The One-Step to Better Customer Service

The demands on customer service have never been greater – and there’s only one strategy able to address the challenge.

Not only has customer service come under pressure from the increasing number of channels on which it must respond, but it’s also easier than ever for consumers to harm a company’s reputation through those channels.

Now, digital interactions comprise more than 40% of all customer conversations, and those interactions happen across nine non-voice channels on average. Moreover, more than one-third of consumers polled say they are prepared to publicly shame a company that doesn’t respond to their social requests.

Automation is the single technology that has the power to reshape the customer service experience and enable the enterprise to manage the rising pressures.

Automation and machine learning facilitate faster, more intelligent customer support while reducing contact center costs.

For example, by sifting through massive volumes of data to understand customer behavior, machine learning can pinpoint the reasons why customers are reaching out, identify and act on bottlenecks in the customer experience, and streamline customer support interactions.

ServiceNow Inspire, which consults Global 2000 businesses to deliver improved customer and user experiences while improving operational efficiency, has seen this work inside a wireless provider. The company knew that call center volumes spiked within five days of posting customer bills. What the contact center supervisor was not able to detect—but machine learning could—is that most customers calling in were confused by their billing statements. By getting to the root cause of the problem and taking action to simplify the billing statements, call volume was dramatically reduced and support costs were slashed, while customer satisfaction and customer retention rose.

Another example, Epicor, a business software provider, is using ServiceNow’s Cloud Services Platform to optimize its customer service processes, deliver higher quality customer support, and enhance the service experience.

As machine learning develops, we are discovering even more ways that automation can transform customer service from reactive to predictive.

In fact, we dove into this conversation at our recent CIO Decisions17 conference. Read more about our discussions from the CIO Decisions17 Insight Report.