While companies like to stick their customer front ends and process engines on top of a wealth of data, it’s like adding an additional car dashboard in the back of your car for your passenger. They can see you’re driving too slow or too fast, but are powerless to make a change because they’re not in control. They could shout at the driver to make a change, but maybe that individual speaks a different language.
Often in the service to resolution process, the agent, or person trying to solve the issue, is simply the passenger along for the ride, and not in the driver’s seat. They can’t see all the relevant information, and aren’t able to take the right actions, leading to less-than optimal outcomes for the business and the organization or individual with the issue.
Imagine that something runs out in the road in front of your car. You hit the brake, your software writes a quick message to the car and posts it, but it’s busy still speeding up from the last message you sent.
Finally, a response comes back, “Are you sure you need me to stop”? “Yes, now!” you shout, and the brakes slam on, just as the car following plows into the back of your car… you then receive another message: “Did you want the brake lights on?”
Sounds horrific, right? Yet this mimics many of the stuttering integration processes in many CRM solutions today. If operating your car was as disconnected as your CRM processes, would you trust it?
Modern service CRM
That’s a big problem considering how important service has become as significant differentiator and a new source of growth for companies.
Organizations that move the fastest to embrace new technologies and engagement models are benefiting the most. Modern cloud solutions enable them to take advantage of the potential to accelerate change and innovate service through digital transformations that are now an executive priority.
Why, may you ask? This change is driven by the perfect storm of market drivers, including:
- A gradual move from product to service based or focused offerings
- The changing sales engagement models – meaning that service interactions are often the ONLY time a brand connects with its end customer
- The changing dynamics and working conditions of the workforce
- The opportunity to codify and capture the day-to-day ways issues are solved across a business and work gets done opens opportunities for optimization and efficiencies
- Increasingly sophisticated and connected industrial and consumer equipment enables new service models
- Technologies like the internet of things (IoT) opens new doors for automation and equipment performance management
The business benefits of capturing the processes that address all your service inquiries and support needs has been known for years. Historically, the software industry has responded with a plethora of front facing, customer or employee solutions that track the interaction, endeavoring to capture the history of how it was solved for some sort of future knowledge delivery.
However, these systems often are an artificial layer, sitting on top of where the work actually gets completed and is truly tracked. The trick has been trying to connect all these disparate parts together.
The simple fact is, for every different issue resolution and the outcomes that result from it, there’s an end-to-end process–irrespective of the problem–that interacts with other systems to provide the answer.
Servicing requires every element of the process to be deeply connected for speed to the resolution, appreciating all factors that will influence or enable specific outcomes, and always ensuring that up-to-the minute context is well understood: As ordered, as built, as installed, as maintained!
Connected customer service that drives resolution and outcomes
Let’s take a closer look at what traditional service resolution has been like. When customers, suppliers, partners, or employees need help or advice, they connect to a service process or customer agent. The likelihood is that first-level troubleshooting doesn’t work and the process is escalated for further help or interaction.
The next level interaction, be it an agent or an expert, then needs to be able to understand so many things: sales orders, installations, equipment (real-time) performance, contracts, warranties, HR data, manufacturing dates, or a new product someone ordered to name just a few. To get this, the transaction dialogue often manifests itself in an instant message, an email, or a phone call into a back office where disconnected messages are traded back and forth. Getting some sort of decision or advice then ends up relying on experts who aren’t necessarily seeing what the agent or process is seeing and vice versa.
The individual then calls back again or tries another process. They reach another agent or similar, and that agent kicks off the same cycle trying to figure out what’s going on. What was the latest update on any sort of firmware upgrade, or inventory availability, if a replacement needs to be shipped, if a payment batch stalled, or HR process applies. Altogether, not a great customer or user experience.
Delivering service competence is impossible if your servicing solutions are an island that’s disconnected from that value chain.
In fact, how you address customer or employee service is part and parcel to protecting the brand promise, influencing, and strengthening your customer and employee loyalty.
The future of enterprise service management is here
At SAP, we think about service as an end-to-end process with the focus on resolution in the fastest, best possible manner, while optimizing for known and other possible advantageous outcomes. Resolution and outcomes are both dimensions of service excellence and equally critical components of loyalty and engagement. SAP’s years of experience, industrial know-how, partner relationships, and enterprise depth of solutions means we’re better placed to understand the context and relevant facts associated with delivering resolutions and maximizing outcome potential.
Our solutions can know when your washing machine came off the assembly line, its shipping and installation history, and more. If it unfortunately contains a faulty part due to a supply issue, we’re aware of it and already prepared with a response or are in the process of delivering proactive mitigation before any failure occurs.
In this situation, we move from resolving an issue to creating an outcome from the identification of the problem–one that potentially means the issue never arises for your other customers.
In this solution domain, we also recognize that the escalating move to product, or product feature as a service is changing the boundaries for operations. Assets that were maintained by an owner may now be owned and “serviced” by the manufacturer, OEM, or a third party. This requires new collaborative processes, not just for execution of service, but also for remote monitoring i.e., with IoT, customer service frameworks and ticketing in line with new contract models, SLAs, and usage-based subscriptions.
The actual processes to monitor and fix equipment remains unchanged, however there’s a convergence between service and maintenance processes across solutions, and a need for streamlined intelligence and automation across the two.
Service complexities require ongoing effort
In other business-focused service challenges, be it employee, finance, supply chain or travel, significant challenges exist to aggregate the various real-time and historical facts, to understand, identify resolution outcomes, transact actions, and over time learn and optimize the opportunities for automation.
The complexities of maintenance, service, support, and streamlined process execution ripple through to our workforce, with complex experiences desperately in need of improvement.
We must not lose sight of the need for sustainability, and increased environmental safety and worker safety priorities, governance practices, and end-to-end auditability. Maintenance and service operations play a major role in how we keep equipment operating at maximum performance, safely, for as long a life as possible, to reduce energy and environmental footprint.
Technology shifts like generative AI plus the fact that service is one of the top priorities for industries that are getting disrupted also plays a major role in market dynamics, and is adding pressure to improve software models.
Finally, we have the changing workforce with skilled and experienced individuals retiring and younger workers beginning their careers. These new employees have inherently different work approaches and expectations. They want intelligence and work management capabilities at their fingertips via mobile devices. Supporting them is part and parcel of modern service.
Ready to get in the driver’s seat, or would you rather be screaming from the back?