Is your CRM sabotaging your customer support experience?

Great after-sales support can convert a one-off transactional engagement to a long-term, high-value relationship. 95% of consumers say that (good) customer service is essential to gaining their brand loyalty. But if your support is poor, beware! That’s because 60% of consumers say they’ve changed brands due to bad customer service.  

And poor service takes a lot of hard work to recover from. In her report, Understanding Customers, Ruby Newell-Legner says it takes 12 positive customer experiences to compensate for one negative experience. 

So, what is bad support? And what’s behind it? 

CRMs are a wonderful thing. But (and there’s always a but) they don’t help your agents to do the best job possible in supporting your customers.  

Why is this a problem? When talking to a customer, your agents need information on who they are talking to, previous interactions, product information, access to subject matter experts in some cases, and more. This means they have to flick between separate systems and tools to resolve the issue while the customer gets increasingly frustrated with being kept on hold.  

The outcome? Sorting out issues (TTR, aka time-to-resolution) takes longer than it should, and customers are considerably grumpier than they need to be.  

Let’s have a look at poor and good service in action, to illustrate the difference. 

Meet Rui, he's not having a great day.

Rui is a customer service rep at Implode, a company that delivers retail products and after-sales support to consumers and businesses. He’s worked there for a while, providing telephone support for customers with questions and issues. Most of the time, he enjoys the interactions and his job.  

However, one Wednesday afternoon, Rui answers a call from Eve, a customer who’s having a recurring issue with her purchase. Now, this isn’t Eve’s first call; it’s her tenth, so she’s pretty over the whole situation to start with.  

Unfortunately, Rui has never encountered Eve or her specific product issue before, so he needs to spend some time reviewing the notes of the previous calls to get up to speed. While he’s busy reading the notes from the last nine calls so he has the information and context needed to help Eve, she’s talking about her (poor) customer support experience so far and is unsurprisingly becoming increasingly frustrated.

Now, Rui is doing his best, but there’s a lot to go through and it takes some time. All the while, Eve is getting more and more annoyed.

Finally, Rui has got to grips with the issue, and he moves out of the CRM and opens the company’s knowledge centre to try and find a viable solution.  

After jumping back and forth between various systems and repositories of knowledge (human and otherwise) and placing Eve on hold several times, Rui manages to propose a viable solution. While that’s great, neither he nor Eve have had a pleasant experience on the call.  

Once off the call, Eve takes to social media to share exactly how unimpressed she is with her friends, and Rui wonders about his choice of career and employer.  

Here’s Eve again, having a much better day

Eve has also bought products from Xceptional, another company that delivers retail products and provides its customers with after-sales support. 

As luck would have it, Eve is having a recurring issue with a product she’s bought from Xceptional. She doesn’t much like having to call a support line - and after her experience with Implode, who could blame her? Fortunately for her, Xceptional uses ServiceNow Customer Service Management (CSM), which offers customers and vendor partners omnichannel engagement.  

So, Eve jumps onto Xceptional’s service portal and searches through their customer-accessible library of product knowledge and FAQs for a solution. While there, she also connects with a user community and scans through posts by other customers who have experienced similar issues to find out what they did. Read more about ServiceNow self-service solutions! 

In this instance, Eve can’t find the answer she needs, so she reaches out for help by clicking the chat icon on the service portal. She’s immediately connected with a Virtual Agent that accepts and answers her questions using natural language.  

Detecting that Eve has already contacted support and has a case logged, the Virtual Agent connects her with Nez (a live agent), a customer support specialist. ServiceNow’s NowAssist Generative AI capability quickly summarises Eve’s case history, so Nez is up to speed and ready to act within moments.  

Nez consults the inbuilt ServiceNow Knowledge Base and decides that offering a warranty replacement is the best course of action. She runs this past Eve, who says, ‘Yes – let’s do it’ and then triggers the replacement request from the case in ServiceNow. The request and the chat details remain linked to Eve’s case, so there’s just one reference number, and other Xceptional representatives can see the entire history of interactions. 

The combination of Nez’s customer service skills and ServiceNow’s powerful technology delivers a simple, positive experience for Eve. She is delighted to tell everyone that her issue was sorted out quickly and easily.  

And (eat your heart out, Implode) she even gives the business a 5-star Google rating for exceptional service. 

The reality is that traditional CRMs aren’t designed to serve customers effectively at a time when fast and fabulous support is critical to business success.  

Luckily, ServiceNow CSM addresses the need for purpose-built customer engagement technology. It uses sophisticated processes that have evolved past call logging to provide smooth, end-to-end, high-quality engagements across multiple channels.  

Additionally, ServiceNow’s integration capabilities allow you to connect any modern API-enabled systems and workflows quickly, easily, and securely. So those organisational silos can help instead of hindering your support team in delivering those exceptional (5-star) customer experiences. 

If you’d like to learn more about how ServiceNow can transform your customer experience offerings, talk to a Fusion5 ServiceNow expert today.