What you need to know about Customer Service Management (CSM)?

Customer service refers to all activities performed by an organization in support of its customers. These activities are formative of customer satisfaction, which is a function of the overall customer experience.

Customer satisfaction determines whether customers remain loyal to the organization and promote it to new customer candidates, or abandon the organization in favor of a competitor. Retaining existing and attracting new customers is an existential concern for most organizations. Growth in customers and customer consumption equates to organizational success. For this reason how customer services are managed is an all important question, which is addressed by Customer Service Management (CSM).

CSM, involves the management of business policies and processes, business practices, organizational culture and supporting technologies as well as customer facing organizational elements, involved in orchestrating and executing customer service/support in the resolution of customer needs and problems.

To identify customer needs and determine suitable responses, CSM utilizes analysis of customer interaction that occurs across the full spectrum of communication channels including telephony, email, web forms, messaging and social media.

An important aspect of CSM is process measurement and monitoring, to maintain service quality and identify/execute process improvement opportunities.

Customer Experience is the totality of a customers’ perception of a product, brand of the product, support for the product and all interactions with the organization delivering the product.

Every interaction with the customer, be it through the utility of a product, access to the organizational website or call-center communication contributes to shaping the customer experience. In addition, opinions expressed through social media significantly impacts customer perception, and colors customer experience.

Growth is driven by an expanding satisfied customer base, which in turn is driven by customer experience. There is no kind of business that does not benefit from positive CX.

Effective customer experience management begins by observing that CX is shaped by the totality of customer interaction, as opposed to selected touchpoints. Organizations must establish solution-oriented communication with customers at all touchpoints supported by suitable CX infrastructure.

With next4biz CSM, all customer interaction can be driven with comprehensive workflows, guided by agent scripts and supported by AI, to ensure perfect customer experience end-to-end.

next4biz makes listening to and understanding of customers easy!

Process-based customer service is a new approach to Customer Service Management. It entails the management of customer issues through processes specific to the issue category.

next4biz CSM is designed to support process-based customer services: Customer issues that cannot be solved at level one can be forwarded to higher echelons for solution with category specific workflows. This allows for solution standardization and performance measurement/reporting.

The world is rapidly digitalizing, and customer – business interactions are no exception to this trend. For this reason CSM is becoming increasingly more reliant on digital communication channels as customers shift to self-solving problems through digital channels.

In terms of customer support, this shift leading to a decline in call-center loads which must be offset by effective web accessible self-service facilities by organizations.

next4biz CSM’s customizable “self-service” extension is a one-stop solution to meet all the self-service customer service requirements of organizations: It is deployable as an iFrame within organization websites and can be used by customers to post issues/requests, query issue resolution status, communicate with customer representatives, and access answers to frequently asked questions.

Unnecessary and redundant calls present a widespread problem for many call-centers. Customer calls made to query the status of an issue or attempting to speed-up issue processing as well as simple queries regarding products and services fall into this category. Responding to such calls is a drain on call center resources and an inefficient way for customers to access information.

One way to reduce this burden is to provide an effective self-service customer service using next4biz CSM’s customizable “self-service” extension, eliminating the necessity for customers to call-in in many cases.

For the issues that cannot be resolved by self-service, it is important to resolve as many of them as possible during the first customer call regarding the issue. The ratio of issues that are solved like this is referred to as the first contact resolution (FCR) rate.

FCR rate is an important measure. A high FCR rate is desirable, as issues solved on first contract are issues that don’t burden the call center or wider organization with follow-on processing. FCR also contributes positively to the customer experience.

next4biz CSM makes it easier for organizations to achieve high FCR rates through many features including automated notifications, agent scripting, and process based service. These features also serve to minimize issue turnaround times overall – FCR or not. In addition, next4biz CSM’s use of digital agents, supported by its artificial intelligence, provides the opportunity to increase issue resolution times beyond what sole human agents are capable of.

Customer representative – customer interaction is prone to problems of communication: Misunderstanding between the parties; lack of training and experience of the customer representative; and out-of-date information provided to the customer representative are just some of the causes frequently causing customer frustration and dissatisfaction as well as serious inefficiencies.

next4biz CSM eliminates these problems with its agent scripting feature. Agent scripting involves the design of dialog structures to direct the interaction of customer representatives with customers in a step-wise fashion.

An agent script consists of steps representing a question and answer in the dialog between the customer representative and customer. Conditional branching within the scrips cause the dialogs to flow down different paths according to customer responses.

Agent scripts are issue category dependent, in other words how the issue is categorized determines the script and ensuing dialog.

next4biz CSM agent scripting enables organizations to centrally standardize the customer representative
– customer dialog. Besides ensuring the quality of customer interaction and up-to-date information flow to customers, this standardization significantly issue resolution time. It also reduces qualification requirements of customer representatives, speeds their training and preparation and eases the HR burden of call center operations.

Yes.

next4biz CSM is an end-to-end platform enabling not just employees but all authorized stakeholders such as outsourced call centers, cargo and courier companies, technical services, dealers and agencies participate customer service management activities through a common application interface.

next4biz CSM also has the flexibility to be easily integrated with ERP, CRM and all other corporate applications and systems so there is no necessity for users to access data from these systems through different interfaces.

Next4biz CSM can be used in the same fashion by organizations of all sizes and types in the same manner.

Next4biz CSM is device independent, requiring only a web browser is for access. This web interface is the same regardless of the environment or technology employed by users.

Next4biz CSM has a “no code” architecture employing simple “drag and drop” style user interaction, allowing even design and customization to be performed through the same interface used in operations.

Multichannel means listening to customers on many channels. Omnichannel means integrating all channels to be listened and managed together.

With omnichannel communication all customer communication is monitored simultaneously.

Consider a customer to calling into a call center: Omnichannel communication enables a receiving customer representative to have what the customer has posted on social media and sent by email on-screen whilst interacting with the customer.

Multichannel communication frustrates the customer who has to repeat information multiple times. It makes providing good customer service hard, as information on the customer issue must be accessed and consolidated from multiple channels.

Next4biz CSM is architected to support omnichannel communication.

The next4biz CSM AI module utilizes machine learning technology to “listen” to customer issues and categorize them automatically. If a solution to the issue is available in the knowledge base, it will also provide the solution to the customer and closes the issue without human intervention.

This is a huge boost to operational efficiency that significantly reduces issue resolution costs, dramatically increases first contact resolution (FCR) rates and leads to much higher customer satisfaction levels.

All functions of next4biz are managed through a specially designed configuration interface. Settings and customizations centrally performed and managed via this interface.

Performing functions such as defining customer interfaces, creating data fields, designing workflows and specifying work rules can be accomplished within this interface without using code.

In next4biz CSM, coding is only required to develop new integration interfaces to systems for which integration has not been performed before.

next4biz CSM comes with ready-made dashboards, operational process analysis and follow-up reports. These have been prepared to meet standard reporting needs irrespective of the business area, and provide a range of new and unique features that make next4biz indispensable to organizations and users.

Ready-made reports can be customized, restricted and/or extended and allow the use of custom fields to match particular user requirements. Reports allow drill-down analysis from high-level views down to the minutia of root transactions. This facilitates root-cause analysis, difference analysis, relational analysis and other types of descriptive analysis be performed with ease.

Custom fields are first class citizens of next4biz data structures. Complex combinations of ready-made and/or custom fields can be used in the filtering interface to determine the exact subset of data for which to report on and precisely match business requirements.

It is also possible to integrate third-party reporting tools into next4biz CSM. This can provide a valuable way for organizations to correlate customer service metrics with other performance process data. Needless to say, next4biz CSM provides excellent support for Excel. Any ready-made or custom report can be downloaded in Excel format.

Organizations gain real-time insight into service performance with next4biz CSM reporting: Detailed monitoring of bottlenecks and analysis of process inefficiencies becomes simple, and identifying process improvement opportunities straightforward.

In short, next4biz CSM reports transform service process management from an art into the routine.

Issue escalation is a service management concept supported by next4biz CSM.

In next4biz CSM, customer issue processing consists of a sequence of processing steps, each executed by an assignee. Each as assignee has a supervisor which, may differ according to the issue category and workflow.

The maximum completion time of each issue processing step, is predetermined by a service level agreement (SLA) and is peculiar to the issue category and workflow.

Escalation occurs when an assignee is unable to complete a customer issue step within its predetermined timeframe, at which point next4biz CSM determines the supervisor of the current assignee and re-assigns the issue to this supervisor.

Escalation is an important feature. It ensures operational awareness of customer service on behalf of supervisors and promotes timely delivery by members of the service organization and thereby maximizes the likelihood of resolving issues within SLA boundaries undertaken with customers.

There is no time cost overhead due to escalation. By automatically notifying the relevant user/user group in the lead-up to, and occurrence of the escalation event, next4biz ensures that there are no justifiable delays associated with the escalation process.

Potentially escalations can propagate further upwards, from the supervisor to the supervisor’s supervisor and so on. At each level, next4biz CSM will determine the higher level supervisor to escalate the issue to, following progressively higher levels of authority.

The hierarchy of supervision followed is not necessarily that of organizational hierarchy. next4biz CSM recognizes that different authorities may coexist within an organization in relation to subject area (such as administrative, technical, IT and quality assurance), market divisions (such as product lines and customer segments) or operational necessities (such as geography) and that the issue resolution process may span multiple organizations. To facilitate this, next4biz CSM enables different escalation hierarchies to be defined and issue assignment/escalation be determined by issue category and workflow.

Even the biggest and best organizations are prone to receive customer complaints. This is not an indicator of failure in its self. It can even present an opportunity to extend the customer life cycle through effective complaint management.

However collating and responding to customer complaints and dissatisfaction is not always straightforward. Complaints may be directly made to the organization providing the product or service, or through its call-center. It may also feed through partner organizations or the multitude of social media platforms. It might take the form of a text message, email or telephone call.

Through support of omnichannel communication next4biz CSM enables engagement with the full spectrum of customer opinion and facilitate the correct response/solution through the correct communication channel.

Beyond effective and efficient response to customer complaints, it is important to address the root causes of complaints. Through next4biz CSM reporting, complaints can be monitored, analyzed and classified according to a multitude of criteria to ascertain the cause and impact of root causes. This analysis in turn, may be put to use for process and product improvement.

Yes. For multiple applications simultaneously.

For many organizations popular marketplace applications provide ideal platforms to present products and services to audiences of potential customers. These platforms are also places where customers voice opinions, complaints and criticisms regarding products and the organizations supplying them. In the absence of suitable responses, publically expressed negative opinions have the potential to cause harm to organization and brand reputations. In the case of positive opinions, the opportunity to leverage positive publicity may be missed.

next4biz CSM enables organizations to respond to customer requests, complaints and opinions from all marketplace applications engaged with. next4biz CSM makes this possible through its pre-implemented integration with all widely known (and many lesser known) marketplace applications. It automatically converts requests and complaints from these platforms into customer issues, which are then managed and resolved as regular issues.

For an organization of any size, logging on to each marketplace application, scanning customer comments and creating issues manually is just not feasible.

In short, organizations using next4biz CSM need never worry about not responding to a customer complaint or commendation ever again!