How a Customer Service Management System Can Help a Growing Business

Your customer experience is your business growth driver. Unfortunately, the gap between what companies think they’re delivering and what customers believe is wide; 87% of companies believe their customer experience is excellent, but only 11% of customers agree. So, if you use your customer experience as a growth strategy, you must address your customer service management system first.

What is CSM and How Does it Fit into CX?

Customer service management is the strategy you use to run your customer service operations smoothly while providing excellent service. It’s critical to business growth because customer service makes up half of your customer experience. The other half comes from your customer success teams, who provide outreach, solicit feedback and improve your processes.

However, that is only possible with a customer service team. They’re on the front line, responding to customer issues and complaints, and how they interact will directly affect retention. 3 out of 5 buyers report customer service as a deciding factor in whether they stay loyal to a brand.

The customer service standard is even higher for business customers who are typically spending more and expect greater service as a result. Failure to provide effective customer service to these individuals can damage their businesses by creating delays for their customers as the issue gets resolved. This will directly affect B2B customer churn, as companies are unlikely to work with vendors who damage their bottom line.

To avoid this, you must have a robust and data-driven strategy. It should provide the information your teams need to respond to customer contacts and the tools customers need to help themselves.

The Components of a Customer Service Management System

A customer service management platform is made of a series of integrated tools that will help you control operation costs, improve service and handle more volume with the same resources. There are five critical components of good customer service management systems.

Ticketing	Workflow management	Unified Platform	Self-service	Continual Improvement
A detailed ticketing system will collect all the needed information to assign the task and resolve the customer’s issue.  It may also assign a priority to that ticket based on the type of call, whether it’s an inquiry for new services, a report of an outage, or an issue needing immediate resolution.	The ticket is routed to the appropriate agent, and communications are sent to the customer, letting them know their issue’s status, their case number, and who the assigned point of contact is.	The agent can see the entire customer contact history, what has been done before, and the status of the issue currently. This allows them to take appropriate action without the need to ask the customer redundant questions.	Many customer issues are easily resolvable through self-help portals, FAQs, or automated updates. Effectively offering self-service takes the burden off of agents for smaller tasks so they can concentrate on more complex ones.	Customer service management also feeds into customer success. Information pulled from your customer service tickets can help you plan improvements, review your worker’s performance, and understand bottlenecks and waste in your process.

The five components of the customer service management system will feed into your overall experience. For example, say a customer calls in to report an outage. A good system will trigger an email letting the customer know their case number and automatically assign that ticket to an appropriate agent. The agent will also be able to see all the information in the file to make the right decision or guide the customer to self-service options that may resolve the problem quicker. Performance monitoring across all of this can help you discover common issues that you can resolve proactively. These pieces all work together to deliver that critical customer service experience.

Using Customer Service Management as a Business Growth Driver

Customer service is critical to retention, but good customer service management can be a growth driver. When you automate mundane, repeatable tasks, you save time and better utilize resources. For example, simply assigning tickets to the best regional agent or subject matter expert would be slow and prone to error if it was completed manually. It also wouldn’t be scalable. Your worker handling the assignments may have periods of high volume where they struggle to complete all their tasks and, a week later, have nothing to do at all.

An automated system that assigns tickets based on various keywords or fields can immediately and correctly assign them every time. It’s also scalable. Instead of paying a worker to wait for tickets, the tool is on standby until it’s needed again.

With repeatable, predictable tasks like that out of the way, your agents can handle more complex calls that require human intervention. As a result, you can take on a much higher volume of calls with the same staff to support a broader customer base. Meanwhile, the system makes it easy for the agent to resolve these issues by providing the necessary information and tools to help. That creates a positive experience that builds business through upsells and referrals.

Finally, the information on customer interaction is captured within the system. Business leaders can use that information to make decisions about operations, staffing, and new services that could improve experiences even more.

Your customer service management system will profoundly affect your overall experience. Your service team drives your business growth by using tools that capture interactions, streamline workflow, and build transparency into your process.

For more than two decades, Vivantio has been helping clients optimize their service organizations by leveraging a unified service management platform. Contact our team today to learn how Vivantio can help you grow your business through a more effective customer service management system, or register for a free demo.