Delivering a seamless customer experience through innovation

The digital economy is placing new demands on businesses of all sizes for smarter services and the capability to work from anywhere. When we at Sify Technologies in India see a challenge like this, we say, “Bring it on,” and this is how we break down the barriers to innovation.

Sify is India’s most comprehensive information and communications technology (ICT) solutions and services provider. We provide cloud, data center, network, security, and integration solutions and services to more than 10,000 businesses across India.

To deliver a great customer experience, you first need to put yourself in customers’ shoes and learn what their pain points are. If you understand your customers’ pain points, you can eliminate them before they interrupt a personalized service, which means you’ll get fewer support tickets.

Getting the customer experience right

For many of our customers, the pandemic forced digital strategies to be built, tested, and executed in only eight weeks versus five-year roadmaps pre-pandemic. Since our services are the backbone of their operations, we wanted to make it as simple as possible for customers to work with us to innovate together.

Our customers want to be able to self-serve across multiple channels with a tap, swipe, and click. They should be able to manage their account straight from their smartphone and have exactly the same experience as they would on a laptop.

Accessing support services should be as intuitive as using social media. Opening a ticket should be fast and easy via phone, web chat, text message, or email. We also need to be mindful of providing attentive customer support without being intrusive. Our customers don’t like chatbots that pop up on every page they visit, and they only want to accept the cookie policy prompt once.

By tracking which topics people need help with, you can work out which pages to put your chatbot on. Capturing user feedback at the design stage is crucial to become more predictive of customer needs. The ideal situation is to know what customers want before they do, so you can delight them with a modern, intuitive experience.

A platform approach to customer engagement

The best way to create a seamless, human-centered customer experience is to give customers one place to access everything they need.

We’ve always thought of ServiceNow as a platform rather than a variety of separate solutions. We leveraged ServiceNow Customer Service Management to build our OneSify platform as a central portal, adding all information relating to customers and services to our ServiceNow Configuration Management Database (CMDB) to create a single source of truth.

Working with ServiceNow’s team of architecture experts, we mapped the customer experience against features of the platform and brought key stakeholders together to define our priorities:

• Flexible pricing: Everything we offer is as a service, so the customer only pays for what they need. OneSify goes one step further, enabling experience as a service.

• Self-service: Customers get fast and direct access to their account and services.

• API-led: Services need to be integrated seamlessly with customer systems.

• Connected experience: The whole lifecycle, from discovery to sales and support to payments, needed to be supported by the platform.

This approach may seem unusual, but starting with the desired outcome and working backward is a great way to keep customers at the heart of the project.

Driving continuous improvement

To make sure we continue to meet customer needs since the platform went live, we track engagement metrics. This used to be a time-consuming task—manually checking multiple spreadsheets—but it’s simple with ServiceNow.

The platform gives us great visibility into the customer experience across the whole lifecycle. There are more opportunities to capture metrics at different touch points. And as soon as you start tracking figures, you’ll start to see opportunities to improve them.

In a short period of time, we saw a 60% reduction in service requests and 50% fewer incident requests, leading to both better service level agreements (SLAs) and higher customer satisfaction. But the biggest benefit to customers is having a unified experience across all channels.

OneSify means giving customers one portal and one experience—and delivering consistently high-level services to help take the pain out of digital transformation at a difficult time. Together, we can innovate at speed to create the best experiences for real people.

Learn more about Sify’s converged customer experience in our on-demand Knowledge 2021 session. Registration is free.

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