5 Steps to Optimize Customer Experience with Team Alignment
Customer Experience (CX) doesn’t start and stop with the Customer Support organization. It runs across and throughout an organization and each department, team, and individual at a company and in some way impacts the overall customer experience your brand delivers.
Organizations that seek to deliver an outstanding customer experience face unprecedented challenges due to increasing customer expectations, disconnected organizational processes, and outdated legacy technology.
To succeed at customer experience optimization, it’s important to establish a seamless strategy across all teams in the organization to directly or indirectly influence customer experience outcomes. A single platform strategy can greatly simplify this effort.
Here are 5 steps to align customer experience strategy across your organization to deliver world-class customer support.
Step 1: Reevaluate the measurements.
There are no one-size-fits-all metrics that will improve CX in every business. Taking the time to determine what the most important metrics are across the entire business can lead to dramatic improvements. Make an effort to collect customer feedback, which can be invaluable and addressed as actionable items via business process transformation enabled by ServiceNow Customer Service Management.
Step 2: Reach across the borders.
Using your systems to tightly integrate engineering, product teams, operations, billing, and service/support reduces the distance between the support agents and the tools they need for resolution.
For an increasing number of businesses today, the service offering is driven by technology infrastructure (data centers, software, etc) but most support groups have little to no visibility into the operations of infrastructure. Likewise, those managing the infrastructure do not understand how changes to their environment might impact customers. With ServiceNow and Configuration Management (aka CMDB), we now have the tools to overcome this separation of duties.
Step 3: Be Proactive.
With the help of Service Management frameworks like ITIL, enterprise IT has largely moved away from the traditional break/fix model of support. The idea of Problem Management seeks to look for recurring issues and find the root cause, and ultimately take preventative actions. For the same reason, Change Management seeks to reduce the risk of unintended disruptions when changes are made to the IT environment. The net result of these efforts is far fewer issues disrupting daily tasks and better service experiences for your customers.
Step 4: Maintain a Customer Experience Task Force.
To truly improve the customer experience you need a task force spanning across the entire business and involving representatives from any part of the business that impacts the Customer Experience. Define an Owner for the overall customer experience that reports to the CEO or COO. Establish, maintain and monitor KPIs and drive the technology and process improvements organization-wide.
Step 5: Perform Regular Reviews and Take Action.
At least once per quarter, the task force should meet to evaluate the areas where customer experience can be improved. This group should be looking at the metrics, proposing new metrics, defining action plans, and reviewing progress from previous action plans. This continuous momentum will serve to keep everyone focused on overall improvements to CX. The chair of this group should be issuing a report that is shared with senior management and the entire organization so that everyone can contribute to the overall success.
The process Covestic recommends to clients is reviewed in detail in my most recent webinar. You can watch the recording here: 5 Steps to Align your Teams to Optimize Customer Experience.
About the Author
James Divine, ServiceNow Senior Solutions Architect, Milestone
James is a Solutions Architect with 24+ years of IT industry experience working in a wide variety of small, mid-sized, and enterprise organizations. James has 19+ years of software development experience and over 6+ years of experience in architecting, implementing, designing, managing, and developing ServiceNow.
A Disruptive Force in Customer Service: ServiceNow Customer Service Management
