This is the era of consumerization with an impactful service delivery model. Today, ServiceNow consulting services are a driving force for modern IT evolution. To ensure enhanced customer service with superior quality, businesses are working hard to provide excellent customer experiences.
Many businesses are going for customer service management (CSM) to stay ahead of competitors in terms of loyal customers. This can help companies in reforming and personalizing the service management process. ServiceNow has become one of the leading platforms that offer omnichannel to support and manage the dynamics of customer satisfaction.
It’s an inventive approach to enhance customer service management by introducing agile capabilities. Moreover, ServiceNow CSM has a portal that acts as a single window to sort client issues. You can report incidents, place a request, inquire queries and address them. It's more like a birds-eye-view on the existing use of services and promotes opportunities for informed decisions for both clients and consumers.
“A satisfied customer is the best business strategy of all.” -Michael LeBoeuf
Customer Service Challenges
In the age of customer supremacy, businesses are getting extra concerned with the way their customers are being treated. Did you know businesses lose USD 62 million per annum due to bad customer service? Let’s evaluate common customer service challenges and find out how ServiceNow can be a light at the end of the tunnel.
Slow Response time
Nobody appreciates waiting! Today, the customers expect a quicker response from service departments. Instead of waiting for hours, they prefer solutions to their problems instantly. Some companies view customer service as an expense that doesn’t add any revenue. However, they fail to realize the positive impact on ROIs through it.
There could be multiple reasons of a slow response time in customer service. For instance, businesses lack the standard procedure of answering and evaluating customer responses. No accountability when the answers are being prolonged or absence of automation where call agents are busy with manual work.
Impolite customer service representatives
Having an impolite customer service agent is the worst thing that can happen. There’s no doubt that handling so many queries and complaints can be a tough job. But lashing out or being rude to customers is highly disrespectful.
When your customers reach out for support, they are already upset and worried. Being impolite to them is unprofessional. Rude customer service forces your customers to switch brands immediately.
An inexperienced customer service representative may usually end up being rude. Sometimes the customers themselves are rude and abusive, provoking a response from the customer service agent. Other times the agent himself may have personal issues where he lashes out at the customer in frustration. However, in either case you just can’t be impolite with the customers.
The customer is transferred from one department to another
One of the most common customer service problems is getting transferred from one agent or department to another without a solution. Sometimes customers keep on rolling from one person to another, describing their problems and receiving the same answers again and again.
It’s a frustrating process that easily scares customers away. This usually happens when your company’s customer service agents don’t have enough knowledge or are new to the system. It’s also unwise to give ambiguous answers when you don’t have the solution to the customer’s problem.
Sometimes the non-technical staff is asked to handle the situation. With no experience at all, they mess up the process, marking a bad reputation for your brand. This issue also arises when the customer service representative isn’t confident enough and believes low about themselves.
Lack of real-time solutions
The majority of the time, customers need instant answers to their queries and hate to wait. For such a stance, the live chat support system is always good. But what if the customer requires face-to-face interaction? Or desire to chat with a human and not a chatbot?
On one hand, live chat tools and automation have simplified the lives of customer support agents. But on the other hand, it annoys the customers sometimes to converse with a bot and not a human. Some issues can’t be resolved by bots. And of course, there is a language barrier all the time.
Businesses opt for automation in the hope to resolve customer wait time. But sometimes it backfires and creates problems. Sometimes organizations try to reduce resource costs and invest directly in chatbots. Human interaction is always important and can never be replaced by automated tools.
Pitching irrelevant products and services
Understanding the needs, wants, and desires of the customers should be the number one priority for any business. However, many businesses fail in evaluating their customers’ requests which results in losing them forever.
Many times, your customer service representative wouldn’t understand the wants of the customers. Therefore, they offer the wrong product or service to them. This usually happens when the customer service agent isn’t paying attention or forgets things after lengthy phone calls.
Sometimes these representatives adopt a “one size fits all” strategy where they offer the same solution to everyone without understanding customers’ requests. They focus on giving answers at any cost and offer services that the customer never asked for.
Failure in meeting the commitments
In cases when the customer service department is incapable of offering an instant solution, they deal with the situation with promises. For instance, giving a stipulated time for delivering a promise. However, the majority of the time these promises are never fulfilled resulting in loss of customer trust.
It’s bad for your business reputation to make false commitments. Always try to deliver the best as it will help you gain customer loyalty and trust. But promising something that you fail in delivering can infuriate your customers.
Overpromises usually happen when the customer service representatives aren’t able to review the complaint or query ticket on time. Sometimes the agents are just too lazy to analyze the information completely and make commitments to get over the case instantly.
Absence of right tools to resolve queries
Harvard Business Review proposes that the customers are always looking for ways to reduce their efforts. Therefore, whenever they face difficulty, they quickly contact customer support for assistance. These problems can be sometimes easy to resolve while often complex to understand.
Since customers are always in a hurry, they wish businesses to invest in the latest technological solutions and tools to simplify their concerns. However,60% of the customer service agents don’t have access to the right tools to handle problematic issues.
This results in failed responses and wrong product or service suggestions. When a customer receives wrong information or their problems aren’t solved, they would never revert back. Businesses will lose customers and negative word-of-mouth marketing can ruin their reputation.
Unable to deal with aggressive customers
Another bigger problem is dealing with angry and abusive customers. Many times, when customers contact customer support agents, they start being aggressive. Even when the representative is talking calmly, customers’ aggressive behavior provokes rudeness from them.
According to Bill Gates, unhappy customers are an important source of learning. Therefore, one must learn from the mistakes and try to convince the customers to remain patient and loyal. Skilled and professional customer service executive’s majority of the time handle such cases with perfection.
However, inexperienced and new staff usually lose their patience and respond to threats. Businesses and representatives must understand that the customers are suffering from a fault which isn’t theirs. They must respect their frustration and keep their calm all the time.
Tackling customer service issues
You start your business to earn and you can get money by serving your customers. If they aren’t satisfied then what’s the point of running a company? The consequences of poor customer service are a nightmare.
After receiving bad customer service, some consumers will stop purchasing from your business. While some may start a revenge spree by posting negative reviews. Many would never recommend your business to their friends and family. While some will start negative propaganda against your business. The result? Your business will suffer where stakeholders may no longer trust you with their money. Your brand reputation will be ruined, resulting in a market share crash.
If you will deliver exceptional customer service to your customers then expect to:
- Acquire more customers and retain them: If you go the extra mile to resolve your customer’s query, you can easily retain them and acquire more customers, resulting in growth and expansion.
- Nurture customer loyalty: Prompt support and useful solutions can promise positive reviews, word-of-mouth, and a strong customer base, resulting in continuous profits, sales, and development.
- Reduction in customer loss: Even with high-quality products, bad customer support will result in the loss of customers. Effective services promise more customers, investors, and genuine reputation management.
How can ServiceNow rescue customer service department
Customers usually have different and unique issues with complex solutions. The above challenges are proving how customer support representatives lack in ensuring services that result in utter failure. Since customers are always in a hurry and receiving wrong information or no support result in a bad reputation for your business and consumers leaving you forever.
To such challenges, the answer is ServiceNow and its exceptional capabilities. ServiceNow CSM is one of the most comprehensive solutions you can find in the market to combat such customer service issues. You can easily enhance your customer support services and fight against the challenges that are causing hurdles in your way.
1. Intellectual customer issue channeling
The omnichannel capacity of ServiceNow empowers the customers to select their channel of communication. They can choose from mobile app communication or chatbot conversation, use the CSM portal, and many more. ServiceNow CSM also uses NLU (Natural Language Understanding) to detect and evaluate the type and topic of the request generated by the consumer.
It then categories them and generates a ticket. These tickets are channeled to the right experts saving time and manual efforts. With ServiceNow CSM, businesses can automatically identify, prioritize, and delegate the task to a specific customer support agent. This eliminates repetitive boring tasks, kills over response time, and provides time to the agents to better focus on the work.
2. Enhanced connectivity across all departments
Sometimes the queries and problems faced by the customers need support from different departments. This may increase the time of resolving the concerns resulting in annoyed and frustrated customers. Undoubtedly, it’s one of the major concerns customer support agents face on a daily basis.
ServiceNow consulting services is a perfect solution in such situations. It performs cross-company investigation conveniently in less time. With ServiceNow CSM, complex problems requiring multiple department involvement outline the central source of the issue and automatically derives the solution. Through this way, businesses can improve the interconnectivity of the departments, link them, and reduce the resolution time of the problems.
3. Allows self-service capabilities
The majority of the time, customers come with repetitive queries and problems. Such concerns can be easily resolved without human intervention. ServiceNow CSM has a phenomenal in-depth understanding of the services and their trends to isolate common issues with complex unique ones. It can automate the common problems while leaving unique ones for humans to resolve.
ServiceNow is also brilliant to minimize resolution time and satisfying customer queries. It’s a solid self-service ecosystem popularly known as Knowledge Management, that can facilitate information being shared. The ecosystem offers a wide range of solutions to popular and frequently asked questions via articles.
Not sure which customer service questions can be automated? We are here to help!
- What’s the status of my package?
- I want to inquire about my refund.
- How to log into my account?
- How can I know my gift card or credit card balance?
- I need to change the schedule of my order.
4. Unique multi-channel communication
With ServiceNow consulting services, businesses can enjoy multi-channel communication where customers can easily interact with the company anytime. They can use any device or platform like a chatbot, web portal, mobile application to reach out.
Complicated customer service portals are always confusing and challenging for the customers. Customer service chatbots can come in handy in such situations. The chatbot can answer multiple requests and provide unique solutions instantly. As soon as the chatbot receives the request, it routes the process and updates the consumer with the progress. The capability of ServiceNow smoothens the communication system eliminating complexities and problems.
Wrapping Up
Customer service is a tricky part of any business and ignoring its importance can eliminate any business from its existence. To achieve a smooth customer support you can not overlook basic customer care challenges.
ServiceNow promises a new way for businesses to keep their customers engaged and satisfied. They can drive process efficiency via ServiceNow and eliminate human errors, mistakes, and faults that can ruin a brand image.
Looking for ServiceNow consulting services and planning to bring its effectiveness to your business workflow? Get in touch with Tkxel and uplift your customer care. Drop us a line today!
