Business process management can dramatically enhance customer service operations by delivering value and saving cost and time. In this article, we look at five ways in which business process management can improve your customer service.
We constantly hear bizarre stories from customers sharing their unforgettable customer service experiences. But how many times were you on the receiving end of such an experience?
I have had horrendous experiences with customer service departments of well-known brands as well as the newborn companies. From the customer 'help' call being transferred from one rep to another like a ping pong ball to explaining my issue 20 times over to multiple people, I have seen it all.
In the end, I always vowed never to do business with these companies, again.
Customer service is one of the most critical components of customer experience. And in a world where the customer is king, businesses state customer experience as their number one priority.
Hence, improving customer service has to take precedence in your business strategy. After all, businesses that do not invest enough in customer service are predicted to lose billions of dollars due to poor customer service.
Business process management is a business practice that can help you improve your customer service operations to make them more efficient and effective.
Customer service is a business function that includes various business processes. When you optimize the execution of these processes, the performance of your processes improves.
Business process management is defined as a discipline in operations management in which people use various methods to discover, model, analyze, measure, improve, optimize, and automate business processes. Check out this detailed article where you can learn everything there is to business process management (BPM).
Let us look at the five ways in which business process management can help improve customer service.
Customer service operations are a complex mix of human and system elements. If not managed properly, the processes do not positively contribute to your customer experience. In some cases, if these processes are not given enough attention, they can negatively affect your customer experience, resulting in low customer retention and satisfaction.
Managing these processes using BPM can play a critical role in increasing the efficiency of your customer service. It can help you discover, map, document, and analyze your existing customer service processes in their as-is state.
Once you have a fair understanding of your process workflows, you can make efforts to improve them by filling the gaps and adding additional value using tools such as process automation and re-engineering.
BPM applies to all your customer service processes such as:
With proper management and improvement efforts, these processes can run with minimum resources and deliver maximum output, ultimately increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of customer service operations.
To support this claim, a report from 2018 notes that 65% of businesses agree that BPM processes have helped their organizations improve efficiency, versatility, and customer satisfaction.
Business process management as a practice also includes process automation - use technology to automate complex, redundant, and clerical processes. Your customer service operations include certain processes that can function with minimal to no human interference. For example, customer ticket allocation, query segmentation, feedback storage and allocation, and data backups.
While good customer service thrives on empathy and communication, it can use a hand with tasks that do not necessarily require the human touch. This way you can increase the efficiency of your customer service processes by eliminating human errors and dependency.
The use of technology to automate tasks also increases the effectiveness of your processes by helping your employees to focus on priority tasks such as communicating with customers for critical cases and gaining detailed feedback.
An example of customer service process automation is to automate customer service call allocation. This can help save valuable time for not only your customer service employee but also your customer. There you have it - efficiency again!
Data management across the organization is a common challenge in modern businesses. Data is critical to customer service - customer records, complaints, feedback, and history are all part of the customer service function.
Business process management practices help you map, analyze, organize, and manage your data processes such as:
Streamlining these processes to their most efficient and effective form helps enhance your customer service operations.
Business process management helps you with customer service process automation and streamlining. This in turn leads to better resource management and spending.
For example, automated recordings and chats on your customer helpline can save the cost of hiring extended teams. Similarly, system configurations to categorize and distribute customer cases to respective customer service teams will streamline the systems and eliminate management and upgrade costs.
Personalization is reported to lift revenues by up to 15%, which is why more and more companies are investing in building a personalized customer experience. According to a report by Forrester, more than 80% of digital businesses are investing in personalization.
And since we are talking about customer service, personalization takes priority over everything else as it is directly related to the customer experience.
Process management helps you implement personalization in your customer service operations in many ways. When your customer service processes are effective, you have the liberty to design processes in a way that your customer service teams spend more time getting personalized feedback from your customers through various channels.
Data is another critical element that helps enable personalized experiences. With process management, you can streamline your data processes to make sure your data is properly segmented, updated, and distributed to the right teams and systems. This will ensure that your personalization is exercised accurately and effectively.
Customer satisfaction and happiness take precedence over everything for a successful business. Customer service plays an important role in satisfying your customers. Use business process management as a tool to improve and enhance your customer service operations to deliver a personalized and memorable customer experience.
Explore the opportunities of improving your customer service operations by discovering and analyzing you existing processes. Start today with a discovery call.