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How to Turn Raging Customers into Raving Fans
Think about the last time you contacted a company—were you calling to offer a compliment or thank the company for their excellent service? Chances are that wasn’t your motivation. More likely you called customer service to complain about something that was wrong.Customers typically pick up the phone when they need to resolve an issue. And frequently, that’s after they’ve tried to find the answer on their own with no success. Depending on how long they have spent searching, you can imagine patience may be running low by the time they call, making that engagement especially challenging.In fact, two-thirds of customers who encounter customer service problems experience feelings of rage, according to a 2017 survey by Customer Care Measurement and Consulting. Rage seems to be on the rise in other ways: Some customers will even go to “rage rooms” where they can blow off steam by demolishing breakable items, electronics, or objects of their choice.While no one can break or throw anything on a negative customer-service call, the outcome of a bad experience can be far more detrimental than broken glass. It can do serious damage to customer loyalty and brand perception if customers tell others about their experience.Staying ahead of the game with a proactive strategy for combating customer rage will help you turn customers into raving fans. Here are a few useful rules of thumb:
Be proactive. The best problem to have is one that’s already solved. Improve your customer experience by addressing issues before your customers are even aware of them. Monitor the health of customers’ products and services. Act on trend data, or real-time data from connected devices, to better anticipate needs or spot problems as they’re happening. If you find an issue and fix it before your customer even knows they have it, they’ll never need to pick up the phone.Another strategy is to take steps to anticipate customer needs so when they do reach out, you’re already a step ahead. If you sell or manufacture consumer products, you can also take stock of your onboarding content for first-time users. Is it complete? Is it easy to find on the web? Can you push it to them proactively when they buy? Proper planning ensures customers can find exactly what they need, when they need it. And that makes everyone happy.
Improve self-service outcomes. Customers prefer self-service, but only when it works. To improve outcomes, offer connected experiences to your website that manage processes end to end. Simplify routine inquiries with automation, machine learning, and virtual agents. If customers can’t find the answers they’re looking for, reduce their frustration by letting them escalate to a live agent with a simple click or tap.Intelligent workflow technology can also work in the background to open a new case, route the question to the person with the right skill set to solve the problem, create additional workflow tasks as needed, and manage tasks to completion. You can also make sure the customer feels like they’re in complete control by letting them view and respond to open cases, check service notices, or get updates on product or service status anytime, anywhere, on any device. Giving customers control positively impacts their perception of your company and brand.
Personalize, personalize, personalize. When stress is high and time is short, customers have zero patience for slogging through irrelevant information to answer questions or resolve issues. Personalized self-serve portals are a great way to make sure your customers keep their cool.Start by making it easy for them to view and track their orders, products or subscriptions, history, or account details online. Shortcut their search for answers by proactively recommending articles based on the products or services they own, how recently they were purchased, or whether those products currently have service issues. Up your game by highlighting recent community postings related to their products or areas of interest.The faster your customers find the answers they’re looking for, the happier they will be. The happier they are, the more likely they are to share that with others. In fact 72% of customers will share a positive experience with 6 or more people.
Solve the problem. Unsolved problems are one of the key reasons for customer dissatisfaction. In the same Customer Care Measurement and Consulting study, only 17 percent of the customers who experienced rage were satisfied with the actions taken to solve their most serious problems. Bouncing from one agent to another and being asked to re-explain things was a key stressor. Lack of issue resolution was the other.Modern technology can help you reduce this type of frustration dramatically by intelligently routing and categorizing cases and then tracking them to completion. You can also automate the prioritization and assignment of incoming customer service requests to quickly connect customers with the right agent to solve their problem. When further work is needed to resolve the issue, experts are engaged from across the whole organization, ensuring a positive outcome.
By applying modern customer service technology, companies can eliminate customer rage and turn every customer experience instead into one that builds raving fans. By providing end-to-end service, delivering quick and easy answers for routine issues, personalizing the delivery of timely, relevant information to your customers, and connecting them more quickly to the right agents and answers, you can ensure a seamless experience for customers that genuinely turns them into raving fans.To learn more, download The Road to Transforming the Customer Service Experience ebook, which details how to remove roadblocks and transform the customer journey into an exceptional customer experience.
Expert viewpoint: Prioritizing business continuity
Every business decision holds risk, but are companies prepared? With accelerated digitalization in the wake of the pandemic, companies must plan for a range of risk management scenarios, from operations and strategic risk to business continuity, brand, and security.To stay on top of the fast-changing risk management landscape, businesses must proactively invest in the right tools, infrastructure, and workflows to swiftly act in the course of an event. They must also educate and empower their teams to take control and make smart decisions.My colleagues explored all of this and more with risk experts on the Innovation Today podcast. Here are some ways risk management professionals are driving change for their companies and clients.Focusing on resilienceAs companies embrace modern strategies for risk and resilience, there’s been a noted change in the overall risk management discussion. Risk has become something more than one initiative or function; forward-thinking companies increasingly refer to it as “operational resilience.” It’s about encouraging people to do the right thing and to make intelligent, informed decisions—not about control, rules, and punishment.It’s also high stakes. “There’s a lot of pressure for the Institutions to make sure that they have adequate controls in place, not only for business as usual, but also [to confront] regulatory challenges,” says Dan Prior, partner at the EY consulting practice. This has produced “an environment that is very cumbersome from a control and technical debt perspective.”These sweeping changes in approach to risk must start at the top—with the CEO. The CEO has the authority and the vision to encourage a culture by which silos are broken down and collaboration and accountability across the company are encouraged.Setting a foundation for strong risk managementMelissa Cohoe, global director of security, risk, and resiliency at NewRocket, a business advisory firm and a LIKE.TG partner, has seen risk management evolve over the last decade to encompass more consistent and holistic strategies. “The organizations that are most successful are the ones that realize the results they want to achieve,” she explains.Although companies of different sizes and stages may vary in their maturity and approach to risk, one area she says every company must think about is the end result. Cohoe recommends companies ask themselves questions such as:
What is our board or senior executive team asking us to accomplish?
What results do we need to solve for?
What business problems are we specifically addressing?
Once you determine your goal, she adds, it’s important to empower your teams with the why. The more knowledgeable they are about controls and the deeper reasoning behind any new risk management protocols, the more likely the organization is to succeed. To execute, she recommends working with an experienced partner that can guide you in the right solution.Hunter Freeman, senior manager at Edgile, a cyber risk and regulatory compliance company, points to getting the company aligned as a way to begin.“It starts with having a consistent definition of risks,” he says. “We should have a good idea of what are the common risks facing the business, the assets, and then take it from there.” This requires having the discipline for consistency—to compare risks in an apples-to-apples manner, across the enterprise. “We need to be consistent about what risks we apply to what items.”Understanding risk is a journey“Risk is a journey,” Cohoe adds. “You're going to mature over time. Your potential attack surface is going to change over time...You need to be prepared to constantly examine your risk management program: How successful is it? What has changed? What's emerging that you now need to respond to?”The idea is to approach risk with a sense of malleability. Simply put, avoid strict structures and rules. Instead, lean into being flexible and open to changes as your program evolves.Every organization will have its own priorities and challenges, but one must-have, Cohoe says, is response planning. “Make sure you’re prepared so that you’ve got plans in place for business continuity and disaster recovery. Make sure you’ve got your playbooks for security incident response.”Moving fast to implement software is key to avoiding “analysis paralysis,” she adds. Change requires preparation, planning, and cultural change—the faster you can implement, the easier overcoming these hurdles will be.Investing in modern tools and frameworksResilient companies know spreadsheets no longer cut it. They place too much burden on humans to manually keep data up to date, including the tedious effort of pulling metrics and forming reports for senior leaders and boards.Like Cohoe and NewRocket, EY is seeing a transition to a more holistic approach. “A lot of what we’re seeing in our clients is this focus on not only automation and the risk and compliance space to get out of doing things on paper or spreadsheets, but a transition to technology as well as thinking about what we call a unified experience,” says Chris Lucado, a partner at EY.“We’re also seeing a lot of clients who enabled governance, risk, and compliance technology years and years ago,” adds Angie Leggett, managing director of cybersecurity services at KPMG. “These tools are very old in nature and have a lot of inaccurate and stale data. We’re seeing the need for a shift in identifying modern-day technologies that can improve productivity, reduce overall costs, and bring stakeholders together.”These modern tools and approaches include:
Humans in the loop, with care: Companies must be aware of when to expose (or not expose) humans to potential risks. Exposures may lead to a faulty sense of judgment, bias, or indecision. In parallel, technologies must “speak up” and flag risks so that the right people can jump in and address them.
Integrated risk management: “Integrated risk management is bringing together the worlds of risk and compliance,” Freeman notes. “I think in many organizations these are separate-but-related functions, but historically they've been a little more siloed. We're operating in email, we're operating in spreadsheets, and all of that kind of hinders the free flow of information between those two functions.” When those are integrated together, businesses can expand their risk conversations to broader compliance objectives, he adds.
Third-party risk management: An IBM report found that 17% of critical infrastructure breaches were due to a business partner. Third-party risk management is a must-have in every strategy. Companies must constantly ask themselves, “Who has my most sensitive information?”
AI: AI is proving beneficial in aggregating data and identifying trends and issues. It sets the foundation for fast reporting, eliminating rote, manual tasks.
Automation: Streamlining processes will be essential for companies that want to stay ahead of changing regulations. This requires tools and systems that can address regulations quickly and remediate issues as they arise.
Advanced reporting: Traditionally, risk has been reported quarterly. Yet today, leaders expect an always-on approach, with a continuous audit of data. Agility will determine the winners with new compliance and regulations. A common set of controls will also be critical in supporting risk management frameworks across the organization.
A common solution for successFor integrated risk management programs to truly take off, access to data is critical. “Where we see clients being successful is when we can get these programs operating on a common solution like LIKE.TG so that we can leverage and have all that data in one place,” Freeman notes.“The name of the game is data,” Lucado agrees. “[Companies] need to not only figure out how to harness their own risk data, but also connect that to other types of data within the organization...It’s about a breadth of capabilities,” he explains.It goes beyond the data. It’s also the ability for your team to have controls, reporting, and continuous monitoring, all in real time. This means clear insights into real-time risk vulnerabilities and the capability to update the risk rating immediately, view trends, and get proactive—before it leads to a breach.“That's really what's unique about LIKE.TG and how we're working with LIKE.TG with our clients,” Lucado continues. “It provides the risk capabilities as well as the broader platform capabilities to provide that unified experience...as well as workflow across functions.”Find out more about how LIKE.TG helps with modern approaches to integrated risk management.
Customer Workflows: Q&A with Farrell Hough
Meet the future of customer serviceManaging a large customer service operation is a complex undertaking for any company. It’s even more challenging when that effort requires juggling multiple CRM platforms. Most platforms can’t share information effectively, making it that much harder for customer service agents to provide great experiences.We asked Farrell Hough, Senior Vice president of Customer Workflow Products, to explain how the Now platform manages that complexity—and helps agents use fewer resources to provide better and faster customer experiences.There have been enterprise CRM solutions on the market for 20 years now. What’s different about LIKE.TG?The CRM market is made up of four segments: sales, commerce, marketing and service. LIKE.TG sits squarely in the service component, the fastest growing component of CRM overall. But 60% of that market is still filled with homegrown solutions. Another 20% are legacy solutions, and the remainder come from our peers in the marketplace.The large proportion of homegrown solutions means there's a lot of customer pain to solve and a lot of room for LIKE.TG customer service management to address that pain.In the service space, most CRM vendors are really only able to provide case-logging capabilities. I call that reaction management. By contrast, we bring together core capabilities like omnichannel and case management, combined with operational capabilities like service management and service operations.This creates an end-to-end experience that gets to root causes and solves customer problems.How would you describe LIKE.TG’s vision for customer service management?We tie in the operational excellence of the rest of the organization. We provide end-to-end, proactive self-service, connecting the customer service agent with the back-end operations team or the engineering team that built the product.Those teams can help the agent identify the issue and get to the root cause so we can ultimately fix the issue. Customers today have an advantage using Service Now CSM in that they can fix issues once and for all.How does the Now Platform help deliver great customer experiences?The Now Platform is unique because users get a platform with a single data model rather than having to integrate myriad data models from different platforms into their customer service workflow. That means they can take full advantage of our core capabilities: machine learning, native mobile experiences, a service catalog that drives self-service requests, a native knowledge base, and the capability to create a self-service portal.I’ll add that the Now Platform has long been known in the industry for bringing operational excellence to the IT organizations of worldwide enterprises. Customers get to leverage investments they’ve already made for additional use cases, like customer service. So, the customer is not adding another platform or point solution. Instead, this is about extending their investment to create new value through another channel.LIKE.TG is part of a broader ecosystem of IT infrastructure platforms and tools. How do we fit into that ecosystem?We tend to be one of the four or five major platforms that enterprises are investing in to support the entire organization. These platforms are built to grow and evolve alongside the enterprise.We can also add in third-party capabilities or integrate different data sources that allow customers to meet the unique requirements of their business. Our New York release has a virtual data source capability that will allow customer service agents to access external information, such as account records, that aren't native in other customer service management tools.Additionally, the integration hub in our core platform makes it easy to extend integrations to other third parties, building workflows around them with our Flow Designer application. Those platform capabilities allow us to reach out into the ecosystem and build broader solutions that work well for any of the enterprises that we support.Everyone in our industry talks about digital transformation. What’s a concrete example of a customer that has used LIKE.TG to transform customer workflows?My favorite example is Nice Software, a leading analytics software company based in Israel. Nice is part of our ecosystem and they have the same vision that we do for improving customer experiences, but they do it with telephony.Nice was handling about 70,000 customer cases a year, with 1,000 cases coming in every month that needed individual attention. They weren’t able to assign cases based on agent skills. As a result, cases would often get assigned to the wrong people.When the case finally reached an engineer with the proper skills, that engineer often hadn’t encountered the issue before and lacked access to a knowledge base to help with resolution. Consequently, it took an average of 24 days to resolve a case.Implementing LIKE.TG CSM allowed Nice to automate and accelerate case management. Within a week of implementing Service Now CSM, Nice reduced the volume of assignments by using skills-based routing. Now, required skills are identified during case creation. LIKE.TG automatically routes cases to people with the right skills and availability. By combining intuitive processes and a more engaging user interface, NICE reduced back-end case volume by 72%, saving $450,000 a year. That’s the power of the Now Platform.
How eBay built a lean, mean InfoSec machine with LIKE.TG
When you run an enterprise that serves more than 190 markets worldwide, information security (InfoSec) is of utmost importance. That’s why online marketplace eBay embarked on a multiyear journey to transform and strengthen how it manages InfoSec.eBay's transformation focused on three key areas: security incident response, vulnerability management, and governance, risk, and compliance (GRC).Reduced security incident response timesFaced with an increasingly hostile cybersecurity environment, eBay needed a way to quickly respond to and resolve a rising volume of security incidents—without radically increasing headcount. The company wanted to automate the response process and consolidate information from multiple security tools to create an efficient, unified view for its security engineers.After evaluating its options, eBay chose LIKE.TG Security Incident Response for its advanced workflow capabilities and integrations with security tools and other systems. LIKE.TG also provided the flexibility and extensibility eBay needed to address its unique security requirements.Security Incident Response automatically collects information from multiple security tools and native logs, giving security engineers a single dashboard for managing security alerts. When an engineer spots an issue with an employee account, for example, they can automatically disable the account with the click of a button rather than wasting precious time on long phone calls trying to get it disabled.The combination of unified visibility and automated remediation has reduced response times by nearly 80%, and 50% of security alerts are resolved automatically without any human intervention.
Took control of vulnerabilitiesBuoyed by its success with security incident response, eBay turned its attention to vulnerability management. As an established tech company with a track record of innovation, eBay has an extremely diverse set of technology stacks. This results in a broad range of vulnerabilities that need to be managed.eBay’s vulnerability management team had to engage in extensive email interactions with multiple infrastructure teams, including following up repeatedly to ensure vulnerabilities were addressed within rigorous service-level agreement periods. eBay saw the opportunity to streamline this process using LIKE.TG Vulnerability Response.The product automatically gathers information from eBay’s vulnerability scanners and configuration management database (CMDB) to enrich the vulnerabilities with information such as infrastructure owners.After that, Vulnerability Response groups the vulnerabilities into tasks for owners using grouping rules eBay set up. Once a vulnerability management engineer has checked a task, the product automatically raises a ticket for the owner.Since eBay uses JIRA, an application available out of the box in LIKE.TG Integration Hub, Vulnerability Response automatically creates a corresponding JIRA ticket. This gives owners a familiar mechanism to address vulnerabilities.The product then detects when the vulnerability has been remediated using data from subsequent vulnerability scans, automatically updating and closing the ticket. This automated approach has allowed eBay to scale its vulnerability management program.Collected evidence automaticallyWith a handle on security incident response and vulnerability management, eBay launched the third leg of its InfoSec journey: GRC. Faced with increasing GRC requirements due to evolving regulations and the launch of a new payment system, eBay needed a way to extend the reach of its InfoSec GRC team while reducing the burden on control owners.
The company created a user-friendly LIKE.TG portal to give end users one-click access to a comprehensive range of LIKE.TG Integrated Risk Management capabilities. These include policy management, requesting and tracking exceptions, risks, controls, and attestations.eBay quickly realized one of the key bottlenecks in its GRC processes was gathering evidence of control compliance. This caused significant work for control owners and resulted in back-and-forth communications between owners and the GRC team.To address this issue, eBay decided to automate evidence collection wherever possible, including collecting evidence within the LIKE.TG platform and from external tools such as Splunk and Qualys. Now, Integrated Risk Management automatically gathers this evidence, presenting control owners with easily digestible information they can review and attest to with a single click.To date, eBay has automated nearly 50% of its evidence collection tasks, saving significant time for control owners and ensuring the right evidence is provided to the GRC team.Continued momentumeBay continues to grow the value of its LIKE.TG InfoSec solution, working with process owners and end users to deliver enhanced capabilities that increase both security and efficiency. By bringing together Security Incident Response, Vulnerability Response, and Integrated Risk Management on a single platform, eBay benefits from synergies that span these three areas and produce results that are greater than the sum of the individual parts.The company has achieved these outcomes with a core team of just two employees and two consultants, delivering advantages that far outweigh the investment.Find out more about how LIKE.TG can help your organization boost cybersecurity resilience with security, risk, and IT working together.
LIKE.TG is a Leader in governance, risk, and compliance platforms
I’m excited to announce that LIKE.TG has been named a Leader in the Forrester Wave™: Governance, Risk, and Compliance Platforms, Q4 2023. We’re especially pleased that we were recognized with the highest rating in the strategy category of all vendors evaluated.We believe this recognition reflects our strong customer focus on delivering solutions that exceed expectations, make work easier, and help businesses innovate with confidence. This acknowledgment would not be possible without our customers, and we thank them for their continued support.Improving the user experienceAccording to the report, LIKE.TG “delivers automated GRC backed by broad AI innovation plans.” We’ve helped customers rapidly digitally transform operations to work faster, smarter, and easier. Tailored workspaces provide a role-based interface to help meet the unique needs of risk and compliance teams, while GRC activities embedded in the Employee Center simplify engagement for everyone.Based on our position in the Forrester report, LIKE.TG is a leader among top GRC vendors. The report states that LIKE.TG features “…automated metrics, intuitive dashboards, and extensive use of AI to enhance user experience and productivity.”Recent enhancements to LIKE.TG® Governance, Risk and Compliance improve users’ abilities to perform targeted risk assessments, manage policies and compliance cases, and audit engagements with integrations to Office 365. The focus is on how to use AI to improve the user experience further.Our innovation continues as our customers’ needs evolve. As noted in the report, LIKE.TG’s “superior roadmap and innovation strategies are forward looking, targeting enhancements to digital experience across all lines of business, risk process automation at scale, and AI-led operations and insights throughout the risk management lifecycle.”True enterprisewide risk and complianceOur long-term mission for GRC is to seamlessly embed risk, compliance, resilience, and sustainability into enterprisewide workflows and digital experiences to make the world work better for everyone. We’re pleased that the importance of enterprise-class solutions is gaining recognition.The Forrester report states, “LIKE.TG GRC is well known for its platform strength in workflow, automation, and integrations—affording maximum configuration and control to users to scale their GRC program. The product features strong risk monitoring and communication tools.”LIKE.TG GRC provides the breadth and depth of capabilities to address organizations’ most pressing challenges. We use the power of the LIKE.TG platform to break down organizational silos and enable:
Horizontal integration across risk and compliance teams
Deep integration into operational workflows
Engagement at all levels of the organization with familiar user experiences
Holistic integration with the organization's ecosystem to drive business performance and success
Continuous monitoring for optimal performanceThis holistic approach to risk and compliance management extends across all domains of risk at an organization, regardless of industry. LIKE.TG GRC natively integrates with other LIKE.TG products that help manage ESG, privacy, legal, business continuity, security, IT services, assets, third parties, HR, and more.The data managed in these applications and through third-party integrations is used as real-time evidence for risk protection, control effectiveness, and compliance confirmation. The connected nature of the platform provides the foundation to continuously monitor for risk and control performance across the enterprise—and events that would trigger reassessment or remediation.GRC provides the essential framework for enterprises to swiftly assess the impact on existing compliance obligations and overall risk posture as they contend with a rapidly changing and uncertain AI-led future.See for yourself what Forrester has to say about LIKE.TG GRC in the complimentary Forrester Wave™ for Governance, Risk, and Compliance 2023 report. It’s an invaluable tool for those seeking an unbiased, third‑party evaluation of vendors as risk, compliance, resilience, and sustainability become essential for business.
4 ways Australians can use AI to protect data
In the time it takes to read this blog post, one Australian individual or organization will have reported a cybercrime.The Australian Cyber Security Centre received more than 76,000 reports of crime between July 2021 and June 2022, or one every seven minutes. The average loss per report was $64,000 AUD ($42,387 USD).Globally, nearly half (46%) of chief information officers and 41% of their C-level peers are concerned their cybersecurity isn’t keeping pace with their digital transformation efforts to protect data, according to research by LIKE.TG and ThoughtLab.EY estimates those numbers are higher in Australia, noting that most companies are struggling to keep up with new security compliance obligations while digitizing their employee and customer experiences.“Leaders need to change strategically in response,” says Rohit Rao, Asia-Pacific financial services cybersecurity leader at EY. “It’s about building a cybersecurity mindset into the culture—starting in the boardroom and extending throughout the whole business.”EY’s cyber experts say AI is increasingly seen as an essential tool in organizations’ defensive arsenals. Let’s explore four ways AI can help leaders address security challenges.1. Use AI to map and minimize riskDigital transformation has scattered data across departments, legacy systems, and cloud and on-premises infrastructure. Across industries, reliance on outsourced third-party providers has increased dramatically, but accountability still rests with your organization. If you don't have visibility into your data, how can you detect an attack?
“It's not possible for large enterprises to have a 100% airtight environment 100% of the time,” Rao says. “So, the context must be: How swiftly can we identify a breach? How effective are our continuous detection and management processes?”Automating discovery and assessment of new technologies and vulnerabilities can help you maintain an accurate profile of devices and software that make up your company’s threat surface. Use consistent risk scoring to evaluate diverse systems and prioritize what to respond to.Include recommended fixes and details in communications between security and outsourced partners who implement updates. Replace uncertainty and delays with precision and continuous improvement.2. Use AI top build a single viewSiloed organizational structures often mean different departments have no understanding of what other teams are doing—delaying action and increasing risk.“We’ve entered a new era, where security requires organizational ownership,” Rao says. “It’s no longer the sole responsibility of the cyber folks. Companies that recover quickly view cyber response capabilities as whole-of-business crisis planning—not technical incident management.”Every case differs, but cross-functional understanding of information flows is key. Identify how and when to engage the board, inform employees, and reach out to customers. Organizations need to assume a breach has occurred and be ready to respond, regardless of severity.AI can help you share data and tools across teams to improve collaboration and reduce silos. Integrate and enrich data from different systems to improve the quality and relevance of each department’s decisions and actions. Automation makes it easy to gather timely and defensible evidence to satisfy C-level leaders and board governance committee members.3. Use AI to do more with lessIncreased cybersecurity spending can be a tough sell because it’s inherently a future cost-saving measure, not a revenue-increasing one. As security ownership expands across the organization, cyber teams need to partner with business owners to understand how data is being used and where duplication exists. Then they can work together to quantify risk and manage budgets holistically.
“Across industries, we see similar behavior,” Rao says. “Security hygiene factors are frequently ignored in favor of more exciting new tech, so there’s catch-up to do there. At the same time, leaders need to reset the way they view security costs. Security teams must engage with the broader business and bring them into the tent.”Employing AI can slash workloads by eliminating manual steps. Less grunt work for human analysts frees them to focus on more strategic tasks. Stretch limited resources with automation wherever possible.Heighten vigilance against threats with continuous monitoring to reveal and reduce the most critical gaps. Automation tools can collect, analyze, and present risks, progress, and trends over time to demonstrate the positive impact of investments.4. Use AI to do the legworkWith more regulations on the horizon, organizations should be thinking beyond key performance indicators and check boxes. Gathering the right data, synthesizing it, and reporting on it is a complex task. Leaders can't afford to keep growing their reporting or technology teams—or adding more tools.Rao is encouraged by an increased appetite from leaders to dig into what different obligations mean for all stakeholders. “Delivering a better digital experience inherently brings more risk to the organization,” he says. “But we’re seeing more leaders asking the right questions around protecting the interests of the general public, not just meeting the regulator’s checklist.”Powered by AI, regulatory change management systems can update frameworks used in compliance monitoring and reporting. Automated monitoring collects and reports compliance data with less effort and fewer spreadsheets.It’s inevitable that every organization will eventually fall victim to an attack or suffer a data breach. AI offers executives the ability to be proactive, improving response times, reducing recovery costs, and maintaining customer—and employee—trust.Find out how Australian firms are using AI.
Shifting customer service into high gear
When a customer contacts customer service, whatever channel they use or problem they have, they want fast answers. Most expect “now” service within 5 minutes of making contact online and say that valuing their time is the most important thing a company can do to provide good customer service.Companies struggle to balance providing rapid answers with the need to ensure their customer service agents are as productive as possible. While agents are at work, it is critical to maximize their time and skill sets, so they can deliver optimal service to as many customers as possible, as fast as possible. Sounds easy, right?Not so fast. Great customer service means arming agents with the right technology and ensuring they have access to the right information to help them help your customers…as quickly as possible.So how do you make your agents faster and more efficient? Let’s take a look at three opportunities to help increase the speed and efficiency of your customer service operations.Improve the equipmentFirst, take a hard look at the technology that agents use on a day to day basis. It starts with some basics. How many systems or screens is an agent required to use? If they have to refer to gt1 system or multiple screens to get to the information they need to solve a typical customer issue at hand, this is not good. Especially when customers expect the agent to be equipped with complete information, including their contact and product data to service information and history.
LIKE.TG is a Leader in third-party risk management (TPRM) platforms
I’m excited to announce that LIKE.TG has been named a Leader in the The Forrester Wave™: Third-Party Risk Management Platforms, Q1 2024.In the competitive third-party risk management (TPRM) market, technology vendors must continue to deliver innovative solutions that meet customers where they are in their maturity journey. Global regulations such as the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA), Germany’s Act on Corporate Due Diligence Obligations in Supply Chains, and the NIS2 Directive are driving the need for an integrated risk management approach to increase operational resilience and enhance risk visibility.Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) mandates are heightening the awareness of Scope 3 emissions reporting challenges across company networks. It's no longer just the company itself that needs to be considered, but also upstream and downstream suppliers, vendors, partners, and others.Third-party risk is an integral component of a robust enterprisewide risk program to meet these growing challenges in a dynamic world. In the last few years, LIKE.TG has proven our strong commitment to helping organizations grow their TPRM programs through continual enhancements to our Third-Party Risk Management product.Connecting stakeholders across the organizationThe report by Forrester states that LIKE.TG’s “strategy builds on the success of its vast suite of products to weave third-party risk management into business priorities and connect key stakeholders across the organization around the TPRM lifecycle.”The report also notes that “LIKE.TG takes a broad view of third-party risk that encompasses all external entities, including customers.” We purposely built our product to address the unique needs of these third parties, as well as the needs of internal stakeholders across an organization.We provide a customer-branded portal with multilingual support, a robust chat feature, and other capabilities that help foster communication with third parties. We also offer workflows and internal approval processes that help drive internal collaboration.Extending workflows to drive resultsLIKE.TG received the highest possible score in the Workflow criterion in the Forrester report. To further enhance these capabilities, we recently extended the workflows in our Third-Party Risk Management product to help ensure end-to-end support across the entire TPRM lifecycle.These enhancements enable quick onboarding, due diligence assessments, renewals, and off-boarding of all types of third parties.Building a strong customer and partner ecosystemThe Forrester Wave™ report says LIKE.TG’s “strong vision is supported by an expansive partner ecosystem that has built a library of certified applications, content, and integrations available for purchase in the LIKE.TG Store and a highly engaged customer community.”We’re proud of the deep relationships we’ve developed with our customers and partners and thank them for helping us achieve this milestone for TPRM.Improving the user experienceThe report provides several key market insights. One of those is the critical aspect of user experience in any TPRM platform. “According to reference customers, ease of use influences TPRM buying decisions more than breadth of capabilities, executive support, or price,” the report states.To this end, we continue to make enhancements to Employee Center, recently enabling business users to:
Request due diligence for a new or existing third-party engagement
Respond to inherent risk assessments assigned to them
Request status updates on due diligence requests
Innovating to meet evolving needsBased on our position in the Forrester report, LIKE.TG is a leader among top TPRM vendors. But this doesn’t lessen our drive to deliver new enhancements to our Third-Party Risk Management offering. We’ll continue to innovate as organizations’ needs evolve.Read the complete complimentary Forrester report.
Customer service 2020—Are you ready?
Everywhere you look, digital transformation initiatives are taking hold across the enterprise. Customer service is no exception. Today, new digital technology options mean customers expect choice, flexibility, speed, transparency, and personalization from the companies they do business with—expectations that are only increasing.While these digital developments don’t necessarily require completely replacing customer service solutions that work, it may be a good time to reconsider your options since customer service is evolving from single-channel or nonintegrated multichannel into a dynamic platform for customer experience delivery.The upshot? Channels don’t matter. The focus is customer service effectiveness instead of efficiency.
But, what’s driving this customer service evolution? And, is your business ready?ThinkJar’s Esteban Kolsky recently spoke to customer service practitioners as part of his annual research project about the state of customer service. Read this four-part blog series to highlight trends and how you can apply valuable insights to fuel your customer service transformation.Featured in the Customer Service is Digitally Transforming – Series:Part 1 - Customer service is digitally transforming—Are you ready? (this blog post)Part 2 - Six trends driving customer servicePart 3 - The new customer-centric customer service modelPart 4 - How to translate CSM trends to business value
Customer service from A to Z: A LIKE.TG glossary for success
Expectations for customer service are changing fast—and so is the language around customer service.A growing list of acronyms and jargon has sprung up due to new technologies and the dynamic nature of customer service software. Keeping track of the new terminology can be tough. And when stakeholders don’t speak the same language, confusion and frustration follows.As a leader in digital transformation, we’ve had a firsthand look at how customer service terms and technology has evolved. Use this glossary to establish a shared language for your organization’s customer service transformation. Because when we’re all on the same page, we can have more productive conversations—and make better-informed choices throughout the buying process.Artificial intelligence (AI): AI can simulate human intelligence and do mundane or data-intensive tasks without boredom or burnout. With today’s abundance of data (and increasing customer expectations), AI is needed to achieve dramatic efficiency gains and improve customer and agent experiences.Automation: The process of converting high-touch and largely manual business processes into faster and smoother low-touch digital workflows. If you’ve handed over control of certain processes to your customer service system, you’ve already stepped into the world of automation. For customer service, examples in LIKE.TG Customer Service Management include providing a customer self-service option in a service catalog without contacting an agent, routing a customer to the agent best able to help them, and creating tasks for other departments necessary for solving the customer’s problem.Case deflection: The ability for customers to find answers to questions without contacting support. Case deflection is a key component of self-service. You can improve your case deflection rate by providing your customers with a strong knowledge base and community, along with a virtual agent (chatbot) and service catalog to automate common requests. LIKE.TG Knowledge Management provides an out‑of‑the‑box knowledgebase.Communities: The place where customers come together to connect, learn, and engage with content, experts, and one another. This is an essential feature of a self-service strategy. Specific to LIKE.TG, Communities refers to the application that facilitates customer collaboration with peers, experts, and customer service agents.Configuration management database (CMDB): The ability to build logical representations of customers’ assets, devices, infrastructure, or services, and the relationships between them. These details help to pinpoint specific issues for a customer, especially when those assets are being operationally monitored. This information can also be tied to service level agreements (SLAs) to ensure assets are being maintained or services delivered as defined.Continual improvement management (CIM): The ability to initiate and track improvements across the enterprise by aligning people, processes, and data. Enablement of the CIM application allows a company to set up roles, groups, and integration properties. Next, the company can track improvement initiatives that contain goals to measure success, along with phases with specific tasks and actions to complete the improvement.Customer service operations: The team responsible for helping a company’s customer service team be more productive, work more effectively, and deliver better service to customers through the use of new technologies. For example, in a telecommunications company, customer service operations might both identify new technologies such as AI or chatbots to reduce agent load while serving customers faster as well as monitor customers’ products and services to avoid outages.Digital workflows: Using software and other technology tools to automate underlying tasks, processes, and manual workflows. This allows humans to augment their capabilities with smart machines and shift their focus away from menial, repetitive tasks toward more creative and analytical work. Digital workflows are increasingly being adopted for automation to streamline processes across the enterprise. LIKE.TG Workflow automates multistep processes across the platform consisting of a sequence of activities within a drag-and-drop interface.Dynamic scheduling: The process of assigning tasks to field service technicians and optimizing agent schedules to accommodate new work and shifting priorities. Use it in tandem with LIKE.TG Field Service Management to manage your end-to-end activities.Gamification: Encourage customers to participate, contribute, and engage with community content by providing incentives (e.g., points, achievement levels, badges) through a system of defined rules.Geolocation: The ability for field service to track technicians, plan efficient routes between locations, and calculate accurate travel times. Learn more by exploring our Field Service Management application.Internet of things (IoT): The connection of devices to the internet and to each other for automated sending, receiving, and processing of data. As an example, a medical technology company can monitor equipment at hospitals via the internet. If service is required, notifications or alerts are sent to customer service agents, field service technicians, or operations to be addressed. The company can then send a service technician to perform maintenance before the equipment fails. With Customer Service Management, you can take advantage of IoT and Operational Intelligence (IT Operations Management) to provide real-time visibility into the operational health of customers’ products and services.Knowledge management: The ability to quickly and easily share support information in knowledge bases for agents and customers. The LIKE.TG Knowledge Management solution includes workflow and publishing tools along with service portal integration for an out-of-the-box knowledge experience for customers and agents.Machine learning: A type of AI that allows systems to learn from experience and be trained on large volumes of data to perform specific tasks. LIKE.TG Predictive Intelligence provides a layer of artificial intelligence that learns from patterns in historical data. Cases can be categorized, prioritized, and routed to the best agents to improve efficiency and increase customer satisfaction. Predictive Intelligence can also be used in an agent workspace (unified desktop for an agent) to help agents find related knowledge and community content, similar cases, or major cases reporting critical issues. This greatly shortens the time to resolution for customers.Major issue management (major case management): The ability to efficiently identify and manage critical issues and tie individual (yet related) cases to a parent major case that, when resolved, will solve child cases. The Major Issue Management feature also identifies customers who have not yet reported the issue and proactively creates cases on their behalf, helping to manage internal and customer communications until the issue is resolved.Natural language understanding (NLU): A branch of artificial intelligence (AI) that uses computer software to understand input made in the form of sentences in text or speech format. Model builders and inference services enable the system to learn and respond to human-expressed intent, understanding word meanings and contexts to infer user or system actions. LIKE.TG has added NLU to Virtual Agent functionality in its New York release.Net Promoter Score® (NPS): A measure of customer experience that predicts business growth. The gold standard for evaluating client loyalty, your measurement of NPS should be simple, customer-focused, and easy to configure and track. LIKE.TG Performance Analytics simplifies NPS trend monitoring with common KPIs.Omnichannel: A cross-channel strategy that organizations use to improve their customer experience. It provides a single source of truth for customer conversations by managing all interactions within one system, eliminating the need for agents to pivot between systems and making it easier for them to service customers. This is a step above multichannel systems, where the involved channels are typically disconnected, e.g. telephone calls are recorded in one silo, while chat transcriptions are saved in a different system.Proactive service: The ability to identify and solve a customer’s problem before they know they have one. Proactive Customer Service Operations is specifically designed to track your customers’ digital services, alerting you to service disruptions and allowing you to notify affected customers up front. Analytics can also help pinpoint trends indicating issues.Problem management: The ability to handle the full lifecycle of all problems, including information about problems, workarounds, and resolutions. Problem Management tracks problems across cases to provide valuable information, particularly for RD or engineering organizations. Using the metric of percentage of new critical problems helps reduce the number and impact of issues over time.Robotic process automation (RPA): An emerging form of business process automation technology that automates rules-based business practices by automating actions within the user interface to streamline operations and reduce costs. Although AI and robotic process automation are being used in tandem across enterprises, RPA has limitations versus using a single-agent workspace with support from digital workflows.Self-service: Allowing customers to solve their own issues through access to online information about their products and services and automating frequently made requests and tasks. LIKE.TG enables your customers to log into a Customer Service Portal, efficiently access existing information in Communities and Knowledge Management, and use automation to perform common tasks via the Service Catalog and Virtual Agent.Skill-based routing: The ability to auto-assign and route tasks to the most qualified agent based on the skills required to perform a task. As an example of a skill-based work assignment, you can configure the routing of cases from a particular country to agents who speak that country’s language.Unified desktop: A single interface that consolidates and integrates customer service applications for agents. The LIKE.TG Agent Workspace is a configurable user interface that gives agents a fully integrated, intuitive user experience.Virtual agent: Also referred to as “chatbot” or “virtual assistant,” virtual agents interface with the customer to quickly get them what they need. The LIKE.TG Virtual Agent allows organizations to design and build automated conversations to help customers quickly access information, run applications such as performance diagnostics, or process transactions such as creating or looking up a case.Visual Task Board (VTB): An interactive graphic interface that simplifies the navigation of multiple task records, lists, and forms. The LIKE.TG Visual Task Board provides a graphic-rich experience that enables the management and assignment of tasks across the enterprise and provides visibility into the status of those tasks.A common vocabulary equips customer success leaders with language for customer service transformation and gives teams with the right knowledge to navigate buying decisions.Reference this glossary when educating stakeholders and exploring ways to optimize your organization’s customer service function, and learn more about LIKE.TG® Customer Service Management from real-world success stories.Net Promoter, Net Promoter System, Net Promoter Score, NPS and the NPS-related emoticons are registered trademarks of Bain Company, Inc., Fred Reichheld, and Satmetrix Systems, Inc.
Proactive customer service – How to anticipate and solve issues
Think about the people in your life that can tell what you are thinking without you saying a word, or know what you are going to do, even before you do. Those are the people that ‘get’ you. They are the ones you can rely on and turn to, time and time again.Wouldn’t it be nice if you could have connections like that with a company? I’m not saying a company is going to start finishing your sentences, but it could start anticipating your needs and taking care of issues with the products or services you are using before you even encounter them. That’s what proactive service enables. And it can change everything for customers, increasing their overall satisfaction, preference, and loyalty.What does it take to establish proactive customer service? In the webinar: “Top 5 Practices: Proactive Customer Service for Digital Services” John Ragsdale, distinguished VP of technology research for the Technology Services Industry Association (TSIA), discusses what proactive customer service could mean and look like for a company.While the vision of anticipating and then delivering on a customer’s needs has always been a goal of companies everywhere, what’s been called proactive customer service for the past couple of decades was really not.It’s hard to argue companies were being proactive, when it was the customer that typically initiated the interaction and reported a problem to trigger an investigation. Once started, the speed and effectiveness of the investigation was often limited by the technology customer service agents or field service technicians had at their disposal to try to figure out what was going on. Slow, clunky connections (e.g. Telnet) to a customer’s on-premises equipment was usually all they had to run basic tests; if those tests failed, they would be forced to pull and manually analyze the customer’s log files to look for clues.When the problem was finally understood and fixed, information on the resolution remained largely in the silo of that customer’s case. If another customer called with the same problem, rather than applying the same fix, the process would start all over again. The reality is companies were being responsive, not proactive.What’s changed with the digital economyNow, John notes, the ability of companies to deliver a truly proactive customer experience is finally possible, thanks to the technology advancements that are powering the digital economy. Today, the promise of truly proactive customer service that can transform customer experiences and outcomes can finally be realized.Why? Because there is a lot more information easily accessible that can be used to understand the customer’s environment, particularly as more and more organizations move to the cloud. However, more data in and of itself doesn’t make a difference, if there is no way to make sense of it. Advances in new artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technologies are paving the way for real-time analysis and insights that can help organizations make connections between customer issues and identify and even predict where problems may arise.A glimpse at what proactive customer service looks likeAccording to John, these new technologies have enabled some organizations to get a jump on issues and start to anticipate what customers are going to need. These companies are monitoring customer usage of their products and services, identifying conditions that could cause an error or failure. Once detected, the company is then either auto-scheduling a repair or auto-restarting a system to apply a fix and resolve the issue. All of this is done before a customer even knows they have a problem-that’s proactive!And the benefits of this level of customer service are easy to understand. If a customer feels the company is making the ongoing operations of their product or service a priority, they are going to be more satisfied. Plus, it’s good for the business too. Uninterrupted service and operations not only keep customers happy, but also reduces unnecessary work in customer service. Taking preventative steps is generally much more cost effective than having to triage and recover from an actual problem.What’s slowed the adoption of proactive customer?Despite all the potential benefits, only 24% of support teams have a proactive support or intelligent diagnostics solution in place, according to the 2019 TSIA Support Services Tech Stack Survey. The 2019 TSIA Support Services Benchmark found that only 3% of new incidents are created automatically using embedded diagnostics.Why so low? John explains it has been extremely tough to get technologies to enable proactive customer service. Typically, organizations had to piecemeal something together, which required committing resources to build, manage, and maintain a homegrown solution. The few solutions traditionally available on the market tended to stem from technology developed for internal IT use, not remote customer use—so they too required a lot of tuning and customization.As we know, when organizations have to develop solutions that are not core to their business, they can fall by the wayside or end up not being as robust or effective as they could be.
Times are changing“Out-of-the-box” capabilities are now readily available in LIKE.TG® Customer Service Management to enable organizations to deliver more proactive customer support.As a result, support services, field services, and managed services are starting to budget and adopt these innovative technologies, as part of their efforts to transform their customer experiences.But achieving proactive customer service isn’t as easy as making a purchase and flipping a switch. There are things you need to consider and systems you need to deploy and link to be able to achieve the benefits of proactive customer service.
Great Customer Service Can Come with Great Cost Savings
Insights from the Forrester Total Economic ImpactTM Study on the Business Benefits of LIKE.TG Customer Service Management Customer service holds the key to business success. Great customer service leads to greater customer satisfaction and loyalty, which research shows leads to revenue gains and profitability increases.LIKE.TG can help companies achieve the great customer service they need to move the needle. To prove that point, LIKE.TG commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study on the potential return on investment (ROI) an enterprise may realize by standardizing on LIKE.TG Customer Service Management.To find out how companies are saving millions with LIKE.TG and creating great customer experiences, check out guest speaker Sean Owens, Principal Consultant, Total Economic Impact Practice, Forrester Consulting, who presents the study’s key findings here.Here’s a recap of some of the questions webinar listeners had for Owens:The study found $1.8 million in cost savings could be achieved by using more efficient support channels. How do you optimize value in a mixed service environment of phone, email, and web? First, you need to look at all the support channels in place at your organization and determine what each one costs. Next, you need to identify which are the most efficient for your business and which are the simplest and most convenient for your customers. Ideally, they will be one and the same. Then, you need to employ strategies that help move usage away from the most expensive channels, which is usually phone, to the ones that are the simplest to use and maintain, which is usually web.We saw the use of phones drop to 10% when customers were given alternatives they preferred; web contacts grew to 90% and email was eliminated. Contacts that migrated from phone or email to the web portal represented a savings of $2 to $5 per contact (the difference in the cost per contact between phone/email and web).While you may not have email in the mix, you might have chat and social media channels. Any changes—including a new customer service management solution that can now manage all your support channels—should help you divert traffic to more efficient channels and drive down costs per contact for each channel.Organizations can realize significant savings by standardizing on LIKE.TG Customer Service Management, but are there opportunities to save for existing customers? Even if you’re not replacing a legacy system and are a current LIKE.TG customer, there may be opportunities to achieve additional cost savings with your deployment. For example, take a look at your overall management costs. How are you tracking support? If you are using a homegrown database or other more manual processes that require staff or IT resource time, those costs may represent a potential savings opportunity.How exactly do you measure success with Net Present Value (NPV) and Return on Investment (ROI)?The short answer is that any NPV over $0 usually indicates a good (successful) investment and any ROI over 0% a positive return. The explanation of why requires a little more detail:
NPV —this takes a series of cash flow values over time and summarizes them in a single number that reflects “today’s dollars.” It assumes a dollar you earn today is worth more to you than a dollar earned in a year, because you can spend or invest it now. Similarly, a dollar spent today is more costly than a dollar you spend next year, because you can use or invest that money for an extra year.The NPV equation uses a discount rate, as a percentage, to account for how much more today’s dollar is worth than next year’s dollar. Forrester Consulting TEI projects use a 10% rate. Ultimate, an NPV of more than $0 is a positive investment. Note, any decisions on whether or not to invest in a project with a lower or higher NPV is subjective. You may need to consider additional factors, such as the size of the project, your business, and other strategic or unquantified benefits.
ROI—this is the ratio of net benefits and total costs. So, anything over 0% reflects a positive return on your investment, and higher ROIs indicate a project that will likely be more successful. There is no exact ROI value to decide whether or not to invest in a project or not — it depends on a variety of factors including the project scope, your industry, and your organization’s appetite for risk. But any ROI with three digits should be a strong contender.To learn more about how enterprises were able to reduce support costs, improve customer satisfaction and retention, and even drive support contract revenue with LIKE.TG, check out the full study or webinar.
How to transition customer service from good to great
A new executive survey reveals where companies stand nowWhen you get customer service right, the dividends can be fantastic. Regularly cited benefits include increased customer satisfaction, repeat customers, increased sales and profit margins.But anyone who has been involved in the underlying service operations or front-end customer engagement knows that achieving great customer service to maximize its benefits is no easy task.To learn what it takes, LIKE.TG worked with Corinium Global Intelligence to interview 100 C-level executives who oversee customer service strategies to understand what they are doing and seeing in the marketplace. This blog shares some of the key insights, with the full, detailed report found here.The personal payoff of great customer serviceFor those executives leading the charge, being able to deliver a superior, end-to-end customer experience can lead to significant personal payoffs. When C-level executives were asked what the impact of achieving good customer service would mean for them:
55% said they would be “seen as a strategic business leader within [their] company”
50% indicated they would “have more opportunities for leading impactful initiatives within [their] company”
This is because great customer service is foundational to business success. It only makes sense that the executives responsible for establishing effective customer service strategies are rewarded for their accomplishments.Service operations hold the keyYou might be surprised to learn that most businesses only consider external engagement processes when they map their customer’s journey. Internal service operations, which include triaging, problem solving, service delivery, and the proactive prevention of issues are not as rigorously tracked or documented.Only 28% of respondents said they had “full documentation of the internal service processes” they use to deliver an end-to-end experience. This can lead to issues getting stalled, detoured, and potentially never resolved which can have a huge impact on the customer experience. Capturing each and every component of a customer’s experience and mapping it to their journey can help organizations identify gaps and opportunities to intervene to ensure service can not only meet, but exceed, expectations.The first stepWant to know where most organizations can start improving? The short answer is with customer self-service. Empowering customers to quickly and efficiently address their needs and concerns–on their own timetable, not yours, is often the most visible and impactful way to enhance the customer experience. Plus, it has the added benefit of improving the productivity of your customer service agents, freeing up time for them to focus on more challenging service assignments.Despite being an effective way to offer customers a better experience, most organizations admit they need to improve their offerings:
59% said they had “some room for improvement”
24% of respondents said they offered self-service options, but still had “a significant amount of work to do”
Only 13% were satisfied that their self-service capabilities were “fully optimized.”
(Check out the report to get the details on what self-service features customers have indicated are most and least helpful.)Other considerations for delivering great customer serviceAnother way organizations can improve service delivery is to solve the root cause of customer issues—61% of respondents believed that they could eliminate between 21% and 40% of their recurring cases if they were able to solve the root cause of customer issues. Solving those requires making the right connections between teams and technologies. This ensures expertise and knowledge is captured and codified, making it possible to automate processes and deliver proactive customer service.When done right, organizations can garner obvious, tangible results that can make a big difference for their business. Survey respondents acknowledged that if they were able to connect their customer experience end-to-end and eliminate service gaps, it could improve their customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores – with many believing it could result in improvements of 11-20% (39%), 21-30% (38%) and 31-40% (17%).All the insightsThese are just a few of the valuable insights available in the survey. To see what organizations are doing to proactively mitigate customer service issues and close these gaps, get the full report.
Six trends driving customer service transformation
Customer service is changing. As we mentioned in our last blog post, channels don’t matter as much—the focus has shifted to customer service effectiveness instead of efficiency.ThinkJar’s Esteban Kolsky recently spoke to customer service practitioners as part of his annual research project about the state of customer service.According to Esteban, practitioners identified six critical trends fueling customer service innovation:1. Budgeting. Growing budgets are shifting from maintenance to improvement aided by digital transformation initiatives bringing customer service in alignment with the rest of the enterprise.2. Spending priorities. There are three areas where customer service will be spending over the next two years: customer experience and customer engagement; automation and self-service; and a new operational excellence model aligning these needs with corporate digital and business transformation.3. Technology adoption. Technology is slowly deployed in customer service, usually following lengthy and painful pilots. We are seeing a slight shift in this model supported by the comfort of customer service practitioners with platform-based operations and artificial intelligence following years of use. There is also an increase in the use of technology to train better agents.
4. Data. Data-based decision making is rising. Virtually all customer service practitioners we talked to are investing in data analytics and predictive operational enhancements and are less concerned with cost savings. Expect to see an effectiveness-focused metrics model emerge.5. Channels. Disconnected channels became cumbersome to support and impossible to tend to separate from everything else. Channels are becoming the communication medium for customer service operations, irrelevant as separate entities. And with platforms becoming the prevalent solution in customer service, channel management is now commoditized.6. Cloud and platforms and ecosystems. Large service organizations are still running on-premises for critical functions, but virtually all organizations are being forced to consider cloud-adoption strategies. Smaller and modern organizations have taken to the cloud quite well, showcasing the realities of this transition; expect larger cloud adoption to happen soon.Customer-centric customer serviceAccording to Esteban, these six trends, combined with a shift toward enterprises becoming digital businesses, is resulting in a new model for customer service that emphasizes customer-centric effectiveness rather than company-centric cost efficiency.You can also check out the full ThinkJar white paper, Six Transformational Customer Trends, and hear what Esteban has to say in this this webinar, 5 Critical Steps for Outcomes-First Customer Service.This blog post is part of a four-part blog series highlighting trends and how you can apply valuable insights to fuel your customer service transformation.In the Customer Service is Digitally Transforming – Series, you'll find the following posts:Part 1 - Customer service is digitally transforming—Are you ready?Part 2 - Six trends driving customer service (this blog post)Part 3 - The new customer-centric customer service modelPart 4 - How to translate CSM trends to business value
Better customer experience starts where CRM ends
I had the pleasure of presenting at Gartner’s 2019 Customer Experience and Technologies Summit in London recently and thought I would share some of the main themes that I picked up from attending the various sessions, plus discussions with event attendees:(NB - Please note these are my personal thoughts and impressions)1. A better customer experience starts where CRM endsIt’s no coincidence that this was the title of my presentation at the Gartner CX event. My summary view on this is that CRM is a broad set of solutions covering sales, marketing, e-commerce and customer service.In customer service, traditional CRM really stands for Call Reaction Management, and that is simply not good enough to deliver great outcomes for either the customer or the organisation providing the service. At LIKE.TG, we believe there’s a better way, and we call it Customer Service Management. LIKE.TG® Customer Service Management effectively brings together 4 key components on a single, cloud-based platform:
Omni-channel customer partner engagement; drive action with self-service
Connect the back-office to the front-office; resolve complex issues end-to-end
Connected devices and IoT; provide proactive service
Use Enterprise Service Management principles
It was great to see the level of interest in Customer Service Management at the event – both from happy existing customers of the solution, and prospects who were really interested in its differentiated proposition. Exciting times ahead!2. An increased focus on business outcomesCustomer experience (“CX”) is beginning to come of age, and as a result, organisations are asking more and more questions about how the CX directly impacts on a company’s performance, or putting it another way, what is the return from making additional investments into CX.Time and again, my discussions with organisations are about 5 broad categories of business outcomes or business drivers that are driving CX activities:
Improving customer satisfaction
Improving employee engagement and satisfaction
Cost and efficiency improvements
Innovation and business agility
Compliance (both regulatory and operational)
But the challenge for everyone is to link these broad areas of focus into tangible KPIs and metrics, and then to directly link them to a business case and financial performance.Gartner’s analysis shows that 50% of organisations are already using financial metrics to measure ROI on CX improvement projects, with a further 24% using (non-financial) business metrics, and the trend for both categories is increasing.1 If you’re not using either of these to measure the effectiveness and impact of your CX activities, you need to think again, and quickly.3. What you do next in CX depends on where you are starting fromI call this ‘where are you on your Stairway to Heaven?’:
In the opening keynote Gartner presented ‘nine strategies for CX victory’ which I liked a lot2:
3 proven practices
Move from chaos to co-ordination
Make individuals accountable
Set one direction
3 surprising successes
Don’t delight but be effortless. We take this as drive for an effortless customer experience
Don’t innovate but imitate
Don’t correlate but help jobs to be done
3 bold behaviours
Radically reduce the number of products being sold/supported
Select 1 or more processes to be an order of magnitude faster
Invest to enable employees to have more digital dexterity
4. Self-service is going mainstreamSelf-service solutions are not new, but in the past they have typically been ‘add-ons’ to customer interaction channels like voice, chat and e-mail. But Gartner’s analysis3 seems to me to indicate that self-service is starting to be the primary channel for a number of organisations:
8% of customer service leaders believe that at least 20% of current ‘live’ customer service volumes can be handled by self-service. 15% of these same leaders believe that 60%+ of the volume can move to self-service.
38% of customer service resources are already being applied to self-service channels (e.g. implementing things like Knowledge Centered Service®)
Gartner says there are 3 eras of the service function:
Era 1: Live service-dominant strategy
Era 2: Self-service as an add-on
Era 3: Self-service dominant strategy
5. As a CX vendor, on which personas/functions in an organisation should I focus on?Gartner’s analysis shows that CX measures can occur in almost all areas of a typical organisation, but that the ranking is as follows4:
i. Customer satisfaction @ >95%ii. Loyalty churn retention @ >90%iii. Advocacy brand reputation @ >70%iv. Quality operations @ <50%v. Employee engagement @ <10%
In addition, Gartner’s research shows that CX’s position in the overall business priorities amongst different classes of executives is as follows5:
CX is the number 1 business priority: Customer Service, Marketing
CX is 1 of the Top 3 business priorities: CEO, Operations, Sales, Strategy
CX is 1 of the Top 5 business priorities: IT
In order to be successful selling CX solutions, vendors need to go ‘broad’ across departments/functions, but go especially ‘deep’ in the areas of Customer Service/customer satisfaction and Marketing.6. How important is CX to organisations?A variety of surveys undertaken by Gartner, covering different functions/roles, highlight the overall importance of the Customer Experience to most organisations.From the Gartner CIO survey6:
CX is the heart of 55% of business model changes
75% of ‘top performers’ report having changed or are actively changing their business model
73% of these changes are driven by customer centricity
From a Gartner survey of CEOs, 63% say that their companies are likely to make changes to the business model in the next 2 years.And finally, Gartner’s survey of CMOs showed the following:
60% 2 years ago, 67% today, and 81% in 2 years, of marketers responsible for CX say their companies compete mostly or completely on the basis of CX
7. What’s this AI thing? Is it important or relevant?AI – Artificial Intelligence – is undergoing rapid growth and being deployed in more and more areas of customer service and the overall customer experience.And the folks at Gartner have some other predictions about AI over the next few years: which I think are bold about just how much of an impact AI is going to have on both businesses and consumers:
By 2020, 30% of all B2B companies will employ AI to augment at least one of their primary sales processes. 7
By 2021 15% of all customer service interactions will be completely handled by AI, an increase of 400% from 2017. 8
By 2022, 40% of customer-facing employees and government workers will consult an AI virtual support agent daily for decision or process support. 8
By 2023, 80% of organisations using AI for digital commerce will achieve at least 25% improvement in customer satisfaction, revenue or cost reduction. 9
By 2025, customer service organisations that embed AI in their multi-channel customer engagement platform will elevate operational efficiency by 25%. 9
Summary:Fascinating to see the whole topic of CX mature, and the discussions focusing more on more on business outcomes and driving real value for both customers and organisations. I am sure many of us will be keenly watching to see if Gartner’s predictions about the rise of AI will pan out.And of course, it was great to meet so many existing LIKE.TG customers at the event, whether currently using our other solutions (predominantly IT and HR workflows) or already using Customer Service Management.Looking forward to attending again next year!
Gartner Event Presentation, How to Measure and Build the Business Case for Customer Experience, Ed Thompson, Gartner Customer Experience Technologies Summit, 22-23 May, London, UK.
Gartner Event Presentation, Gartner Keynote: Three Bold Strategies for Customer Experience Victory, Don Scheibenreif, Ed Thompson, Michael Chiu, Gartner Customer Experience Technologies Summit, 22-23 May, London, UK.
Gartner Event Presentation, Delivering on the Digital Experience: Building Customer Confidence to Resolve Without You, Richard DeLisi, Gartner Customer Experience Technologies Summit, 22-23 May, London, UK.
Gartner Event Presentation, How to Measure and Build the Business Case for Customer Experience, Ed Thompson, Gartner Customer Experience Technologies Summit, 22-23 May, London, UK.
Gartner Event Presentation, Gartner Keynote: Three Bold Strategies for Customer Experience Victory, Don Scheibenreif, Ed Thompson, Michael Chiu, Gartner Customer Experience Technologies Summit, 22-23 May, London, UK.
Gartner Event Presentation, Gartner Keynote: Three Bold Strategies for Customer Experience Victory, Don Scheibenreif, Ed Thompson, Michael Chiu, Gartner Customer Experience Technologies Summit, 22-23 May, London, UK.
Gartner Event Presentation, Top Technology Trends and Their Impact on Customer Experience, Don Scheibenreif, Gartner Customer Experience Technologies Summit, 22-23 May, London, UK.
Gartner Event Presentation, Leverage the AI Capabilities in CRM for Better Business Outcomes, Brian Manusama, Gartner Customer Experience Technologies Summit, 22-23 May, London, UK.
Gartner Event Presentation, Plan for the Digital Future — The Revolution in CRM Technologies and Their Impact on Your Customer Strategy, Olive Huang, Gartner Customer Experience Technologies Summit, 22-23 May, London, UK.
The Value of Customer Service Management for Service Providers
A Closer Look at the Commissioned Forrester TEI Study on the Cost Savings and Benefits of Using Customer Service Management at a Communication Service ProviderSolving customer problems, making it easy for everyone to find the information they need, and meeting SLAs: These capabilities might seem like table stakes for a service provider’s customer service program. Yet for many providers, they’re out of reach because of fractured platforms, siloed knowledge bases, and costly legacy systems.Service providers looking to improve customer service delivery have turned to LIKE.TG Customer Service Management to centralize support systems, reduce costs, and boost productivity. But what is the return on investment (ROI) of the solution? How can a service provider quantify what deploying Customer Service Management might mean in financial terms to their organization?LIKE.TG commissioned Forrester Consulting to find out and conducted a Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study at a communication service provider on the ROI realized by standardizing on LIKE.TG Customer Service Management.Guest speaker Sean Owens, Principal Consultant, Total Economic Impact Practice, Forrester Consulting, presented the study’s key findings in a recent webinar. Here are some of the key takeaways from the ensuing QA:The study found that one provider saved $15.6 million in support costs by reducing support calls and increasing self-service. How do we achieve these kinds of benefits?First, you need to look at all the support channels in place at your organization and determine what each one costs. For example, before deploying LIKE.TG, the provider had a mix of support calls coming in from phone, web (or portal), and email. The phone made up 60% of the calls, the web was 35%, and email was 5%; a phone call cost $30, while the web cost $23, and email cost $27.Next, you need to identify which channels are the most efficient for your business and which are the simplest and most convenient for your customers. Ideally, they will be one and the same. Then, you need to employ strategies that help move usage away from the most expensive channels, to the ones that are the simplest to use and maintain, such as the web. The provider was able to shift a number of contacts from phone to a customer service portal, essentially saving $7 (the difference in phone and web contact costs) per contact, which ultimately added up to a significant savings.While you may not have email in the mix, you may have chat and social media channels. Any changes — including a new customer service management solution that can now manage all your support channels — should help you divert traffic to more efficient channels and drive down costs per contact for each channel.My organization is not a telecommunications provider, do the findings still apply?Yes, because everyone deals with customer support. The content of those contacts and the volume of more complicated contacts that require escalation will differ, but all organizations should strive to provide efficient and useful support to their customers. Any process changes or technology solutions that enable customer service agents to resolve issues more accurately and quickly mean that customers are happier (or at least less likely to be angry or frustrated). They may be more likely to purchase again or less likely to leave for a competitor.So, if you are in IT services, the retail industry, in another commercial business, or perhaps even in the public sector, the themes addressed in the TEI study can help. For some, it may be a matter of simply adjusting some of the input metrics: the cost per contact, the amount sold per transaction, or the cost of service-level agreement upkeep. For those in the public sector, there are probably a few more steps that will depend on your situation. For example, there may not be upsell opportunities here, but there are opportunities to complete more service contact requests and avoid other costs.How do you measure success with Net Present Value (NPV) and Return on Investment (ROI)?The short answer is any NPV over $0 usually indicates a good (successful) investment and any ROI over 0% a positive return. The explanation of why requires a little more detail:NPV takes a series of cash flow values over time and summarizes them in a single number that reflects “today’s dollars.” It assumes a dollar you earn today is worth more to you than a dollar earned in a year, because you can spend or invest it now. Similarly, a dollar spent today is more costly than a dollar you spend next year, because you can use or invest that money for an extra year.
The NPV equation uses a discount rate, as a percentage, to account for how much more today’s dollar is worth than next year’s dollar. Forrester Consulting TEI projects use a 10% rate. Ultimate, an NPV of more than $0 is a positive investment. Note, any decisions on whether or not to invest in a project with a lower or higher NPV is subjective. You may need to consider additional factors, such as the size of the project, your business, and other strategic or unquantified benefits.
ROI is the ratio of net benefits and total costs. So, anything over 0% reflects a positive return on your investment, and higher ROIs indicate a project that will likely be more successful. There is no exact ROI value to decide whether or not to invest in a project or not — it depends on a variety of factors including the project scope, your industry, and your organization’s appetite for risk. But any ROI with three digits should be a strong contender.
To learn more about how service providers can improve customer satisfaction, reduce SLA penalties, increase agent productivity, and reduce reliance on costly legacy systems with LIKE.TG, check out the full Forrester TEI study and the webinar.
The new customer-centric customer service model
The new customer-centric customer service model—it’s all about resolving customer issues not efficiency and savingsAre your customer service strategies shifting to align with enterprise digital transformation efforts across the business? If you’re still measuring customer service success based on how efficient and cheap it is to meet the needs of your customers, the answer likely is no.In part two of our series on how customer service is evolving, we presented findings from ThinkJar founder Esteban Kolsky, who tracks trends in an annual customer research project. Esteban indicates that there are six critical trends fueling customer service modernization: budgeting, spending priorities, technology adoption, data, channels, and cloud and platform ecosystems (to explore these trends in detail, you can read the entire white paper, Six Transformational Customer Trends).Today, we’re going to explore a new customer-centric customer service model taking center stage thanks to the impact of these transformational trends. This model focuses on customer service effectiveness instead of efficiency where customer service is treated solely as a cost center.
According to Esteban, customers want accurate, fast, and simple answers to their questions or resolutions to their problems. They don’t really care about a company’s customer service costs and whether customer service providers are more productive, which are the metrics organizations have traditionally used to gauge operational excellence.So how do you begin to evolve customer service to truly address customer requirements to retain—and gain—new business, while also calibrating with enterprise-wide digital transformation?Building a model of customer service effectivenessEsteban suggests that this new model of customer service operational excellence is built around five tenets: outcomes-first, customer-centricity, data-driven, automation-focused, and ecosystem-based. The recent rapid and successful adoptions of chatbots, self-service, and artificial intelligence are deeply aligned with these trends. The focus on customers and outcomes, leveraging cloud and ecosystems, and a deeper understanding of how data improves customer service are all aligned with the corporate initiatives for digital and business transformation.In addition to these five areas there is one important underlying concept: work collaboratively with customers (and other stakeholders) to co-create value at each interaction, with the long-term goal of achieving engagement.The objective for this new model of customer service is to change from doing more with less (company-centric efficiency and cost-cutting) to doing better with more (customer-centric effectiveness and value co-creation). Ultimately, as your customer service budget shifts and grows, you and other customer service practitioners on your team will be more empowered to support digital transformation.Coming up tomorrow in the final post of our four-part series, we’re going to highlight the steps you can take to embrace this new customer-centric model of customer service in your organization and translate it into real business value.You can also get a more complete picture of the new customer service model by checking out ThinkJar’s publication: Customer Service 2019-2024: a Framework to Adopt the New Model of Operational Excellence for Your Service Team and hear more about what Esteban had to say on the topic in this in this webinar.In the Customer Service is Digitally Transforming – Series, you'll find the following posts:Part 1 - Customer service is digitally transforming—Are you ready?Part 2 - Six trends driving customer servicePart 3 - The new customer-centric customer service modelPart 4 - How to translate CSM trends to business value
10 mind-blowing customer service stats
What they tell us about the state of customer service, now and in the futureAre you a glass half empty or a glass half full kind of person? Depending on your answer, you will either see the new infographic, “10 mind-blowing customer service stats,” as an indicator of doom or a precursor to what’s possible.Take the $75 billion lost by US companies annually because of poor customer service. A pessimist could see this stat as evidence that not much has changed over the past few decades–demonstrating quick, valuable, easy-to-engage customer service remains elusive for many companies. But an optimist could see this loss as a wake up call–representing an opportunity to make changes to the customer experience that can directly contribute to the bottom line.We've seen firsthand how transforming the customer experience can pay off big. Take Vodafone, who was able to streamline their processes to gain a “360 degree view of the customer,” which led to a 45% increase in productivity and a 25 point increase in customer satisfaction. It’s why we are optimistic about the future.But, we don’t want to put rose colored glasses on you. Take a look at these stats from the past few years and decide for yourself whether you think the current state of customer service is dire or full of possibilities.
Adobe and LIKE.TG announce global availability of integration
Adobe and LIKE.TG announced the availability of its partnership integration, to deliver an industry-first solution connecting data from Adobe Experience Platform and LIKE.TG’s Customer Service Management workflow product to enable more seamless, connected customer experiences. In today’s experience economy, where digital-only is our reality, marketing and customer service organizations must be aligned around a data-driven, customer-first approach. Connecting the Adobe Experience Platform, the industry’s first purpose-built Customer Experience Management (CXM) platform, and LIKE.TG’s Customer Service Management product empowers brands with a more complete view of the customer.“Today’s customer service teams are faced with unprecedented levels of customer inquiries, which has created urgency for omnichannel, end-to-end customer service solutions that provide a complete view of every customer,” said Farrell Hope, Senior Vice President of Customer Workflows at ServiceNow. “Together with Adobe, LIKE.TG is enabling organizations to have greater access to important customer information and build deeper loyalty with their customers.”This integration leads to seamless workflows between Adobe Experience Platform and LIKE.TG, enhancing Adobe’s Real-time Customer Profiles with rich customer data and improving personalization of customer experiences across all touchpoints. Additionally, leveraging this LIKE.TG and Adobe Experience Manager integration, brands can now deliver enhanced customer service capabilities.“As the leader in intelligent transformation, Lenovo understands that it needs to be a cross-organizational effort,” said Paul Walsh, global chief digital officer, Lenovo. “Leveraging Adobe and LIKE.TG, we are looking forward to aligning our marketing and customer service organizations even more closely to engage customers with more intelligent, data-driven and contextual interactions.”
The ways that businesses support their customers now will define their brand and relationships for years to come. Today organizations fall short of serving customers as they are reliant on outdated and siloed systems that fail to deliver relevant data to customers. Through this integration, Adobe and LIKE.TG joint customers can:
Establish Context to Drive Brand Loyalty: Enterprises are often challenged by navigating internal silos of data pertaining to interactions with their customers. This integration creates seamless data workflows that removes those barriers and connect marketing and customer service organizations. Now, when a customer reaches out with a concern or inquiry, the organization can see the full view of that customer’s engagement with the brand, from the products or services the customer has purchased to its most recent interaction with the company. This perspective leads to a more personalized and connected experience.
Gain Deeper Insights for Personalization: Great experiences are built on the understanding of a customer’s journey. Through Adobe Experience Platform and the LIKE.TG Customer Service Management workflow product, customers can streamline work between teams by aggregating data during the “evaluate” and “purchase” touchpoints, capturing service interactions to ultimately build rich, real-time customer profiles in Adobe Experience Platform.
Improve Customer Experiences: A seamless customer experience equates to anticipating needs before they arise. With LIKE.TG, organizations will understand which products or services the customer owns and uses, allowing organizations to drive towards greater personalization. By integrating Adobe Experience Manager and LIKE.TG Customer Service Management, end customers receive a web experience and content that is truly tailored and relevant to their stage in the journey.
“Adobe’s mission to change the world through digital experiences has never been more relevant or powerful,” said Amit Ahuja, vice president, ecosystem development, Adobe. “Adobe and LIKE.TG are partnering to empower enterprises with a more complete view of each customer, so they can provide an experience that will drive better engagement and ultimately business success.”
Zoom and LIKE.TG partner to make the best work-anywhere experiences even better
Zoom Video Communications, Inc. and LIKE.TG today announced a commitment to each other’s technology solutions to make work-anywhere experiences work even better.With the ongoing pandemic and shelter in place orders Zoom’s usage rocketed to 300 million daily meeting participants in April 2020. Zoom deployed LIKE.TG’s Customer Service Management (CSM) to scale its customer service operations and enable critical communications capabilities for its global community. LIKE.TG CSM also provides proactive case management and personalized self-service options to help manage the influx of customer requests. In addition, Zoom will deploy the Now Platform, including new AIOps capabilities, to enable its new Hardware as a Service (HaaS) business model. Zoom will also expand its implementation of LIKE.TG’s CSM to provide HaaS customer support.LIKE.TG has been a Zoom customer since 2018, using Zoom Enterprise for its 11,000+ global employees to host video meetings across desktop, mobile, and conference rooms. Since the global pandemic, LIKE.TG employees working from home have relied heavily on Zoom to stay productive. LIKE.TG plans to displace its legacy hardware phone system with Zoom Phone, providing a connected and seamless unified communications experience for its employees.“Since March, we’ve scaled to meet the incredible increase in business and consumer demand for our solutions,” said Ryan Azus, Zoom’s chief revenue officer. “LIKE.TG has enabled us to deliver exceptional customer experiences during this period of growth. With the deployment of LIKE.TG Customer Service Management, we expect to significantly increase productivity and reduce case volume.”“Zoom has enabled employees across industries around the world to stay connected, and it’s also a core piece of our own technology ecosystem,” said Chris Bedi, LIKE.TG’s chief information officer. “Zoom’s capabilities and easy-to-use interface have helped our employees stay productive, supporting seamless digital conversations with our customers. Going forward, with the addition of Zoom Phone, we’re getting a head start on an even more robust experience with Zoom – one-touch communication and collaboration features, plus Zoom-connected conference rooms, giving our teams the best work-anywhere experience.”Zoom chose LIKE.TG’s CSM Workflow product to help unite its front-, middle- and back-office teams to solve issues, fix problems before customers notice them, and simplify engagement to quickly take care of customer requests. As a LIKE.TG Now Platform customer, Zoom has deployed its IT and Employee Workflows and is in the process of deploying additional LIKE.TG Workflow products, including ITOM Health, Field Service Management, and ITBM. Zoom is also leveraging out- of-the-box capabilities, including LIKE.TG’s Virtual Agent, to help facilitate conversations with customers, the LIKE.TG Integration Hub to integrate with its existing legacy systems, and the LIKE.TG Service Catalog to provide self-service remediation.LIKE.TG and Zoom offer multiple tech integrations that allow their joint customers to tailor the Zoom and LIKE.TG experience for their employees. For example, LIKE.TG can be configured to provide employees with extensive Bot; by using LIKE.TG Virtual Agent, dozens of the most frequently asked questions can be easily and quickly resolved. With Zoom Meeting Anomaly detection, Zoom can identify latency, jitter, and average packet loss, which LIKE.TG will use to automatically create an incident on behalf of the user. And, with LIKE.TG’s AI Ops, Zoom can be enabled to proactively provide users the option to rate their meeting with a thumbs-up or -down icon. If a user clicks the thumbs down icon at the end of a Zoom meeting, the user’s IT department will be notified of the issue and LIKE.TG Virtual Agent will reach out to the employee to address and resolve their problem.About LIKE.TGLIKE.TG (NYSE: NOW) is making the world of work, work better for people. Our cloud‑based platform and solutions deliver digital workflows that create great experiences and unlock productivity for employees and the enterprise. For more information, visit: www.servicenow.com.About ZoomZoom Video Communications, Inc. (NASDAQ: ZM) brings teams together to get more done in a frictionless and secure video environment. Our easy, reliable, and innovative video-first unified communications platform provides video meetings, voice, webinars, and chat across desktops, phones, mobile devices, and conference room systems. Zoom helps enterprises create elevated experiences with leading business app integrations and developer tools to create customized workflows. Founded in 2011, Zoom is headquartered in San Jose, California, with offices around the world. Visit zoom.com and follow @zoom_us.
The future of the workplace—predictions for 2020 and beyond
What major trends are shaping the future of the digital enterprise?LIKE.TG polled some of its leading technologists to get their take on this big question. Their insights, surprisingly, tended to revolve around a common theme: Some of the biggest tech advances and innovations for the workplace will focus on the design and delivery of employee services. Here are a few highlights.
Your ultimate goal should be to incorporate transformation customer service trends to create strategies for the next two years aligned with the new customer service model. It’s also important to collaborate with your providers and partners to determine how to better achieve a truly effective customer service platform for everyone, not just customers, to have better experiences.To get a more complete picture of the new customer service model, check out ThinkJar’s publication: Customer Service 2019-2024: a Framework to Adopt the New Model of Operational Excellence for Your Service Team and hear more about what Esteban had to say on the topic in this webinar.In the Customer Service is Digitally Transforming – Series, you'll find the following posts:Part 1 - Customer service is digitally transforming—Are you ready?Part 2 - Six trends driving customer servicePart 3 - The new customer-centric customer service modelPart 4 - How to translate CSM trends to business value
A Forrester Report sneak peak: our three key takeaways from Customer Service Megatrends in 2020
It’s a new report from Forrester: “The Three Customer Service Megatrends In 2020: Fuse AI and Agents to Drive Better Experiences.” We won't reveal all the details in this blog – you’ll need to download the complete report for that, but we will preview one takeaway of growing interest: “Your organization needs Superagents, and they need AI.”
Welcome to the new age of the SuperagentThink Ironman... but helping out customers. These new hybrid helpers must be a flawless melding of the human touch and computer omniscient. Customer don’t care who assists them, man or machine, they just want satisfaction. That will require dynamically-adaptive experiences (think easy toggling from self-serve to full-serve), cross-departmental collaboration, and cross-database synchronization, all driven by enhanced context as to what the customer wants and needs – which often start as different things.Superagents will need workspaces that facilitate collaboration and knowledge.Besides the rockets, lasers, and titanium suit, Ironman’s power comes from his heads-up display, giving him immediate access to the latest vital information. Same can be said for the new breed of Superagent. Single views of and instant access portals to key back-office workers, engineers, and product experts is a must. This functionality is not restricted to the desktop computer. Just like the always-on, tech savvy customer, superagents need and expect empowerment via mobile devices, as well.
But, be mindful of this game-changing fact: Agents will no longer be essential to scale customer service.The days of simply throwing more headcount at growing demand are over. Companies must remove repetitive agent tasks from a worker’s day, as well as automatically routing the complex, high-touch interactions to a live person to deliver empathy and personalization.That’s all we’ll say about this new report. But don’t fret.You can easily and quickly learn more about Forrester’s findings. How customer service organizations must rethink their culture, and the new developments prescriptive AI, robotic process automation, and adaptive agent desktops.Download the full report:The Three Customer Service Megatrends In 2020: Fuse AI and Agents To Drive Better ExperiencesAttend the live Webinar featuring guest speaker and Forrester Analyst Kate Leggett“Three customer service megatrends for 2020”Date: Wednesday, April 8, 2020 Time: 10:00am - 11:00am PT | 1:00pm - 2:00pm ETHow AI and automation are changing the game in customer service.
New ways to think about efficient customer service
How efficient is your customer service? Conventional wisdom says that reducing the time required to solve customer problems and increasing the number of customers served each day would indicate a rather efficient operation.Even so, you may be missing a huge opportunity to give your organization a competitive advantage.A recent report by Aberdeen suggests that the most savvy organizations are changing the focus of their customer service strategies to emphasize efficiency moves that benefit the customer and directly impact the bottom line.It’s all about convenienceStanding out in the marketplace – and reaping significant return on investment – requires making service interactions more efficient and convenient for customers across all channels. According to Aberdeen, firms that deliver effortless service experiences see as much as a four-fold annual increase in customer retention rates.But what exactly is convenience? The definition is subjective and depends on a customer’s expectations. While challenging to measure, what influences convenience can be measured by tracking the effort required to achieve a happy customer.Measuring customer efforts to get serviceCompanies typically measure customer effort by:
Monitoring direct customer feedback
Gathering customer behavioral data such as a decrease in product or service usage
Harvesting operational data such as average wait time or handle time
The goal, of course, is to reduce the amount of friction the customer encounters. Naturally, customers’ opinions of the service they receive tend to rise and fall with the amount of effort they had to expend to get their needs met.An example of what Aberdeen calls a “high effort”—i.e., inconvenient—customer service interaction is a website chatbot that is unable to resolve a customer issue, forcing the customer to call customer service and speak with a human.Making customer service convenient doesn’t happen by chanceAberdeen’s research shows companies that implement formal processes to reduce customer effort across all channels achieve significantly greater increases in annual customer satisfaction rates compared to organizations that don’t.And we all know what happy customers do: stay loyal. It’s never too late to start these customer-effort programs; Aberdeen also found that improving customer effort increases the chances that companies can win back customers who’ve left.Empowered customer service reps help customers to get service more easilyDon’t underestimate the power that fully enabled customer service reps have on customer loyalty. Aberdeen found companies that create formal programs, empower their employees to work efficiently, and give them the information they need to solve customer problems reported a 13% decrease in annual customer-service costs.How to start enabling effortless customer serviceTo create an effortless customer service program, first establish a unified view of customer insights across all channels and empower your employees with the tools and data they need to mine customer insights.Learn more about tools and solutions that can help you enable effortless customer service. In this on-demand webinar, you’ll learn how: convenience can drive customer service.
LIKE.TG named a Leader in the 2020 Gartner Magic Quadrant for the CRM Customer Engagement Center
Customer experience (CX) is made up of all the interactions you have with your customers. Good experiences can boost the bottom line while generating loyalty, brand preference, and premium pricing.On the other hand, just one bad experience can drive that customer away for good. That’s why customer experience has become a strategic priority for most organizations. So, what does it really take to deliver great customer experiences, and what does that mean for a business?To get some perspective on LIKE.TG® Customer Service Management (CSM), we sat down with Michael Ramsey, VP of product management for customer workflows at ServiceNow. Here’s what he had to say:Customer Service Management is one of LIKE.TG’s fastest growing workflow products. What’s driving this growth? Almost every organization is at some phase of their digital transformation. Part of that journey is the digitization of the customer experience, which is now broadly viewed as strategic to the success of the business. We’ve been able to help our customers make this transition and capitalize on disruptions that are taking place in their markets, so they can build new products and services supported by the customer experience they need to deliver to win.What do you see as the key features of the LIKE.TG Customer Service Management solution?LIKE.TG CSM enables organizations to engage customers on their channel of choice, including voice, web, mobile, and chat. It provides self-service and assisted service capabilities that ensure the right level of support is available for every request.Self-service enables customers to leverage service catalogs, knowledge libraries, and virtual agents, sometimes referred to as chatbots, to quickly find answers or complete service requests without involving a human agent. When human assistance is needed, the requests can be seamlessly routed to the agent best able to address the issue and ensure it is resolved quickly and permanently.What makes all this possible is that LIKE.TG CSM automates the workflows behind every customer request. Every time a customer engages with the organization, whether they are disputing a bill, opening a new account, or returning a product, a workflow is triggered to complete that request. Sometimes this workflow requires involvement from the front, middle and back offices. LIKE.TG CSM handles it all, end-to-end, taking the customer engagement and driving that workflow across the organization to complete the customer’s request.The other piece to note is that LIKE.TG Customer Service Management is built on the Now Platform®, one of the most secure, flexible, modern cloud platforms available. This means we have artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), task-based workflows, and the robust ability to model all the products and services that a customer is entitled to, so we can provide truly proactive service to customers.Can you give some examples of how AI and machine learning play into Customer Service Management?We are using AI to solve problems for our customers. Some examples include our use of machine learning to identify common issues that affect multiple customers, so organizations can proactively take action and resolve them before they impact more customers or before a customer even knows there is a problem.We also automatically look at customer engagement data and cases to identify underlying trending topics or issues and then surface them for action. For example, LIKE.TG CSM might initiate a workflow to resolve an issue that impacts many customers or initiate the development of an FAQ or knowledge-based article that could help customers help themselves, via a virtual agent. In addition, Customer Service Management can predict how to classify a case, so it can be routed to the person best qualified to resolve that request accurately and efficiently.LIKE.TG claims to be the only company that connects customer engagement and service operations with digital workflows. What does that mean? We can support the entire customer experience, end-to-end. We have the ability to model the products and services an organization offers to their customers, which could be digital products and services or digital assets that are bound to physical products and services, and engage customers to support them around those products and services. We can also drive the workflows needed to complete those requests across the organization’s front, middle, and back offices.By combining engagement and service operations, we deliver proactive customer service. That’s how we were able to introduce industry workflows for telecommunications, financial services, and healthcare that will provide a single system of action with insights across systems of record. This allows organizations to manage processes such as onboarding a new customer or managing a complaint from end-to-end while collaborating in real time across departments.LIKE.TG bills itself as “the platform of platforms.” What does that mean?Every customer is going to have a complex IT landscape, which means they need a solution that works elegantly across that landscape. For example, a customer request may involve the company’s front, middle, and back offices. As a result, some steps and tasks needed to resolve that request need to be done in a back-office system that isn’t a LIKE.TG system.We can automate these workflows across the enterprise and talk to all these systems, like a billing, order management, or marketing system, to drive the workflow to completion. We can orchestrate workflows across people, across teams, and across systems. That’s the power of the Now Platform and why we say it is the platform of platforms.Has the pandemic impacted how LIKE.TG and its customers approach customer service management?There were a few new trends that came out of the pandemic, like the use of video chat for telehealth scenarios, but for the most part I think it simply accelerated two trends that already existed. The first trend was the adoption of more automated self-service solutions to handle customer requests. The second was empowering a distributed workforce to engage with customers from anywhere in the world.Suddenly, with shelter-in-place mandates, organizations found they needed both capabilities, immediately, in order to keep servicing customers. Overnight, organizations that might have only enabled 10% of their workforce to work remotely and resolve customer requests now had everyone working from home.Demand didn’t drop. In fact, it spiked for many organizations, including those in financial services, the public sector, and healthcare. Yet resources were more constrained than ever. So, we saw increasing demand for self-service, automation, and the ability to support a work from home workforce, including those in customer service.. Why do you think LIKE.TG moved into the Leaders Quadrant?LIKE.TG was recently named a Leader in the2020 Gartner Magic Quadrant for the CRM Customer Engagement CenterI think it really comes down to our customers. We are delivering a solution that solves real problems and delivers real value to our customers. I think being in the Leaders Quadrant is validation that we are helping our customers succeed.*Gartner, Inc., "Magic Quadrant for the CRM Customer Engagement Center," Brian Manusama, Nadine LeBlanc, 4 June 2020.Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in our research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner's research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
LIKE.TG and Zoom prove that great customer experiences matter
As the world transitioned to shelter-in-place mode this spring, businesses that were digitally enabled fared better than those that had not fully embraced digital transformation. Companies inevery industry, including tech, manufacturing, telco, and healthcare, are creating digital services to protect revenue in the COVID era. To scale and succeed in the current environment, however, these services need to provide a great customer experience.Many organizations—including Zoom, Disney+, 7-Eleven, State of Tennessee, Verizon and Vodaphone—have turned to LIKE.TG to help scale their customer operations and enable growth through digital services.The recent partnership announcement between LIKE.TG and Zoom put a big smile on my face. As we all navigate the messiness of working from home during a pandemic, Zoom has revealed our collective humanity, blending formal business conversations with personal connections. Call it mutually assured empathy, as kids, pets and grandparents (or in my case, goats) fill the backgrounds of our work calls. At a time when there is more competition than ever to provide enterprise-level digital services, those personal connections have only improved the customer experience.Like many other enterprises, LIKE.TG relies on Zoom to keep our employees connected and productive. Zoom’s usage rocketed to 300 million daily meeting participants in April 2020, up from 10 million in December. With that massive increase in customers, the company adopted LIKE.TG’s Customer Service Management (CSM) solution to scale its customer service operations and enable critical communications capabilities for its global community. CSM also provided proactive case management and personalized self-service options to help manage the influx of customer requests.Zoom has become a trusted pillar of LIKE.TG’s infrastructure, one we use to serve our employees and our customers efficiently and collaboratively. Zoom hardware will also replace LIKE.TG’s legacy phone system and provide a connected and seamless experience for its employees, whenever and wherever they may be connected.I’m thrilled that Zoom is not only standardizing on the Now Platform to power its customer service for its new Hardware as a Service business model, but also using LIKE.TG’s IT and Employee Workflows to help power its internal business processes.Zoom will soon broaden its deployment of LIKE.TG solutions to couple its existing deployment of ITSM to include ITOM Health, Field Service Management, HRSD, and ITBM, which will allow the company to resolve issues faster and, as a result, be more responsive to customers.The Now Platform will also enable Zoom to proactively monitor its worldwide infrastructure. When issues arise, Zoom can either provide customers with an immediate workaround or, in some instances, resolve a potential issue before it even occurs.I’m proud that Zoom chose LIKE.TG as the platform to help manage its exponential growth while keeping the world connected and productive. And because my global customer support team depends on Zoom to be always on and ready to perform, I’ll also rest easier knowing Zoom is using our technology to enhance its customer service.I know we’ll rise to the challenge. Great customer service breeds customer loyalty, which in turn drives revenue protection and growth. That’s something every business can get behind.
