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Modern service leaders win by focusing on customer convenience
New study: Customer convenience is a winning strategyDriving efficiency gains has long been a top objective of customer service leaders. Traditionally, this has meant reducing issue resolution times and increasing employee productivity while reducing operational costs.Efficiency remains a key objective for many service leaders. However, successful service leaders increasingly focus on driving efficiency to make it easier for customers to do business with them.Managing customer effort generates real resultsConvenience is subjective. It depends on the personal assessment of each customer. However, the amount of effort a client must put in to get their needs addressed has a direct impact on their convenience assessment. For example, if a customer uses a company website for self-service and is unsuccessful, and then uses live chat where the agent also can’t assist them, they are then forced to call the contact center and explain the issue for a third time. This interaction can be classified as “high effort,” and hence inconvenient for the customer.Findings from the Aberdeen Group’s February 2020 study, “The return on managing customer convenience in modern service programs, shows that firms with dedicated programs to minimize customer effort achieve far superior annual performance improvements, compared to service organizations without such programs.
Our study found that firms with a formal program to manage customer effort across all channels enjoy a 3.9X greater annual increase in customer satisfaction rates, compared to those without it (All Others).Besides improving customer satisfaction at a rapid pace, firms monitoring and managing service activities, with an eye to minimize client effort, decrease customer effort scores by 16.8X more than All Others. When combined, improvement across these two key performance indicators shows that minimizing effort to ensure customer convenience ultimately leads to happy clients.It’s not surprising that monitoring customer effort is becoming a priority for many forward-thinking service leaders.Empowering employees creates happy customersOne of the most common mistakes many service organizations make, when managing customer experience programs, is overlooking the impact employees have on customer satisfaction and loyalty. Happy employees create happy customers. Employee satisfaction is often intertwined with a company’s ability to empower employees with the tools and information they need to do their jobs.When employees are empowered, they can drive the efficiency gains that have long been top-of-mind for service leaders. Specifically, findings from our study reveal that firms with a formal program to deliver effortless service experiences reduce average handle times by 2.3X more than All Others. They also report a 13.0% annual decrease in customer service costs, compared to a 3.7% decrease for the All Others category.To put cost reduction improvements into perspective, let’s assume a service organization incurs $15 million in annual customer service costs. Adopting a formal program to minimize customer effort and taking the related steps to accomplish this goal would help this firm trim nearly $1.4 million more in service costs each year, compared to the same firm without such a program.
Customer convenience yields better customer experiencesIt’s harder for companies in many industries to compete based on price, products, or services alone. Competitors can grab market share by lowering prices or launching new products and services. However, it’s much harder for competitors to replicate the advantage that comes from minimizing the effort required for customers to get their needs met across all channels.To learn how service leaders across various industries are using best practices to enable customer convenience and become more customer-centric watch this webinar: The secret sauce helping CX leaders create loyal clients: convenience.You can also read a summary of the webinar here.
Translate CSM Trends to Business Value
Six key trends are transforming customer service—Here’s how to translate them into real business valueToday, digital transformation across the enterprise is impacting customer service. The most successful companies are evolving customer service from single-channel or non-integrated multichannel into a dynamic platform for customer experience. These organizations are embracing a new model of customer service where channels are irrelevant and customer service operational excellence is measured by effectiveness rather than efficiency and cost-savings.ThinkJar’s Esteban Kolsky recently spoke to customer service practitioners as part of his annual research project about the state of customer service. He identified six critical trends fueling this customer service transformation, including budgeting, spending priorities, technology adoption, data, channels, and cloud and platform ecosystems (to read more about the trends, check out this blog post or the full ThinkJar white paper.But how do you begin to translate these trends into real business value so you can embrace this new customer-centric model of customer service in your organization?Collaboration: the foundation of the new customer service modelAccording to Esteban, it’s critical to talk to peers and colleagues because customer service strategies must follow corporate investment priorities. If your organization has a chief customer officer, or someone who oversees experiences and engagement, this is the first person you need to engage with to make sure your initiatives align with what they are doing. Some of the investment priorities detailed in ThinkJar’s latest study are end-to-end experiences, customer engagement, and a better use of data.Finding other people in your organization who are undergoing similar modernization efforts is also crucial. While, it’s unlikely you will have to completely replace existing customer service solutions, you will likely combine efforts and resources between departments. The truth is, actions that were formerly privy to sales or marketing or even accounting are no longer isolated from customer service given the focus on end-to-end experiences.As you work to adopt trends to fuel customer service transformation, make sure to have conversations with operations, IT, marketing, and even sales because customers will require more than what customer service can provide. For example, as new customer service technology is adopted, 60-90% of customer service interactions are likely to be automated. The remaining interactions will be exceptions, one-off cases, and previously unknown issues. All will need to be resolved along the entire customer continuum—with help from other departments and subject matter experts—and not just from a simple interaction with customer service.Personalized, ad hoc experiences are what customers are after, requiring access to more IT resources than ever before. Access will be required not only to other departments and their processes, but also access to data and information previously unavailable to customer service. Talking to IT and architecture teams about making this simpler is also essential.Leveraging cloud to create innovative customer service solutionsFinally, understand the enterprise’s cloud strategy. While customer service continues to lag in cloud adoption, solutions that are ecosystem-based must be run from a cloud infrastructure to be effective. Whoever oversees cloud-migration and adoption in your organization must understand this new customer service model. They can plan the necessary integration points, technology needs, and how to better leverage data tools existing in the enterprise, as well as what customer service platforms bring to the table and how they can be used to improve operations in other areas of the enterprise.Ecosystems are about leveraging cloud properties and components to create innovative solutions for the enterprise. Working together, collaboratively, is the essence of the new customer service model.
Your ultimate goal should be to incorporate transformation customer service trends to create strategies for the next two years aligned with the new customer service model. It’s also important to collaborate with your providers and partners to determine how to better achieve a truly effective customer service platform for everyone, not just customers, to have better experiences.To get a more complete picture of the new customer service model, check out ThinkJar’s publication: Customer Service 2019-2024: a Framework to Adopt the New Model of Operational Excellence for Your Service Team and hear more about what Esteban had to say on the topic in this webinar.In the Customer Service is Digitally Transforming – Series, you'll find the following posts:Part 1 - Customer service is digitally transforming—Are you ready?Part 2 - Six trends driving customer servicePart 3 - The new customer-centric customer service modelPart 4 - How to translate CSM trends to business value (this blog post)
The 7 building blocks of customer service
Efficient and productive customer service representatives are a baseline, not a gold standard.A recent Aberdeen report reveals that forward-thinking customer service organizations have developed strategies to directly benefit customers by making engaging with brands more convenient. These companies understand that effortless service experiences create a competitive advantage.The building blocks of convenient, customer-focused serviceAberdeen suggests that seven building blocks help companies minimize customer effort.1. Understand your customers’ journeys clearlyIt’s important to capture customer feedback across all channels, to monitor sentiment and feedback. Analytics help you understand how customer sentiment and feedback change throughout a customer’s journey and then identify areas to improve.2. Ensure all interactions are consistentInteraction consistency is critical across channels and departments, to avoid frustrating and confusing customers. Integrating disparate systems is essential to this consistency.3. Be a consistent, authentic communicatorDon’t rely on customers to initiate the engagement process. Be proactive and use alerts, reminders, and notifications to help them anticipate potential issues and to understand that you’re addressing them. Become not just a responder but also a trusted partner.4. Analyze self-service data to identify common issuesUnderstand the problems that customers are trying to solve themselves. Chatbots and automated apps can resolve issues that otherwise vex customers.5. Enrich customer journey management activitiesTake advantage of tailored workflows to better manage customer journeys, including workflows to provide personalized self-service options or automate customer requests.6. Give your customer reps the tools to winThe right tools include the training, technology, processes, and data—as well as the authority to use them to full advantage—to satisfy customer needs and solve problems. Without the right tools, your customer service will be a source of customer frustration.7. Align organizational cultureProvide your employees with the training required to understand how greatly they influence the customer experience. Allow them to suggest improvements to the business of client management.Business benefits of customer-focused convenience: by the numbersAberdeen reports that companies who create formal programs to optimize effortless customer service enjoy significant business benefits.
96% greater year-over-year growth in annual company revenue
4.1x greater improvement in the annual customer retention rate
3.5x greater annual improvement in average customer spend
3.9x greater annual improvement in customer satisfaction rate
Customer retention is good businessHappy customers tend to be loyal customers, so enabling effortless customer experiences is worth the investment. Aberdeen also found that focusing on customer convenience also increases the chances that a company can win back former customers.Learn more about tools and solutions that can help you enable effortless: customer service.
5 fixes for the customer experience quandary
Customers expect products and services to work. When they don’t, customers want fast, permanent solutions. But delivering against that expectation is easier said than done. Multiple barriers stand in the way of your organization delivering the seamless experiences customers expect. Let’s explore five ways to improve customer service.1. Resolve issues the first time, fastCustomer service has been, by tradition, reactive: A problem occurs and, in response, a customer sends an SOS by phone, email, or messaging app, or seeks help online. It’s important to get the response right because a poor customer experience can have a far-reaching negative impact on the business.Digitally transforming the customer experience can help ensure issues are resolved fast and effectively. It’s one of the reasons why digital transformation reigns as a top customer contact priority, according to a Customer Contact Week study, with 85% of businesses saying “increasing the use of digital channels” will become more important going into 2025.Artificial intelligence (AI) has greatly improved the outcomes of reactive customer service. Conversational chatbots, for instance, use AI algorithms to contextualize an issue before offering suggestions. If the customer then escalates to an agent, AI categorizes and prioritizes the issue. It also puts the most appropriate information for solving the problem in front of the agent to speed resolution.Proactive customer service holds even more promise. At LIKE.TG, we use AI to help customers avoid costly service disruptions by predicting and helping prevent issues. As AI technology matures, we continually explore new ways it can be applied for seamless, successful customer experiences.
When you look for fast ways to resolve issues, make sure you consider customer self-service options beyond chatbots. You can reduce customer effort by providing personalized search results and suggested solutions—especially automated solutions—based on the customer’s history and purchased services or products.A searchable knowledge base helps customers get answers to common questions and problems fast, with more details than can be provided in a FAQ. An online community facilitating the sharing of ideas, experiences, and solutions between peers can also provide insightful guidance.2. Keep contact center volume under controlThere are many indicators that a problem is brewing. Some might be obvious; others might be subtle. In a digitally connected world, customers expect no disruptions when they use products and services. Yet, disruptions happen. How the customer feels afterward is heavily influenced by how you react. According to a Qualtrics XM Institute report, only one in five customers will forgive a bad experience if they rate a company as “very poor.”That’s why it’s critical to optimize operational and customer service processes across the organization. By unifying these processes on a single platform, you can monitor for and circumvent potential problems.You can also track device and service health, automatically schedule preventive maintenance, and analyze trends to reduce disruptions. That yields great customer service, which in turn leads to business growth. As Qualtrics reports, customers who rate a company’s service as “good” are 38% more likely to recommend that company.When a problem does occur and it affects multiple customers, connected processes between customer service and operations can limit spikes in contact volume and impairment of customer experience. Ideally, you’ve discovered the problem first by monitoring digital services, noticing a service trend early, or being informed by an internal team. The next step is to proactively notify customers affected by the issue and provide an estimated time to resolution, if known.
By seeing you take the lead, customers are less likely to contact customer service—and have a better experience because they know you’re actively working on the issue.In its efforts to create a more streamlined and satisfying experience for customers, Proximus, Belgium’s largest telecommunications company, added personalization and timeliness with ServiceNow. The payoff includes the company’s ability to detect the failure of a component and understand which customer it may affect, enabling Proximus to proactively create an incident on the customer’s behalf.Surges in contact volume are also mitigated by proactive communications with customers. In the case of planned engineering works, automated notifications are sent to customers in advance, and customer service agents have full visibility of incoming calls related to the issue.3. Reduce omni-channel complexityWhen fielding even simple customer requests, disconnected communication channels force agents to switch between systems to see previous interactions in other channels. It’s easier to ask the customer for the information again. This has a negative effect on agent productivity, slows service delivery, and ultimately impacts customer satisfaction.To avoid losing customers, organizations need to consolidate interaction information across systems into a single location rather than rely on multiple point solutions. Centralized customer activity history simplifies work for agents and frees them to focus on assisting customers.
It’s good for customers too. They want to move conversations between their preferred channels, which can be different depending on the time of day or the situation. Companies that adopt this single-location strategy have seen up to a 35% annual increase in customer retention, according to Aberdeen.Telecom company Vodafone wanted to provide its customer service agents with a simple, intuitive, and streamlined system that would allow clear insight into a customer’s journey. After implementing LIKE.TG Customer Service Management, Vodafone increased agent productivity by 45%, gained a 360-degree view of customers, and achieved a 25-point increase in customer satisfaction.4. Connect all teams resolving customer issuesBusiness model changes or rapid company growth, either organically or by acquisition, can create disconnected processes, departments, and systems. Hybrid workplaces, with some employees in the office and others working remotely, add to the challenge.Relying on emails, spreadsheets, and departmental systems with manual processes between groups can impact a company’s ability to deliver quality customer service. Fragmented customer operations negatively affect customer experience, yet only 7% of companies recognize the need to seamlessly manage end-to-end service delivery activities from the front office to the back office, Aberdeen reports.By implementing end-to-end, orchestrated workflows, an organization can:
Automate and accelerate processes.
Connect teams for better visibility and accountability.
Help ensure employees have the information they need to resolve issues quickly.
When you connect all teams involved in customer issue resolution, you optimize the speed and efficiency of your operations. You also create great experiences for front, middle, and back-office agents, partners, and end customers.
At one point, Tennessee’s Department of Human Services (DHS) faced a customer service crisis caused by limited staff and rising citizen case volumes. Due to siloed channels and manual processes, the organization struggled to deliver responsive customer service.With LIKE.TG Customer Service Management, Tennessee DHS decreased inquiry assignment times by 99% and inquiry resolution times by 70%. “We immediately saw dramatic improvements in quality and efficiency,” said the agency’s then-director of customer service operations. “Instead of taking 36 hours to assign an inquiry, it now takes less than two minutes.”5. Enable field techs to quickly resolve issuesField service can be tough, with diverse and broad products, reliance on past job experience, and customers expecting work to be done quickly and correctly the first time. Limited access to effective solutions and experts, along with manual processes, can lead to repeat service visits, missed maintenance windows, asset downtime, and reduced customer loyalty and revenue.Providing easy access through a mobile app to available solutions, along with the ability to collaborate with other employees, makes technicians more effective—especially newly hired employees with less experience.
Still, field service is typically reactive. Until a customer reports a problem, the organization doesn’t know someone is having issues with their machine or device or needs replacement equipment earlier than scheduled. Before the rise of the Internet of Things (IoT), this was a problem with no viable, cost-effective solution.IoT data can mean the difference between gaining or losing a lifetime customer. By monitoring IoT-enabled devices, you can proactively alert field service and customer service to irregularities.You can improve service levels and speed by dispatching technicians equipped with all of the issue details and necessary parts and skills to resolve the problem quickly. Customer service will be ready to answer questions if the customer contacts the company. You identify problems sooner, and the data provides additional insights for reducing truck rolls and increasing first-time fix rates.Traffic and parking safety solution provider TAPCO struggled with limited visibility into equipment status, tedious manual processes, and slow time to repair. Now it continuously monitors its intelligent traffic systems with LIKE.TG Connected Operations. IoT rules trigger remediation workflows automatically when exceptional readings are detected. Affected customers get notified proactively.Integration with LIKE.TG Field Service Management means a work order is also automatically created, dispatching a technician to complete maintenance. Before LIKE.TG, this process was manual and slow. Now it’s automated, traceable, and connected. TAPCO has a clearer understanding of activity in the field, its technicians arrive on-site armed with both historical and near-real-time customer data, and there’s a transparent audit trail of issues and resolution.Delivering seamless customer experiencesThere’s no magical incantation or trick that can turn your customers into diehard fans of your brand. Improving customer service is about:
Optimizing and empowering customers with personalized self-service backed by automation
Reducing disruptions when customers use your product or service—and notifying them quickly if you learn about a problem before they do
Accelerating processes through digital workflows and connecting teams for fast resolutions and better visibility
Unifying your approaches to customer service with a single digital platform
Learn more about LIKE.TG Customer Service Management.LIKE.TG, the LIKE.TG logo, Now, and other LIKE.TG marks are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of LIKE.TG, Inc. in the United States and/or other countries. Other company names, product names, and logos may be trademarks of the respective companies with which they are associated.
3 ways to digitally transform the customer experience
Updated Feb. 14, 2023In an age when customers voice their dissatisfaction by ranting on social media or quietly taking their business to a competitor, it’s more important than ever to keep them engaged with—and coming back to—your brand. That requires a concerted effort to:
Create an experience that meets customers where they are
Provide solutions to their challenges
Deliver quick and timely responses
Personalize the experience for each individual
At LIKE.TG, we’re committed to making work better for everyone. Let’s explore three practical, attainable ways to digitally transform the customer experience:1. Proactive supportHelping customers stay loyal to your brand is no easy feat. But a proactive support strategy can make the challenge easier. Acting on issues before they affect customers can completely transform customer experience. Other proactive support benefits include:
The ability to scale your customer cloud operations and customer support efforts
Decreased case resolution times
Increased productivity
Watch our Adopt a proactive support strategy to learn how LIKE.TG streamlined our own customer experience through artificial intelligence monitoring.2. One system of actionWhen people, processes, technology, and data are siloed, it can be difficult to get work done, let alone keep your customers happy. Adequately addressing customers’ changing needs and growing expectations requires integrating your front, middle, and back offices to deliver a seamless experience.LIKE.TG provides one platform, one architecture, and one data model to help that ideal become reality. Get tips to optimize processes and workflows in Create effortless experiences that build long-term loyalty.Frost Sullivan Analyst Michael DeSalles joins Ajda LaPrad, product marketing director at LIKE.TG, for a thought-provoking conversation. Discover ways to accelerate issue resolution, provide transparency and, ultimately, boost customer loyalty.3. AI-powered self-serviceWhen it comes to delivering frictionless customer service, there’s no silver bullet. But there are ways to optimize the process. Empowering customers to get quick answers to common questions is one of them.Adopting an everything-as-a-service business model with AI-powered self-service, personalization, and integrated support and operations can help you cut costs and position your business for growth. Watch Powering your everything-as-a-service business for details.
Enhanced customer experience: A conversation with Rogers Communications
The success of a modern business starts with recognizing the value of the customer and committing to provide a great experience. The best companies do this by putting respect and empathy at the core of every interaction.In today’s new era of work, delivering an enhanced customer experience has become increasingly connected with the employee experience. This creates new opportunities for organizations to drive stronger satisfaction for both parties simultaneously.A new customer experience approachRogers Communications grew from a humble beginning 60 years ago to become the largest communications and media company in Canada, servicing more than 10.8 million subscribers today. In our fourth episode of the Canadian Leadership Exchange, we spoke with Scott Thomson, vice president of business customer service at Rogers, to learn how the company measures satisfaction and friction levels for both customers and employees in fulfilling ongoing service requests.Rogers employees take pride in the legacy of founder Ted Rogers, who “believed in the power of communication to enlighten, embolden, and entertain.” But to stay competitive, the company needed to re-evaluate the design of its business units and modernize a changing corporate structure. Rogers Communications rose to the challenge by making enhancements to its products and services to keep up with the company’s accelerated growth.Watch the video to learn how Rogers’ transformation using digital workflows can help other organizations improve the customer and employee experiences.
Workflow Guides offer curated content for business leaders
Organizations are facing an unprecedented challenge adjusting their businesses to operate in a time where resiliency and continuity are suddenly top priorities. As a result, digital transformation, once a vision for the future, has now become a business imperative.While there’s a lot of content out there about digital transformation, it can be daunting to understand what’s credible and where to start. We are here to help.Introducing Workflow Guides. These are theme-based content hubs that curate ideas and quality resources in one place. From inspirational thought leadership content to solutions relevant to wherever you are in your digital transformation journey. Workflow Guides make navigating ideas and resources easy. Here’s a snapshot of what’s available now.Returning to the workplace. This Guide shares a collection of articles and solutions to help get your business running again. Check out advice from LIKE.TG CIO Chris Bedi and other leaders. Read HR guru Josh Bersin on the future of employee experience. Download new safe workplace apps to provide a safe, employee-ready workplace.Digitize customer experiences. This Guide contains perspectives from Gartner, IDC and other industry thought leaders, including Dean Robison, LIKE.TG’s head of customer support. You can also dive into a LIKE.TG demo and estimate the business value you can achieve with the LIKE.TG value calculator.Customer experience in the new normal. Across Europe, the Middle East and Africa, organizations are looking to digital workflow solutions that are simple and affordable. Learn how companies in these regions are adapting to the post-Covid world Check out insights from EMEA business leaders and podcasts featuring experts from Deloitte and Accenture.The new banking landscape. The banking industry faces distinctive challenges in the Covid era. This Guide features incisive reporting by independent journalists, and case studies about financial services companies reaping the benefits of digital transformation.Personalize patient experiences. Healthcare delivery is more important than ever in these challenging times. This Guide provides a glimpse into the future of AI, original research, and case studies of healthcare organizations that are creating the future of patient care.Digitize government workflows. Governments get real with digital transformation. This Guide shares perspectives, insights, expert resources, and solutions to improve the citizen experience of government. It covers topics ranging from how to secure citizen data to techniques for fostering public sector innovation.
Top 3 priorities to enhance customer experience
The retail, banking, telecom, and tech sectors have been trying to prove their love of customer experience (CX) for years. But the COVID-19 pandemic has underscored the need to elevate those vital customer relationships.German shoemaker Adidas is a case in point. In November 2020, it reported strong quarter-over-quarter performance. CEO Kasper Rørsted told Seeking Alpha that a great deal of the company’s success stemmed from using digital channels to woo people into enrolling in its membership program, which had tripled from 50 million to 150 million during the prior 12 months. Members shop more and spend more on each transaction, resulting in a lifetime value 2.5 times greater than non-members.[Ready to enhance customer experience? Read IDC’s Spotlight, sponsored by ServiceNow.]Digital has changed the CX tuneThe COVID-19 pandemic has turbocharged the migration from physical to digital channels. And expectations are high. The "app for everything" mentality is rampant. If one app—or product or service—doesn't work, we can easily switch to another.The pressure is on for customer success leaders to set priorities that turn things up to 11. According to an IDC-LIKE.TG survey conducted in Europe in late 2020, these are the top three priorities for customer leaders:1. Workflow optimizationCustomer experience and engagement are like a streaming channel with hundreds of songs on shuffle play united by a theme. At a basic level, customer success leaders must ensure digital touchpoints (websites, self-service portals, apps, etc.) are consistent with each other and with traditional ones, such as contact centers, products, and physical locations.UK-based Cheshire Datasystems Ltd. (CDL) is a tech supplier to the insurance industry. CDL deployed workflow automation tools to streamline its customer service desk. Customer requests that once took hours to resolve now take minutes. Calls and emails to service staff plunged by 50%, and service-level agreement achievements soared to 97%.2. Digital trust and securityAccording to a 2020 survey by IDC, approximately two-thirds of European enterprises have implemented trust programs.1 Of those, only about a third say a program goal is to establish trust agreements with partners. And just 28% say a goal is to help improve perception of the enterprise.This suggests a missed opportunity to burnish brands. Security must always be a priority to ensure regulatory compliance, but a brand’s commitment to trust is a song that needs to be in heavy rotation. The more it's played, the more loyal customers and partners are likely to be.Trust and privacy must also include efficient data exchange and respect for customer preferences. It’s about timing offers and promotions for when they’ll be welcome and soliciting customer feedback proactively.3. Business model innovationOnce you’ve had a smooth digital experience, it’s hard to tolerate old-school, analog processes. For example, we can hail rides using apps that allow us to choose a vehicle type and track our driver’s progress to the pickup point. The app provides the expected drive time, fee, and driver ratings. After that experience, going back to hailing cabs by hand and paying in cash would feel like playing music on an eight-track cassette.Similarly, during the pandemic, many restaurants have shifted to a pickup and delivery model, leveraging Uber-like ordering apps that integrate with point-of-sale systems—and sometimes inventory management systems. While we all look forward to dining in physical restaurants when health conditions permit, these new apps have permanently changed how we order takeout.B2C manufacturers are also creating digital customer experiences. Well before the pandemic, French skin care and cosmetics manufacturer L'Oréal had been laying the groundwork for engaging customers online.In addition to optimizing its own sites, L'Oréal solidified relationships with partner sites. This included getting them to use the AI-powered ModiFace, an application that allows customers to try on makeup virtually. Though sales through shops and to professionals suffered in 2020, the company saw its e-commerce revenue soar by 64% year over year in the first half of the year.Cross-functional compositionCustomer success comes from harmonizing experiences across the organization. For that reason, customer success officers need to break out of their functional silos in sales and marketing. Siloed performance metrics won’t cut it either. If you want your work to resonate across the enterprise, you need to blend traditional front-office metrics with technology, operations, and finance metrics.Every function has its part to play. The CIO needs to be a partner to link in the right systems. The human resources department is critical to drive employee experiences that foster exceptional service. Operations can automate and optimize supply chains to simplify ordering, delivery, invoicing, and payments. And so forth.The good news: Implementing customer-centric solutions often sparks discussions about technical, data, and operational silos that eventually contribute to their elimination. This paves the way for everyone to play to the same customer-focused beat.Enhance customer experience with help from LIKE.TG and IDC.1 Trott, D., Brown, D., and Child M. (October 2020). The future of trust in Europe: Moving beyond technology deployment to support business outcomes. IDC.
Empowering customers and employees through digital experience
The pandemic has made clear that businesses can’t work in silos anymore. That reality extends to customer experience (CX) and employee experience (EX). The path to success is integration between the two to create a total digital experience, because happy employees produce happy customers.“The employee and customer experience are like a mobius strip or infinite loop. They are interconnected,” explains Dean Robison, senior vice president of customer service and support at LIKE.TG, in a recent Workflow article.Benefits of total experienceThe benefits of a total experience approach fall in three key areas, according to LIKE.TG-sponsored research by ESI ThoughtLab and reported in the Workflow Quarterly Summer 2021 issue: financial, organizational, and customer/employee. Of the 900 senior-level executives surveyed:
45% reported higher revenue from merging CX and EX.
36% noted better organizational decision-making.
22% found a combined approach attracts customers.
Further benefits include increased market share and lower capital costs, improved organizational health and safety, and better products and services.Perhaps that’s why half of the survey respondents are making large or very large investments in total experience, linking CX and EX. “Creating a cohesive total experience reduces the drag, cost, and redundancy of serving both internal and external stakeholders,” according to ESI ThoughtLab’s analysis of the results.The need for improved IT platformsGetting your company to embrace total experience isn’t necessarily easy. Survey respondents agreed modern, improved IT platforms are a prerequisite. In fact, more than half of the companies represented named modernizing IT platforms their top priority in the next two years.Digital platforms such as the Now Platform enable digital workflows that connect front, middle, and back-office functions, eradicating silos.Other ways companies are investing in the total experience include digitizing CX, providing staff with technology and data, integrating EX and CX, acquiring talent, and including employees in CX design (see Figure 1).
Figure 1: Top total experience steps taken now vs. 1-2 years. Source: ESI ThoughtLabToward experience maturityImproving the overall experience is fraught with challenges, but they’re not insurmountable. The survey found these challenges subside as companies mature their CX and EX initiatives. Here’s how to start merging your CX and EX:
Create an experience strategy and roadmap.
Design an experience that puts people at the center.
Build the right team with the right skills.
Get real-time feedback and sentiment analysis.
Design low-code apps for faster innovation.
Following these steps can lead to big payoffs—for your customers, your employees, and your business.Get more insights in the Workflow Quarterly Total Experience issue. To stay abreast of emerging tech and business trends, subscribe to the Workflow newsletter.
LIKE.TG named a leader in the Forrester Wave for Value Stream Management Solutions
As an executive your focus is always on delivering the most value from every investment. Value for your customers, and of course value for yourself. Yet there are so many places in the value delivery process where things can – and do – go wrong.The term “value stream” describes the end- to-end process of developing and delivering software to your clients. The value stream starts with your investment selection and prioritization, which is itself driven by feedback from clients.It continues through the resourcing and scheduling processes and then enters the delivery cycle, taking any number of different paths to ultimately reach the point where a solution is ready for deployment. That solution must be released effectively and efficiently and must be managed and supported in the production environment while generating more feedback that starts the cycle over.Historically that end-to-end value stream has not been managed as a continuous flow, but rather as a series of points, each with its own working methods, software tools and resources. Each of these variables can cause problems and make it harder for you to identify bottlenecks and adjust work mid-stream in response to emerging threats and opportunities.Enter Value Stream Management. VSM is a process designed to integrate your value stream. It’s a common data platform that covers the entire value stream from initial ideation and investment management, through agile and continuous planning, development and testing, release management and all the way through to production with IT operations and service management.VSM gives all value stream stakeholders a view into what’s happening at every step of the process. That view is tailored to each stakeholder’s needs. It combines high level overviews with the power to drill down to the deepest detail. Most importantly, it enables action. When something changes, or when you need to adjust work, you can do it in one place without disrupting teams or derailing the process.Not all VSM solutions are created equal. Your platform should support the entire value stream from client feedback loops to operations and service management. It should allow you to make an impact by focusing on specific areas like test automation and change management, while still maturing your organization, processes and technology.You also need the ability to easily connect to common tools like Jira, Azure DevOps, GitLab and many more. In short you need a solution like LIKE.TG, a Leader in The Forrester Wave Value Stream Management Solutions, Q3 2020. Download the report.
LIKE.TG a Leader in Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for CRM Customer Engagement Center
I’m thrilled to announce that Gartner has named LIKE.TG a Leader in its 2021 Magic Quadrant for the CRM Customer Engagement Center for the second year in a row.1 We believe this is external validation of our strategy and vision to improve the end-to-end customer experience through our Customer Service Management solution.Our mission in Customer Workflows is to transform the customer service and support market for the better. To do that, we need to skate where the puck is going, and that’s all about meeting customers at their point of need and in the channel of their choice to actually solve their problems.Fastest-growing vendorAccording to the Gartner Market Share: All Software Markets, Worldwide, 2020 report, we’re the fastest-growing vendor among the top 15 customer service and support vendors by market share based on 2020 worldwide revenue and year-over-year growth. We achieved 75.6% growth in worldwide customer service and support revenue year over year.2We’re growing largely because of this changing landscape, where customer service professionals have to constantly adapt to meet the needs of their customers. After only five years in the customer service market, we now have more than 1,500 customers across industries, from high-tech, telecom, and financial services to healthcare, manufacturing, and government.Trends like direct to consumer, everything as a service, and work from anywhere are driving digital transformation in every industry—and driving transformational change in customer experiences.We all witnessed this as customers over the last 18 months during the pandemic, sometimes with great experiences, sometimes not so great. Literally millions of customer service agents were sent home overnight. Supply chains were disrupted. Yet, customer service departments still had their jobs to do. Companies that had invested in modern agile customer support systems did well. Companies that had not, suffered significant disruptions, and their customers suffered the consequences.Disruption is the new constant. That's why speed, agility, and operations efficiency have become so important in customer service solutions.Customer innovationI’d like to provide two concrete examples of how LIKE.TG® Customer Service Management is helping companies deliver better customer experiences and drive operational efficiency. Lloyds Banking Group digitally transformed its mission-critical payment operations in only 12 weeks, significantly improving its customer experience and the experience and efficiency of its service agents in the process.Previously, agents had 16 steps and had to interact with six different systems. The situation wasn’t good for the agents or the customers. We helped the organization reduce those numbers to two steps and one system of action. As a result, the bank has 70% better resolution times and increased customer satisfaction—all while reducing errors and mundane tasks for agents.This is a great example of how innovative customers can both improve end-to-end customer experience and drive massive operational efficiency with Customer Workflows. And that’s what digital transformation is all about.Another customer, Siemens Healthineers, provides medical equipment ranging from MRI, ultrasound, and X-ray machines to respiratory and patient monitoring systems. Because many of these devices are mission-critical, all of the standard customer service key performance indicators (KPIs)—first-time fix rate, mean time to resolve, and first-call resolution—take on a whole new meaning.Siemens had multiple systems, which led to inconsistent user experiences and the inability to offer seamless self-service. With Customer Service Management, Siemens was able to provide one consistent system of action for its support staff and a modern portal for customer self-service.Connect engagement to where the work gets doneWith the pandemic, we saw that companies that weren’t digitally enabled couldn’t deal with the massive and sudden disruption that hit them overnight. The crisis also highlighted that digitally enabling customer engagement is not enough—that’s only half the story in customer service.The other half is how you solve the problem or fulfill the request. Although it’s great to have omni-channel digital engagement for customers, if the people doing the work to fulfill the request continue to rely on antiquated systems, you still have bottlenecks and inconsistencies.The completion of a customer request often spans multiple teams, departments, and back-end systems, which are typically siloed. Traditionally, a lot of this work is done manually via swivel chairs, emails, and phone calls—all glued together by agents and middle-office service workers. Sometimes this workflow isn’t even defined in software and is dependent on tribal knowledge. The result is a slow, inconsistent process that leaves customers frustrated.LIKE.TG takes a different approach by combining great engagement and operations. The Now Platform® is the platform for digital business at scale. We enable organizations to structure their processes into automated, digital workflows in a consistent manner, without losing the flexibility required for their unique needs.Looking aheadThe demand for great, end-to-end customer experiences will only increase in coming years. We’ve seen that innovative companies are embracing digital transformation to improve customer experiences while driving operational efficiencies. We’ve learned that disruption is the new norm and that agility has never been as important as it is today.The Customer Workflows team is fired up to tackle these challenges, and we’re committed to partnering closely with our customers to deliver better experiences for everyone. We’re just getting started.Download the full Gartner Magic Quadrant report.1 Gartner, Inc., "Magic Quadrant for the CRM Customer Engagement Center," Nadine LeBlanc, Jim Davies, Varun Agarwal, 15 June 2021.2 Gartner, Inc., “Market Share: All Software Markets, Worldwide, 2020,” 14 April 2021. Calculations performed by LIKE.TG based on Gartner report.Gartner DisclaimerGartner and Magic Quadrant are registered trademarks of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved.Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner's research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
How Playbooks improve customer service delivery, agent productivity
Kathy Neff, director of Customer Workflows product marketing at LIKE.TG, co-authored this blog.We all know one bad experience can impact a customer’s perception of—and even willingness to deal with—an organization going forward. That’s why so many companies, in virtually every industry, have made investing in customer experience (CX) a top priority, according to ResearchAndMarkets.com.The problem is, for any given organization, there are a number of customer service processes along the entire life span of an interaction that need to be looked at and made great.These processes are often complex, encompassing multiple siloed teams and departments across the organization. That makes it difficult to visualize and orchestrate the entire process at a glance—and allows inefficiencies and delays to persist. These, in turn, prevent organizations from delivering a great end-to-end digital experience.In general, the main difficulties organizations struggle with fall into four categories:
Fundamental – “I can’t see the entire process lifecycle in a single view. The vital data I need to help understand and resolve an issue is trapped in other systems or scattered across other teams.”
Operational – “I don’t know where the process is currently or who’s working on it. I have no way of identifying where we have bottlenecks.”
Functional – “I can’t provide my agents with all the necessary data to complete their tasks. I don’t know how to guide agents through the steps required to resolve a customer issue.”
Strategic – “I don’t know how likely it is we’ll meet or breach our service-level agreements.”
The specifics may vary by organization and industry, but one thing remains constant: Unless work flows seamlessly across the process, customer experiences and subsequent business performance suffer. A lack of visibility and control over customer service workflows creates inefficiencies that drive up the cost of service and decrease customer (and often employee) satisfaction.Break down silos and gain visibilityPlaybooks for LIKE.TG® Customer Service Management solve these challenges. By enabling companies to define, visualize, and orchestrate complex workflows, Playbooks help deliver the experiences customer service agents want and customers expect.Playbooks empower agents to view all the necessary steps to solve a customer’s issue or complete their request. They provide visibility into the status of tasks, including those assigned to downstream teams, so that everyone knows where the process stands and what’s still needed from both colleagues and systems.This also enables executives to “see” why work doesn’t flow across all service processes, quickly identify bottlenecks, and make improvements to speed completion.Organizations can create multiple Playbooks, one for each process, to define the data, tasks, and automation necessary to digitize processes. Playbooks provide agents with a visual guide of the various tasks required to complete the process, along with the sequence in which they need to be executed (either serially or in parallel) to resolve the customer issue or request as quickly as possible.Improving the agent and customer experienceIn the Now Platform® Rome release, we significantly enhanced Playbooks to deliver a focused layout experience. This makes it easier than ever for agents to understand the task at hand and accelerate the resolution of issues or the completion of work, thereby increasing their overall productivity. The focused layout (see Figure 1):
Optimizes the real estate on the screen to help agents focus on their current task, starting with the creation of a new record.
Displays dynamic, contextual data and resources within the Playbook in a collapsible side panel—including activity stream, case details, and related records—making it easy for agents to find what they need, when they need it.
Empowers agents by allowing them to view the entire process lifecycle, determine which step they’re on, and get visual cues to indicate the progress of the phase, etc.
Figure 1: Customer Service Playbooks: Focused layoutWith these enhancements, companies can streamline their processes to accelerate service delivery and increase customer satisfaction and agent productivity. Playbooks help make work better for people, combining customer engagement and operations to make work flow naturally throughout the company—the way it’s supposed to.Experience the power of Playbooks firsthand. Download one of our packages from the LIKE.TG Store today:
Case Playbook for Onboarding
Case Playbook for Complaints
Case Playbook for Product Support
Increasing the efficiency of customer service delivery
Virag Shah, senior manager for inbound product management in industry and Customer Workflows, co-authored this blog.Running a customer contact center to meet the sky-high expectations of today’s customers is hard work. Success depends on having agents who can empathize with and advocate for your customers in order to give them satisfactory answers and resolutions. This is no small task, and the dynamic nature and complexity of all the factors involved make it even more difficult.For starters, customer service centers must track and manage customer interactions across multiple channels: telephone, email, chat, and social media. Although each channel requires live agents to monitor and respond to customer requests, not every agent can handle every channel. Specific channels often require specific skills and expertise.For live chat, social media, and email, for instance, agents need to be proficient in grammar, spelling, and typing to quickly and effectively answer customers’ questions. To take calls, especially when representing a global business, agents need to be able to converse in the language the customer is most comfortable using.Add to this the fact that customers expect a representative to be available 24/7, and scheduling quickly becomes a critical gating factor for success. You have to consider the hours that different customer service agents are available, including meals and break times, across multiple time zones, not to mention scheduled and unexpected time off.Plus, there are special events to think about, such as holidays and new product or service launches—all of which may have variable staffing requirements. Ensuring the right agents are covering the right channels to meet your organization’s service levels (e.g., 80% of calls answered in 30 seconds, emails responded to within eight hours) can be a monumental task.Taming the complexityWorkforce Optimization for LIKE.TG® Customer Service Management can help managers, team leads, supervisors, and agents improve the quality and efficiency of their service teams. It creates transparency, facilitating better planning, coordination, and communication that lead to high-performing, engaged, and satisfied service teams.The solution provides customer service supervisors and managers with real-time visibility across channels and agent activity, enabling them to monitor productivity and workloads from their own unique workspace. They can also identify key performance indicators (KPIs) and measure the performance of their team across review periods (see Figure 1).For example, supervisors can use their dashboard to track average handling times and drill down to get details that can help identify and address potential bottlenecks or replicate efficient processes.
Figure 1: Managers can monitor and measure the performance of their team members.Scheduling within Workforce Optimization makes it easy for supervisors and managers to see agent availability, manage shift assignments, and balance agent workloads. On the flip side, agents can see their personal work schedule and request to swap shifts as needed to avoid gaps in coverage.Workforce Optimization gives managers 360-degree visibility into their agents’ workloads, as well as their historical performance, to inform evaluation and growth conversations. This creates opportunities for supervisors and managers to coach their agents, help them perform assessments, and offer feedback to improve performance.Machine learning further helps managers maintain necessary skills across their teams, recommending the skills and expertise that should be allocated to different team members.Agents can see how they’re doing from their desktop by tracking their performance against key metrics. In addition, they can access training and knowledge resources to help them acquire new skills and experience to improve their service levels and grow in their career.3 key enhancements in the Rome releaseThe Now Platform® Rome release further enhances the capabilities of Workforce Optimization in three ways:1. Schedule Adherence enables managers to monitor an agent’s compliance with scheduled work times and set adherence targets to drive desired behaviors (see Figure 2). This ability brings together forecasting, scheduling, and actual agent activity to help supervisors and managers better keep tabs on contact center activities.
Figure 2: Managers can view their team’s schedules, shifts, and shift swaps at a glance.2. Demand Forecasting allows managers to visualize historical work/volume data along with forecasts (see Figure 3). This information simplifies staff planning in order to accommodate changes in demand (e.g., product launches, holidays) and ensure high customer satisfaction levels. The forecasting algorithm can be selected and forecast parameters adjusted to suit circumstances, such as volume spikes or vacation times.
Figure 3: Plan future demand and make manual adjustments to your forecast.3. Skills Development and Coaching helps managers evaluate an agent’s work and discuss opportunities for improvement and growth by identifying available trainings to increase the agent’s expertise. Any feedback customers provided during or after their interactions is available to help inform the manager’s coaching discussions with their agents.Team members’ skill profiles help managers make the best use of their resources, allowing them to identify gaps and better allocate resources at the individual, team, and cross-team levels to prepare for the ever-changing needs of the business (see Figure 4).
Figure 4: Managers can quickly see and adjust the distribution of skills across their teams.These enhancements continue to build out Workforce Optimization, enabling you to make your agents more knowledgeable and efficient—and, ultimately, leading to better service and happier agents and customers. Learn more about how LIKE.TG can help you streamline customer service.
Rethinking customer experience
On a video call, a customer asked why I had a stack of boxes behind me. That’s one of the things about Zoom—you get glimpses into other people’s worlds. My world is full of cardboard. I moved to a new home on the East Coast a few months ago, and unpacking is a slow process.The boxes are full of business books. I have a healthy collection, and my latest addition is Think Again by Adam Grant, the top-rated professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School. Grant is super inspiring. I wish he’d been there in my time at Wharton. In Think Again, he encourages us to behave more like scientists—not to settle for the accepted way of doing things, but to test, challenge, and try out new ideas, to rethink in order to continuously improve.I’ve been doing lots of rethinking recently about how to deliver great customer experience. As products become commoditized and choices infinite, organizations are competing on experience. It’s the new differentiator. Customers have high expectations. If brands don’t deliver, customers will vote with their feet in favor of an organization that does.The need for a unified approachA large chunk of digital investment has focused on improving customer-facing touch points—websites, apps, and chatbots. Those interactions are key, but on their own, they’re not enough to transform experience.Below the surface, organizations are struggling to deliver the service customers demand and deserve. A sprawl of legacy systems that don’t talk to each other means agents resort to spreadsheets and swivel-chair between systems to chase down information and make sense of the black hole capturing their request.Field service teams turn up on site without the customer history, issue insight, and equipment they need to fix the problem, resulting in costly return visits and increased downtime. When organizations don’t work in harmony, experience suffers, and customer-facing teams are left to face frustrated and angry customers.You need to bring the power of the whole organization to better serve your customers. That means going beyond your customer-facing layer to connect your front, middle, and back office. When people and processes are connected, information flows freely, it’s easier to take action, and everyone has the visibility and insights they need to achieve more, fast.Uniting people, processes, and systemsLIKE.TG makes this happen. With one platform, one architecture, and one data model, it brings people, systems, and data into a single system of action. It simplifies case management by breaking work down into discrete tasks and ensuring those tasks flow across people and functions. It enables you to automate and optimize how work gets done.The use of automation, artificial intelligence (AI), and other technologies opens the world of self-service so customers can access the information and support they need on their terms. Freed from routine and mundane tasks, employees have more time to do their best work and excel in their roles. This makes them happy, and happy workers make happy customers.Sometimes the best kind of experience is no experience at all. People want things to happen as they should, smoothly and without interruption. We can help you predict and preemptively solve issues before they escalate into bigger problems.You’ll see where storm clouds are forming so you can intervene and get in front of the downpour. In this way, you can either remediate issues before the customer notices or communicate clearly with customers who may be affected before they get in touch with you. When things do go wrong, you’ll be able to fix them fast, keep customers updated on issue status and resolution, and earn trust along the way.Great things happen when an organization is connected, works in harmony, and is united in the goal of serving customers better. Experience soars, customers are more loyal, it’s easier to attract and retain talent, and the whole company sees significant improvement to its bottom line.Find out how LIKE.TG can help you improve customer experience in our Experience in action ebook.
How Guided Decisions improve customer service for everyone
Rahul Guha, product management director for Customer Service Management, co-authored this blog.When customers request help from customer service agents, it’s usually because they can’t find the answers they need or are unable to resolve problems on their own. When they do turn to customer service, they expect representatives to know how to fix their issues quickly and completely.This isn’t easy for new or less experienced customer service agents, who may not know what to do, whom to ask, or where to go to provide customers with support. Even seasoned employees may be similarly challenged when they face an issue they’ve never seen before.The need for a friction-free solutionOrganizations use a range of custom tools and technologies to support agents and provide organizational knowledge that addresses the problem at hand. Often, these tools fall short. They offer piecemeal solutions that can be extremely labor-intensive and difficult to use, increasing agent “swivel-chairing” and creating additional maintenance and cost issues.For example, agents at a leading European telecommunications provider had to manually key data into a custom decisioning tool, which pulled results from hundreds of decision trees that were manually maintained in an Excel spreadsheet. The results were often clunky and out of date, resulting in frustration all around.A leading automotive technology provider felt similar frustration. The company had agents reference a Word document when customers contacted them. This document advised agents to ask the same static list of questions, regardless of the reason for the call, to determine how to proceed. This created a slow, mind-numbing experience for both customer and agent.Changing the customer service experienceLIKE.TG Guided Decisions helps solve service inconsistency problems. It uses institutional knowledge and experience to give every agent quick, easy access to specific guidance tailored to the problem in front of them. Guided Decisions helps new agents ramp up quickly, supporting data-driven decision-making for consistently good service, regardless of experience level.With Guided Decisions, organizations can automatically suggest the agent’s next best action to help a customer based on the circumstances of the interaction. These recommendations are integrated directly into customer service processes and presented in the Agent Workspace—all on the Now Platform—to reduce swivel-chairing and increase productivity.Complementary to Playbooks for Customer Service Management—which are designed to help companies define, visualize, and orchestrate complex workflows end to end—Guided Decisions are meant to help agents perform a specific task or take the appropriate next step in a workflow. This guidance pulls from multilevel, nested decision trees defined by the organization to offer agents a clear, consistent path forward:
Decision nodes consider the context of the current situation to determine what possible steps can be taken. They look at:
Business context – what products and services the customer bought in the past, what they’re using, what their last interaction was about, etc.
Customer input – what type of issue they’re dealing with, what they’d like to do, etc.
Data from internal third-party systems – what they ordered, how recently they made a purchase, etc.
Guidance nodes contain the recommended next steps for the agent. These can be a range of suggestions, such as:
Attach a knowledge article to the case.
Create a work order.
Propose a resolution for the customer.
Offer the customer a 20% discount on a related service.
There are two modes for the decision tree. The first mode asks agents simple questions to determine the optimal path forward, and then uses embedded decisioning logic to identify the appropriate guidance. The second uses the business context to directly surface the right guidance, which gets presented as the next best action in the Agent Workspace.Either way, agents can feel confident they know what to do to help their customers. This increases agent productivity, efficiency, and satisfaction.Making customer service work betterIn the Now Platform Rome release, we enhanced Guided Decisions (see Figure 1) to help organizations:
Recommend best actions to agents through either of the two available modes—walking through a decision tree, where the system prompts the agent to get more information (via questions) first, or directly accessing guidance on what their next step should be.
Dynamically rank next best actions based on the business context, and always display the optimal recommendation for each interaction along the customer journey.
Quickly develop and deploy new guidance via configuration. This no-code/low-code approach makes it dramatically easier to create new guidance to meet various business needs.
Figure 1: Guided Decisions can help organizations recommend the best actions for agents to take.With these enhancements, customer service works better for the benefit of everyone. Organizations can dynamically guide agents to take the next best action to troubleshoot and resolve complex issues fast, increase their revenue generation, and deliver high-quality experiences that satisfy both agents and customers.Learn more about Customer Service Management.
3 ways to improve field service management
Updated Feb. 11, 2022Field service management covers a lot of areas, from installing and maintaining field equipment to scheduling, dispatching, and labor tracking. Across those myriad areas are numerous challenges: scheduling conflicts, miscommunications, workforce changes, customer dissatisfaction, poor first-time fix rates, lack of asset visibility, and more.But field service management is vital to successful business operations. Here are three ways LIKE.TG helps companies improve their field service operations:1. Keep trucks rollingWorkforce challenges are not unique to field service management. They affect every industry and business. But labor shortages in field service can have a domino effect on customers’ businesses. Adopting new technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI) and augmented reality, can ease your workforce struggles.Watch our Embrace new technologies to address the field service talent shortage webinar to find out how. Miles Szkoda, director of Field Technologies Online, moderates a discussion between LIKE.TG experts Nikki Narang and Rob Schaefer.2. Be proactiveField service relies on technicians. Amid the "Great Resignation," keeping technicians can be challenging. Our Delivering proactive field service webinar discusses the barriers to maintaining a skilled workforce and explores ways to create great experiences to overcome those barriers.Gain insights from John Ragsdale, a distinguished researcher and VP of technology ecosystems at the Technology Services Industry Association (TSIA), and LIKE.TG experts. You'll learn how to identify patterns and get ahead of potential needs.3. Enhance the technician experienceWith the rising talent shortage in field service, you can’t afford to lose field technicians to your competition or even to other fields. Yet, 33% of field techs admit their jobs are not satisfying, according to the Service Council’s 2021 Voice of the Field Service Engineer survey. And 60% aren’t committed to staying in the field for the duration of their career.This can negatively affect customer relations. To overturn it requires a hard look at the source of the dissatisfaction. Watch the Voice of the field service engineer webinar to learn how Xerox improved its technician experience with mobile technology.
5 ways to create a memorable customer experience
Mayank A, senior principal inbound product manager for Customer Workflows at LIKE.TG, co-authored this blog.The way customers want to engage with organizations is radically changing. The pandemic and multiple shutdowns brought these changes to the forefront, forcing organizations to rethink their customer experience, both in person and online, and accelerate digital transformation projects to try to better align the customer journey with expectations.We all have stories about companies getting it right—they’re the ones that make it effortless for us to get what we need. But we also have nightmare stories about those that are unable to provide immediate help or relevant information.What can we take away from the organizations that create an amazing experience for their customers? All are applying a deep understanding of how their customers engage with them and use their sites to create a streamlined, frictionless journey.The goal is to meet customers where they are, and then help them find the answers they’re looking for or request what they need. This takes embedding service everywhere a customer engages on a site. It also takes augmenting what’s already working with new digitized service capabilities.Removing friction from the customer journeyEngagement Messenger in LIKE.TG® Customer Service Management can embed service on any third-party website. It brings rich service capabilities together into one solution that can be launched anywhere. Those capabilities include knowledge articles, chat, virtual agent (chatbot), case management, AI search, service catalog items, and appointment and technician scheduling.Customers can then interact online with organizations and access services without leaving their current web experience or online transaction. By adding Engagement Messenger into the way customers normally engage, organizations can leverage their existing, proven customer service workflows that orchestrate the activities and tasks necessary to fulfill a customer’s request.Organizations can also configure when and where to launch Engagement Messenger to deliver targeted service to customers when they actually need it (see Figure 1). For example, instead of displaying an annoying pop-up, even when it’s clear a customer doesn’t need assistance, Engagement Messenger will launch a virtual agent or chat at the appropriate time.
Figure 1: Engagement Messenger can deliver targeted service to customers when they actually need it.Engagement Messenger can launch anywhere in the customer journey, or it can trigger specific actions to provide more targeted engagements. Let’s look at five key ways it can help organizations improve the customer experience:1. Offer rich omni-channel engagementWith Engagement Messenger, customers can chat with either a virtual agent or a live one, depending on what they need or are trying to do. This gives customers immediate service on the channel of their choice.The LIKE.TG Virtual Agent uses an AI-powered chatbot that can answer questions or direct customers to find relevant solutions on their own (via knowledge articles or the Service Catalog) 24 hours, seven days a week.Customers also have access to existing Virtual Agent conversations, such as how to purchase a new product or service, check the status of an order, return a product, or get assistance during checkout.At the conclusion of the interaction, customers can provide feedback for future improvement. And, if the customer requests to move the conversation to a live agent, the full transcript will be retained and visible to the agent, so the customer doesn’t have to start all over.2. Provide access to intelligent informationGetting access to the right information at the right time prevents customer frustration and escalation. LIKE.TG Knowledge Management offers customers the option to search or browse for answers in knowledge base articles. It’s a capability that Engagement Messenger leverages, via AI Search, to help customers get quick answers to their questions without having to go somewhere else or stop what they’re doing.Engagement Messenger can also present featured articles that help anticipate information a customer may need. Customers can provide feedback on whether an article was helpful or not to improve the relevance of future engagements.3. Deliver personalized serviceBeing able to access key services on the sites customers visit provides a level of convenience they greatly appreciate. However, to create the value organizations want and customers expect, these services should use known information about the customer to make it as easy as possible for them to do what they want.Adding Engagement Messenger to websites helps organizations offer the personalized services customers are looking for, such as opening or reviewing the status of their case, making requests through a service catalog, scheduling a walk-up appointment, or requesting a field service technician visit.These capabilities personalize the service experience, giving customers access to their own personal information from wherever they are on their customer journey. For example, customers can manage, create, and view their case details without having to navigate to the service portal. Or, they can browse a list of available catalog items and submit a request that’s automatically routed to the relevant teams that can assist them.4. Anticipate customer needsAnticipating what customers need by knowing when and where to provide services makes them feel understood by the organization. In the Now Platform Rome release, we added the ability to launch Engagement Messenger from an icon, button, custom link, or URL on a website. This allows a customer to initiate engagement and immediately get an appropriate response from the organization.Engagement Messenger is launched at the customer’s point of need and displays the relevant service features to best address their request. With chat, for example, this means launching the conversation in the customer’s selected language.This flexibility provides a better engagement experience by allowing organizations to configure what they present based on their understanding of the customer journey. For example, an organization can launch Engagement Messenger with Virtual Agent to help the customer complete an e-commerce purchase, assist with product warranties, or book an in-store appointment.5. Get up and running fastCustomer satisfaction scores improve when customers no longer need to hunt for support. Instead, they can complete their journey and get the help they need without having to leave their current experience.With Engagement Messenger, a wizard allows organizations to easily create one or more service modules and configure their behavior, appearance, and styling to suit the online channel in which they’ll be embedded (see Figure 2). This gives organizations the ability to configure the appearance and behavior of their modules to align with the company’s branding, as well as customers’ specific needs.
Figure 2: A wizard in Engagement Messenger lets organizations configure service modules to suit the channel they’ll be embedded in.Once created, the low-code/no-code solution automatically generates a few lines of code that will add the Engagement Messenger to the website. This code can be emailed to a web administrator, making it easy to embed anywhere.Organizations that have already invested in self-service features—such as virtual agents and robust knowledge bases—can leverage existing capabilities using Engagement Messenger to lower their cost of ownership and deliver service anytime, anywhere.Engagement Messenger helps organizations create the kinds of experiences customers will remember for all the right reasons.Learn about more Customer Service Management innovations in the Rome release at Now at Work. Registration is free.
Helping customers answer the trillion-dollar digital transformation question
As a former chief experience officer, I’ve seen just how impactful digital transformation can be. When I worked at Under Armour, we focused on our customers’ connected fitness journey, which unlocked new revenue streams and engagement opportunities.Yet, I’ve been around long enough to see my fair share of disappointments and underperforming projects. Any C-level executive will say the same.IDC estimates that more than $3 trillion have been invested in digital transformation initiatives globally over the past three years, but less than half of organizations implementing those projects have yet to achieve the expected outcomes.1 In fact, our successes at Under Armour were something of an anomaly.According to the 2021 McKinsey Global Survey, less than one-third of “companies’ transformations have been successful at both improving organizational performance and sustaining those improvements over time.”However, leaders are still expected to deliver innovative digital products and experiences—and for good reason. The right digital transformation can supercharge a business in today’s competitive digital world. The trillion-dollar question is: Can we flip the script, change mindsets and behaviors, and foster an environment in which the majority of organizations realize their expected ROI?I believe the answer is yes. Over the past six months, we’ve been on a journey here at LIKE.TG to enable just such a reality, and we’re really excited to announce LIKE.TG Impact™, available today.
Efficiency unleashed: 4 ways to empower customer service agents
Updated Oct. 4, 2023In the dynamic world of customer service, efficiency is the secret ingredient that turns good into great. It enables tasks to be done well while saving time, effort, and resources. Efficiency can help organizations meet and exceed customer expectations.Let’s dive into four capabilities that promise to supercharge customer service. These capabilities aren't just about making things run smoother; they're about empowering customer service agents and transforming the entire customer experience.1. Customer self-serviceEnabling customers to help themselves is nothing short of revolutionary. In this digital age, many customers prefer to self-serve to achieve their desired outcomes before reaching out to customer service.Giving customers the tools for resolution—such as a self-service portal and catalog, knowledge base, and community—can reduce the number of incoming cases while addressing the needs of a customer base that values efficiency and autonomy.Fewer cases mean more than streamlined operations. The reduction translates to happier, more productive, and deeply empathetic agents who have more time to dedicate their expertise to the most complex issues, where their human touch truly shines. It’s a win-win, if there ever was one.2. Generative AIGenerative AI marks a pivotal moment in the evolution of customer service. At the heart of this transformation lies the ability to intelligently speed up time-consuming tasks such as sifting through case notes to understand a customer’s request, manually entering work notes, and drafting customer emails.Addressing customer needs quickly and consistently can be heavily augmented by generative AI. For example, the technology can generate case and chat summaries, allowing agents and managers to quickly get up to speed on a case and reducing errors as cases get assigned between departments.Emails can be automatically drafted by taking case context and customer sentiment into account, promoting empathy and accelerating response times. Case wrap-up can be automated, increasing agent productivity so they can move on to the next case.These are just a few examples of how generative AI can help agents redirect their valuable time and expertise toward more vital and effective work that results in exceptional customer experiences.3. Workforce optimizationWorkforce optimization represents a paradigm shift in the realm of customer service. It both simplifies customer service operations and empowers agents, thus elevating the overall service experience.Through unparalleled visibility across channels and workloads, and real-time performance reporting, workforce optimization can transform team productivity.Workforce optimization solutions help break down silos between teams by streamlining scheduling, coverage tracking, and the management of shifts and time-off requests. This can enable precise agent demand forecasting and demand scenario modeling so that your team is always appropriately staffed, even during surges in customer inquiries.Additionally, workforce optimization is a master of omnichannel optimization and agent empowerment. It can help ensure your customer service operations run smoothly across all communication channels for a unified customer experience. It also provides agent coaching and development opportunities so that agents can continually enhance their skills. The result is a team of empowered, self-motivated agents who deliver top-tier service.4. Integrations with systems of recordIntegrations are a vital facet to optimizing and fortifying customer service operations. By seamlessly connecting third-party applications, systems, and data sources, integrations can create a unified ecosystem that fuels efficiency and agility.Consider the concrete impact: a significant reduction in the cumbersome practice of "swivel chairing" that has long plagued customer service agents. Integrating third-party applications and legacy systems frees agents from needing to constantly navigate between disparate tools and interfaces to access customer information.Integrations help agents streamline their workflows and enhance their effectiveness. In doing so, they empower agents to focus on what truly matters: providing exceptional customer service and tailored solutions.The next level of customer serviceEfficiency is the name of the game in modern customer service. Self-service, generative AI, workforce optimization, and the ability to integrate third-party applications are catalysts for change. They empower agents, simplify processes, and ultimately elevate customer experiences.As you ponder how to take your customer service to the next level, consider these capabilities your secret weapons. They're the difference between simply managing customer service and excelling at it. In an era where every interaction counts, efficiency isn't an option—it's a necessity.Find out more about how you can empower agents with real-time information and intelligence.
LIKE.TG and Qualtrics enhance customer service to deliver empathy
When a customer service agent picks up a phone or opens an email or text, there's usually a stressed or upset customer on the other end. A package didn’t arrive. A bill contained incorrect charges. A server crashed, and no one can access their data.This is a crucial moment that can make or break relationships—as can any customer interaction with a company, from buying a product to asking for help. It can even happen while the agent engages with other teams to resolve an issue. Solving the problem quickly, regardless of where it occurs, is the best solution. But until that happens, what customers want to hear is that the company actually cares about their problems. They want empathy.Personalizing customer serviceOne way to demonstrate empathy is to familiarize yourself with someone's situation so they don't feel like another number or case file. An agent needs to access specific customer information to be able to offer personalized service to that customer.Yet, companies tend to collect rudimentary data about customers, such as basic satisfaction scores, not the kind of information that can really improve the experience. And the systems that capture the data are often disconnected from the systems that manage service and support interactions.To help organizations deliver more meaningful, personalized service experiences at scale, LIKE.TG and Qualtrics have added new capabilities. Combining LIKE.TG digital workflows with Qualtrics experience management technology, companies can harness and act on customer experience data in real time. This allows them to quickly resolve issues and help improve experiences, increasing engagement, loyalty, and retention.“Great experiences are the modern currency of business,” says Jay Choi, chief product officer at Qualtrics. “The experiences that companies deliver today can become their greatest competitive advantage tomorrow."
The importance of empathyIn a world beset by deadlines, impatience, and short tempers, empathy is more crucial than ever. As companies of all sizes and across every industry continue to compete on experience, they need to re-earn loyalty with every interaction.According to research from Qualtrics and LIKE.TG, 80% of respondents have switched brands because of poor customer experience. Loyalty can only be earned when the whole company—the people and systems—work together.Because many companies haven’t connected their people, processes, and systems, they can’t resolve the issues at hand quickly or with full transparency and empathy. Productivity is slowed, and customers are frustrated that their expectations for fast, simple, and seamless customer service aren’t being met.Delivering superior empathy and customer serviceTo address this challenge, organizations can now access additional customer experience data from Qualtrics on the Now Platform® via the Qualtrics CustomerXM™ and LIKE.TG® Customer Service Management integration. The data will empower service teams to create personalized workflows and automate experiences, increasing loyalty and spend while helping to reduce operational costs.For example, certain customers can be categorized as high-value customers with low satisfaction scores who represent a high-risk customer segment that most companies want to avoid losing. By understanding these attributes, a company can provide unique and proactive service experiences for this segment when an issue occurs.When a high-value/low-satisfaction customer goes to a brand’s website to ask about a shipping delay, a Virtual Agent can identify the customer at once and proactively offer a credit or connection to a live service agent (see Figure 1). Paying a little extra attention to that high-value customer will go a long way toward making sure they remain a customer for the foreseeable future.
Figure 1: Virtual Agent support that identifies a customer and offers a personalized solution to their issue can increase customer loyalty.Forbes reports that personalizing the customer service experience can yield up to a 500% increase in overall consumer spending."Companies who understand and act on experience data—the feedback that employees and customers share with them—will successfully build long-term relationships with their most important stakeholders," Choi says.Looking aheadLIKE.TG and Qualtrics are working on further advancements for 2022 that will visualize sentiment and profile data directly on the Now Platform. This will enable service agents to see customer data in a more holistic and meaningful way.Organizations that succeed in the future will be the ones that show their customers they truly care. In order to show customers you truly care about them, you need to know them, and you need to be able to connect people, processes, and systems to deliver the seamless experiences that customers want.After all, customers want speed and convenience in addition to knowledgeable and friendly help. Access to rich customer insights allows organizations to respond to individual needs and powers digital workflows that drive great experiences, customer loyalty, and empathy. LIKE.TG and Qualtrics' continuing partnership will empower service agents to act on that empathy.Visualization of sentiment and customer and employee profile details, along with visualization of satisfaction insights and stakeholder feedback, are expected to be available in 2022.Customers can access the enhanced Qualtrics Customer Experience Management and LIKE.TG Customer Service Management integration immediately on the LIKE.TG Store and the Qualtrics Marketplace.
How to improve customer engagement: Use conversational messaging
Prithvi Yoganand, product management director for Customer Service Management at LIKE.TG, co-authored this blog.How we communicate with each other has changed, thanks in large part to rapidly evolving technology. Every day, we spend time online and on our smartphones. We’re accustomed to rich messaging with family and friends using images, videos, and emojis to help make our point and highlight our meaning. We also communicate asynchronously, meaning when we have time and it’s convenient for us.Increasingly, consumers expect to engage with organizations the same way. Meeting customers on their terms, their timing, and their channel of choice isn’t always easy for businesses and institutions to do. Many organizations are revising their customer engagement strategies and augmenting their traditional channels to focus on conversational messaging. LIKE.TG can help.Concentrate on conversationsConversational Messaging for LIKE.TG® Customer Service Management enables organizations to accelerate the adoption of messaging and quickly deploy conversational experiences with WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and LINE to better engage and serve their customers.Conversations can be initiated by the customer, an agent, or the system. Once an interaction has begun, customers get immediate help from either a live agent or a Virtual Agent with natural language understanding (NLU)—which can understand the user’s statements and initiate the right response. Additionally, these conversations can extend over many days to maintain continuity of experience for the customer.Meet them with messagingConversational Messaging provides a flexible messaging framework that allows organizations to engage with their customers or constituents wherever they are. The framework not only provides integrations with popular messaging channels out of the box, but it also allows organizations to add adapters for connecting to other messaging channels used by their customers.Once these conversational integrations are set up, configured, and enabled, organizations can accept customer-initiated messages and start engaging with them directly. For example, customers can send a message to start a conversation and quickly resolve a product issue (see Figure 1).
Figure 1: Customer-initiated message about a product issue that launches an interaction with Virtual AgentThe Now Platform Rome release enables organizations to use WhatsApp and LINE to send system-initiated messages to update customers on key information. These messages can be non-actionable (providing a status update or confirming an order) or actionable (asking for more information or taking a next step). Actionable messages can then launch the Virtual Agent dialog to help customers perform an action, such as initiate a return or exchange a product (see Figure 2).
Figure 2: System-initiated message for product delivery with options to return, exchange, or send feedbackThe Rome release also added the ability for individual agents to initiate messages directly to customers using WhatsApp and LINE. Agents can compose new messages or continue an existing conversation with the customer at any time.Create engaging experiencesRich messaging goes beyond traditional texting to create better experiences for both customers and agents. It enables communications with pictures and videos, as well as engaging graphical elements, such as controls and buttons, that allow users to make choices and take actions.For example, a customer can initiate a conversation to ask about an appointment and then use an interactive calendar to schedule and book that appointment at their convenience (see Figure 3).
Figure 3: Customer rescheduling an appointment using Conversational Appointment BookingAgents can also see chat transcripts of a customer’s previous messaging interactions from their workspace so they know exactly what information the customer was given and what they did with it. Agents can then initiate rich messages to keep the conversation moving forward and help the customer take the next step.Simplify servicesAdditionally, the Rome release introduced the Messaging Service, which allows customers to purchase SMS and WhatsApp services directly from LIKE.TG at favorable, pre-negotiated messaging rates.Previously, LIKE.TG customers who wanted to use messaging channels (such as SMS and WhatsApp) needed to acquire services and negotiate separate contracts with multiple vendors on their own. With this offering, LIKE.TG simplifies the process by managing and billing the customer for SMS and WhatsApp access.By enabling customers to interact with your organization from the channel of their choice, you can enrich your engagement, reduce the likelihood of expensive escalations, and deliver more productive experiences for customers and agents. Learn more about how Conversational Messaging can help improve customer engagement and satisfaction.
Driving customer experience with connected digital workflows
The success of any organization, brand, product, or service hinges on customer sentiment. Positive customer experience leads to positive feelings. To deliver the best experience for every customer at scale, companies must address needs quickly, transparently, and proactively. That starts by connecting customer engagement, operations, data, people, and processes in a single system of action.With LIKE.TG, customer issues and requests are broken down into tasks that can be automated. Multistep processes are standardized and orchestrated to save time and money. This frees agents to focus on delighting customers and allows you to create experiences that make each customer feel seen and valued.Creating a seamless customer experienceAlthough experience is everything, many businesses still operate with disconnected systems (legacy or otherwise). Delivering seamless experiences requires connecting people, processes, and teams to:
Reduce resolution time.
Eradicate muddy experiences.
Rise to meet customer expectations.
Blackhawk Network, which produces the gift cards for sale in grocery stores, is transforming customer experience with a LIKE.TG form called Submit an idea. It allows employees to suggest customer service improvements. Each suggestion gets its own ticket, making it actionable and trackable as it goes from idea to demand to implementation to measurement right on the Now Platform.In two years, Blackhawk Network received nearly 1,200 employee ideas, implemented about half of them, and paid its agents $16,000 in rewards. The employee-submitted suggestions have saved the company more than $2 million.
Putting the flow back into workDigital transformation investments, which were already expected to account for $7 trillion between 2020 and 2024, according to IDC, have accelerated due to COVID-19. With those increases comes the need to take experience off the page and make it reality. To do that, businesses need to connect their front-, middle-, and back-office teams, technologies, and processes.Dreamworld, Australia’s biggest theme park, uses LIKE.TG to monitor, troubleshoot, and service everything that happens across the 40- to 50-acre property. The details, including food safety information for several hundred thousand dollars’ worth of food in the park’s fridges and freezers, are all recorded in ServiceNow.Internet of Things (IoT) sensors attached to all of the park’s refrigerators and freezers enable Dreamworld to gather all the temperature readings, work orders, and everything else needed for an inspection in one click. Just this effort saves team members more than 500 hours per year.
Scaling customer operationsGerman parking solutions company Scheidt Bachmann has “intelligent mobility” transportation-related divisions. To better deliver satisfactory experiences across its 10,000 parking lots in more than 50 countries, the company needed a platform-based system with end-to-end integration.Scheidt Bachmann connected its customer service, field service, and enterprise resource planning (ERP) processes using ServiceNow. In a surprising addition, the company used the customer portal that comes with LIKE.TG Customer Service Management to allow its customers to make requests for on-site service.Boris Ansorge, director of global service at Scheidt Bachmann, said 97% of customers are satisfied or very satisfied with the service.Learn how your organization can offer superior customer experiences by downloading our Customer Workflows Book of Knowledge.
How Customer Data Models for B2B2C improve customer service
Sharath Lagisetty, senior principal product manager for Customer Workflows at LIKE.TG, co-authored this blog.As companies engage with different customers and partners via digital channels, it’s critical to establish a rich understanding of each entity and their relationships, both to the company and to each other.The latest release of LIKE.TG® Customer Service Management extends Customer Data Models to support multilevel relationships. That means not only business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) relationships are captured and modeled, but also business-to-business-to-consumer (B2B2C) relationships.Organizations can now quickly understand complex, multilevel relationships in order to simplify workflows and optimize the value of their interactions.Benefits of customer data modelsCustomer data models build the connections organizations need to understand their customers—and their customers’ customers—so they can innovate fast and serve all parties well. LIKE.TG customer data models provide:
Out-of-the-box capabilities that save organizations the time and resources typically required to build and customize complex, multilevel customer relationship models
Visibility throughout the value chain that allows organizations to trace cases and optimize workflows—from business customers to end customers—and speed their completion
Security that ensures customer data is only available to those authorized to see it, when they need to see it (e.g., when assisting a customer)
What multilevel customer data models look likeThe best way to understand the benefits of these multilevel customer data models is with a familiar example.Consider an automobile manufacturer that has both business customers (dealerships) and end consumers (car owners) who purchase its automobiles. The manufacturer needs visibility into the cars it sells to its dealers (B2B), as well as the end consumers who buy the cars (B2C).Enhancements in the Now Platform Rome release enable manufacturers to take this visibility further, putting these pieces together to see which customers are connected to which dealerships (B2B2C: auto manufacturer to dealership to consumer).This out-of-the-box functionality helps reduce customizations and speeds deployment of multi-relationship workflows. Now, when a customer calls the dealer to report an issue with their car, the dealer can create a case on their behalf that’s immediately visible to the auto manufacturer and routed to the appropriate customer service representative (see Figure 1).Alternatively, when a customer goes directly to the manufacturer to initiate a case, the manufacturer will be able to see the customer’s relationship with different dealers and accommodate their preferences.For instance, they’ll see the customer purchased the car from one dealer but subsequently had it serviced multiple times by another dealer. So, they’ll connect the customer with their preferred service dealer to get an appointment.
Figure 1: An auto manufacturer’s view of customer cases currently being handled by a particular dealershipCustomer data models for all industriesAlmost every industry can benefit from multilevel relationship data models. For example:
Telecom companies need visibility into the connectivity/wireless plans they provide to their business customers, as well as the end users (employees) those businesses have signed up for different services and plans. The telecom provider needs to know which subscribers are employees of which business customers, along with the specific products and services they’re subscribed to.
Insurance companies need visibility into the life insurance plans their business customers are using as part of their human resources benefits for employees, as well as the individual employees who are signed up for those plans. The insurance company needs to know which life insurance policy holder is an employee of which business customer, along with the specific policies they’ve subscribed to.
Healthcare payers need visibility into the health plans they’ve offered their business customers, as well as the employees that business customers have signed up for those plans. The healthcare payer needs to know which member is an employee of which business customer, along with the specific health plan they’ve subscribed to.
Modeling complex relationshipsLIKE.TG Customer Data Models for B2B2C give organizations visibility into multilevel relationships that provide a more holistic understanding of a customer’s touch points and interactions. Prior to the Rome release, LIKE.TG Customer Service Management made it easy to model complex relationships between:
Accounts (and account contacts): Business customers and their employees
Partners (and partner contacts): Partners of business customers and their employees
Consumers: Consumers who interact directly with the company (B2C)
Households (and household members): Household units and their members, as well as their relationships
With the Rome release, organizations can now also easily model complex relationships between:
Business accounts and consumers
Business contacts and consumers
Business partners and consumers
Organizations can use these models to quickly see and understand what a customer bought and used, where they bought it, who they bought it from, who serviced it, any internal relationships (e.g., with a case worker, account manager) or external relationships (e.g., with a business customer or partner) they have, etc.This allows the organization to better serve its customers while maintaining tight, secure control over the data—ensuring it’s only available to customers, partners, and employees when required.Learn more about Customer Service Management.
Addressing Australia’s customer service generation gap
All age groups demand speed, transparency, and a personalized approach when it comes to resolving customer issues. But new research from LIKE.TG reveals a stark gap between how Australia’s oldest and youngest populations want issues addressed.Tech-savvy millennials want to communicate through chatbots, email, and direct messages. Baby boomers prefer to speak to an operator to resolve a problem. Other generations lie somewhere in between. Post-pandemic, many will opt for self-service but be just as happy to speak to someone—as long as their issue is addressed quickly and transparently.The generation gap creates a conundrum for businesses trying to develop a post-COVID-19 customer service mix that works for everyone.Do you ditch phone calls to resolve disputes, in favor of automation? This can save costs but potentially alienate older segments of your customer base. What about millennials, who want to jump online and instantly resolve a problem? And how do you connect these different systems so every team or department can address issues fast?The answer lies in a streamlined, hybrid model where efficiency is the hero and customers have real-time visibility into when and how their issue will be resolved.Something for everyoneData is driving the need for a diverse approach. The research shows 71% of baby boomers favor speaking to a person to resolve a problem. That’s nearly four times greater than Gen Z (18%) and more than double millennials (31%).The pandemic has driven an overall rise in customers resorting to self-service options when they have issues, with a quarter of survey respondents (including a large portion of Gen Z) using self-service systems. Across all channels, key priorities are having issues fixed quickly (51%) and dealing with one person (44%).In every sector, the need to improve customer service comes at a time when expectations and demands are rising. More than a third of survey respondents (36%) said their customer service expectations have increased post-pandemic. One in four reported they’ve contacted customer service teams more, putting pressure on organizations to respond or risk losing business.
Finding common groundDifferent generations are also divided on who’s leading—and lagging—when it comes to resolving customer complaints. Although everyone agrees the telecommunications industry and government departments rate the worst, Gen Z and millennials believe the food and beverage industry needs to step up when it comes to resolving customer issues.Perhaps this divide directly correlates to what constitutes good customer service. For Gen Z, it’s all about getting issues fixed quickly and receiving compensation or special offers to remedy issues. Older generations believe it comes down to customer service agents knowing their details while being able to speak to someone based in country.Despite the differences, there’s one thing the generations agree on: No one likes to wait on hold. Yet, Australians clocked 89.5 million wasted hours on hold in the past 18 months. And a third of people (31%) say wait times are getting worse. Now is the time for businesses to overhaul their customer service departments.A roadmap for the futureIn 2022, customer experience will continue to be critical to business success, requiring organizations to streamline their complaint resolution processes for a frictionless, fast, and fail-proof approach. Success will be built around customer satisfaction. The quality of complaint resolution is an integral part of positive customer experience, directly influencing where consumers spend their money and how loyal they remain to your brand.To find a solution that satisfies all age groups, organizations need to reimagine their service model mix while providing transparency at every step of the process, so customers know exactly what’s happening and when.Many organizations will look to a hybrid model that prioritizes digitization but provides the capacity to speak to team members—while simultaneously reducing hold times. Ensuring front, middle, and back-office teams are connected will avoid bottlenecks and enable automation to increase speed, efficiency, and customer satisfaction.Whatever the solution, the focus should be on the delivery: an efficient, genuine experience that leaves customers feeling valued.Find out more in our ebook: Evolving Customer Experiences and Expectations in Australia.
5 steps to shift from reactive to proactive field service
Proactive field service is about being one step ahead of your customers. It requires systems that meet customer needs while minimizing their efforts.When thinking about moving from a reactive field service model to a proactive one, most people jump to the Internet of Things (IoT), servitization, and outcome-based services. But it’s important to first create an operationally efficient foundation that benefits both customers and employees. These five steps can help.1. Listen to your customersThink outward first when moving to more proactive service. Start by asking for customer feedback.
What do customers need?
What information do customers want, and how is it best delivered to them?
When do they prefer to troubleshoot on their own, and when do they prefer to speak with a technical support engineer?
Identifying these answers can position you to provide the most value to your customers. Surveys are a good place to begin. A survey can ask for desired information and communication methods. It can also address general customer satisfaction and Net Promoter Score inquiries.2. Build a strategy for quick winsOnce you understand your customer needs, at both a macro and micro level, you can build out your strategy to address where you want to go and the steps to get there. You don’t have to do it all at once. Take small steps, get quick wins, and learn from the process.A solid strategy should take into account what’s in your control and what you can influence. Consider all the human elements and technological and change management implications. Create feedback loops from customers and employees to continue to iterate on the journey.Although a primary goal is to stay one step ahead of your customers’ needs, things will break. Consider how you can help prevent that and how you can minimize the inconvenience when things do break.
3. Automate and optimize processesMost organizations still rely on manual methods to some degree for their field service operations. Various parts of the organization often operate in silos. Smart, integrated, digital investments help organizations:
Improve service quality and response times
Provide real-time visibility into customer and equipment statuses
Reduce time spent on administrative tasks
Reach across multiple systems and present the data necessary to the user to perform their assigned tasks
Digitizing manual processes that hinder efficiency can help proactively deliver progress updates. Digital workflows enable you to answer queries or deflect incidents earlier in the customer journey. They can also free field service professionals to ensure their customers feel valued and supported.4. Make maintenance work for your customersMaintenance contracts that help detect and address issues before equipment fails can minimize customer disruptions. The types of contracts you offer may be an evolution as you progress on your journey toward proactive service.Service companies start contractual services with warranty extensions and time and materials coverage. The next phase is offering preventive maintenance contracts that provide service on set schedules (i.e., quarterly, semi-annually, etc.). While visits are within the window, timing between visits may vary.Cycle-based preventive maintenance controls the interval of time between visits to keep it consistent. This is the most effective for equipment uptime but can result in performing unnecessary maintenance. Usage-based preventive maintenance is the most proactive, attending to maintenance based on how much equipment has been used.5. Empower customers with self-serviceBeing able to access and request information through customer portals, email, chat, and telephone empowers customers with self-service capabilities. An omni-channel solution helps meet customers where they are on the channel of their choice, with a human touch if needed.Customer portals can do much more than customer-initiated product information inquiries. These portals can be enabled to offer pertinent knowledge base articles and more, such as:
Interactive chat inquiry and response using natural language
Service request initiation and status updates
Appointment booking
Moving from reactive to proactive service can improve the customer experience, reduce resolution time, drive operational excellence, reduce the cost of service delivery, and help pave the way for new service offerings.Find out more about delivering proactive field service in our on-demand webinar.
