It’s safe to state that the start of the pandemic caused the largest disruption in the customer service industry’s history. Millions of customer support staff were sent home overnight worldwide, causing significant disruptions for organisations that were overly reliant on manual operations.

Companies that lacked the necessary tools for the new environment were forced to keep their clients waiting for long periods, and some requests were never fulfilled. Companies that had previously used a digital form of engagement, on the other hand, were able to adapt to the new situation quickly. They also had minimal downtime.

2020 served as a stark reminder for businesses to modernise and digitally transform to provide better customer experiences and increase operational efficiency. As a result, the most important criteria of customer service are speed, agility, and efficiency, all of which ServiceNow Customer Service Management (CSM) helps to fulfil.

Emergys ServiceNow Customer Service Management is a set of workflows and tools for supervising and tracking all customer interactions. This enables organisations to deliver customer care and assistance over various communication channels, including the web, email, chat, phone, and social media. Customer Service Management’s purpose is to manage the customer experience regardless of the channel of engagement or type of interaction. Customer Service Management focuses on:

• Automating routine tasks to make the customer experience feel effortless.
• Streamlining customer service by connecting departments, workflows, and technology to proactively resolve customer issues and automate common requests.
• Identifying and addressing problems before customers contact you.

• Customers are increasingly seeking efficient, consistent customer service across numerous communication channels, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Companies will have to rely on Customer Service Management because they cannot adjust the size of their customer care personnel.
• Before contacting a live operator, the majority of customers attempt to resolve an issue on their own. Customer Service Management delivers pre-built frameworks and templates for self-service alternatives to organisations. When customers cannot locate a solution on their own, Customer Service Management refers them to a service agent who can assist them.
• Because clients have so many purchasing options, there is no way they will put up with poor customer care. After a bad customer service experience, most customers will never buy from the company again, so companies require Customer Service Management.

Digital engagement, which incorporates how customers make requests, is the first step in changing customer service. Customers want businesses to be available when they need them, on their preferred channel, which has shifted away from traditional phone-based call centres and into the realm of chatbots, virtual agents, self-service portals, and embedded service.

Customer service encompasses more than just the “engagement layer.” The other half of customer service is getting work done to fulfil the client’s request, handled by the “customer operations layer”. Organisations must orchestrate a succession of tasks to meet client requirements, and this orchestration is referred to as “workflows.”

An agent, a self-service web portal, or an AI-powered virtual agent can handle a request like “What is the status of my order?” in the engagement layer. The majority of customer demands, on the other hand, are far more complicated. Even the most basic requests, such as “I’d like to submit an insurance claim” or “I’d want to dispute a bank payment,” would need a series of tasks to be completed. Typically, the process involves numerous systems and departments across an organisation. Traditionally, much of this work has been done manually via emails and phone calls, with agents and middle-office staff with tribal knowledge tying everything together. As a result, clients are left irritated by a slow, inconsistent process. By connecting the front, middle, and back offices, ServiceNow Customer Service Management can improve service operations and engage customers with digital workflows.

Many businesses have been driven to prioritise e-commerce over the traditional hybrid in-store/online model due to COVID-19. As a result, they were swamped with customer inquiries. Those businesses required a way to deal with the rising demand for their products online. Like most businesses at the start of the pandemic, Swarovski had to close or cut capacity at the majority of its retail outlets in 2020. As a result, Swarovski has seen a significant increase in online queries, including inquiries regarding the progress of consumers’ online orders and other activities. Swarovski needed more advanced digital customer service immediately. Swarovski was able to handle the volume of inquiries thanks to ServiceNow Customer Service Management.

When ServiceNow Customer Service Management is combined with ServiceNow IT Operations Management, businesses may provide proactive customer support by resolving issues before consumers even report them. Companies can benefit from seamless cross-departmental communication when using ServiceNow IT Service Management to address challenging client situations much faster. When ServiceNow Customer Service Management is combined with IT Business Management, firms can reduce operating expenses while still adapting to customer input and demands.

Delivering excellent customer experiences begins with the right technology in place, which supports consumers across their preferred channels while also connecting front, middle, and back-office operations. The same technology that kept businesses on top of their game during the pandemic will now pave the way for a new era of connected customer experiences.

Emergys is proficient in other ServiceNow product lines and is a premier partner of ServiceNow, which makes us qualified to implement ServiceNow Customer Service Management and other ServiceNow products.