Empowering northern EMEA with customer workflow solutions

A few years ago, the majority of my conversations with customers revolved around the same question: How do we communicate better with those we’re trying to reach? For a long time, it was all about omnichannel strategies, customer engagement, and chatbots. Today, these conversations have changed. Our customers in the North region are realising that omnichannels are a great starting point, but it’s exactly that—a starting point.

Now, companies looking to take their customer experience to the next level—and, crucially, thrive in challenging economic circumstances—must look to streamline disconnected systems with modern customer workflow solutions. Let’s explore what that means for businesses from a technical standpoint, and how you can get started on your own customer workflow journey.

A need for customer workflow solutions

Customer workflow solutions have always been important. Amidst tight budgets, an ever-changing economy, and macro uncertainty, they’re becoming more important.

PwC research shows that, for customers in the EMEA region, it’s no longer enough simply to offer your customers an instant messaging service, especially if that service isn’t connected to other parts of your business. What your customers want are efficient, simple solutions to their problems. Delivering on this requires connected technology and innovative customer workflows.

How customer workflow solutions work

Essentially, workflow solutions are about making sure you have everything you need to engage with your customers, internal stakeholders, and partners in an efficient, professional way. This is true regardless of what industry you’re in.

In the North region, I speak to financial services and public sector organisations about the need to better service citizens as much as I do with retail organisations. Whichever way you look at it, it’s about meeting stakeholder demand. Modern workflow solutions are about finding ways to identify exactly what’s happening in your organisation and what needs to be improved upon.

If your company regularly delivers to customers and a delivery arrives late or incorrect, your customer needs to be able to tell you about it. With a customer service chatbot, this is entirely possible. However, if the process beyond that chatbot is not connected, resolving the issue for your customer can be error-prone and time-intensive. That can result in an inefficient workflow and an unhappy customer.

The right technology connects all your processes and systems, making sure everything talks to each other, and provides a consolidated view of everything that’s going on. By understanding what’s happening across your processes, you can identify areas for improvement on the customer end.

The right customer workflow in action

You don’t have to look far to see the benefits in action. In EMEA, healthcare technology provider Tunstall wanted to simplify access to customer support, unlock real-time visibility across teams, and implement a standard IT process framework to maximize efficiency.

The team implemented ServiceNow Customer Service Management and built a portal, Tunstall Connect, to implement standard IT processes so that issues reported by customers could quickly be addressed by technical staff. As a result, Tunstall’s customer satisfaction rating increased by a huge 70%.

Similarly, telecommunications giant BT worked with us to automate processes, connect silos across the business, and ultimately boost its customer offering using our customer workflow solutions.

By standardising processes across the entire organisation, BT was able to consolidate a variety of systems onto a single server, the Now Platform. This enabled employees to better serve customers, identify customer service issues quicker, and provide a top-tier experience all round.

Crucially, this was all done by slotting a flexible, customisable infrastructure on top of existing technologies, meaning there was no need for a costly or time-consuming system overhaul. This kind of architecture is game-changing across a whole range of organisations, specifically those in public sector industries, which typically must work around legacy technology and limited budgets.

How businesses can get started

It’s important to recognise every business is different. In fact, my own experience with customers has shown levels of digital maturity can vary significantly not just from company to company, but even internally within separate departments of an organisation.

To resolve this, we need to look at how we consolidate and simplify processes. Because ServiceNow solutions all operate on the same platform, it’s possible to join the fragmented dots across an organisation, bringing everything together to benefit customers.

Another added benefit is that organisations can reuse parts of this platform, almost like building blocks, to make something much bigger and better for customers than the sum of its individual parts.

Find out more about our customer workflow solutions and what they can do for your organisation.

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