Some say "the best service is no service," yet getting to the nirvana of eliminating the reasons why customers call is a challenge. Today's customer service teams are buried under manual workloads, and the volume of incoming cases is increasing, leaving little time for redesigning processes, anticipating customer issues, or driving strategic projects. One of the quickest ways to reduce caseloads and make measurable improvements to the bottom line is with self-service and automation.

Yet, according to a recent ServiceNow report, almost 60% of customer service leaders stated that lack of self-service was an extremely or somewhat large challenge and another 53% said they offer no automation today of service processes.

Why Haven't More Companies Embraced Automation?

To provide an effortless experience for customers as well as for the agents serving them, businesses need to move beyond siloed approaches to embrace a modern cloud-based customer service system with an end-to-end workflow that connects departments, processes, and systems. Imagine taking your most frequently recurring requests, such as a customer asking for an upgrade or password reset, and enabling them to help themselves while having the entire process completed without agent or technician involvement. Not only is the service faster, but errors are reduced, and agents can spend time-solving the less familiar and more challenging problems.

Best-In-Class Customer Service Requires Focus on Automation and Self-Service

ServiceNow's recent survey of 200 customer service leaders reveals practices of best-in-class customer service organizations, and according to the findings, these companies are 36% more likely than their lower performing counterparts to offer self-service to their customers. This substantial gap translates into cost savings, higher quality service delivery, and improved customer satisfaction.

Getting Started with Automation

A modern customer service management system should provide the following capabilities to take full advantage of self-service and automation opportunities:

Self-service portal and catalog– Many companies have websites or portals to initiate a request for service, but the winning combination is to have not only a delightful entry point for customers, but to complement that with end-to-end automation on the back end that drives the process to completion. Additionally, your portal should enable customers to make typical requests from a catalog, file cases directly for less common issues, view details of their products and services, including operational status, as well as receive proactive updates regarding issues or opportunities to improve their use of the product they purchased.

Knowledgebase and collaborative forums– Company and customer-generated content provide the quickest way for customers to help themselves before generating a call or case. Additionally, being able to drive continuous improvement with knowledge management performance analytics helps you to know which content is being read, whether it's serving customer needs, or if it needs to be improved. Make sure your customer service system provides a knowledge base, question and answer capabilities, as well as collaborative capabilities like forums.

Publications or notifications– To truly deliver proactive service, customer support teams need to be able to provide information to customers via newsletters or notifications. These should be readily available from your self-service portal.

Chat– While many users will take advantage of the knowledge base, Q&A, collaboration, or filing their own cases, chat provides a quick way for customers to engage quickly.

Automated case assignment– Get the most appropriate agents assigned to cases based on skills, location, or availability. This works for both customer service and field service whether the case is from a call or other self-service channels such as the service catalog or chat.

Flexible workflow and business rules– Not traditionally part of customer service systems, a modern approach to serving customer requires a flexible workflow capability that is part of a single platform that works across all of the people, processes, and systems needed to support a customer.

Performance analytics– The only way to continuously reduce the number of recurring requests, know what is helping customers, and know where improvements are needed is to proactively monitor real-time performance so that you can take action.

With the power of the cloud and a modern customer service system, any organization can become best-in-class by taking advantage of self-service and automation. Take advantage of these capabilities to begin your journey becoming a proactive customer service organization.