Application Development
Three ways to create inspirational customer experiences
By Peter Niederhauser, Head of Technical Service Desk, Swisscom
The support desk of the Swisscom Large Enterprise Customer division takes 1.2 million calls annually and manages the completion of more than 300,000 service visits.
Our team of qualified personal advisors are ideally placed to work with our enterprise customers on any issues, bringing expertise in the fields of connectivity, digital business, and IT infrastructure and cloud delivery.
But the technology our support team was using was a different story entirely. A long history of mergers and acquisitions had led to a patchwork of inadequate legacy infrastructure and systems to support our customer service team .
We were not able to provide the exceptional service we aspired to deliver or accelerate new lines of business.
A platform to transform support services
The introduction of ServiceNow’s Now Platform has changed our position dramatically. Through the Customer Service Management (CSM) solution, we are powering digital workflows and an online customer service portal to accelerate support. We’re able to resolve complex issues end-to-end, which means our customers benefit from a streamlined service that continues to put them at the heart of the work we do. As a ServiceNow partner in Switzerland, as well as a customer, our clients now and in the future benefit from the experience we’ve gained through our own system landscape setup.
Around 5,000 out of our 180,000 large enterprise customers have been migrated onto the new platform, bringing positive changes to both the employee and customer experience. For the business it’s a win too — once all large enterprise customers have migrated, we’re expecting cost savings of 20 million Swiss francs due to increased efficiencies.
Today, we are three years into our journey of IT consolidation and there’s a lot we have learnt. Here are my top tips on putting in place a solid IT foundation for customer service that empowers agents, delights customers and delivers value to the business.
1. Challenge old processes
The introduction of end-to-end digital workflows to automate and orchestrate customer services is a fantastic opportunity to inspect and challenge your processes.
Core processes that you have in place were probably designed in times when cloud-based platforms did not exist. There’s a good chance you will not be able to get the most out of your selected solution by simply copy-pasting existing processes onto a new platform.
We have challenged the business to adapt our customer service processes to fully leverage the advanced capabilities that are in ServiceNow’s CSM solution.
2. Practice what you preach
You can’t provide strong consultancy around technology that you are struggling with as an organisation. Swisscom is a trusted partner on cloud transformation, but our Large Enterprise Customer infrastructure was a mishmash of dated solutions, preventing us from providing a great service.
By transforming our processes, introducing digital workflows and consolidating these on the ServiceNow platform, we have not only improved the efficiency of our agents and empowered them to deliver superior support, but also gained invaluable expertise which we can share with our enterprise customers.
The depth and breadth of our experience with ServiceNow is strengthening our market position as a leading IT services provider in Switzerland.
3. Move beyond a 3600 view of customer
At Swisscom we used to struggle to provide a seamless experience, with our agents having to rely on heterogeneous and disconnected systems for their daily work.
The integration of ServiceNow CSM with our business-critical applications has armed our agents with a 3600 overview of each customer, creating a much more streamlined and slicker support.
But in this day and age, this is not enough.
Customers, particularly large enterprises, expect their telecommunications or IT services provider to deliver an end-to-end proactive service. To this end we are evaluating ServiceNow as an orchestrating platform for processes such as product migration, customer migration and new product onboarding.
The goal is to create exceptional experiences at every point across the customer journey to drive satisfaction and loyalty.
These are my key learning points from the past three years but I am certain there will be many more as our project with ServiceNow continues to evolve. Stay tuned.
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