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Customer Experience Improvement is high on the agenda for most enterprises. If you are in the Services Industry catering to high volume customer service requests, you would immediately relate to the challenge at hand.

As most Services based Businesses are highly reliant on IT, it becomes that much more important to efficiently manage IT Services in order to provide better customer service.

Today, consumers are spoilt for choice and brand loyalty is a rarity. Customer Experience is one of the key differentiators to not only retain existing customers but also to attract new ones.

In this post we will look at how IT Service Management plays a key role in ensuring consistent customer experience across the enterprise.

1. Customer Service drives Brand Perception/ Experience

In today’s highly competitive digital economy, almost all service providers provide similar products, services and tariffs. But the experience a consumer has with the brand is unique. Its driven by how you treat them, how much you know about them and your preparedness to assist them.

If your customer service staff is equipped with the right tools, information and insights to serve them, their experience with the brand is that much pleasant. Customers appreciate these little things and it goes a long way in forming brand perception and positive experiences.

IT Service Management platforms provide service agents with a Customer Dashboard which gives them a birds eye view to the customer and how best to serve them.

Here is a post we wrote about ServiceNow Customer Service Platform and how it helps companies in enhancing customer experience.

2. Always Available Systems and Services

Downtime and Delayed Service is a customer service nightmare. Business critical applications and systems are expected to be on all the time. No matter how well you treat your customers but if your customer portal or services are down even for a few hours, it would create enough damage both for your brand and the business operation.

IT Operations Management Platforms help you monitor each and every aspect of your IT Operations. Whether it’s your servers, network, business applications or complete data center. They help you mitigate risks by predicting and alerting you on possible delays/ downtime in the near future.

Checkout this post on Requirements of a Modern IT Operations Management Platform.

3. Easy Access to Assistance

Customers should be able to avail assistance with utmost ease. This is the most crucial touchpoint in the customer service journey. Whether the customer connects via phone, web, email or chat; the customer service agent should have enough insights on the customer history, root cause of the issue, business impact and resolution time.

IT Service Desk Platforms provide service agents with the intelligence to handle service requests efficiently. Common issues related to service usage, FAQs, delay reasons, etc. should be addressed at first contact.

You may want to checkout Micro Focus SMA-X or ServiceNow ITSM which provides Machine Learning based Contextual Analytics which takes customer experience to a new level.

4. Consistent Service Experience

Consistent experience in handling customer requests is another area which can be assisted via efficient implementation of ITSM processes. Regardless of the knowledge and competence of the service agent, customers should have a consistent experience when dealing with your brand.

Again, ITSM Systems, as well as processes, play a crucial role in bridging the gap and parity of different customer service agents.

We wrote a detailed blog on ITIL and Change Management process, you can access it here.

The Bottomline

Brand Experience and Customer Service are two aspects which make good brands great. There are countless examples both in the consumer as well as B2B space where loyal customers stay with the brand for life.

IT Service and Operations Management platforms play a key role in enhancing the experience the customer has with your brand.

Have you implemented a Customer Service Platform yet?