Poor customer service can cause your business to lose customers, miss potential future markets, and destroy your reputation. Many companies believe that having excellent marketing strategies can overcome subpar customer service, but CSM research has proven this wrong. Negative experiences rapidly spread through social media and many consumers today research companies through customer reviews before making purchases. You could be losing potential customers without realizing it.

Customer service management should be a top priority for your company, not something to put off as an afterthought. Believing that improving CSM in the distant future can solve your current service issues, consider the numbers from a recent Zendesk-sponsored Dimensional Research service study. Negative customer experiences caused 39% of people to avoid vendors for more than two years, and 66% stopped buying from a company altogether. Start avoiding the consequences of poor customer service management now by adopting ServiceNow as your CSM solution.

Increased Customer Access to Information and Support

Routine questions and basic information can be hard for customers to receive if they are forced to spend time on hold. Many customer service reps find themselves answering the same questions all day long, which could account for unfriendliness during customer interactions. If your company is guilty of not providing enough readily available information to customers, consider ServiceNow as a solution.

ServiceNow’s Customer Service Management (CSM) offers an online, self-service portal for customers. This service automatically routes requests and allows your customers to find solutions through community engagement, access answers to common questions through the Knowledge Management portal, and perform basic tasks such as resetting passwords. Request routing drastically improves customer outcomes as well, because it ensures that the appropriate department is notified of the issue and can respond to the customer directly.

Connectivity to Avoid Common Customer Frustrations

There is nothing more frustrating for customers than to wait on hold for extended periods of time and explain their problems to multiple representatives. These complaints are common: long wait times, inexperienced representatives, and rude interactions. Each of these issues alone can be annoying, but combine them, and it is no wonder customers stay away from companies so long after a bad experience.

How can you combat these issues using ServiceNow? Their intelligent routing systems quickly direct customers to the appropriate department that can help them right away. This significantly improves the value of your business: 73% of consumers polled in a RightNow survey said friendly reps could “make them fall in love” with a company. Direct connectivity better equips your employees with the knowledge they need to respond to customer complaints.

Improved and Personalized Customer Service

Personalized customer service makes people feel valued and heard. This value drives loyalty, resulting in more repeat customers and long-term investments. Connecting every department means your company is working together to find a solution. By identifying the specific needs of your customers through automated routing processes and shared knowledge through communities, you can deliver personalized services to customers.

The ServiceNow self-service portal does more than give customers access to knowledge – with customized portals to fit the specific needs of your market; customers feel more comfortable finding the information they need. You can deliver a customized, personalized online experience that shows concern for the needs of your customers. By giving your customers options, you are giving your customers power over their services and improving their experiences.

Solve Problems Before Customers Experience Them

Delivering fast solutions to problems is important, but what if your company could avoid the issue in the first place? ServiceNow’s CSM provides real-time business metrics – Performance Analytics – to help identify and predict customer trends and product performance. With this information, your company can make proactive decisions to improve business outcomes by alerting customers to problems or resolving issues before they are noticed.

Targeted Communications, a service connected to Performance Analytics through the ServiceNow platform, lets you provide immediate support to customers and help them avoid the need to contact your service representatives. This type of on-demand support will help instill loyalty in your customers and increase your value to them as a company.

Deliver Improvements Through Better Business Metrics

With ServiceNow, your company offers instant knowledge access, personalized support, and proactive solutions. Now how do you use your CMS products to improve your enterprise as a whole? Improved analytics is an excellent place to start because these metrics can give you an idea of how your customers are interacting with your services and overall operational health. These metrics are delivered in real-time and provide a holistic view of your enterprise. The connectivity of ServiceNow products enables your company to access every area of the organization to make company-wide decisions and improve metrics.

Navigating these products can be tricky, however, and finding a single person to manage the platform can be difficult with a high workload. Luckily, ServiceNow technology partner Infocenter can offer an easy solution. By letting the representatives at Infocenter create, deliver, and improve a strategic plan tailored to your company, you can realize the full potential of your ServiceNow investment.

Eliminate the Risk of a Negative Customer Experience with ServiceNow

Your business can avoid all of the typical customer complaints by delivering more efficient, responsive, and personalized customer services. Using ServiceNow to deliver and maintain positive customer service management is a cost-effective way to lower your risk of a negative experience and increase customer loyalty and value. Through better knowledge access, personalized service, proactive solutions, improved business metrics, you can improve your customer service experience and lower overall costs associated with customer service. ServiceNow is the smartest CSM business solution for your company.