This article appears in its original format here.
Are your customers realizing the most value from your support and service delivery teams? Are your tools helping your teams best service your customers? While traditional tiers of support are effective at triaging and supporting customer issues reactively, unlocking the full value from AI insights to drive proactive support will take your team to the next level. Let’s talk about the benefits of refocusing subject matter experts across your service delivery teams, and leveraging AI insights to drive service transformation and significantly improve your customer experience.
Customer Support Lifecycle
Customers are generally most satisfied when their issue is resolved at the initial point of contact. This interaction may occur at a Service Desk, self-help tool, or automated workflow. A good SLA benchmark is 75% of those contacts. This is referred to as first contact resolution. There are two things to note here. The first is that the customer has to take the time to contact you, and you are providing reactionary support. The second, even at a 75% first contact resolution rate, is that 25% of your customers still require additional support.
SLA’s may begin to loosen when issues move on to second and third tiers. The reason for this is not that these upper tier teams are incapable of quickly resolving customer issues, but typically they have competing priorities. Projects, enterprise initiatives, and ongoing infrastructure, network, security, and/or application support can get in the way of consistently meeting established SLA’s. Additional delays can negatively impact the value the customer perceives from their support experience, which is increasingly measured by an Experience Level Agreement (XLA). Here’s a helpful overview if you want to learn more about XLA’s.
While it’s good practice to spend time working with functional leaders to track and measure established SLA’s, equal time should be spent on proactively identifying and resolving customer issues at scale before they reach your service channels. This adds greater value by improving the customer experience. That’s where tools such as digital employee experience (DEX) platforms can help teams identify and prioritize the resolution of problem areas, and begin a proactive service delivery transformation.
AI Insights
There’s no shortage of tools that provide analytics on what’s happening across your environment. The challenge is that with so much data, it becomes quite the task to sort through it all. The good news is that tools are now using AI to help simplify this by analyzing large amounts of customer data and rolling it up into insights. This capability is crucial when selecting which tools you want to implement and will save your teams an incredible amount of time. With actionable insights at your disposal, you can now focus on the areas that require the most attention, and those which will drive up your customer satisfaction.
Level Up
Achieving this requires strategic planning and identifying the right resources across your team to review, prioritize, and take action from these valuable insights. In order to have the best chance of success, leverage key subject matter experts across your team that you can bring together as a focused group. While implementing tiger teams has proven to be a successful approach to resolve point in time issues, this concept can be expanded as an ongoing continual improvement effort. There are advantages to this approach.
1. You are empowering your team to proactively improve service on an ongoing basis, while prioritizing reducing support volume and costs.
2. You are creating development opportunities to foster creative and analytical thinking, and helping your team become enhanced customer advocates.
3. You are leveraging insights to continuously assess the health of your environment, proactively, and correcting issues at scale.
4. You are creating more cross functional collaboration opportunities, and building relationships across the various support teams.
5. You are pivoting from operational support to customer experience management.
Let’s expand on these 5 areas.
Empowering The Team
A smaller and focused agile team with functional subject matter expertise, tasked with a clear set of deliverables, will drive meaningful change more quickly and with less distractions. The team needs to feel empowered to make decisions, and to take action on them. Their leader should encourage this, and provide direction and guidance based on key findings.
The team should start with a discovery period analyzing all of the available insights and build a backlog of issues, prioritize them, and determine which areas are the best opportunities based on business priorities, and customer impact. All outputs should be measurable, and tracked centrally. A cadence of progress updates should be established, as well as change management and communications, as appropriate. This is where action plans come to life to support the primary goal of improving customer satisfaction.
While leading a global Service Desk, our SME team was tasked with eliminating email as a contact method. After careful planning, robust change management, and flawless execution, the team not only migrated email requests to self-help automated workflows, they also reduced Service Desk volume by 40%, lowered the cost of service by 10%, and improved resolution times significantly for our customers. This is a great example of the value this approach can bring and I’m happy to share how we accomplished this, and other improvements, in more detail for a future article.
Career Pathing
As the team gets its footing and starts to gather some early wins, their value will start to resonate across the broader team, and other members will want to get involved. This is an opportunity to promote analytical thinking across the team while challenging them to get creative in their solutions. Establishing specific roles within the subject matter expert team, tailored to your environment, will open up career opportunities and empower other team members to improve their skillset. The visibility, acknowledgement, and satisfaction from achieving positive feedback from your customers will become infectious.
Hygiene
Having access to insights data will give you better visibility into the health of your environment, and improve how you measure your current customer experience. By focusing on key problem areas impacting your customers, you can formulate action plans to resolve issues at scale. Rather than ingesting multiple customer calls about application or network performance issues, you can spot trends proactively and engage the appropriate support teams to drive quicker resolutions.
This approach will help reduce contact volume to these support teams, and improve accountability and awareness on the impact of the delivery of their services. This also creates opportunities to reconcile data across the various monitoring tools, and identify areas to improve data accuracy. As data improves, the team can take proactive measures to reach out to customers and help resolve issues more effectively, improving the customer experience.
Collaboration
I’ve highlighted in a prior article the importance of investing in your team to drive service excellence for your customers. Strong personal relationships built on empathy and trust is crucial to success when collaborating with team members, peers, and customers. As continual improvement opportunities are identified, teams must work together efficiently to resolve them. AI insights data will prove highly valuable to help mitigate perception issues, and improve team collaboration by providing better metrics to expedite the resolution of customer issues.
Another important action is to clearly articulate the value of the activities the teams will need to collaborate on, and how these joint efforts will be mutually beneficial. Upper tier support teams may not experience the urgency or direct impact of customer issues the way a front-line support team will. Help them understand that working together to reduce support volume and potential customer escalations benefits all teams, improves the customer experience, and frees up valuable resource time for them to deliver on other enterprise initiatives. That should resonate.
Experience Management
Implementing proactive actions to improve the customer experience takes time and investment from all stakeholders. Leaders must reinforce the message that improving customer satisfaction, loyalty, and advocacy is crucial to the success of the company. Whether your customers are internal or external, their experience should always be at the top of the priority list and customer advocacy needs to be embedded in the DNA of your service organization. Having core teams of SME’s, operating as customer advocates, and accountable for improving the customer experience, will elevate the teams around them and improve overall service delivery.
While building ITSM and subject matter expert teams from scratch, using existing resources, I’ve learned that the positive impact these teams have made towards proactively improving the customer experience, collaboration across the broader team, and having a greater sense of purpose to drive meaningful and positive change is a gift that keeps on giving. Empowering your teams to drive service transformation and continual improvement, while taking full advantage of the valuable insights AI is providing, will level up your customer experience to new heights. I wish you all continued success.