Meet Frank. He's your average customer support monster. A true mash-up of different systems, platforms and data silos that support reps interact with every day. Even though Frank is a monster, he doesn't have to be scary.
Attivio can help you unify all your sources of data and knowledge into a single, accessible and actionable beauty.
As products become commoditized, and the time and cost of innovation lengthens, businesses are relying on their brand and support experiences to become a business differentiator. But providing an exceptional support experience for customers, and internally for employees, is incredibly tough. To be successful, support organizations must find and apply the right information in order to add efficiency to their business operations, increase employee retention and effectiveness, and improve customer satisfaction. Yet most organizations fall well short of these objectives. That’s why today we’re excited to announce early access to Elevate™. Elevate is a new suite of apps (Elevate ITSM, Elevate HR, Elevate CSM) tightly integrated with ServiceNow.
Customer service has a historically bad reputation. Sitcoms like Friends and The Office have joked at the banality of call centers and the rigidity of the dreaded “customer service script.” In these scenarios, nobody — not the caller or the customer service agent — is expected to have a positive experience. Those shows, however, are stuck in a past in which efficiently and effectively answering customers’ questions was a punchline. Today, that bad reputation is being repaired by a strengthened focus on self service, better trained employees, and investments in problem-solving and cost-cutting AI systems like those offered by Attivio.
Once viewed as a non-revenue generating expense, more and more companies are realizing the impact good customer support has on their bottom line, including self-service. Business leaders now devote large amounts of time and resources into their support teams and equip them with the modern tools they need to resolve all kinds of customer issues.
Given this shift in perspective, we wanted to better understand what the modern support experience should look like. To do this we conducted a consumer survey last month of 168 American adults who engaged with customer support within the last year.
When it comes to customer support, the entire process is built on a simple idea: when someone communicates a problem, the representative dealing with the case uses their dashboard to review, work, resolve, and close a ticket. This ticket then remains open until the issue is closed, along the way acting as a repository for information about that particular request or problem.
From the point of view of the people here at Attivio, a ticket is just a repository of information that, when combined with existing information repositories, adds to the understanding of the customer relationship.
There are plenty of reasons why you want to keep you customers happy: Happy customers make great “brand ambassadors.” The cost of attracting a new customer is higher than retaining an existing one. Today’s social media makes it possible for an unhappy customer to do harm in the marketplace. Etc.
In a world in which anyone can order any product at any time with just the click of a mouse, the once dominant differentiators of price and product are quickly disappearing. In fact, it’s predicted that in just two years, customer experience will become the key competitive advantage for any organization, no matter the product or service. In other words, brand identity will be less about what you’re selling and more about both how you sell it and what you do after the sale.
Some time ago, people looking for answers to solve business problems realized that the information they sought resided in different places. It could have been in a file system, on an intranet, on the web, or in a proprietary database associated with a specific line-of-business application. What could be done to make sure employees and customers had a way to search once and get answers back from any source? The initial answer was federated search, which, on behalf of the user, submits the query to multiple repositories, and returns results back in a list, sometimes consolidated, often not.
Recently, we spoke with a head of customer service at a US-based manufacturing company. He relayed how he periodically reviews recordings of support calls, to understand where coaching is needed or improvements can be made in the process. He shared how incredibly frustrated he was that in most cases, 80% of the call time is actually silence. Silence, while the agent searches for the right answer to solve the problem, and the customer waits.
What shocked us was the estimated cost of that silence – thousands of dollars per day; millions of dollars per year.
Imagine if that answer could be found 1 minute faster – or even 10? The savings for a team of 100 agents in 1 year could amount to over a million dollars.
With customer support & service at the forefront of the brand battle, it's no wonder that companies are turning to artificial intelligence (AI), such as a chatbot, for help. The customer churn caused by poor customer service is $62 billion problem, so finding ways to speed response time is no small matter.
On CMS Wire, David Roe took a look at "10 Ways AI Helps Improve Customer Experiences" based on a report from PointSource. The report found that of more than 1000 people surveyed, 83% said they'd be OK shopping with a brand that uses chatbots or other AI capabilities.
