Listen to this articleFor any contact center, the key to enhanced efficiency is customer service automation. But not every company is able to achieve that automation successfully. The need is to work more to enhance your customer service process, even after automating it.
According to one of the research reports from Boston Consulting Group (BCG), 70% of digital transformation efforts are not so well implemented. There’s a lot that needs to be done to make sure the customer service team is making the most of digitization.
You might have already automated the process using Service Cloud features, but how do you know if your automation is working well for your operations? And if it’s not going right, what can you do about it?
Here are a few steps that can help you to ensure that your customer service process automation is up and running for success:
Before you launch the workflow company-wide, check if your automation is working the way it was planned and if it will work for people who are going to use it. You need to conduct testing for the workflow.
Make sure the testing process includes some people who are typical contributors to the service process.
For example, if your automated workflow has some processes related to middle- and back-office employees along with customer service agents, then you should include these users too for the testing process.
If you achieve positive process improvements from the test, make sure that the workflow automation is available to all who would be using it. The respective users actually need to use the workflow at scale to acquire its full benefits.
It is important that the users know about workflow automation and that they understand how they should work with it.
For internal users, you can spread the word through learning lunches, training sessions, or some other communications channels. For external users like customers and partners, make sure they know where to find and access links, which could be a website or self-service portal, that could take them to the automated process.
Once the automated workflow is up and running at scale, gather as many metrics as you can to know how the automated workflow is performing.
One important metric that you should consider is the average time the automated customer service process takes to complete. You should also look for the impacts of the automated process on your issue resolution time, customer service response time, costs, and customer satisfaction scores.
Next, consider looking at usage stats. Discover the percentage of your process stakeholders who are actively engaging with the automated workflow? Also, consider measuring the number of times the automated workflow is engaged on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. Are there any errors with the process?
Now you need to compare your automation metrics against the original metrics due to which you selected your customer service process for automation.
For example, if your goal was to achieve an improvement in the cycle time of your returns process, you need to compare this metric before and after the respective process automation. Check if the cycle time has improved and by how much. If there is not a lot of improvement, you’ll need to identify the issue.
Always remember that you should keep the customer experience front and center. Whether your initial goals were to free agents for cross-selling or to boost the process cycle time, in the end, it should all come back to the customer.
All the points we’ve mentioned above would help you set up your automated customer service process and ensure its success. And if you need help, you can always hire a Service Cloud developer who could offer you the best assistance with the implementation.
