Key findings:
* How intelligent business process
management-based approach can help to
boost the quality of your customer service
* Shaping seamless customer experience by
transforming your service from reactive to pro-active with BPM
* How to choose the right process-driven
technology to support your BPM initiative and
add value to your customer service
BPM as the top priority for every forward-thinking customer service organization
1. BPM as the top priority
for every forward-thinking
customer service organization
Key findings:
How intelligent business process
management-based approach can help to
boost the quality of your customer service
How to choose the right process-driven
technology to support your BPM initiative and
add value to your customer service
Shaping seamless customer experience by
transforming your service from reactive to
pro-active with BPM
2. Business value behind the formalized service processes
Process guidance and extended business process management are frequently considered as a couple of the key aspects that will shape the future of customer
service. Smart customer service organizations are formalizing agent actions by implementing a process-driven approach to streamline service delivery, minimize
agent-training times, ensure regulatory and company policy compliance, control costs, and provide a seamless omnichannel customer experience. They
increasingly leverage vendor-defined best-practice process flows and industry-specific solutions as starting points and extend these process flows in ways that
uniquely differentiate their offerings.
Extending BPM to customer service introduces consistency that customer service
decision-makers need to control the service experience from a cost and customer
satisfaction perspective. BPM software does this by intelligently applying contextual
business rules and process rules that govern the customer interaction. That's why
coupling contextual knowledge with business processes enables agents to deliver
targeted, personalized service to customers. At the same time, the process of formalizing
your customer service actions with BPM needs to be supported with software to help you
overcome bottlenecks and avoid common pitfalls. BPM will become one of the core
aspects for service professionals looking to provide more consistent customer service.
џ Net promoter score (NPS)
NPS is the percentage of your customers who would or would not
recommend your company. It helps organizations determine whether their
service processes are consistent enough to provide the needed quality of
customer experience.
џ Customer effort score (CES)
CES helps you determine the effort required by your customers to
accomplish specific task such as getting a support request. This is one of
the key metrics that indicates the effectiveness of your service processes
from the customer point of view.
џ Process cycle efficiency (PCE)
PCE, which is one of the top-list metric is the process of identifying those
areas that do not contribute to the value of the product. PCE is typically
calculated by using a value stream map.
џ First response time & average handling time
First response time is the average amount of time it takes for a customer
to get an initial response to their support issue. This is measured by taking
the average amount of time from when your customers first open their
support tickets to the time that they receive their first response.
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TIP:
30%
In 2015, Forrester
found that more than
30% of BPM initiatives
had customer
experience (CX)
improvement as a
primary driver.
16%
Only 16% of global
business and technology
decision-makers at firms
that are prioritizing
improving customer
experience are creating a
dedicated user group for
customer experience
initiatives.
80% 30%
Organizations report
that BPM could help
drive 80% growth in
new business while
also delivering a 30%
reduction in overall
costs.
30%
In 2015, cost reduction
and efficiency
improvements were the
top drivers for BPM
investments, cited by
30% of responding
companies.
Determine the most successful case resolution paths - leverage BPM solutions that are capable of recommending to agents the next best actions during the case
resolution process. Processes guide agents through the most successful resolution path that is aligned with both customer preferences and organization's overall
business objectives.
Primary metrics that organizations undertaking a BPM program for
enhancing their customer service should consider:
3. The core benefits organizations gain after coupling their customer service capacities with BPM
BPM software helps service organizations, increase efficiency and decrease costs. This means more growth and revenue opportunities for companies, as
well as increased speed and efficiency for customer service teams:
Thanks to BPM capabilities, agents are guided through the
discovery process instead of needing to learn and remember the
sequence of steps to be taken to resolve issues. Thus, they can
focus on the customer and their request better. Agents who are
empowered to help customers tend to stay on the job longer.
Deliver a consistent experience with service agents or
self-service solutions regardless of the interaction
channel.
Organizations can build necessary compliance steps into
process flows, so agents must follow the required steps.
Information and knowledge can be pushed to the agents
at the right point in the resolution process, which boosts
agent efficiency, and ultimately customer satisfaction.
Because agents are guided through issue resolution
processes, customers should enjoy a more consistent
experience.
Gain the agility and flexibility to implement process
changes faster, to adapt to the ever-growing customer
expectations and ensure these expectations can be
met more readily, while avoiding confusion or resolving
miscommunication faster. This also includes an
enhanced customer experience with self-service
portals.
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Minimizing Agent Training Time And Turnover
Leveraging Omnichannel Approach To Customer Service
Driving Policy Compliance
Enhancing Agent Efficiency
Improving Resolution Process Consistency
Agility and Flexibility
TIP:
Leverage analytical data While today's business faces many forms of risks, the strategic risk of losing customer to enterprise level organizations due to ever-.
growing demand and expectations, has never been higher. Leverage the analytical data gathered while measuring the processes efficiency to manage this risk
by evaluating organization's ability to deal with it, for instance business agility. The BPM program that is incorporated into your service strategy captures
metrics that assess the speed of making important changes to the process, business model, product, or service to adapt to these changes to meet them in
timelier manner to provide higher level of the customer service.
73%
According to Forrester, 73%
of consumers say that
valuing their time is the
most important thing a
company can do to provide
them with good service —
whether on a call, in a chat,
or while waiting for a
service technician to
troubleshoot and fix their
product.
4. Shaping seamless customer experience by transforming your service from reactive to proactive with BPM
Proactive customer service supposes that an action is taken in anticipation of the customer need or request, which prevents escalation, prevents or at least
reduces excessive customer service delivery costs, and leaves the customer satisfied with level of provided service. Today, more and more forward-thinking
service organizations are starting to leverage BPM to provide proactive customer service to better engage their customers. This also involves the usage of
learnings from these proactive engagements to improve operational efficiency and to predict future customer behavior, such as predicting the preferred
communication touchpoints or likelihood of attrition.
First of all, the effectiveness of coupling BPM with customer service depends on the organization's maturity level and performance. Organizations at a low level of
maturity should tackle high-priority metrics as well as start to engage business stakeholders for metrics discussions. They should also develop expertise in design-
thinking approaches and customer journey mapping needs to capture customer experience metrics and streamline service processes. Those organizations at
higher levels of maturity should focus on consistency of metrics across processes and divisions.
4
TIP:
Action plan for transforming your service from reactive to proactive:
Position BPM as a key enabler for enhancing your customer service. To accelerate the process of transforming your service to proactive, it is recommended for
organizations to create strategies and road maps for how BPM can serve as a catalyst for achieving their customer service objectives. You will also win over
stakeholders with a strong vision for how BPM can help digitize operational service processes, making these processes more accessible and adaptable for
omnichannel experiences.
Get a deeper understanding of your service team's efficiency and effectiveness. BPM projects often treat metrics too lightly. Customer service leaders need to create and help gain
consensus on key metrics and build them directly into the project tasks and milestone achievements for the BPM initiative to keep track of the key performance indicators.
Link leading customer service indicators for CX and agility to business goals. In particular, CX and agility are leading indicators that communicate change in the environment and are
predictive in nature. Link these leading indicators to balance sheet metrics to develop a framework for clear accountability so that customer service professionals can evaluate whether the
specific process runs properly and what part of it should be optimized.
Analyze customer feedback to build a proactive customer service. The biggest challenge you need to overcome when switching from reactive to proactive customer service is finding
situations where a customer needs your help before they even ask for it. You need to know what pitfalls users have to deal with on your website or what causes customers to scratch their
heads and leave a request for your customer service team. You can do that in two ways: by listening to customer voice and by monitoring user activity. This will allow you to detect and react
to customer pain points catching them before they grow into impossible to overcome problems. This means that you don’t have to wait for customers to become annoyed with something
before you can help them and can proactively assist them.
5. Choosing the right technology to support your BPM initiative and add value to your customer service
Today, customer service struggles to balance customer experience and cost by dozens of disconnected applications during their workday, each having its own access
requirement and user experience. This causes numerous inconsistencies that lead to siloed communication channels, misaligned departments, lack of flexibility, impersonal
service, and an inability to enforce company process, that in turn negatively affect customer satisfaction and increase costs.
That's why organizations need to consider equipping their agents with BPM-driven service management solutions to automate and streamline their core customer service
processes and gain the needed level of agility. Companies looking for the right software to meet their specific needs, need to consider adopting the system that is capable to
improve the consistency of service delivery, personalize service and elevate agent efficiency by intelligently guiding him/her through the steps of a service resolution process.
Reporting and analytical capabilities to monitor overall key performance indicators and optimize the success of each process flow are also important.
While evaluating the process-driven solution for customer service automation, businesses should also consider whether the software provides the needed level of agility and
flexibility to enable them to continually test, modify, and improve service processes. The most powerful solutions are backed by a BPM engine that provides all the necessary
tools for the full cycle of service process management: design, execution, monitoring and analysis. The BPM-centric solutions enable organizations to personalize
communications with their clients and manage all client requests in a single view no matter what channel they came from: phone, email, chat, social network or customer
portal. The right solutions need to provide a user-friendly interface that is clean and easy-to-use, so service agents are able to access necessary information and manage
customer data regardless of what device they are using.
Such process-driven solutions also offer out-of-the-box business processes that make it easy for companies to jump start adoption of the system and implement industry
best practices.
Organizations using BPM-centric customer service solutions report impressive improvements in customer responsiveness and cost metrics. Therefore, businesses need to
make sure that selected solution that will provide the most long-term agility and best business value without requiring huge investments.
Recent research states that by 2017, two-thirds of all
customer service activities will be accomplished without
human intervention. In order to keep up with the
changing business environment, forward-thinking
companies are deploying BPM tools with service
automation capabilities to help them remain competitive
and achieve service excellence. This allows for
streamlining and automating service processes to
achieve the best results and ROI.
5
600
HOURS
x3
A THREE PERSON CUSTOMER SUPPORT TEAM CAN SAVE 600 HOURS PER YEAR
THROUGH AUTOMATION WITH BPMS THE #1 FACTOR IN A CUSTOMER'S
LOYALTY IS REDUCING CUSTOMER EFFORTS
6. Conclusion
In the upcoming years the industry will see a complete restructuring of the
customer service domain, with channel specific strategies taking a backseat
and real-time engagement and integrated communication taking frontstage. In
order to succeed, businesses will need to demonstrate a confident
understanding of the current and future trends in service processes and
incorporate these innovations into their customer service strategies. For
achieving the best results, organizations tend to leverage the agile BPM
software to support customer experience efforts that can pay dividends in a
variety of ways. Turning to BPM provides a provable, data-driven framework
for process improvement that, when applied to customer service efforts, can
add a sense of weight and value to the efforts being made.
Source: Creatio index, supported by third-party research
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