Building a better customer experience with Proactive Service Operations: A use case in Network Operations
In the digital age, customer service has evolved from merely resolving issues to anticipating them. Proactive customer service uses customer-interaction data and automation tools to recommend products, solve problems, and personalise the customer experience - setting brands apart in a competitive market. In this study, we’ll look at the role of Customer Service Operations, and how businesses can bring the power of ServiceNow to the customer experience.
Customer Service Operations, especially in a proactive model, plays a critical role in the process by:
Identifying Issues: Flagging problems before they impact customers, such as delayed orders or service slowdowns, and communicating pre-emptively.
Product Recommendations: Utilising customer data to recommend new products and services, thereby personalising their experience and demonstrating attunement to their needs.
To deliver proactive service, Customer Service Operations teams can use:
Customer Feedback: Using surveys and tracking online behaviour to understand customer needs and pain points.
Knowledge Base: Offering accessible and regularly updated self-help information.
Automation: Employing automation to anticipate and address customer needs, such as tracking order delays, and communicate changes.
Measuring proactive customer experience helps you understand what you’re doing right, and what you need to do better. Key metrics include:
Retention Rate: Indicating customer loyalty and repeat business.
Churn Rate: Measuring customer loss over time.
Support Tickets/Resolution Time: Analysing the volume and resolution of support tickets to gauge product/service issues and the effectiveness of proactive service.
The Challenge in Network Operations
In an era where digital services are paramount, outages can be detrimental to customer experience. Often, customers are the first to discover and report an outage, triggering a reactive chain of manual processes, overwhelming customer service agents, and extending downtime.
The ServiceNow solution in action
Step 1: Alert and Incident Creation
A Network Operations Centre operator receives an alert in the Operator Workspace, which monitors service health using analytics and machine learning. The alert auto-generates an incident, and using the Service-aware Install Base, the operator identifies affected customers and creates a Proactive Case.
Step 2: Engaging Customer Service
The customer service agent reviews impacted accounts and guided by Predictive Intelligence, proposes a major case, managing communications and resolution processes for issues affecting multiple customers.
Step 3: Major Case Management
The major case manager reviews and approves the major case, automatically creating child cases for each affected customer and initiating notifications.
Step 4: Incident Update and Communication
The operator updates the incident with progress and estimated resolution time. Automated updates from the incident inform the major case, visible to customer service.
Step 5: Coordinated Communication
The major case manager reviews updates and can add a customer-facing statement to the major case, automatically updating all child cases and notifying all impacted customers with a single update.
Step 6: Customer Interaction
Customers can view case updates and outage information on the Customer Service Portal, staying informed about the issue and expected resolution times.
Benefits of Implementing Proactive Customer Service Operations
- Preserve the user experience by reducing downtime.
- Foster trust through open, proactive communication.
- Streamline issue resolution with automation tools.
- Proactively resolve issues, decreasing customer complaints.
- Enhance loyalty through dedicated, seamless experiences
Proactive Customer Service doesn’t necessitate foresight but demands a customer-centric view and a commitment to constantly improving the customer experience. By employing tools and strategies that anticipate and address issues before they reach the customer, businesses can elevate their service operations. With ServiceNow, proactive customer service is a tangible, achievable reality.
Want to learn more about how you can build a competitive edge with ServiceNow? Speak to our ServiceNow experts.
