and data, integrating EX and CX, acquiring talent, and including employees in CX design (see Figure 1).
Figure 1: Top total experience steps taken now vs. 1-2 years. Source: ESI ThoughtLabToward experience maturityImproving the overall experience is fraught with challenges, but they’re not insurmountable. The survey found these challenges subside as companies mature their CX and EX initiatives. Here’s how to start merging your CX and EX:
Create an experience strategy and roadmap.
Design an experience that puts people at the center.
Build the right team with the right skills.
Get real-time feedback and sentiment analysis.
Design low-code apps for faster innovation.
Following these steps can lead to big payoffs—for your customers, your employees, and your business.Get more insights in the Workflow Quarterly Total Experience issue. To stay abreast of emerging tech and business trends, subscribe to the Workflow newsletter.
LIKE.TG named a leader in the Forrester Wave for Value Stream Management Solutions
As an executive your focus is always on delivering the most value from every investment. Value for your customers, and of course value for yourself. Yet there are so many places in the value delivery process where things can – and do – go wrong.The term “value stream” describes the end- to-end process of developing and delivering software to your clients. The value stream starts with your investment selection and prioritization, which is itself driven by feedback from clients.It continues through the resourcing and scheduling processes and then enters the delivery cycle, taking any number of different paths to ultimately reach the point where a solution is ready for deployment. That solution must be released effectively and efficiently and must be managed and supported in the production environment while generating more feedback that starts the cycle over.Historically that end-to-end value stream has not been managed as a continuous flow, but rather as a series of points, each with its own working methods, software tools and resources. Each of these variables can cause problems and make it harder for you to identify bottlenecks and adjust work mid-stream in response to emerging threats and opportunities.Enter Value Stream Management. VSM is a process designed to integrate your value stream. It’s a common data platform that covers the entire value stream from initial ideation and investment management, through agile and continuous planning, development and testing, release management and all the way through to production with IT operations and service management.VSM gives all value stream stakeholders a view into what’s happening at every step of the process. That view is tailored to each stakeholder’s needs. It combines high level overviews with the power to drill down to the deepest detail. Most importantly, it enables action. When something changes, or when you need to adjust work, you can do it in one place without disrupting teams or derailing the process.Not all VSM solutions are created equal. Your platform should support the entire value stream from client feedback loops to operations and service management. It should allow you to make an impact by focusing on specific areas like test automation and change management, while still maturing your organization, processes and technology.You also need the ability to easily connect to common tools like Jira, Azure DevOps, GitLab and many more. In short you need a solution like LIKE.TG, a Leader in The Forrester Wave Value Stream Management Solutions, Q3 2020. Download the report.
LIKE.TG a Leader in Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for CRM Customer Engagement Center
I’m thrilled to announce that Gartner has named LIKE.TG a Leader in its 2021 Magic Quadrant for the CRM Customer Engagement Center for the second year in a row.1 We believe this is external validation of our strategy and vision to improve the end-to-end customer experience through our Customer Service Management solution.Our mission in Customer Workflows is to transform the customer service and support market for the better. To do that, we need to skate where the puck is going, and that’s all about meeting customers at their point of need and in the channel of their choice to actually solve their problems.Fastest-growing vendorAccording to the Gartner Market Share: All Software Markets, Worldwide, 2020 report, we’re the fastest-growing vendor among the top 15 customer service and support vendors by market share based on 2020 worldwide revenue and year-over-year growth. We achieved 75.6% growth in worldwide customer service and support revenue year over year.2We’re growing largely because of this changing landscape, where customer service professionals have to constantly adapt to meet the needs of their customers. After only five years in the customer service market, we now have more than 1,500 customers across industries, from high-tech, telecom, and financial services to healthcare, manufacturing, and government.Trends like direct to consumer, everything as a service, and work from anywhere are driving digital transformation in every industry—and driving transformational change in customer experiences.We all witnessed this as customers over the last 18 months during the pandemic, sometimes with great experiences, sometimes not so great. Literally millions of customer service agents were sent home overnight. Supply chains were disrupted. Yet, customer service departments still had their jobs to do. Companies that had invested in modern agile customer support systems did well. Companies that had not, suffered significant disruptions, and their customers suffered the consequences.Disruption is the new constant. That's why speed, agility, and operations efficiency have become so important in customer service solutions.Customer innovationI’d like to provide two concrete examples of how LIKE.TG® Customer Service Management is helping companies deliver better customer experiences and drive operational efficiency. Lloyds Banking Group digitally transformed its mission-critical payment operations in only 12 weeks, significantly improving its customer experience and the experience and efficiency of its service agents in the process.Previously, agents had 16 steps and had to interact with six different systems. The situation wasn’t good for the agents or the customers. We helped the organization reduce those numbers to two steps and one system of action. As a result, the bank has 70% better resolution times and increased customer satisfaction—all while reducing errors and mundane tasks for agents.This is a great example of how innovative customers can both improve end-to-end customer experience and drive massive operational efficiency with Customer Workflows. And that’s what digital transformation is all about.Another customer, Siemens Healthineers, provides medical equipment ranging from MRI, ultrasound, and X-ray machines to respiratory and patient monitoring systems. Because many of these devices are mission-critical, all of the standard customer service key performance indicators (KPIs)—first-time fix rate, mean time to resolve, and first-call resolution—take on a whole new meaning.Siemens had multiple systems, which led to inconsistent user experiences and the inability to offer seamless self-service. With Customer Service Management, Siemens was able to provide one consistent system of action for its support staff and a modern portal for customer self-service.Connect engagement to where the work gets doneWith the pandemic, we saw that companies that weren’t digitally enabled couldn’t deal with the massive and sudden disruption that hit them overnight. The crisis also highlighted that digitally enabling customer engagement is not enough—that’s only half the story in customer service.The other half is how you solve the problem or fulfill the request. Although it’s great to have omni-channel digital engagement for customers, if the people doing the work to fulfill the request continue to rely on antiquated systems, you still have bottlenecks and inconsistencies.The completion of a customer request often spans multiple teams, departments, and back-end systems, which are typically siloed. Traditionally, a lot of this work is done manually via swivel chairs, emails, and phone calls—all glued together by agents and middle-office service workers. Sometimes this workflow isn’t even defined in software and is dependent on tribal knowledge. The result is a slow, inconsistent process that leaves customers frustrated.LIKE.TG takes a different approach by combining great engagement and operations. The Now Platform® is the platform for digital business at scale. We enable organizations to structure their processes into automated, digital workflows in a consistent manner, without losing the flexibility required for their unique needs.Looking aheadThe demand for great, end-to-end customer experiences will only increase in coming years. We’ve seen that innovative companies are embracing digital transformation to improve customer experiences while driving operational efficiencies. We’ve learned that disruption is the new norm and that agility has never been as important as it is today.The Customer Workflows team is fired up to tackle these challenges, and we’re committed to partnering closely with our customers to deliver better experiences for everyone. We’re just getting started.Download the full Gartner Magic Quadrant report.1 Gartner, Inc., "Magic Quadrant for the CRM Customer Engagement Center," Nadine LeBlanc, Jim Davies, Varun Agarwal, 15 June 2021.2 Gartner, Inc., “Market Share: All Software Markets, Worldwide, 2020,” 14 April 2021. Calculations performed by LIKE.TG based on Gartner report.Gartner DisclaimerGartner and Magic Quadrant are registered trademarks of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved.Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner's research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
How Playbooks improve customer service delivery, agent productivity
Kathy Neff, director of Customer Workflows product marketing at LIKE.TG, co-authored this blog.We all know one bad experience can impact a customer’s perception of—and even willingness to deal with—an organization going forward. That’s why so many companies, in virtually every industry, have made investing in customer experience (CX) a top priority, according to ResearchAndMarkets.com.The problem is, for any given organization, there are a number of customer service processes along the entire life span of an interaction that need to be looked at and made great.These processes are often complex, encompassing multiple siloed teams and departments across the organization. That makes it difficult to visualize and orchestrate the entire process at a glance—and allows inefficiencies and delays to persist. These, in turn, prevent organizations from delivering a great end-to-end digital experience.In general, the main difficulties organizations struggle with fall into four categories:
Fundamental – “I can’t see the entire process lifecycle in a single view. The vital data I need to help understand and resolve an issue is trapped in other systems or scattered across other teams.”
Operational – “I don’t know where the process is currently or who’s working on it. I have no way of identifying where we have bottlenecks.”
Functional – “I can’t provide my agents with all the necessary data to complete their tasks. I don’t know how to guide agents through the steps required to resolve a customer issue.”
Strategic – “I don’t know how likely it is we’ll meet or breach our service-level agreements.”
The specifics may vary by organization and industry, but one thing remains constant: Unless work flows seamlessly across the process, customer experiences and subsequent business performance suffer. A lack of visibility and control over customer service workflows creates inefficiencies that drive up the cost of service and decrease customer (and often employee) satisfaction.Break down silos and gain visibilityPlaybooks for LIKE.TG® Customer Service Management solve these challenges. By enabling companies to define, visualize, and orchestrate complex workflows, Playbooks help deliver the experiences customer service agents want and customers expect.Playbooks empower agents to view all the necessary steps to solve a customer’s issue or complete their request. They provide visibility into the status of tasks, including those assigned to downstream teams, so that everyone knows where the process stands and what’s still needed from both colleagues and systems.This also enables executives to “see” why work doesn’t flow across all service processes, quickly identify bottlenecks, and make improvements to speed completion.Organizations can create multiple Playbooks, one for each process, to define the data, tasks, and automation necessary to digitize processes. Playbooks provide agents with a visual guide of the various tasks required to complete the process, along with the sequence in which they need to be executed (either serially or in parallel) to resolve the customer issue or request as quickly as possible.Improving the agent and customer experienceIn the Now Platform® Rome release, we significantly enhanced Playbooks to deliver a focused layout experience. This makes it easier than ever for agents to understand the task at hand and accelerate the resolution of issues or the completion of work, thereby increasing their overall productivity. The focused layout (see Figure 1):
Optimizes the real estate on the screen to help agents focus on their current task, starting with the creation of a new record.
Displays dynamic, contextual data and resources within the Playbook in a collapsible side panel—including activity stream, case details, and related records—making it easy for agents to find what they need, when they need it.
Empowers agents by allowing them to view the entire process lifecycle, determine which step they’re on, and get visual cues to indicate the progress of the phase, etc.
Figure 1: Customer Service Playbooks: Focused layoutWith these enhancements, companies can streamline their processes to accelerate service delivery and increase customer satisfaction and agent productivity. Playbooks help make work better for people, combining customer engagement and operations to make work flow naturally throughout the company—the way it’s supposed to.Experience the power of Playbooks firsthand. Download one of our packages from the LIKE.TG Store today:
Case Playbook for Onboarding
Case Playbook for Complaints
Case Playbook for Product Support
