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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
Increasing the efficiency of customer service delivery
Virag Shah, senior manager for inbound product management in industry and Customer Workflows, co-authored this blog.Running a customer contact center to meet the sky-high expectations of today’s customers is hard work. Success depends on having agents who can empathize with and advocate for your customers in order to give them satisfactory answers and resolutions. This is no small task, and the dynamic nature and complexity of all the factors involved make it even more difficult.For starters, customer service centers must track and manage customer interactions across multiple channels: telephone, email, chat, and social media. Although each channel requires live agents to monitor and respond to customer requests, not every agent can handle every channel. Specific channels often require specific skills and expertise.For live chat, social media, and email, for instance, agents need to be proficient in grammar, spelling, and typing to quickly and effectively answer customers’ questions. To take calls, especially when representing a global business, agents need to be able to converse in the language the customer is most comfortable using.Add to this the fact that customers expect a representative to be available 24/7, and scheduling quickly becomes a critical gating factor for success. You have to consider the hours that different customer service agents are available, including meals and break times, across multiple time zones, not to mention scheduled and unexpected time off.Plus, there are special events to think about, such as holidays and new product or service launches—all of which may have variable staffing requirements. Ensuring the right agents are covering the right channels to meet your organization’s service levels (e.g., 80% of calls answered in 30 seconds, emails responded to within eight hours) can be a monumental task.Taming the complexityWorkforce Optimization for LIKE.TG® Customer Service Management can help managers, team leads, supervisors, and agents improve the quality and efficiency of their service teams. It creates transparency, facilitating better planning, coordination, and communication that lead to high-performing, engaged, and satisfied service teams.The solution provides customer service supervisors and managers with real-time visibility across channels and agent activity, enabling them to monitor productivity and workloads from their own unique workspace. They can also identify key performance indicators (KPIs) and measure the performance of their team across review periods (see Figure 1).For example, supervisors can use their dashboard to track average handling times and drill down to get details that can help identify and address potential bottlenecks or replicate efficient processes.
Figure 1: Managers can monitor and measure the performance of their team members.Scheduling within Workforce Optimization makes it easy for supervisors and managers to see agent availability, manage shift assignments, and balance agent workloads. On the flip side, agents can see their personal work schedule and request to swap shifts as needed to avoid gaps in coverage.Workforce Optimization gives managers 360-degree visibility into their agents’ workloads, as well as their historical performance, to inform evaluation and growth conversations. This creates opportunities for supervisors and managers to coach their agents, help them perform assessments, and offer feedback to improve performance.Machine learning further helps managers maintain necessary skills across their teams, recommending the skills and expertise that should be allocated to different team members.Agents can see how they’re doing from their desktop by tracking their performance against key metrics. In addition, they can access training and knowledge resources to help them acquire new skills and experience to improve their service levels and grow in their career.3 key enhancements in the Rome releaseThe Now Platform® Rome release further enhances the capabilities of Workforce Optimization in three ways:1. Schedule Adherence enables managers to monitor an agent’s compliance with scheduled work times and set adherence targets to drive desired behaviors (see Figure 2). This ability brings together forecasting, scheduling, and actual agent activity to help supervisors and managers better keep tabs on contact center activities.
Figure 2: Managers can view their team’s schedules, shifts, and shift swaps at a glance.2. Demand Forecasting allows managers to visualize historical work/volume data along with forecasts (see Figure 3). This information simplifies staff planning in order to accommodate changes in demand (e.g., product launches, holidays) and ensure high customer satisfaction levels. The forecasting algorithm can be selected and forecast parameters adjusted to suit circumstances, such as volume spikes or vacation times.
Figure 3: Plan future demand and make manual adjustments to your forecast.3. Skills Development and Coaching helps managers evaluate an agent’s work and discuss opportunities for improvement and growth by identifying available trainings to increase the agent’s expertise. Any feedback customers provided during or after their interactions is available to help inform the manager’s coaching discussions with their agents.Team members’ skill profiles help managers make the best use of their resources, allowing them to identify gaps and better allocate resources at the individual, team, and cross-team levels to prepare for the ever-changing needs of the business (see Figure 4).
Figure 4: Managers can quickly see and adjust the distribution of skills across their teams.These enhancements continue to build out Workforce Optimization, enabling you to make your agents more knowledgeable and efficient—and, ultimately, leading to better service and happier agents and customers. Learn more about how LIKE.TG can help you streamline customer service.
Rethinking customer experience
On a video call, a customer asked why I had a stack of boxes behind me. That’s one of the things about Zoom—you get glimpses into other people’s worlds. My world is full of cardboard. I moved to a new home on the East Coast a few months ago, and unpacking is a slow process.The boxes are full of business books. I have a healthy collection, and my latest addition is Think Again by Adam Grant, the top-rated professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School. Grant is super inspiring. I wish he’d been there in my time at Wharton. In Think Again, he encourages us to behave more like scientists—not to settle for the accepted way of doing things, but to test, challenge, and try out new ideas, to rethink in order to continuously improve.I’ve been doing lots of rethinking recently about how to deliver great customer experience. As products become commoditized and choices infinite, organizations are competing on experience. It’s the new differentiator. Customers have high expectations. If brands don’t deliver, customers will vote with their feet in favor of an organization that does.The need for a unified approachA large chunk of digital investment has focused on improving customer-facing touch points—websites, apps, and chatbots. Those interactions are key, but on their own, they’re not enough to transform experience.Below the surface, organizations are struggling to deliver the service customers demand and deserve. A sprawl of legacy systems that don’t talk to each other means agents resort to spreadsheets and swivel-chair between systems to chase down information and make sense of the black hole capturing their request.Field service teams turn up on site without the customer history, issue insight, and equipment they need to fix the problem, resulting in costly return visits and increased downtime. When organizations don’t work in harmony, experience suffers, and customer-facing teams are left to face frustrated and angry customers.You need to bring the power of the whole organization to better serve your customers. That means going beyond your customer-facing layer to connect your front, middle, and back office. When people and processes are connected, information flows freely, it’s easier to take action, and everyone has the visibility and insights they need to achieve more, fast.Uniting people, processes, and systemsLIKE.TG makes this happen. With one platform, one architecture, and one data model, it brings people, systems, and data into a single system of action. It simplifies case management by breaking work down into discrete tasks and ensuring those tasks flow across people and functions. It enables you to automate and optimize how work gets done.The use of automation, artificial intelligence (AI), and other technologies opens the world of self-service so customers can access the information and support they need on their terms. Freed from routine and mundane tasks, employees have more time to do their best work and excel in their roles. This makes them happy, and happy workers make happy customers.Sometimes the best kind of experience is no experience at all. People want things to happen as they should, smoothly and without interruption. We can help you predict and preemptively solve issues before they escalate into bigger problems.You’ll see where storm clouds are forming so you can intervene and get in front of the downpour. In this way, you can either remediate issues before the customer notices or communicate clearly with customers who may be affected before they get in touch with you. When things do go wrong, you’ll be able to fix them fast, keep customers updated on issue status and resolution, and earn trust along the way.Great things happen when an organization is connected, works in harmony, and is united in the goal of serving customers better. Experience soars, customers are more loyal, it’s easier to attract and retain talent, and the whole company sees significant improvement to its bottom line.Find out how LIKE.TG can help you improve customer experience in our Experience in action ebook.
How Guided Decisions improve customer service for everyone
Rahul Guha, product management director for Customer Service Management, co-authored this blog.When customers request help from customer service agents, it’s usually because they can’t find the answers they need or are unable to resolve problems on their own. When they do turn to customer service, they expect representatives to know how to fix their issues quickly and completely.This isn’t easy for new or less experienced customer service agents, who may not know what to do, whom to ask, or where to go to provide customers with support. Even seasoned employees may be similarly challenged when they face an issue they’ve never seen before.The need for a friction-free solutionOrganizations use a range of custom tools and technologies to support agents and provide organizational knowledge that addresses the problem at hand. Often, these tools fall short. They offer piecemeal solutions that can be extremely labor-intensive and difficult to use, increasing agent “swivel-chairing” and creating additional maintenance and cost issues.For example, agents at a leading European telecommunications provider had to manually key data into a custom decisioning tool, which pulled results from hundreds of decision trees that were manually maintained in an Excel spreadsheet. The results were often clunky and out of date, resulting in frustration all around.A leading automotive technology provider felt similar frustration. The company had agents reference a Word document when customers contacted them. This document advised agents to ask the same static list of questions, regardless of the reason for the call, to determine how to proceed. This created a slow, mind-numbing experience for both customer and agent.Changing the customer service experienceLIKE.TG Guided Decisions helps solve service inconsistency problems. It uses institutional knowledge and experience to give every agent quick, easy access to specific guidance tailored to the problem in front of them. Guided Decisions helps new agents ramp up quickly, supporting data-driven decision-making for consistently good service, regardless of experience level.With Guided Decisions, organizations can automatically suggest the agent’s next best action to help a customer based on the circumstances of the interaction. These recommendations are integrated directly into customer service processes and presented in the Agent Workspace—all on the Now Platform—to reduce swivel-chairing and increase productivity.Complementary to Playbooks for Customer Service Management—which are designed to help companies define, visualize, and orchestrate complex workflows end to end—Guided Decisions are meant to help agents perform a specific task or take the appropriate next step in a workflow. This guidance pulls from multilevel, nested decision trees defined by the organization to offer agents a clear, consistent path forward:
Decision nodes consider the context of the current situation to determine what possible steps can be taken. They look at:
Business context – what products and services the customer bought in the past, what they’re using, what their last interaction was about, etc.
Customer input – what type of issue they’re dealing with, what they’d like to do, etc.
Data from internal third-party systems – what they ordered, how recently they made a purchase, etc.
Guidance nodes contain the recommended next steps for the agent. These can be a range of suggestions, such as:
Attach a knowledge article to the case.
Create a work order.
Propose a resolution for the customer.
Offer the customer a 20% discount on a related service.
There are two modes for the decision tree. The first mode asks agents simple questions to determine the optimal path forward, and then uses embedded decisioning logic to identify the appropriate guidance. The second uses the business context to directly surface the right guidance, which gets presented as the next best action in the Agent Workspace.Either way, agents can feel confident they know what to do to help their customers. This increases agent productivity, efficiency, and satisfaction.Making customer service work betterIn the Now Platform Rome release, we enhanced Guided Decisions (see Figure 1) to help organizations:
Recommend best actions to agents through either of the two available modes—walking through a decision tree, where the system prompts the agent to get more information (via questions) first, or directly accessing guidance on what their next step should be.
Dynamically rank next best actions based on the business context, and always display the optimal recommendation for each interaction along the customer journey.
Quickly develop and deploy new guidance via configuration. This no-code/low-code approach makes it dramatically easier to create new guidance to meet various business needs.
Figure 1: Guided Decisions can help organizations recommend the best actions for agents to take.With these enhancements, customer service works better for the benefit of everyone. Organizations can dynamically guide agents to take the next best action to troubleshoot and resolve complex issues fast, increase their revenue generation, and deliver high-quality experiences that satisfy both agents and customers.Learn more about Customer Service Management.
3 ways to improve field service management
Updated Feb. 11, 2022Field service management covers a lot of areas, from installing and maintaining field equipment to scheduling, dispatching, and labor tracking. Across those myriad areas are numerous challenges: scheduling conflicts, miscommunications, workforce changes, customer dissatisfaction, poor first-time fix rates, lack of asset visibility, and more.But field service management is vital to successful business operations. Here are three ways LIKE.TG helps companies improve their field service operations:1. Keep trucks rollingWorkforce challenges are not unique to field service management. They affect every industry and business. But labor shortages in field service can have a domino effect on customers’ businesses. Adopting new technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI) and augmented reality, can ease your workforce struggles.Watch our Embrace new technologies to address the field service talent shortage webinar to find out how. Miles Szkoda, director of Field Technologies Online, moderates a discussion between LIKE.TG experts Nikki Narang and Rob Schaefer.2. Be proactiveField service relies on technicians. Amid the "Great Resignation," keeping technicians can be challenging. Our Delivering proactive field service webinar discusses the barriers to maintaining a skilled workforce and explores ways to create great experiences to overcome those barriers.Gain insights from John Ragsdale, a distinguished researcher and VP of technology ecosystems at the Technology Services Industry Association (TSIA), and LIKE.TG experts. You'll learn how to identify patterns and get ahead of potential needs.3. Enhance the technician experienceWith the rising talent shortage in field service, you can’t afford to lose field technicians to your competition or even to other fields. Yet, 33% of field techs admit their jobs are not satisfying, according to the Service Council’s 2021 Voice of the Field Service Engineer survey. And 60% aren’t committed to staying in the field for the duration of their career.This can negatively affect customer relations. To overturn it requires a hard look at the source of the dissatisfaction. Watch the Voice of the field service engineer webinar to learn how Xerox improved its technician experience with mobile technology.
5 ways to create a memorable customer experience
Mayank A, senior principal inbound product manager for Customer Workflows at LIKE.TG, co-authored this blog.The way customers want to engage with organizations is radically changing. The pandemic and multiple shutdowns brought these changes to the forefront, forcing organizations to rethink their customer experience, both in person and online, and accelerate digital transformation projects to try to better align the customer journey with expectations.We all have stories about companies getting it right—they’re the ones that make it effortless for us to get what we need. But we also have nightmare stories about those that are unable to provide immediate help or relevant information.What can we take away from the organizations that create an amazing experience for their customers? All are applying a deep understanding of how their customers engage with them and use their sites to create a streamlined, frictionless journey.The goal is to meet customers where they are, and then help them find the answers they’re looking for or request what they need. This takes embedding service everywhere a customer engages on a site. It also takes augmenting what’s already working with new digitized service capabilities.Removing friction from the customer journeyEngagement Messenger in LIKE.TG® Customer Service Management can embed service on any third-party website. It brings rich service capabilities together into one solution that can be launched anywhere. Those capabilities include knowledge articles, chat, virtual agent (chatbot), case management, AI search, service catalog items, and appointment and technician scheduling.Customers can then interact online with organizations and access services without leaving their current web experience or online transaction. By adding Engagement Messenger into the way customers normally engage, organizations can leverage their existing, proven customer service workflows that orchestrate the activities and tasks necessary to fulfill a customer’s request.Organizations can also configure when and where to launch Engagement Messenger to deliver targeted service to customers when they actually need it (see Figure 1). For example, instead of displaying an annoying pop-up, even when it’s clear a customer doesn’t need assistance, Engagement Messenger will launch a virtual agent or chat at the appropriate time.
Figure 1: Engagement Messenger can deliver targeted service to customers when they actually need it.Engagement Messenger can launch anywhere in the customer journey, or it can trigger specific actions to provide more targeted engagements. Let’s look at five key ways it can help organizations improve the customer experience:1. Offer rich omni-channel engagementWith Engagement Messenger, customers can chat with either a virtual agent or a live one, depending on what they need or are trying to do. This gives customers immediate service on the channel of their choice.The LIKE.TG Virtual Agent uses an AI-powered chatbot that can answer questions or direct customers to find relevant solutions on their own (via knowledge articles or the Service Catalog) 24 hours, seven days a week.Customers also have access to existing Virtual Agent conversations, such as how to purchase a new product or service, check the status of an order, return a product, or get assistance during checkout.At the conclusion of the interaction, customers can provide feedback for future improvement. And, if the customer requests to move the conversation to a live agent, the full transcript will be retained and visible to the agent, so the customer doesn’t have to start all over.2. Provide access to intelligent informationGetting access to the right information at the right time prevents customer frustration and escalation. LIKE.TG Knowledge Management offers customers the option to search or browse for answers in knowledge base articles. It’s a capability that Engagement Messenger leverages, via AI Search, to help customers get quick answers to their questions without having to go somewhere else or stop what they’re doing.Engagement Messenger can also present featured articles that help anticipate information a customer may need. Customers can provide feedback on whether an article was helpful or not to improve the relevance of future engagements.3. Deliver personalized serviceBeing able to access key services on the sites customers visit provides a level of convenience they greatly appreciate. However, to create the value organizations want and customers expect, these services should use known information about the customer to make it as easy as possible for them to do what they want.Adding Engagement Messenger to websites helps organizations offer the personalized services customers are looking for, such as opening or reviewing the status of their case, making requests through a service catalog, scheduling a walk-up appointment, or requesting a field service technician visit.These capabilities personalize the service experience, giving customers access to their own personal information from wherever they are on their customer journey. For example, customers can manage, create, and view their case details without having to navigate to the service portal. Or, they can browse a list of available catalog items and submit a request that’s automatically routed to the relevant teams that can assist them.4. Anticipate customer needsAnticipating what customers need by knowing when and where to provide services makes them feel understood by the organization. In the Now Platform Rome release, we added the ability to launch Engagement Messenger from an icon, button, custom link, or URL on a website. This allows a customer to initiate engagement and immediately get an appropriate response from the organization.Engagement Messenger is launched at the customer’s point of need and displays the relevant service features to best address their request. With chat, for example, this means launching the conversation in the customer’s selected language.This flexibility provides a better engagement experience by allowing organizations to configure what they present based on their understanding of the customer journey. For example, an organization can launch Engagement Messenger with Virtual Agent to help the customer complete an e-commerce purchase, assist with product warranties, or book an in-store appointment.5. Get up and running fastCustomer satisfaction scores improve when customers no longer need to hunt for support. Instead, they can complete their journey and get the help they need without having to leave their current experience.With Engagement Messenger, a wizard allows organizations to easily create one or more service modules and configure their behavior, appearance, and styling to suit the online channel in which they’ll be embedded (see Figure 2). This gives organizations the ability to configure the appearance and behavior of their modules to align with the company’s branding, as well as customers’ specific needs.
Figure 2: A wizard in Engagement Messenger lets organizations configure service modules to suit the channel they’ll be embedded in.Once created, the low-code/no-code solution automatically generates a few lines of code that will add the Engagement Messenger to the website. This code can be emailed to a web administrator, making it easy to embed anywhere.Organizations that have already invested in self-service features—such as virtual agents and robust knowledge bases—can leverage existing capabilities using Engagement Messenger to lower their cost of ownership and deliver service anytime, anywhere.Engagement Messenger helps organizations create the kinds of experiences customers will remember for all the right reasons.Learn about more Customer Service Management innovations in the Rome release at Now at Work. Registration is free.
Helping customers answer the trillion-dollar digital transformation question
As a former chief experience officer, I’ve seen just how impactful digital transformation can be. When I worked at Under Armour, we focused on our customers’ connected fitness journey, which unlocked new revenue streams and engagement opportunities.Yet, I’ve been around long enough to see my fair share of disappointments and underperforming projects. Any C-level executive will say the same.IDC estimates that more than $3 trillion have been invested in digital transformation initiatives globally over the past three years, but less than half of organizations implementing those projects have yet to achieve the expected outcomes.1 In fact, our successes at Under Armour were something of an anomaly.According to the 2021 McKinsey Global Survey, less than one-third of “companies’ transformations have been successful at both improving organizational performance and sustaining those improvements over time.”However, leaders are still expected to deliver innovative digital products and experiences—and for good reason. The right digital transformation can supercharge a business in today’s competitive digital world. The trillion-dollar question is: Can we flip the script, change mindsets and behaviors, and foster an environment in which the majority of organizations realize their expected ROI?I believe the answer is yes. Over the past six months, we’ve been on a journey here at LIKE.TG to enable just such a reality, and we’re really excited to announce LIKE.TG Impact™, available today.
Efficiency unleashed: 4 ways to empower customer service agents
Updated Oct. 4, 2023In the dynamic world of customer service, efficiency is the secret ingredient that turns good into great. It enables tasks to be done well while saving time, effort, and resources. Efficiency can help organizations meet and exceed customer expectations.Let’s dive into four capabilities that promise to supercharge customer service. These capabilities aren't just about making things run smoother; they're about empowering customer service agents and transforming the entire customer experience.1. Customer self-serviceEnabling customers to help themselves is nothing short of revolutionary. In this digital age, many customers prefer to self-serve to achieve their desired outcomes before reaching out to customer service.Giving customers the tools for resolution—such as a self-service portal and catalog, knowledge base, and community—can reduce the number of incoming cases while addressing the needs of a customer base that values efficiency and autonomy.Fewer cases mean more than streamlined operations. The reduction translates to happier, more productive, and deeply empathetic agents who have more time to dedicate their expertise to the most complex issues, where their human touch truly shines. It’s a win-win, if there ever was one.2. Generative AIGenerative AI marks a pivotal moment in the evolution of customer service. At the heart of this transformation lies the ability to intelligently speed up time-consuming tasks such as sifting through case notes to understand a customer’s request, manually entering work notes, and drafting customer emails.Addressing customer needs quickly and consistently can be heavily augmented by generative AI. For example, the technology can generate case and chat summaries, allowing agents and managers to quickly get up to speed on a case and reducing errors as cases get assigned between departments.Emails can be automatically drafted by taking case context and customer sentiment into account, promoting empathy and accelerating response times. Case wrap-up can be automated, increasing agent productivity so they can move on to the next case.These are just a few examples of how generative AI can help agents redirect their valuable time and expertise toward more vital and effective work that results in exceptional customer experiences.3. Workforce optimizationWorkforce optimization represents a paradigm shift in the realm of customer service. It both simplifies customer service operations and empowers agents, thus elevating the overall service experience.Through unparalleled visibility across channels and workloads, and real-time performance reporting, workforce optimization can transform team productivity.Workforce optimization solutions help break down silos between teams by streamlining scheduling, coverage tracking, and the management of shifts and time-off requests. This can enable precise agent demand forecasting and demand scenario modeling so that your team is always appropriately staffed, even during surges in customer inquiries.Additionally, workforce optimization is a master of omnichannel optimization and agent empowerment. It can help ensure your customer service operations run smoothly across all communication channels for a unified customer experience. It also provides agent coaching and development opportunities so that agents can continually enhance their skills. The result is a team of empowered, self-motivated agents who deliver top-tier service.4. Integrations with systems of recordIntegrations are a vital facet to optimizing and fortifying customer service operations. By seamlessly connecting third-party applications, systems, and data sources, integrations can create a unified ecosystem that fuels efficiency and agility.Consider the concrete impact: a significant reduction in the cumbersome practice of "swivel chairing" that has long plagued customer service agents. Integrating third-party applications and legacy systems frees agents from needing to constantly navigate between disparate tools and interfaces to access customer information.Integrations help agents streamline their workflows and enhance their effectiveness. In doing so, they empower agents to focus on what truly matters: providing exceptional customer service and tailored solutions.The next level of customer serviceEfficiency is the name of the game in modern customer service. Self-service, generative AI, workforce optimization, and the ability to integrate third-party applications are catalysts for change. They empower agents, simplify processes, and ultimately elevate customer experiences.As you ponder how to take your customer service to the next level, consider these capabilities your secret weapons. They're the difference between simply managing customer service and excelling at it. In an era where every interaction counts, efficiency isn't an option—it's a necessity.Find out more about how you can empower agents with real-time information and intelligence.
LIKE.TG and Qualtrics enhance customer service to deliver empathy
When a customer service agent picks up a phone or opens an email or text, there's usually a stressed or upset customer on the other end. A package didn’t arrive. A bill contained incorrect charges. A server crashed, and no one can access their data.This is a crucial moment that can make or break relationships—as can any customer interaction with a company, from buying a product to asking for help. It can even happen while the agent engages with other teams to resolve an issue. Solving the problem quickly, regardless of where it occurs, is the best solution. But until that happens, what customers want to hear is that the company actually cares about their problems. They want empathy.Personalizing customer serviceOne way to demonstrate empathy is to familiarize yourself with someone's situation so they don't feel like another number or case file. An agent needs to access specific customer information to be able to offer personalized service to that customer.Yet, companies tend to collect rudimentary data about customers, such as basic satisfaction scores, not the kind of information that can really improve the experience. And the systems that capture the data are often disconnected from the systems that manage service and support interactions.To help organizations deliver more meaningful, personalized service experiences at scale, LIKE.TG and Qualtrics have added new capabilities. Combining LIKE.TG digital workflows with Qualtrics experience management technology, companies can harness and act on customer experience data in real time. This allows them to quickly resolve issues and help improve experiences, increasing engagement, loyalty, and retention.“Great experiences are the modern currency of business,” says Jay Choi, chief product officer at Qualtrics. “The experiences that companies deliver today can become their greatest competitive advantage tomorrow."
The importance of empathyIn a world beset by deadlines, impatience, and short tempers, empathy is more crucial than ever. As companies of all sizes and across every industry continue to compete on experience, they need to re-earn loyalty with every interaction.According to research from Qualtrics and LIKE.TG, 80% of respondents have switched brands because of poor customer experience. Loyalty can only be earned when the whole company—the people and systems—work together.Because many companies haven’t connected their people, processes, and systems, they can’t resolve the issues at hand quickly or with full transparency and empathy. Productivity is slowed, and customers are frustrated that their expectations for fast, simple, and seamless customer service aren’t being met.Delivering superior empathy and customer serviceTo address this challenge, organizations can now access additional customer experience data from Qualtrics on the Now Platform® via the Qualtrics CustomerXM™ and LIKE.TG® Customer Service Management integration. The data will empower service teams to create personalized workflows and automate experiences, increasing loyalty and spend while helping to reduce operational costs.For example, certain customers can be categorized as high-value customers with low satisfaction scores who represent a high-risk customer segment that most companies want to avoid losing. By understanding these attributes, a company can provide unique and proactive service experiences for this segment when an issue occurs.When a high-value/low-satisfaction customer goes to a brand’s website to ask about a shipping delay, a Virtual Agent can identify the customer at once and proactively offer a credit or connection to a live service agent (see Figure 1). Paying a little extra attention to that high-value customer will go a long way toward making sure they remain a customer for the foreseeable future.
Figure 1: Virtual Agent support that identifies a customer and offers a personalized solution to their issue can increase customer loyalty.Forbes reports that personalizing the customer service experience can yield up to a 500% increase in overall consumer spending."Companies who understand and act on experience data—the feedback that employees and customers share with them—will successfully build long-term relationships with their most important stakeholders," Choi says.Looking aheadLIKE.TG and Qualtrics are working on further advancements for 2022 that will visualize sentiment and profile data directly on the Now Platform. This will enable service agents to see customer data in a more holistic and meaningful way.Organizations that succeed in the future will be the ones that show their customers they truly care. In order to show customers you truly care about them, you need to know them, and you need to be able to connect people, processes, and systems to deliver the seamless experiences that customers want.After all, customers want speed and convenience in addition to knowledgeable and friendly help. Access to rich customer insights allows organizations to respond to individual needs and powers digital workflows that drive great experiences, customer loyalty, and empathy. LIKE.TG and Qualtrics' continuing partnership will empower service agents to act on that empathy.Visualization of sentiment and customer and employee profile details, along with visualization of satisfaction insights and stakeholder feedback, are expected to be available in 2022.Customers can access the enhanced Qualtrics Customer Experience Management and LIKE.TG Customer Service Management integration immediately on the LIKE.TG Store and the Qualtrics Marketplace.
How to improve customer engagement: Use conversational messaging
Prithvi Yoganand, product management director for Customer Service Management at LIKE.TG, co-authored this blog.How we communicate with each other has changed, thanks in large part to rapidly evolving technology. Every day, we spend time online and on our smartphones. We’re accustomed to rich messaging with family and friends using images, videos, and emojis to help make our point and highlight our meaning. We also communicate asynchronously, meaning when we have time and it’s convenient for us.Increasingly, consumers expect to engage with organizations the same way. Meeting customers on their terms, their timing, and their channel of choice isn’t always easy for businesses and institutions to do. Many organizations are revising their customer engagement strategies and augmenting their traditional channels to focus on conversational messaging. LIKE.TG can help.Concentrate on conversationsConversational Messaging for LIKE.TG® Customer Service Management enables organizations to accelerate the adoption of messaging and quickly deploy conversational experiences with WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and LINE to better engage and serve their customers.Conversations can be initiated by the customer, an agent, or the system. Once an interaction has begun, customers get immediate help from either a live agent or a Virtual Agent with natural language understanding (NLU)—which can understand the user’s statements and initiate the right response. Additionally, these conversations can extend over many days to maintain continuity of experience for the customer.Meet them with messagingConversational Messaging provides a flexible messaging framework that allows organizations to engage with their customers or constituents wherever they are. The framework not only provides integrations with popular messaging channels out of the box, but it also allows organizations to add adapters for connecting to other messaging channels used by their customers.Once these conversational integrations are set up, configured, and enabled, organizations can accept customer-initiated messages and start engaging with them directly. For example, customers can send a message to start a conversation and quickly resolve a product issue (see Figure 1).
Figure 1: Customer-initiated message about a product issue that launches an interaction with Virtual AgentThe Now Platform Rome release enables organizations to use WhatsApp and LINE to send system-initiated messages to update customers on key information. These messages can be non-actionable (providing a status update or confirming an order) or actionable (asking for more information or taking a next step). Actionable messages can then launch the Virtual Agent dialog to help customers perform an action, such as initiate a return or exchange a product (see Figure 2).
Figure 2: System-initiated message for product delivery with options to return, exchange, or send feedbackThe Rome release also added the ability for individual agents to initiate messages directly to customers using WhatsApp and LINE. Agents can compose new messages or continue an existing conversation with the customer at any time.Create engaging experiencesRich messaging goes beyond traditional texting to create better experiences for both customers and agents. It enables communications with pictures and videos, as well as engaging graphical elements, such as controls and buttons, that allow users to make choices and take actions.For example, a customer can initiate a conversation to ask about an appointment and then use an interactive calendar to schedule and book that appointment at their convenience (see Figure 3).
Figure 3: Customer rescheduling an appointment using Conversational Appointment BookingAgents can also see chat transcripts of a customer’s previous messaging interactions from their workspace so they know exactly what information the customer was given and what they did with it. Agents can then initiate rich messages to keep the conversation moving forward and help the customer take the next step.Simplify servicesAdditionally, the Rome release introduced the Messaging Service, which allows customers to purchase SMS and WhatsApp services directly from LIKE.TG at favorable, pre-negotiated messaging rates.Previously, LIKE.TG customers who wanted to use messaging channels (such as SMS and WhatsApp) needed to acquire services and negotiate separate contracts with multiple vendors on their own. With this offering, LIKE.TG simplifies the process by managing and billing the customer for SMS and WhatsApp access.By enabling customers to interact with your organization from the channel of their choice, you can enrich your engagement, reduce the likelihood of expensive escalations, and deliver more productive experiences for customers and agents. Learn more about how Conversational Messaging can help improve customer engagement and satisfaction.
Driving customer experience with connected digital workflows
The success of any organization, brand, product, or service hinges on customer sentiment. Positive customer experience leads to positive feelings. To deliver the best experience for every customer at scale, companies must address needs quickly, transparently, and proactively. That starts by connecting customer engagement, operations, data, people, and processes in a single system of action.With LIKE.TG, customer issues and requests are broken down into tasks that can be automated. Multistep processes are standardized and orchestrated to save time and money. This frees agents to focus on delighting customers and allows you to create experiences that make each customer feel seen and valued.Creating a seamless customer experienceAlthough experience is everything, many businesses still operate with disconnected systems (legacy or otherwise). Delivering seamless experiences requires connecting people, processes, and teams to:
Reduce resolution time.
Eradicate muddy experiences.
Rise to meet customer expectations.
Blackhawk Network, which produces the gift cards for sale in grocery stores, is transforming customer experience with a LIKE.TG form called Submit an idea. It allows employees to suggest customer service improvements. Each suggestion gets its own ticket, making it actionable and trackable as it goes from idea to demand to implementation to measurement right on the Now Platform.In two years, Blackhawk Network received nearly 1,200 employee ideas, implemented about half of them, and paid its agents $16,000 in rewards. The employee-submitted suggestions have saved the company more than $2 million.
Putting the flow back into workDigital transformation investments, which were already expected to account for $7 trillion between 2020 and 2024, according to IDC, have accelerated due to COVID-19. With those increases comes the need to take experience off the page and make it reality. To do that, businesses need to connect their front-, middle-, and back-office teams, technologies, and processes.Dreamworld, Australia’s biggest theme park, uses LIKE.TG to monitor, troubleshoot, and service everything that happens across the 40- to 50-acre property. The details, including food safety information for several hundred thousand dollars’ worth of food in the park’s fridges and freezers, are all recorded in ServiceNow.Internet of Things (IoT) sensors attached to all of the park’s refrigerators and freezers enable Dreamworld to gather all the temperature readings, work orders, and everything else needed for an inspection in one click. Just this effort saves team members more than 500 hours per year.
Scaling customer operationsGerman parking solutions company Scheidt Bachmann has “intelligent mobility” transportation-related divisions. To better deliver satisfactory experiences across its 10,000 parking lots in more than 50 countries, the company needed a platform-based system with end-to-end integration.Scheidt Bachmann connected its customer service, field service, and enterprise resource planning (ERP) processes using ServiceNow. In a surprising addition, the company used the customer portal that comes with LIKE.TG Customer Service Management to allow its customers to make requests for on-site service.Boris Ansorge, director of global service at Scheidt Bachmann, said 97% of customers are satisfied or very satisfied with the service.Learn how your organization can offer superior customer experiences by downloading our Customer Workflows Book of Knowledge.
How Customer Data Models for B2B2C improve customer service
Sharath Lagisetty, senior principal product manager for Customer Workflows at LIKE.TG, co-authored this blog.As companies engage with different customers and partners via digital channels, it’s critical to establish a rich understanding of each entity and their relationships, both to the company and to each other.The latest release of LIKE.TG® Customer Service Management extends Customer Data Models to support multilevel relationships. That means not only business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) relationships are captured and modeled, but also business-to-business-to-consumer (B2B2C) relationships.Organizations can now quickly understand complex, multilevel relationships in order to simplify workflows and optimize the value of their interactions.Benefits of customer data modelsCustomer data models build the connections organizations need to understand their customers—and their customers’ customers—so they can innovate fast and serve all parties well. LIKE.TG customer data models provide:
Out-of-the-box capabilities that save organizations the time and resources typically required to build and customize complex, multilevel customer relationship models
Visibility throughout the value chain that allows organizations to trace cases and optimize workflows—from business customers to end customers—and speed their completion
Security that ensures customer data is only available to those authorized to see it, when they need to see it (e.g., when assisting a customer)
What multilevel customer data models look likeThe best way to understand the benefits of these multilevel customer data models is with a familiar example.Consider an automobile manufacturer that has both business customers (dealerships) and end consumers (car owners) who purchase its automobiles. The manufacturer needs visibility into the cars it sells to its dealers (B2B), as well as the end consumers who buy the cars (B2C).Enhancements in the Now Platform Rome release enable manufacturers to take this visibility further, putting these pieces together to see which customers are connected to which dealerships (B2B2C: auto manufacturer to dealership to consumer).This out-of-the-box functionality helps reduce customizations and speeds deployment of multi-relationship workflows. Now, when a customer calls the dealer to report an issue with their car, the dealer can create a case on their behalf that’s immediately visible to the auto manufacturer and routed to the appropriate customer service representative (see Figure 1).Alternatively, when a customer goes directly to the manufacturer to initiate a case, the manufacturer will be able to see the customer’s relationship with different dealers and accommodate their preferences.For instance, they’ll see the customer purchased the car from one dealer but subsequently had it serviced multiple times by another dealer. So, they’ll connect the customer with their preferred service dealer to get an appointment.
Figure 1: An auto manufacturer’s view of customer cases currently being handled by a particular dealershipCustomer data models for all industriesAlmost every industry can benefit from multilevel relationship data models. For example:
Telecom companies need visibility into the connectivity/wireless plans they provide to their business customers, as well as the end users (employees) those businesses have signed up for different services and plans. The telecom provider needs to know which subscribers are employees of which business customers, along with the specific products and services they’re subscribed to.
Insurance companies need visibility into the life insurance plans their business customers are using as part of their human resources benefits for employees, as well as the individual employees who are signed up for those plans. The insurance company needs to know which life insurance policy holder is an employee of which business customer, along with the specific policies they’ve subscribed to.
Healthcare payers need visibility into the health plans they’ve offered their business customers, as well as the employees that business customers have signed up for those plans. The healthcare payer needs to know which member is an employee of which business customer, along with the specific health plan they’ve subscribed to.
Modeling complex relationshipsLIKE.TG Customer Data Models for B2B2C give organizations visibility into multilevel relationships that provide a more holistic understanding of a customer’s touch points and interactions. Prior to the Rome release, LIKE.TG Customer Service Management made it easy to model complex relationships between:
Accounts (and account contacts): Business customers and their employees
Partners (and partner contacts): Partners of business customers and their employees
Consumers: Consumers who interact directly with the company (B2C)
Households (and household members): Household units and their members, as well as their relationships
With the Rome release, organizations can now also easily model complex relationships between:
Business accounts and consumers
Business contacts and consumers
Business partners and consumers
Organizations can use these models to quickly see and understand what a customer bought and used, where they bought it, who they bought it from, who serviced it, any internal relationships (e.g., with a case worker, account manager) or external relationships (e.g., with a business customer or partner) they have, etc.This allows the organization to better serve its customers while maintaining tight, secure control over the data—ensuring it’s only available to customers, partners, and employees when required.Learn more about Customer Service Management.
Addressing Australia’s customer service generation gap
All age groups demand speed, transparency, and a personalized approach when it comes to resolving customer issues. But new research from LIKE.TG reveals a stark gap between how Australia’s oldest and youngest populations want issues addressed.Tech-savvy millennials want to communicate through chatbots, email, and direct messages. Baby boomers prefer to speak to an operator to resolve a problem. Other generations lie somewhere in between. Post-pandemic, many will opt for self-service but be just as happy to speak to someone—as long as their issue is addressed quickly and transparently.The generation gap creates a conundrum for businesses trying to develop a post-COVID-19 customer service mix that works for everyone.Do you ditch phone calls to resolve disputes, in favor of automation? This can save costs but potentially alienate older segments of your customer base. What about millennials, who want to jump online and instantly resolve a problem? And how do you connect these different systems so every team or department can address issues fast?The answer lies in a streamlined, hybrid model where efficiency is the hero and customers have real-time visibility into when and how their issue will be resolved.Something for everyoneData is driving the need for a diverse approach. The research shows 71% of baby boomers favor speaking to a person to resolve a problem. That’s nearly four times greater than Gen Z (18%) and more than double millennials (31%).The pandemic has driven an overall rise in customers resorting to self-service options when they have issues, with a quarter of survey respondents (including a large portion of Gen Z) using self-service systems. Across all channels, key priorities are having issues fixed quickly (51%) and dealing with one person (44%).In every sector, the need to improve customer service comes at a time when expectations and demands are rising. More than a third of survey respondents (36%) said their customer service expectations have increased post-pandemic. One in four reported they’ve contacted customer service teams more, putting pressure on organizations to respond or risk losing business.
Finding common groundDifferent generations are also divided on who’s leading—and lagging—when it comes to resolving customer complaints. Although everyone agrees the telecommunications industry and government departments rate the worst, Gen Z and millennials believe the food and beverage industry needs to step up when it comes to resolving customer issues.Perhaps this divide directly correlates to what constitutes good customer service. For Gen Z, it’s all about getting issues fixed quickly and receiving compensation or special offers to remedy issues. Older generations believe it comes down to customer service agents knowing their details while being able to speak to someone based in country.Despite the differences, there’s one thing the generations agree on: No one likes to wait on hold. Yet, Australians clocked 89.5 million wasted hours on hold in the past 18 months. And a third of people (31%) say wait times are getting worse. Now is the time for businesses to overhaul their customer service departments.A roadmap for the futureIn 2022, customer experience will continue to be critical to business success, requiring organizations to streamline their complaint resolution processes for a frictionless, fast, and fail-proof approach. Success will be built around customer satisfaction. The quality of complaint resolution is an integral part of positive customer experience, directly influencing where consumers spend their money and how loyal they remain to your brand.To find a solution that satisfies all age groups, organizations need to reimagine their service model mix while providing transparency at every step of the process, so customers know exactly what’s happening and when.Many organizations will look to a hybrid model that prioritizes digitization but provides the capacity to speak to team members—while simultaneously reducing hold times. Ensuring front, middle, and back-office teams are connected will avoid bottlenecks and enable automation to increase speed, efficiency, and customer satisfaction.Whatever the solution, the focus should be on the delivery: an efficient, genuine experience that leaves customers feeling valued.Find out more in our ebook: Evolving Customer Experiences and Expectations in Australia.
5 steps to shift from reactive to proactive field service
Proactive field service is about being one step ahead of your customers. It requires systems that meet customer needs while minimizing their efforts.When thinking about moving from a reactive field service model to a proactive one, most people jump to the Internet of Things (IoT), servitization, and outcome-based services. But it’s important to first create an operationally efficient foundation that benefits both customers and employees. These five steps can help.1. Listen to your customersThink outward first when moving to more proactive service. Start by asking for customer feedback.
What do customers need?
What information do customers want, and how is it best delivered to them?
When do they prefer to troubleshoot on their own, and when do they prefer to speak with a technical support engineer?
Identifying these answers can position you to provide the most value to your customers. Surveys are a good place to begin. A survey can ask for desired information and communication methods. It can also address general customer satisfaction and Net Promoter Score inquiries.2. Build a strategy for quick winsOnce you understand your customer needs, at both a macro and micro level, you can build out your strategy to address where you want to go and the steps to get there. You don’t have to do it all at once. Take small steps, get quick wins, and learn from the process.A solid strategy should take into account what’s in your control and what you can influence. Consider all the human elements and technological and change management implications. Create feedback loops from customers and employees to continue to iterate on the journey.Although a primary goal is to stay one step ahead of your customers’ needs, things will break. Consider how you can help prevent that and how you can minimize the inconvenience when things do break.
3. Automate and optimize processesMost organizations still rely on manual methods to some degree for their field service operations. Various parts of the organization often operate in silos. Smart, integrated, digital investments help organizations:
Improve service quality and response times
Provide real-time visibility into customer and equipment statuses
Reduce time spent on administrative tasks
Reach across multiple systems and present the data necessary to the user to perform their assigned tasks
Digitizing manual processes that hinder efficiency can help proactively deliver progress updates. Digital workflows enable you to answer queries or deflect incidents earlier in the customer journey. They can also free field service professionals to ensure their customers feel valued and supported.4. Make maintenance work for your customersMaintenance contracts that help detect and address issues before equipment fails can minimize customer disruptions. The types of contracts you offer may be an evolution as you progress on your journey toward proactive service.Service companies start contractual services with warranty extensions and time and materials coverage. The next phase is offering preventive maintenance contracts that provide service on set schedules (i.e., quarterly, semi-annually, etc.). While visits are within the window, timing between visits may vary.Cycle-based preventive maintenance controls the interval of time between visits to keep it consistent. This is the most effective for equipment uptime but can result in performing unnecessary maintenance. Usage-based preventive maintenance is the most proactive, attending to maintenance based on how much equipment has been used.5. Empower customers with self-serviceBeing able to access and request information through customer portals, email, chat, and telephone empowers customers with self-service capabilities. An omni-channel solution helps meet customers where they are on the channel of their choice, with a human touch if needed.Customer portals can do much more than customer-initiated product information inquiries. These portals can be enabled to offer pertinent knowledge base articles and more, such as:
Interactive chat inquiry and response using natural language
Service request initiation and status updates
Appointment booking
Moving from reactive to proactive service can improve the customer experience, reduce resolution time, drive operational excellence, reduce the cost of service delivery, and help pave the way for new service offerings.Find out more about delivering proactive field service in our on-demand webinar.
3 ways to supercharge your customer service
Successful customer service requires connecting the dots across an entire organization’s teams, systems, and data to address customer needs seamlessly and efficiently. A task of this magnitude and facets comes with myriad challenges. Automation, artificial intelligence (AI), and other advanced technologies can help.Let's explore three ways you can use emerging tech to address your customers' needs proactively and effectively.1. Prioritize digital serviceWhen it comes to customer service, digitization is table stakes. Companies have grown to adapt, but innovation happens faster than organizational change. As a result, businesses struggle to overcome working in digital silos.Watch our How—and why—you should digitize your customer service webinar to learn how you can innovate your technology, processes, and culture. Forrester Research Senior Analyst Christina McAllister joins Michael Ramsey, LIKE.TG VP of product management for customer workflow products, to discuss the importance of digital customer service.With insights from Forrester’s How to Reinvent Customer Service to be Digital-First report, you’ll discover how to:
Satisfy more customers by decreasing resolution times and costs
Solve issues before customers are aware of them
Expand customers’ digital options with chat and messaging
2. Challenge conventionsIt can be difficult for employees to voice their opinions about longstanding business practices and processes. Yet, without change, scaling the business to achieve greater success becomes increasingly difficult. Rapidly growing companies require scaling their customer operations to keep up with client engagements.CDW, a LIKE.TG customer and a member of the Technology Services Industry Association (TSIA), has successfully conquered this struggle. Watch Customer journeys and the service lifecycle to find out how.Tim Ancona, VP of LIKE.TG solutions at CDW, shares how challenging the status quo led to a service delivery model that relies on centralized management of an end-to-end service lifecycle. Experts from TSIA and LIKE.TG join him for an informative exchange.3. Innovate relentlesslyNo matter your organization’s size or industry, constant learning and innovation should be core practices. The smallest ideas and steps toward improvement can add up to push your company forward and keep ahead of your competitors.Learning requires being open to change. With that premise in mind, listen in on a conversation between Ray Wang, founder and principal analyst of Constellation Research, and Dean Robison, senior VP of customer service and support at ServiceNow.In Prepare for the future of customer service, you’ll get ideas to help you:
Rethink operational excellence in your business
Unlock the potential in your organization’s value chain
Drive business value using digital workflows
4 ways to turn field service customers into fans
It’s January 1969, and the pressure is on. Paul, John, George, and Ringo have 17 days to write and record 14 songs. Peter Jackson’s epic documentary, “Get Back,” captures their creative process. We witness individual genius at work, but it’s when the Fab Four play together that we experience the magic of the Beatles.I think the same is true of field service. Our industry is full of talented individuals who are often under pressure. Only when your front, middle, and back-office teams work together in harmony are your field service professionals able to do their best work and truly shine. Field service can, and should, be a strategic differentiator. Let’s explore four ways it can help drive differentiation.1. Strengthen customer experienceHitting the high notes of customer experience starts with understanding what makes customers happy. For customers who depend on field service to keep business-critical assets running, happiness equals more uptime.The best way to deliver standout service is to prevent issues. LIKE.TG® Field Service Management (FSM) provides the insights you need to get ahead of problems and reduce customer effort and angst. When things do go wrong, FSM can help you fix them proactively, quickly, and effectively—keeping customers in the loop.Asset-centric support is only one type of fieldwork. Consumer-centric services such as property maintenance, financial advice, home deliveries, and home healthcare all depend on field workers too. Pioneering healthcare technology provider Tunstall has seen a 70% increase in customer satisfaction since choosing FSM. We’re proud to help Tunstall support vital care providers.2. Amplify employee experienceThe Great Resignation makes it more important than ever to raise the bar on employee satisfaction. As John Perry, vice president of global delivery and transformation at Xerox, explains, “People don’t join this industry to get bogged down in admin. They join it because they like finding solutions to tough problems.”By automating and optimizing processes, we’ve helped Xerox reduce manual, repetitive admin so that field teams can focus on solving tough problems.LIKE.TG Virtual Agent helps customers find solutions to simple issues on their own. This frees field teams to focus on tasks that add value to the business. When workers are in the field, our mobile field service app gives instant access to the knowledge they need to do their best work.We’ve also partnered with, and invested in, CareAR (a Xerox company) to harness the benefits of augmented reality (AR) for field service. One benefit is support for less experienced technicians. They can work virtually side by side with expert colleagues, expediting issue resolution.
3. Work smarter to reduce costsImproving efficiency is on everyone’s playlist. Marginal gains in field service operations can make a huge difference in decreasing costs. With process automation, artificial intelligence (AI), and low-code tools available out of the box, LIKE.TG FSM helps you get to value fast. And it’s easily customizable, evolving with your changing needs.Scheidt Bachmann, the world’s foremost digital parking solution provider, is realizing the benefits of dynamic scheduling. Using FSM, work is routed based on skill matching, availability, location, and service time windows. Dispatchers and managers have the visibility they need to make informed decisions, fast. Customers get experience-enhancing service, fix-first-visit rates increase, and costs decrease.Digital payments innovator SIA (now part of the Nexi Group) reports an 80% reduction in effort to log work since it started working with LIKE.TG approximately two years ago. FSM helps the company work smarter and has saved it 48,000 hours.4. Increase revenueThe Beatles song “Get Back” is built on three chords. Speaking from experience, they’re relatively easy to master, but you have to get the basics right before you can add flourishes. Otherwise, you end up in a mess.Similarly, field service can be a powerful revenue generator for your business, but you have to get the basics in place before you can build. Whether you’re looking for more value from existing revenue streams or want to transform to an outcome-based model, FSM gives you the agile platform you need to respond to market changes and accelerate growth.According to Forrester, enterprises may realize a return on investment of 310% over three years by deploying LIKE.TG FSM.1Hear from some of our fans what’s working and what they value most about our approach in The field service experience ebook.1 The Total Economic Impact of LIKE.TG Field Service Management, Forrester, December 2020
CRM Watchlist recognizes LIKE.TG customer service strategy
I’m pleased to announce LIKE.TG has been named a Winner with Distinction on the CRM Watchlist 2022. The annual awards recognize organizations with high market impact in the previous year that are well positioned to continue that trend over the next three years.LIKE.TG is the only vendor recognized for its mission and vision. We believe this validates our strategy to go beyond customer engagement and bring together all parts of the organization to deliver quick, proactive, and transparent customer service.This win is especially exciting because it affirms our commitment to make the world work better for everyone. We do that by connecting departments and empowering teams to better meet customer needs and achieve long-term loyalty.Meeting customers where they areOur vision is to help companies deliver an effortless customer experience. Companies know they’re competing on experience, not products. How customers achieve their desired outcomes is what matters.Providing an excellent experience goes beyond being able to receive interactions over various communication channels. By bringing people, processes, and systems together across departments onto a single system of action, organizations can fulfil customer requests quickly and effortlessly.With LIKE.TG® Customer Service Management and related industry products, we help companies supercharge the customer experience from issue to resolution.Customer innovation7-Eleven is using Customer Service Management to deliver seamless experiences and maintain customer loyalty. The company embraced digital technologies to accelerate resolution by creating the 7-Help customer help desk. It brings together 20 different help desks and gives both customers and store franchises a single platform to use for reporting issues and requesting services.The omni-channel capabilities of Customer Service Management help 7-Eleven customers receive support when, where, and how they want it. The operational capabilities help ensure the 7-Eleven organization is working toward a model that proactively detects customer hindrances while continuously improving.Empowering a successful futureThe demand for effortless customer experiences will only increase in the coming years. Innovative companies are embracing digital transformation to drive best-in-class consumer-like experiences for both business customers and consumers.When an organization is connected and united in the goal of serving customers better, great things happen.Find out how Customer Service Management can help your organization deliver a seamless customer experience.
Streamlining customer service to eliminate wasted time on hold
Collective sighs from being left on hold to customer service are reverberating around the world—especially in Australia. Research from LIKE.TG revealed Australians wasted 89.5 million hours on hold trying to resolve complaints in the past 18 months. That’s an average of seven hours per person.The seven-hour experience is a wave of emotions—from tolerance while listening to hold music to joy when finally getting through to an operator, to frustration at having to explain your situation another time, only to be placed on hold again. In a world with technology at our fingertips, there has to be an easier way.Room for improvementYet, many Australians believe the situation is getting worse. More than half (53%) of survey respondents said the average time they spent on hold increased during the pandemic. A third said it increased “a lot.”Although consumer use of technology has evolved, businesses haven’t kept pace. They must address the “great hold” by balancing a seamless shopping experience with effective complaint management.Many businesses admit they could do better. According to the research, 40% of chief customer care officers know the importance of focusing on creating positive customer experiences. And a third of chief operating officers want to better integrate risk and compliance controls into their customer service processes.The telecommunications and government industries performed poorest when it came to resolving issues, according to the survey. The common frustration lies in inefficiency and repetition. Australians cited long response times, having to repeat their issue to multiple people, hours on hold trying to resolve a problem, and being passed around internal departments as their biggest irritations.High expectationsToday’s Australian consumers expect more from organizations than ever before. More than a third (36%) of survey respondents said their expectations rose during the pandemic. They have limited patience to deal with shortcomings. They want quick, reliable service—every time.Rightly so. It’s 2022. The pandemic has sped up the evolution of digitization, particularly around e-commerce and how consumers interact with big business. If we can use QR codes to purchase items and check in to venues, use apps to order the delivery of everything from groceries to medicine, and store critical vaccine information on our phones, why can’t we resolve an issue with the touch of a button?
Reimagining the customer experienceMoving forward, the customer experience will be critical to business success, requiring organizations to streamline their complaint resolution processes for a frictionless, fast, and fail-proof approach.The days of waiting on hold are numbered. Customers want to feel seen, heard, and valued, and have their issues taken seriously. Businesses need to act fast to fix the problem.As consumers insist on convenience, efficiency, and ease when resolving problems, organizations will need to focus on issue management processes. A top-notch complaint resolution system will become as important as the overall shopping experience, particularly in retaining customers and driving repeat business.In a hyper-competitive marketplace, organizations will need to find ways to ditch customer waiting. According to the 2021 Global Contact Center Survey by Deloitte Digital, companies leading the way in customer service post-pandemic are the ones accelerating their digital transformation efforts and reimagining their mix of service channels.Striving for greatness in customer service should be a core strategic focus for every business. Companies need to pinpoint the obstacles to a best-practice customer dispute resolution process and then restructure accordingly.The priority should be on automation—streamlining processes and removing bottlenecks by creating a self-service platform that reduces or eliminates hold times, diverts calls to email or instant chat, or uses autofill forms to filter issues and direct customers to the most appropriate place to resolve their problem.Find out how Customer Service Management can help.
Great customer experience is easier than you think
Lionel Richie thinks Sunday morning is easy. Ella Fitzgerald thinks living is easy when it’s summertime. Loving is easy too, according to Rex Orange County.I haven’t heard anyone sing about customer experience just yet (Alexa?). But every time I preorder my Starbucks latte so it’s waiting for me at the store on my way to work, I’m reminded just how important easy is. If easy is the on/off switch for great experience, then speed controls the volume. We expect good things to happen faster than ever before.Reducing customer effortThere’s been a lot of talk about delighting customers. I’m a huge fan of anything that sparks joy. But in most cases, what customers really want is for things to work the way they should—without delay or hassle. For example:
You forgot to cancel a direct debit. When you contact your bank, you’re not in search of delight. You want to recoup the money—fast. And you want to know when it’s back in your account.
Your telecom provider needs to do essential maintenance. That’s fine, but you’d like advance warning of any potential disturbance. Nobody wants to lose connection halfway through an important call.
When a family member relies on in-home healthcare, you need absolute confidence in the caregivers. You expect them to anticipate your relative’s needs, get ahead of potential problems, and deliver outstanding support.
Great customer experience is about making life and work easier for your customers. And that depends on understanding and eliminating their pain points—delivering more of what they want and less of what they don’t.Building from the inside outPutting customers at the center of everything we do is essential. But the term “customer first” can be misleading. Time and again, I’ve seen how great customer experience starts with putting your employees first, not your customers. Effortless experience builds from the inside out.Here’s something obvious but important: People who pursue careers in customer service want to serve customers. They want to be heroes. But you can’t be a knight in shining armor if your armor’s rusty.
As the Great Resignation continues to sweep through organizations, it’s essential that we nurture and support talent. We must equip employees with technologies that make work easier. By automating routine and mundane tasks, we can create space for talented professionals to add value that only humans can.It’s imperative to create engaging and effective self-service options for customers—not just because customers want to self-serve (and they do), but because it reduces call volumes. It allows customer service representatives to focus on supporting customers who want and need their support.It’s never been more important to attract and retain top talent. The best people want to work for a shared purpose in a collaborative organization, one that shows it respects and values them with actions, not just words.Working backwardLIKE.TG is about action, not words. With one platform, one architecture, and one data model, we can help break down silos and build connective tissue across your organization.The Now Platform® organizes work into discrete tasks. Clever automation ensures those tasks flow across people and functions, accelerating work and elevating talent. Everyone has the information and visibility they need to get more done—and they have more time for valuable interactions with customers.As Steve Jobs said, "You've got to start with the customer experience and work backward to the technology." That’s exactly what we do. We work backward to ensure our customers bring the power of their whole organization to better serve their customers.Delivering resultsLet’s take a look at the difference we’re making for a few of our customers and a whole load of theirs:When Lloyds Bank relied on manual processes, it could take up to three days to process direct debit refunds. Now that those processes have been automated, 62% of refund cases are handled in less than three minutes. And all refunds are in customers’ accounts within 30 seconds.Thanks to LIKE.TG, Rogers Communications, a leading Canadian telecom provider, has the visibility it needs to get ahead of issues and keep customers informed. The company has reduced daily case volumes by 41% and status requests by 43%. Customers are more likely to recommend Rogers (71% give them a nine or 10 out of 10 for “likelihood to recommend”), and employee satisfaction is at 91%.Tunstall specializes in technology that enables home healthcare for the elderly and vulnerable and supports caregivers in the field. LIKE.TG makes it easier for the organization to deliver efficient, effective, and empathetic care. As a result, customer satisfaction has increased 70%.Friction-free customer experienceNot everything in life is easy. But, when it comes to products and services, effortless experience and speedy resolution are what make customers sing your praises and come back for more.Find out more about how LIKE.TG can help your organization deliver effortless customer experience.
How to get all your customer service channels ‘smiling’
One of the first things a voice-over acting coach tells their class is that people can hear your face. Studies back that up, even pointing out that we all have “smile sense”—being able to tell if a speaker on the phone or radio is happy.The same applies to customer service. Customers can tell if the agents they speak with are happy.Focus on peopleMany customer service agents are unhappy in their jobs. A 2021 McKinsey article reported 40% of employees overall are somewhat likely to leave their jobs in the next three to six months. Large call centers have always experienced high churn rates, but this exodus now includes the significantly experienced, well-respected “customer champions” you could count on year after year.Although self-service and self-help continue to be a key focus of innovation for customer service organizations, the people aspect must stay at the forefront. Obviously, your customer-facing agents must be supported. That also means supporting the diligent workers keeping vital information moving between front, middle, and back offices.Empower consistent and meaningful serviceThe McKinsey findings showed that while some areas such as feeling “valued by manager” require people actions, others such as “unmanageable workload” and feeling “engaged by work” are directly associated with the tools and systems employees use to help them succeed.Technology that creates logical and sane pathways between operations and people-to-people engagements can help agents stay one step ahead and wow their customers. Those same pathways can be used to power automation and artificial intelligence (AI) to better assign tickets to the right experts while freeing them from mind-numbing repetitive tasks.Keep the smiles realVodafone’s agents have superpowers with a 360-degree view of customers. Agents “have one application that helps them provide excellent customer service," says the company’s former head of digital experience.Blackhawk Network gives employees a voice in driving change. "Our frontline agents are heroes. They’re the ones dealing with the end consumer on a day-in, day-out basis,” says the company’s senior director of customer service. “The amount of recognition they receive when their idea goes all the way from planning to a product…creates a huge sense of engagement with the company.”The city of Santa Monica returns precious time to its workers. Serving citizens through digital means has saved more than 140,000 hours of staff time in the past 2.5 years.With LIKE.TG, employees are empowered to deliver seamless experiences. They’re more productive, able to focus on what matters without getting mired in the routine and mundane. And they’re happier, which enables them to serve customers better.Customers, in turn, are more loyal, and the company sees significant improvement to its bottom line.Gain more insights in our ebook: How to deliver great customer experience at scale.
Field service experience could be the next business differentiator
We’ve all suffered that common irritation: “A service person will be at your house sometime between 9 am and 4 pm.” In our personal lives, that can mean frustration and inconvenience. For businesses, that broad window of uncertainty can add up to real money in lost productivity.Both scenarios can chip away at customer confidence and satisfaction. In increasingly competitive marketplaces, those agitations can even be enough to push a customer to look elsewhere.“Field service can, and should, be a revenue-generating, strategic differentiator for your organization,” says Bulent Cinarkaya, vice president of field service management for ServiceNow.The role of field service professionalsIt’s important to remember how customers view great experiences. For most, a great experience is one that’s effortless: service delivered easily and smoothly with no surprises.By and large, the most powerful deliverer of those great customer experiences is a field service professional.These are the people who are the face of your organization outside your physical or virtual walls. They’re 100% in the realm of the customer—whether in a home or at a business. They include equipment installers and maintainers, as well as healthcare providers and financial consultants.Field service workers are the eyes and ears on the ground. They listen, observe, and communicate back insights that enable you to meet and anticipate your customers’ needs, and grow your business.Empowering field workersHow do you empower your field to consistently keep you in the best light with customers? It starts with a foundation that can strengthen every element of your field service operations: a technology platform that can make work easier and better for everyone—managers, dispatchers, field workers, third-party contractors, and cross-functional teams.To do this well, your tech platform should tap process automation, artificial intelligence (AI), and low-code tools to work in new ways and evolve with your changing needs.Reaping rewardsOn average, a single system of operations can yield a 310% return on investment, according to a LIKE.TG-commissioned Forrester study.1 That return is driven by more flexible and muscular processes that unify and focus your field efforts completely on customer satisfaction. For example:
Antares Vision customers are asking for high-value service-level agreements.
Avarn Security is driving increased technician productivity and happier customer engagement with a single system of operations.
Tunstall is using automation to provide world-class service.
Princeton University is realizing “significant operational efficiencies” which, in turn, better serve its customers.
Jigsaw24 is working more intelligently, which helps it keep customers more fully informed.
Click the image below to see an infographic that explores how LIKE.TG® Field Service Management can help you deliver frictionless experiences.Accessibility note: The infographic is transcribed at the end of this blog.
Transcript of infographicThe field service experienceThe next big differentiator for your businessYour customers rely on field service experts to make things happen and fix issues the first time.Your business relies on them to deliver the kind of service that builds strong relationships and supports revenue growth.LIKE.TG Field Service Management (FSM) helps you:
Reduce cost and increase revenue
Retain, recruit, and onboard the best talent
Prioritize safety
Be proactive and predictive
Strengthen contactless service
Improve scheduling
Empower and enable people to do their best work
Enhance communication
We empower organizations to deliver outstanding, frictionless experiences to customers and employees.Reduce cost and increase revenueTake field service from cost to value creation. LIKE.TG FSM enables you to adapt, innovate, and grow—at speed and scale.“Customers are happy...and are asking for high-value service-level agreements.” - Alessandro la Greca, Technical Service Manager, Antares VisionRetain, recruit, and onboard the best talentLIKE.TG FSM makes work easier, so employees feel valued and stay longer. It also helps you capture and share the experience of a retiring workforce.“We appreciate the close partnership with the LIKE.TG FSM team...and their commitment to continuous improvement.” - Adam Ouellette, ITSM Process Specialist, Princeton UniversityPrioritize safetyWith enhanced tracking and step-by-step safety guidance, LIKE.TG FSM enables you to meet expectations and regulations and gives you peace of mind.“LIKE.TG FSM is helping us to increase the productivity of our technicians and enhance customer satisfaction.” - Kjetil Kaarstein, Department Manager, Custom Development Integration, Avarn Security NorwayBe proactive and predictiveWith AI-powered predictive analytics, machine learning, and process automation, LIKE.TG FSM helps you anticipate and meet your customers’ needs.“LIKE.TG helps us to provide a world-class service.” - Mikael Kluger, IT Support and Services Operations Director, Tunstall NordicStrengthen contactless servicePowerful self-service tools and innovative technologies such as augmented reality support both physical and virtual field service needs.“Xerox and CareAR are working with LIKE.TG to adapt the way we serve customers, using AI to help strengthen the customer experience.” - Steve Bandrowczak, President and Chief Operations Officer, XeroxImprove scheduling and utilizationLIKE.TG FSM matches skills, availability, and location for dynamic, automatic scheduling that reduces travel and costs and increases productivity and customer satisfaction.“We have realized significant operational efficiencies with our FSM and mobile app implementations.” - Adam Ouellette, ITSM Process Specialist, Princeton UniversityEmpower people to do their best workOptimize processes and give everyone the visibility they need. With LIKE.TG FSM, people can excel in their roles and focus on high-value work.“LIKE.TG makes the administration so much easier...I have more time for the customer and the fun part of my job.” - Dion Olie, Field Service Engineer, Scheidt and BachmannEnhance communicationThe FSM mobile app provides team-wide visibility, making it easier for teams to collaborate. LIKE.TG provides the insight you need to keep customers in the loop with advance warning and accurate updates.“We’re working faster and more intelligently with LIKE.TG, keeping our customers informed more effectively and more frequently.” - Ross Buntain, Operations Director, Jigsaw24“Field service can, and should, be a revenue-generating, strategic differentiator for your organization. And we’re here to make that happen.” - Bulent Cinarkaya, GM of Field Service Management, LIKE.TGRead our ebook to find out more.1 The Total Economic Impact of LIKE.TG Field Service Management, Forrester, December 2020
