Unifying customer experiences with contact center as a service
Customer expectations for great service experiences are constantly rising. Many customer experience (CX) leaders have deployed omnichannel communication models to augment legacy call center capabilities, striving to elevate service delivery while keeping pace with the speed of digital transformation.
As McKinsey reports, however, “When these digitally enabled models underperform—and they often do—companies need to master entirely new approaches to performance improvement alongside their traditional tool kits.”
Customer service organisations need more than what one technology provider can offer to turn today’s challenges into tomorrow’s opportunities. ServiceNow, in collaboration with contact center as a service (CCaaS) providers, delivers a turnkey solution to intelligently:
- Elevate the customer journey
- Unify the service experience
- Improve the flow of work in the contact center and beyond
Same old issues, same old results
Contact centers continue to be plagued by fragmented engagement channels and a tangled mess of disconnected applications. Behind this, manual processes strain to hold everything together.
Organisations still rely on multiple engines to route contacts—and other systems entirely—to automate task assignments across middle- and back-office teams. According to the ServiceNow Customer Experience Trends report, 70% of agents require at least four different applications to resolve customer issues.
Data sources, analytics tools, and support groups remain heavily siloed between business units, with 44% of agents experiencing significant difficulties coordinating across departments, the research reveals.
Although customers don’t see these problems firsthand, what they experience can be worse. Misrouted contacts lead to multiple transfers, which extends average handle times and issue resolution, leaving customers confused and frustrated. It’s no wonder 69% of customers say they’re likely to switch brands due to a poor service experience, according to our research.
A new vision for customer service
"AI and generative AI will have a significant influence on contact center growth dynamics," according to Gartner®. The firm further expects that “in 2028, 66% of agents will be supported by CCaaS as opposed to CCI [contact center infrastructure]."1 We believe CX leaders need to prepare their customer service teams to excel in a digital world.
To do that requires a customer service solution that isn't just focused on the point of interaction in the front office, but that also connects teams across functions via automated processes. This should involve a seamless flow of data to enhance efficiency and deliver quality service at every level of the organisation.
In collaboration with CCaaS partners, ServiceNow helps organisations redefine the customer and agent experience in three ways:
- Centralised interaction and work routing: Using AI-powered orchestration capabilities, ServiceNow and partners bring together end-to-end interaction and work routing to help improve self and human-assisted CX. Organisations need only define routing rules once and can centrally manage them for multiple business locations or entire regions.
- Unified agent workspace: An extensible, purpose-built desktop can empower agents to manage work and contact interactions across voice and digital channels on one screen. Agents can access native call controls and an interactive view of their performance to simultaneously serve customers and build valuable skills.
- Optimised workforce engagement: Organisations can visualise, measure, and monitor workforce and customer journey metrics in real time to make informed, data-driven decisions about agent staffing and scheduling.
The next evolution in CX
By bringing together ServiceNow® Customer Service Management and leading CCaaS platforms, organisations can deliver an unmatched level of speed and consistency to customer service experiences. The integrated, AI-powered solution can provide visibility into customer preferences before their journey begins, delivering detailed profile data natively in a smart agent workspace.
An intelligent routing engine channels interactions and tasks to the best agent available based on capacity and skills. This helps ensure work is assigned to the right support group the first time, every time.
Automated workflows track process-related insights after engagement to confirm customer needs are fulfilled quickly and accurately. This allows organisations to optimise for industry-specific outcomes while improving traditional performance metrics.
With a complete solution that orchestrates the entire customer service journey, organisations no longer need to rely on the point solutions of yesterday.
The future of customer service is here. CX leaders must be prepared to meet its challenges. ServiceNow and its CCaaS partners stand ready to help organisations boost agent productivity, improve customer satisfaction, and optimise contact center investments with an AI-powered, deployment-ready solution.
Find out more about how to take customer service experiences to the next level.
1 Gartner, Forecast Analysis: Contact Center, Worldwide, May 22, 2024
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