Consistency is one of the pillars of a good customer experience. When customers become familiar with a support process, it runs smoothly and the end result is a painless and positive experience. Find out how to use customer service workflow to provide a consistent, automated customer support experience by reading this article.
Why do we need customer service workflow?
Human beings are all different, meaning that service desks and call centres often struggle with consistency. Each agent has a unique characteristics and ways of communicating with customers and this means that the customer experience is almost fully defined by the individual providing the service. Call centres famously use scripts to combat this, guiding their agents through the process to deliver a consistent experience to customers.
Unfortunately, we’ve all experienced the negative side-effect of this approach. Dealing with a call centre or support desk which employs scripts is often painful. Not only is the conversation wooden and stunted, the agent often fails to listen because they are bound to follow the script, even if the conversation clearly needs to deviate.
The good news is that now support is moving online, the scripting problem is becoming less of an issue. Customers are comfortable using self-service, which means that we can side-step the problem with humans offering an inconsistent experience. Want to know the key to offering quality self-service without human intervention? Customer service workflow!
How can customer service workflow help?
As you may have guessed, customer service workflow means creating a support facility that ‘flows’ the customer through the support experience. In other words, if the customer answers a), take them to question b), if they answer c), take them to question d). And so on, until the correct answer is reached.
Like a call script, customer service workflow can guide customers through the support experience. Unlike the scripted call, customer service workflow is always consistent, guiding customers seamlessly to the answers they need.
All customer service portals use a form of customer service workflow. But the quality varies by a massive amount. The reason for this disparity? There is a caveat to ensuring a consistent self-service customer experience. The workflow must be well designed. It must ask the right questions and offer the right answers.
The common problem
For many organisations, however, especially service desks, this is difficult to do. Building customer service workflow typically requires coding expertise and is very time-consuming. This is a problematic because most customer facing teams are time-poor. And because you need current and accurate information to offer consistent customer experience, the time to alter the customer service workflow is a huge handicap. It is the inability to build and edit customer service workflow that means so many customer service portal fall out of use.
If you would like to edit your own customer service workflow without any coding knowledge whatsoever, we can help! Just get in touch with us to see what we can do for you to eliminate the difficulties you may face when implementing this secret to IT self-service. In the meantime, why not read our article explaining how to make a success out of IT self-service?