Efficient customer service leads to significant revenue growth and sustainability. Here are four ways in which process discovery helps you improve your customer service efficiency.
We live in an era of customer experience. It is a time when building and serving a positive customer experience takes precedence over everything else in a business.
A contributing factor to this advantage of customer experience is the commodity trap. With more and more businesses being pitted against each other as competitors, customer experience is the only thing that differentiates businesses in the customers' eyes.
And while customer experience is the journey of a customer that starts from them learning about a business for the first time to the end of their relationship with it, customer service is a small yet critical part of this journey.
Customer service is defined as the assistance and advice provided by a business to the people who buy or use its products or services. It is focused on direct interaction between your business and the customer. The objective of customer service is to help, advise, and assist the customer in any possible way so that they can achieve their goal with your business.
Efficient customer service plays an important part in the growth and sustainability of a business. It helps you grow your business revenue and save on unnecessary costs.
According to research, customers switching companies due to poor customer service costs companies a total of $1.6 trillion in the U.S alone. Empathy and personalization have become key drivers of a positive customer experience through efficient customer service.
With all this data and statistics, it is evident that you need to invest in improving the efficiency of your customer service processes. And process discovery can help you achieve your customer service efficiency goals.
But what is process discovery?
Business process discovery is a assessment and management practice that helps businesses understand and analyze their current processes in their ‘as-is’ state. It is a set of techniques that builds a representation of an organization's current business processes, which include their workflows, structures, customer journey, and elements.
In this article, we will explain how process discovery helps you improve customer service efficiency.
1. It brings everything out of the head
If you know how customer service processes operate, you must know for sure that they are complex and detailed workflows. With the digital transformation changing the way customer service departments operate, these processes have become even more complex and integrated.
Social media and online community management are modern customer service platforms in addition to traditional platforms of email and phone support. Managing these platforms and functions without a well defined and documented process can severely affect the performance of your customer service operations.
Process discovery helps you capture the steps and procedures involved in your customer service functions that are stored in your employees’ and partners' heads, and defines them so that they can be mapped, documented, and analyzed. Without process discovery, you run the risk of losing important process information when a customer rep or partner decides to move on. This makes it difficult to predict process outcomes as the process is not regulated and changes almost every time it is executed.
2. It identifies hidden inefficiencies and bottlenecks
Like every other business function, customer service has integrated systems, teams, and processes. These operational elements are bound to have hidden leaks and gaps that cause revenue loss and inefficiencies.
Process discovery helps you deconstruct your customer service process workflows. This makes it easier to identify the gaps in the performance of your customer service processes. The bottlenecks that cause process inefficiencies and lack of productivity are pinpointed when you implement process discovery in your customer service operations.
When your processes are discovered, you learn about the gaps that can be fixed, opportunities for improvements in your processes, and learnings from well-performing process elements that can be implemented in other workflows.
When you have clear visibility into your customer service processes, it not only helps you fix the gaps but also presents an opportunity to increase the efficiency of your customer service operations.
3. It minimizes risks in your customer service process
Customer service operations directly impact your relationship with your customers. Empathy and communication are the pillars of customer service. Ensuring all communication is reliable, accurate, and consistent is a priority for customer service teams.
The slightest mistakes caused by inefficiencies in your customer service processes can impact your customer relations and hard-earned brand reputation. Some studies observed that U.S. companies lose more than $62 billion annually due to poor customer service.
Discovering your customer service processes helps you identify the gaps and bottlenecks in the processes. With the opportunity to fix such broken processes, you can ensure the efficiency of your processes and reduce the risk of unprecedented incidents that may affect your customer relations.
Process discovery is an effective tool to ensure your customer service operations run smoothly with minimum risks.
4. It helps you find opportunities to improve customer service
Customer service has a direct impact on your customer relations, revenue, business growth, and sustainability. This bodes well with the survey that recognizes improving customer service as the top priority for 72% of the businesses.
Process discovery is a management practice that lays the foundation for process improvement. With the right execution, process discovery can play a crucial role in improving your customer service processes.
Discovering your customer service process begins by bringing all process details out of your employees' heads and onto paper. This helps you map your process workflows and identify the gaps and bottlenecks. After mapping your processes, you build an improvement strategy and document all your improved customer service processes to ensure the process details are accurately accessible to every member of the team. This avoids the risk of experimenting and going away from the set processes which causes inefficiencies. Documented customer service processes can then be analyzed to identify opportunities for improvement as an ongoing practice.
Process discovery should be your first step towards improving your customer service operations.
Bringing It All Together
Building good relations with your customers is the key to a successful customer service department, and it is only possible through efficient and productive customer service operations. Take our free CORE Process Self-Assessment to find your improvement opportunity score (Plus an optional free score review with an expert).
Click here to start your free self-assessment.
