How Customer Service Tools Improve Customer Satisfaction

Customer service is a complex process. Software tools can help businesses simplify this process, and can also help improve the customer experience by improving client perceptions during interactions to settle questions or concerns. This improves customer satisfaction, and in turn, makes consumers more open to making repeat purchases.

Such software tools vary in feature sets, but their general purpose is to make the ticket-handling process more efficient. They can provide more and higher-quality information to consumers, and empower customer service team members with a holistic view of each and every client.

To give business owners a better idea of how customer service tools work and why businesses should use them, this blog post will cover:

• The goals of good customer service
• Customer service tools that can help
• How to adopt these tools quickly and easily

Let’s start by describing exactly what goals a brand should aim for to improve customer satisfaction.

The Goals of Good Customer Service

Most modern businesses are sales-driven, and as such, much of their attention gets focused on the sales process, from lead generation to closing.

While this is obviously an important process in acquiring revenue from prospects, the key to creating long-lasting business relationships with satisfied customers is to exchange this linear view of the sales process with a cyclical view of the customer journey.

As one can see, in order to create a cycle in which customers are so pleased with their experiences they naturally flow back into the sales funnel, businesses must focus on improving their customer success and customer service management. This involves:

• Product or service assistance after a purchase to help familiarize users.
• Accessibility to quick and simple customer education materials.
• Recommendations of complementary practices or products to enhance their experience with past purchases.
• Customer advocacy when remediating issues with a product or service.
• Fast and comprehensive responses to questions, concerns, and complaints.

All of these steps are vital to ensuring that customers feel connected with the brand from which they are purchasing. They also create natural opportunities for cross-selling and upselling, increasing the average lifetime value of consumers while giving them a better overall experience.

With good customer service, everybody wins.

Customer Service Tools That Can Help

When shifting to a more comprehensive view of the customer journey, there will naturally be some holes to fill in for a complete customer experience. Repairing these gaps requires applying best practices and procedures that businesses may not yet fully know. These protocols, however, can be easily accessed from longstanding service management frameworks, like the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL 4).

ITIL 4 is a service management framework originally designed for information technology service management (ITSM) departments, but as the customer service space has modernized, it has become the leading framework for businesses looking to improve their CSM as well. ITIL lays out the basic practices involved in managing just about every scenario a customer service department will confront.

So, to improve a customer journey as quickly as possible, a customer service tool or platform built around ITIL presents the perfect option. Today’s market offers comprehensive CSM platforms that integrate the best practices and procedures in ITIL and automate many logistics that can drag out the adoption of a completely new framework.

Adopt a Customer Service Tool with Vivantio

While each of the benefits we list can work wonders for businesses, they won’t help if managers choose a platform that lacks all the necessary features. Vivantio offers a cutting-edge customer service software platform with everything you need and more, including:

• Endless integrations for easy implementation.
• Automatic ticket routing to ensure every ticket gets to the proper agent.
• A workflow designer tool that allows managers to customize the framework of their CS operations—without requiring any prior technical knowledge.
• White-label service portals ensure businesses maintain a cohesive brand throughout the service process.
• A holistic view of each client—so that no service team member lacks vital information.

For businesses looking to upgrade their customer experience efforts, Vivantio is a sophisticated option for out-of-the-box software solutions.

For more than two decades, Vivantio has been helping clients optimize their service organizations by leveraging a unified service management platform. To find out how Vivantio can help your brand adopt a customer service tool, contact our team today or register for a free demo.