Businesses increasingly use customer service as a marketing tactic to help differentiate their products and services in a saturated market. But, in a world of ever-advancing technologies, customer service entails more than simply responding to individual inquiries.
ServiceNow’s modern Customer Service Management (CSM) solution aggregates data to analyze links between customer inquiries, service loads, and develop best-practice workflows for resolving customer complaints and other challenges. Businesses may use these analytics to improve customer satisfaction and boost sales. However, it is often necessary to follow a ServiceNow CSM best practices list.
What is Customer Service Management?
ServiceNow CSM extends beyond conventional solutions to provide faster and more effective services. It refers to a set of tools used by an organization’s help desk to serve customers better and offer non-IT-related unified support to internal and external users. ServiceNow CSM products include:
- Contract and Entitlement Management
- Case Management
- Product and Asset Management
- Account Management
- Communities
- Knowledge Management
Seven ServiceNow CSM Best Practices
Seven ServiceNow best practices that every organization should consider are as follows:
1. Enlist a CSM Expert
An organization’s CSM initiative is not a side project that internal teams can efficiently perform with spare hours. It is a critical business metric, and leadership should ensure that a ServiceNow technology expert, such as Cask, oversees the rollout.
This partner should have experience with comparable industry transitions and have employed a skilled workforce to identify specific business activities and map out a strategic migration path to the ServiceNow platform.
2. Understand the Company-Wide Impact
ServiceNow solutions control and synchronize all workflows from across your organization, such as IT, HR, finance, and administration, to create a single experience for the entire business. It is not a standard IT project for which the IT team maintains sole responsibility for implementation and successful operation.
As a result, stakeholders from all departments and business functions must collaborate and discuss their ideas, issues, and pain points. Because this is a firm-wide digital transformation, they must reach a group consensus on rolling out ServiceNow across the firm without causing any interruption.
3. Look Beyond the Quantitative Metrics
Management teams often measure customer service success in metrics like first response time and issue resolution rate. While these efficiency indicators are important, they are purely quantitative and do not speak to the quality of the customer engagement experience.
Organizations might consider expanding success metrics beyond the initial numbers and dig deeper into customer quality representative interactions. These qualitative measures might include implementing an emotional intelligence scale to assess a help desk’s ability to present a positive persona to customers.
4. Align Metrics with Strategic Business Goals
Successful customer service can contribute to and promote strategic business goals, meaning that management should align customer service success measures with enterprise-wide objectives. All customer service statistics should link to a specific purpose like improving customer experience ratings, reducing backlogs, or encouraging self-service usage.
5. Pave the Way with an Implementation Roadmap
ServiceNow CSM opens organizations up to a new world of possibilities for linking, optimizing, and automating Customer Service processes. However, IT teams must understand how to prioritize which aspects to develop (and when to do it) to fully leverage the platform’s capabilities.
A ServiceNow CSM implementation plan will aid management in aligning all conflicting priorities around a big-picture view of how CSM will improve the customer service experience. This migration will help employees understand which CSM projects to prioritize and why. A better understanding of project urgency increases the likelihood that everyone will buy into the organization’s long-term CSM implementation goals.
6. Connect Marketing and Sales to CSM
Marketing and sales are two crucial areas where you interact with your customers regularly. Marketing teams frequently communicate directly with customers via social media and email. In contrast, sales team interactions are more direct, with representatives often picking up the phone and speaking with customers one-on-one.
Management should understand and track how and when marketing and sales departments communicate with customers to find areas of improvement within the customer service process. The first step in that process might be connecting marketing and sales channels to CSM platforms. Organizations can use these insights to influence and even drive marketing and sales plans in the future after you have an all-encompassing perspective of the channels they use to connect with consumers.
7. Add More Service Units to CSM
On top of integrating marketing and sales, organizations should also consider bringing other service units onto the CSM platform. Field Services, IT, and Engineering, for example, are other critical departments that might benefit from ServiceNow CSM capabilities. Each of these units’ knowledge and information can help improve the customer experience.
However, most customers’ capacity to connect with these departments is inconsistent and often a one-time action. Customer service representatives must figure out how to establish these connections independently. ServiceNow CSM makes it easier to build an interconnected, customer-focused ecosystem to address this need. All departments collaborate to handle customer issues and improve the overall customer journey.
Work With Cask to Implement These CSM Best Practices
ServiceNow CSM is a critical component in simplifying, automating, and unifying service-related digital workflows for a better overall customer experience. Choosing to invest in the platform might be a vital move that clears a path to realize the full benefits of digital transformation.
Request a quote today and learn how Cask ServiceNow CSM solutions and adherence to a set of best practices can boost customer satisfaction.
