In this story from IDC, Epicor shared how they elevated the customer experience by standardising processes using the ServiceNow platform and Customer Service Management.
Headquartered in Austin, Texas, Epicor is a global leader in industry-specific enterprise software designed to promote business growth. Serving customers in the automotive, building supply, distribution, manufacturing and retail industries, with more than 4,300 employees in over 150 countries, Epicor is positioned to help organisations across supply chains around the globe to adopt a data-first strategy that allows them to gain actionable insights to optimise and automate business flows.
“Delivering exceptional customer experience is our priority, and ServiceNow helps us ensure it’s consistent. We aligned on the important goals our team needed to deliver on, and we quickly started standardising and measuring them across the organisation”, says Joe Cherian, Vice President of Customer Support at Epicor. “This way, we have tangible data that allows us to measure our team’s and customers’ success.”
Elevating the Customer Experience
Epicor’s Industry ERP Cloud portfolio is rooted in deep industry expertise in the verticals it serves, one of the company’s core differentiators. Seamlessly providing a consistently world-class customer experience is a top priority, measured in part by improvements in first-call resolution, knowledge base performance, backlog, CSAT and mean time to resolution (MTTR). With customer service top of mind, Epicor knew condensing 10 different CRM tools and 40+ customer portals across product lines—each with different standards and approaches to information and case management—could vastly improve customer experience.
Scaling Customer Service
Epicor implemented the ServiceNow platform and Customer Service Management (CSM) to standardise processes across the entire support organisation, helping it better serve its more than 23,000 customers, worldwide. As an example, for years, simple requests such as password resets were addressed by live customer support agents. After implementing ServiceNow, 90% of requests that were previously routed to Epicor customer support can now be easily addressed by the customers themselves, through self-service tools, allowing agents to reallocate time to more complex cases.
“More than ever, consumers are expecting white-glove service from the companies they work with”, says Cherian. “Whether it’s easily being able to change a password themselves, or spending time with an expert who can help them thoughtfully strategise their software implementation, ServiceNow helps us meet that expectation”.
Empowering the Customers
In that same vein, Epicor creates opportunities for its customers to learn best practices, connect directly with Epicor experts and share quick information. Over recent years, thousands of knowledge articles have been created that support customer self-service and inform and empower agents. With so many knowledge articles available, Epicor’s CSAT score has improved by an impressive 12 basis points in just four years. Epicor’s customer self-service portal, EpicCare, is supported by ServiceNow CSM, which enables the submission of tickets and services requests, as well as case creation for customers. As a part of this service, Wayfinder, a component of the EpicCare portal, enables customers to request information about billing, contracts, service requests and more or to direct questions to specific departments.
As a result, average first-response time to customers has improved by 20%. In addition to this decreased response time, Epicor has reduced its customer onboarding and its ramp-up period for new solutions by 50%.
“The EpicCare portal has been a huge driver in the satisfaction of our customers. As with most technology, it’s important for users to be able to explore and understand the data, processes, and features that will work best for them”, says Cherian. “The portal provides resources that empower users to do just that—while still enabling them to connect directly with experts”.
People-Centric Technology
“Not only has ServiceNow empowered our customers, it’s also empowered the Epicor support teams”, Cherian mentions. “The team quickly realised that generating meaningful data will help them take actionable steps forward—ultimately, making their work much more rewarding”.
Why ServiceNow?
Selecting ServiceNow as Epicor’s customer service management vendor came down to functionality. Key requirements were the flexibility of the platform and the ability to adapt it to the organisation’s immediate and future needs. Working closely with the ServiceNow product teams and account managers was also seen as positive and is still regarded as one of the core drivers for building the relationship between Epicor and ServiceNow.
A Road Map for Success
With a single platform for customer service management that helps meet critical KPIs, the next stage for Epicor customer service will be to explore generative AI, machine learning, virtual agents, AI search and other capabilities that reduce customer effort and improve case deflection. Contextual search will also help customers find specific answers across thousands of knowledge articles, moving Epicor onto even greater levels of customer service and success.
IDC Perspective
Epicor has a defined strategic direction for customer service. Its use of automation technologies is well structured and impactful, and Joe has taken a holistic view of the broader organisation in terms of functions and stakeholders. This balances the needs of the customer base, broader business, agents and employees. ServiceNow is a critical strategic partner in this process and clearly offers the vision and support to take Epicor to even greater heights—customer satisfaction included.
Customer success stories told by IDC, exploring how organisations are driving innovation and business transformation with ServiceNow.