Creating seamless customer experiences
The demands on today’s global supply chains are increasingly complex, with economic turbulence, regional conflicts, and climate change impacting the production and delivery of supplies and finished products. To meet these challenges, Körber Supply Chain offers a comprehensive range of solutions to suit any company size, strategy, or growth plan.
Körber offers software, automation, voice, mail, and robotics solutions, plus the expertise to bring them all together into an integrated solution. This technology provides its more than 4,500 customers across diverse industries around the globe with the business intelligence, agility, and flexibility to conquer complexity and embrace innovation.
Körber partnered with ServiceNow to accelerate the pace of its digital transformation. By deploying Customer Service Management Professional (CSM Pro), with ServiceNow IT Operations Management (ITOM) and IT Service Management Professional (ITSM Pro), the company strengthened its own technology foundations and continually improved the service and support it provides to its customers.
“The implementation of ServiceNow has remarkably enhanced my organization’s capabilities, providing unparalleled visibility and control for leadership in managing customer experience,” says Alex Gurevich, VP, Global Customer Support, Körber Supply Chain.
“This transformative solution allows us to effectively navigate and address customer pain points and internal bottlenecks, thereby optimizing organizational bandwidth. Our experience underscores the significant impact ServiceNow has had on elevating operational efficiency and customer satisfaction.”
Transformational change with out-of-the-box
Like many organizations, Körber’s previous customer service management solution was not easily scalable and did not possess the capabilities required to meet the company’s aspirations for great customer experience while also streamlining its customer service operations.
A reliance on phone calls, emails, and spreadsheets containing thousands of lines resulted in time-consuming manual processes. Furthermore, a lack of visibility into the system’s data and no differentiation between the types of tickets made problem diagnosis, decision-making, and performance improvements extremely difficult.
Despite Körber’s desire to provide a world-class experience, the absence of self-service functionality resulted in customers experiencing prolonged wait times for status updates and resolutions to simple issues. With customer service in reactive mode, the volume of ticket escalations rose constantly.
To deploy CSM Pro, Körber chose to work with US Elite implementation partner, GlideFast. The Körber, GlideFast, and ServiceNow trifecta ensured alignment with Körber’s customer service objectives. This collaboration delivered the CSM Pro launch in just 84 days.
At the heart of the transformed Körber customer experience is a bespoke supply chain customer portal—powered by ServiceNow—which allows instant access to information, advice, guidance, and services through an intuitive interface and streamlined ticketing system.
With all data captured in a robust configuration management database (CMDB), Körber has comprehensive visibility of its customers’ software, services, and status. This enables teams to proactively provide a high-quality, personalized experience for each customer.
The company has created a robust library of 1,200 net new knowledge articles, enabling customers to self-serve and find answers to common requests without needing to interact with an agent. This reduces customer effort and frees agents’ time to focus on higher-value tasks. The ServiceNow Virtual Agent capability has further enhanced the portal user’s experience. Körber’s Virtual Agent, Körb-E, allows users to quickly self-navigate to information sources, knowledge articles, and solutions while providing an intelligent and friendly, conversational style.
From reactive to proactive
“The transformation has been remarkable,” says Melissa Grice, ITSM Process Owner, Körber Supply Chain. “More and more customers are choosing to engage with us through the portal, moving away from emails and phone calls. Since the end of 2022, our case backlog has been reduced by 59%, while the median age of outstanding cases is down by 94%.
“Case escalation is much reduced, too; a lot of ‘noise’ in the system has been eliminated and, with ServiceNow, we can be proactive, not reactive.”
Customer satisfaction scores have increased thanks to the combination of improved communication and positive customer experiences delivered by Körber’s ServiceNow solutions.
What’s more, the analysis undertaken by the organization demonstrated a 167% ROI from implementing CSM, recovering its investment six months after deployment.
Metrics inform action
As self-service expands and the volume of customer data grows so does Körber’s ability to spot trends and patterns. This allows agents to strategically diagnose the cause of common issues while identifying opportunities to further enhance the customer experience.
The company has deployed Continual Improvement Management (a capability of ServiceNow ITSM) to assist customers experiencing issues by clustering them together to find the root cause, rather than addressing the issues one by one.
“With ServiceNow, we have concrete information in a professional format, and we can create dashboards to demonstrate the hard metrics,” comments Chris Roberts, VP of Business Transformation, Körber Supply Chain. “We can see how many tickets each customer has and how long they have been in the system. With ServiceNow, our teams can prioritize and take direct action to resolve tickets. Our executives and managers start the day with a visual briefing about the live status with customers, so they can make informed, proactive decisions. Being able to contact the customer to discuss an issue and explain our plan of action to remedy it—before they are even aware of the issue—is priceless.”
Also, customers have a complete history of their tickets and interactions with Körber and can see the status of each one and what action is being taken. When a customer wishes to have a conversation with an agent, both parties are instantly looking at the same information and can make progress faster.
Körber Supply Chain’s workflow based on the inflection of cases shows a 41% increase in efficiency in mean time to resolution (MTTR). And mean time to acknowledge (MTTA) has been reduced by 50% for all Severity 1 cases. Phone calls now account for just 5% of all customer contacts.
Equipping customers for success
The company is not only using ServiceNow to improve customer service and internal operations. It also uses its technologies and strong partnerships to develop and bring new enhanced warehouse management solutions to market, ensuring its customers are at the cutting edge of their industries.
Körber’s ongoing expansion of its ServiceNow portfolio includes Field Service Management to streamline processes and unlock efficiencies in the services it provides to telecoms customers and, in a new development, to the rapidly growing autonomous mobile robot market.
“With ServiceNow, we have structure, methodology, data, and process to guide everything we do, which is a huge transformation for us, giving us space to focus on what matters most, providing a world-class experience for our customers,” concludes Melissa.