According to a global study by Dimension Data, efficient Customer Service Management (CSM) can have a positive impact on a company’s bottom line by reducing costs, increasing revenue, and significantly improving customer satisfaction. Read on to find out why customer service software can help you meet the increasing demands of customer service and which current trends in customer service you can use to offer your customers an outstanding customer experience.
What is customer service software and why do you need it?
Customer service software functions as a digital ticketing system that documents, manages and resolves customer requests. To do this, it collects requests from all technical channels, such as live chat, messaging apps, social media, email, and phone, and consolidates them into a central CSM portal. This ensures that no request goes unanswered. By orchestrating activities between different parties such as customers, customer service, back-office departments, and IT teams, common and complex issues and customer inquiries can be resolved quickly and completely. Detailed reports and insights into customer interactions also help to evaluate the quality of the company’s own customer service and to keep an eye on details such as response times, status of inquiries, utilization of customer service staff on certain days of the week or frequently asked inquiries. This information can be used to uncover optimization potential and improve customer service performance.
Features and benefits: Why is it worth investing in customer service software?
The top goals in customer service management should be customer loyalty and customer satisfaction, because customers rarely forgive bad experiences. However, this is offset by challenges such as poor communication between departments and inadequate workflows. Here are some of the trouble spots that companies can mitigate with a CSM solution:
- Management of waiting times: With the current state of technology, no one understands waiting hours to days for responses to customer inquiries. Studies show that customers expect feedback within minutes. To get closer to this service, customer service software allows you to create support tickets and process them by priority. Time-wise, it offers workflow guides, which greatly simplifies agents’ work.
- Cross-departmental communication: Many companies struggle to allocate an adequate budget to their customer service. As a result, they lack resources to invest in technology that can shorten customer service workflows and save costs in the long run. Modern customer service management software not only connects employees in real time, it also enables collaborative exchanges to discuss details of customer inquiries, resolve queries and make decisions faster.
- Standardized solution finding and reduced workload: Many customer concerns have already existed in the same or similar form before and no individually developed solution is required. Here, service desk staff can make targeted use of digital databases that provide standardized answers and templates. This means that multiple concerns can be resolved at the same time, which saves an enormous amount of time.
- Dealing with multichannel communication: Customer inquiries reach Customer Service via various channels. Be it over the phone, via email, via live chat or via social media – all these channels need to be served in a timely manner. To maintain an overview, CSM software supports the strategic management of incoming and outgoing customer communications.
- Evaluation of performance in the support team: The analysis functions of a customer service software provide valuable insights into the efficiency of the employees. Productivity, duration of work steps and response times can be measured and evaluated. This gives customer service managers a valuable opportunity to identify and correct existing deficiencies.
Key trends in customer service
The changes associated with digital transformation have enormous potential to sustainably improve existing workflows in customer service. In our e-book “Innovations in Customer Service Management”, (German only) you will learn how to transform your customer service into a successful customer service and receive ideas and suggestions for measures to optimize your customer service in the long term.
The current top trends in customer service include:
- Artificial intelligence (AI) to support service personnel: Artificial intelligence is well accepted by customers, but is primarily regarded as a key success factor for optimized employee experience due to the workload reduction. AI can take over human skills such as visual perception, speech recognition, and decision making, effectively freeing up employees. Customer concerns can be immediately assigned to the right customer service representatives, bottlenecks in service identified, and new insights recorded. Decisions are then made on the basis of data.
- Fast communication through modern media: Messenger apps such as WhatsApp or social media such as Instagram enable customers to address inquiries to a company easily and in the shortest possible time. Younger generations in particular enjoy this type of communication and can be won over as customers in this way.
- Complete customer self-service through chatbots: Chatbots are a form of AI that can even handle concerns completely on their own in simple cases without triggering a ticket. Such concerns include, for example, questions about contact information, working hours or forms. The bots can draw on stored patterns and respond automatically, which significantly reduces the workload of service personnel.
- Omnichannel customer experience: Many customers are very familiar with modern technology and expect interaction options across different channels. Ideally, these should be linked in such a way that information can also be found across channels and customers do not have to repeat their concerns.
- Automation and workflows for fast responses: Instead of passing inquiries from department to department, automated processes ensure that the information gets directly to the right employee. This saves time and resources and increases the speed of response and productivity in customer service.
ServiceNow: powerful platform for customer service management
One of the leading providers of CSM solutions is our technology partner ServiceNow. The powerful ServiceNow platform helps you turn previous customer experiences into outstanding customer experiences and optimize customer service work using automated processes. In our on-demand webinar (German only) on the topic of “Trends in Customer Service Management”, we, as an official partner of ServiceNow in Switzerland, explain how to prepare for the future of digital transformation and get exciting insights into best practices. Get to know the ServiceNow platform now and learn how you can solve the challenges in customer service!
