Exceptional customer service is a critical piece of gaining and retaining customer loyalty.
According to a new report from ServiceNow, some companies are much better than others at providing great customer service, without having to spend more.
In its “Putting Service First” report, ServiceNow commissioned Intergram Online Research Services to survey 200 senior managers in customer service roles at U.S. firms with at least 500 employees to rate their customer service approaches.
Three crucial characteristics that separate companies with the very best customer service emerged from the report:
1. Better problem-solvers: 163% more likely to be able to correctly identify and resolve the root cause of a customer's issue.
2. Self-service providers: 36% are more likely to offer self-serve for simple requests. This empowers customers to answer their own questions, and enables customer service agents to focus on more strategic issues.
3. More collaborative: 127% more likely to enable their customer service agents to enlist the help of different parts of the organization, partners and customers in real-time.
Not only did great service companies carry these characteristics, they also saw a higher impact on revenue (98%) and higher customer loyalty (95%), while delivering customer service at no extra cost.
“We found that top performing companies proactively resolve the root cause and offer self-service,” said Abhijit Mitra, general manager, Customer Service Management, ServiceNow. “The combination of these two practices could essentially prevent the very reasons why customers engage with customer service in the first place.”
The survey also revealed the top challenges organizations face in their customer service programs:
Solving problems (57%): Connecting all service processes to effectively resolve issues for customers as they go from first contact to permanent problem resolution.
Breaking down silos (54%): Bridging the gap between customer service and other departments for collaboration, coordination, and resolution.
Being operationally buried (50%): Manual workloads without automation leave limited time for strategic initiatives.
Here are three key takeaways from the report:
1. Treat customer service as a “team sport”: Engage everyone to solve the problem at hand – customers, partners, and employees from relevant departments.
2. Solve underlying issues that spawn recurring calls: Fix the root cause in the underlying service or product to prevent repeated calls about the same issue.
3. Be proactive: Get real-time visibility into customer systems to proactively solve problems before the customer even calls.
“Connecting customer service to the rest of the organization seems like a natural part of delivering superior customer service, yet a large percentage of companies are not doing this today,” said Mitra. “There is an immense opportunity in applying a service management approach to close that gap between engagement and resolution—and, in effect, prevent reoccurring issues.”