hello everyone my name is rashmi jagada and i'm a servicenow solutions architect with kovastic the topic for today's webinar is related to customer service who phone and email channels belong in the dumpster so let's get started first a little bit about our company kovastic is a one-stop shop across the it ecosystem founded in 2001 we have about 250 employees we're an elite servicenow partner and we helped implement some of the earliest servicenow customers a lot of our business is repeat business which shows how customers are happy with our services our csat score is amongst the highest as you can see for yourself with a little bit of comparison on servicenow's website partner list we have a servicenow consulting practice of course where we do implementations since we got acquired by milestone over a year ago we are backed by a significantly larger managed services operations team we also help plug holes in your hiring by providing staffing who are well qualified post implementation transition is smooth with developer on demand most organizations typically walk away after the implementation is done however this helps you implement smaller features without turning it into a full-blown project this is a sample of some of our customers epicore was one of the earliest customer service management implementations and if you've attended any of the servicenow conferences you've probably heard chris or speak about the incredible success they've had they had consolidated over 50 portals as part of their project g4s is a british private security company with over half a million employees and we have multiple ongoing and completed projects with them all right now on to the main course so let's start with the main issue traditional support channels in the past have been via phone calls and emails you've probably seen enough statistics by now that show how most companies believe they're doing a terrific job providing great support but if you ask their customers most people agree that the quality of support they're getting is subpar there's a disconnect between the two points of view phone calls are difficult to manage and they require a lot of training of staff to be able to answer questions quickly because that's what customers who call in are expecting let's look at it from a manager's standpoint point of view they have a really tough time keeping up with the hiring of personnel they're constantly training them and motivating them to always be polite while handling a great number of calls at the same time so turnover ends up being typically quite high which just adds to the problem from from an agent's standpoint the smallest perceived mistake will cause the customer to go away permanently it's a very high pressure job for the agents and they really can't afford to have an off day because it could easily cost them their job so overall it's a very expensive way to manage support within the organization emails are not much better all the agents are doing is constantly replying to the same questions over and over again boredom sets in after a while and it's no wonder they look for other opportunities if they don't find anything within the company after some exchanges of emails customers often get fed up and they stop responding so many of the more difficult questions just simply get dropped because agents don't have time to get to them so it seems like you're caught in a lose-lose situation and the best thing to do is just dump them so let's take a little deeper look at why emails aren't a good idea first of all emails are considered an unstructured form of communication because you typically need more than one exchange to collect all of the basic information that you need to resolve the customer's case you might be able to extract the name and the company name from the email address however things like what product or what type of service they're calling about or emailing about isn't always straightforward to parse through anytime the issue becomes more complex the first-year agent forwards it to somebody else for assistance working together on an issue becomes difficult with the sheer number of people involved and keeping track of all the exchanges the larger the organization the more difficult it becomes to identify which groups and which specific people within those groups need to be responsible for handling the support queries there are other reasons besides the ones listed here for example it's not easy to keep track of the workload and escalated cases from a management's perspective i could go on and on however in short it's a highly inefficient way of doing business there are just too many emails lost in all the noise and a high number of customers issues remain unresolved as a potential solution to these problems microsoft outlook is the most common tool used by many organizations but it was never designed to provide support by many groups of support staff for a large number of customers email management applications help to a certain extent however they still don't do anything to address the bigger picture so let's look at it from a customer's point of view all they really want from you is a quick answer to their question that helps them on their way sometimes the idea of long hold times even puts some people off from making calls in the first place and they often go away unhappy without giving you an opportunity to serve them even after they connect with you after jumping through a few phone questionnaires and what may be a long whole time they're already likely to be a little bit annoyed because they feel like your application or service should have worked better in the first place what adds to the annoyance is if you waste their time asking too many questions and they end up not having a resolution at the end of it kate leggett is a very well known analyst with forester and she had written this great article about how your customers don't want to call you for support which is still very valid even though it's a few years old customers call you as a last resort when they can't find the answer anywhere else and they can't wait to get off the phone quickly enough since they prefer to be doing anything other than talking to your agents they get impatient when agents are unable to help them within a matter of minutes and anything other than instantaneous solution is uh unacceptable to them so let's look at it from a business perspective you can see that phone calls average cost of a phone call is listed as a little under nine dollars although i'll admit depending on what source you're referring to or what type of industry you're in or the company that you're in this may vary anywhere from seven dollars to 25 emails are significantly cheaper at half the cost chats are still cheaper again this is dependent on what source you're referring to and how you calculate the cost of your service i've seen some studies where chat costs range between phones and emails the point is these are known as assisted service channels and in general they're an order of magnitude greater than what are considered self-service channels so doesn't it make simple business sense just to take a deeper look at what that means and i'll explain what i mean by self-service in shortly all right so am i saying that you should ditch your phone and email channels completely well not necessarily there are some scenarios where phones and emails do make a lot of sense so you can retain the option for your support folks to make outbound calls in cases that you're determined are necessary for your business for more complex issues or where there are lack a lot of back and forth exchanges over other channels it often makes more sense to get on the call to reach resolution faster sometimes it's necessary to see a customer's screen or help them see your screen or even do video calls where you need to see their environment so phones are necessary in that case emails one of the most common reasons i've heard is that your customers are used to them well you can continue to use them for notifications and you can still combine them with other channels for really small shops it makes it sometimes doesn't make sense for to make a large investment into improving tools and processes chats makes sense when customers are unable to get their answers via virtual agents and they need to escalate to a live agent since agents are typically able to handle several chat sessions at once they do end up costing less than other assisted channels so what's the best solution if you don't use phones and emails well self-service of course that's where the world is moving to across pretty much all industries it's a very generic term that includes a lot of different things but the basic idea is simple the ability for a customer to help themselves to answers to their questions which you as a business have made available to them and more importantly they're typically able to get to them quickly remember how we talked about time being their most valuable asset what i recommend is that you shift your focus so self-service becomes your primary resource for providing support one example would be instead of advertising your phone number to call in have your customers call in only during certain situations high priority situations finding an answer with a few basic searches keeps your customers happier and you've spent a relatively insignificant amount of time making this happen and imagine the satisfaction from a customer's point of view when they're stuck in a boring meeting and they are decide to do a little bit of self-service to solve some of their weather issues and end up finding an answer so that's you know there's there's there's a lot of fun there all right so let's define what i mean by self-service channels and really what is meant by each one of them just about everybody is familiar with this web portal nowadays where you log into a website to check your bank balance by your insurance bill check test results from your doctor and a lot of other things community is a network of of users who exchange ideas much like you have a community in your local neighborhood knowledge base is a repository of answers to questions virtual agent is a chatbot that you've probably seen on many websites that interacts with you and answers a lot of your basic questions service catalog is a structured way to automate common tasks like i forgot my password or upgrade my application and social networks includes things like twitter facebook whatsapp so before we get deep into all the different channels let's take a look at an example of how the world has come a long way so some of the older folks on the line may remember back in those days when you actually had to call somebody to book an airline ticket you went to the airport early you waited in lines to check in and then you actually got a paper print out of your boarding pass then you got to the gate after going through security only to find out that your flight has been delayed and even once you finally made it onto the flight you got both stiff especially on the long flights because there was no internet access you had to shut off your phones more recently and even if they showed you a movie you didn't have any choices in terms of what movies you could watch it seems like really old days now doesn't it we've come a long way now in a short period of time with booking online travel checking in online to get your mobile boarding pass getting notifications if your flight is delayed so it saves you that trip to the airport going early shopping online and getting some real work done on a flight with internet access or watching your choice of movies if that's what you want to do so you can see how the entire travel experience has improved so much where you really need to interact with any airline staff and don't we love that so the old way of doing things has always been to focus on improving the efficiency of every support call that comes in you train your staff to be polite and friendly find answers as quickly as possible reduce the average hold times and call duration times and respond to as many cases as you possibly can within any given day the way you really want to go about it is to use tools and maximize their use in a way that prevents the vast majority of calls from coming in in the first place it's like the older days prevention is better than cure well the same principle applies with providing the best possible support to your customers you want to create an environment where customers are quickly able to find their own answers this will make your customers happier since like we discussed earlier most of them don't really want to talk to your support staff anyway your csat score will go up which is always nice i know by the way the operating costs of your business will actually trend downwards or at least stabilize enough to stop going through the roof so let's take a look at a more detailed look at what those self-service channels do the first one is the web portal that most folks are familiar with it requires a customer to log into a website which is pretty common these days customers expect it and they don't consider it to be a hassle frequent visitors usually save their logins on the browsers anyway so it's a one-time deal some of the capabilities include the ability to create cases online in a structured way this is known as structured because you're collecting all of the requirement required information in one chart as opposed to the unstructured way of emails that we had talked about earlier you already know who the customer is what company they're contacting you from what products or services they have and other types of information based on the past history what you don't know and things that you consider to be a basic requirement you're going to solicit through specific fields on the form ability to view the status of their cases deflects a bunch of calls related to hey you know what's going on ability to view search or search for information is the key most questions that customers ask are repetitive so there's no reason you can make it available to them in a knowledge base where they can quickly find it with one or two simple searches this is a much larger topic that we'll come back to in a few minutes and other things that you can make available on your portal are your product documentation products or services that they purchase relevant widgets that focused on different types of faqs that are dynamic in nature ability to manage their own notifications change their profile and pretty much anything that's specific to your business that prevents calls from coming in all right so before we get into the next major self-service capability i want to take a quick pause to explain the concept of crowdsourcing because it's very relevant to the new way of providing support essentially what it means is that you leverage a group of people to perform a task that needs to be done instead of a single person so traditional support calls involve one person calling in one support person helping them out and over time the knowledge that that support person acquires is kind of stays in their head and it really gets tapped into so the idea is to tap into that knowledge and experience gained by all of your support staff and you multiply that by your most experienced staff you're you're creating a responses that your customers can benefit from so a real live example of this many-to-many relationship is your iphone apps that you perhaps use every day without realizing it there are a couple of million apps in existence and a vast majority of them have been created by developers who are not employees of apple they get used by hundreds of millions of customers that's why apple is so widely successful they've figured out how to get you to love your iphone and use apps that even they're not aware of so there's compelling value in that iphone you're gonna gladly pay for it and they make a lot of money out of it in something that they played little to no part in developing i'd actually written a blog about this it's on the quest website uh more details about the crowdsourcing concept all right so let's take an example of how to use that crowdsourcing com concept this is what you see on the screen is community community lets customers interact with each other so they can exchange ideas and have conversations about how other customers work through certain types of problems customers ask questions that get answered by other highly knowledgeable customers over time this can turn into a powerful database where you can search for pretty much any responses to technical questions you have the ability to add blogs and videos to explain concepts in more detail so the screenshot that you see is an example of the servicenow community which is a network of over 300 000 people what they've done is recruit their passionate customers to help them provide support to their customers at pretty much no cost to them i mean talk about putting on the brakes on hiring uh in spite of their explosive growth knowledge base is the most critical piece of your self-service strategy the majority of questions asked by customers are repetitive so it's only logical that you create a database containing the answers to those questions you may already have some documents in place which have been created by some specialists within your organization this is another example of crowdsourcing so it goes beyond that because what we are doing is leveraging your agents to create knowledge based articles from the responses that they've already provided to customers the knowledge base can be made available to your agents and you can make a more refined subset of it available to your customers via the portal simple keyword searches can lead customers to those answers pretty quickly knowledge can be structured in categories like you see on the screen out here and other filters to make it easier for customers to find what they're looking for making this information reusable frees up your agents from having to spend time on answering the same questions over and over again so there will always be customers who will not take that first step of doing a quick search and they want to create a case and that's fine too they'll be presented with search results anyway based on keywords used within the short description fields while they're filling out the case creation form there's a decent chance that something amongst the search results is going to catch their eye as a response to their question and it's a great way to deflect a good number of cases from being submitted all right the next channel is the virtual agent this is another key piece that can deflect a portion of your incoming request you can build topics that can guide customers through the simpler issues this can be a really fun experience for them it combines information from the knowledge base to present relevant answers if customers don't find the answers they're looking for they always have the option of creating a case or they can escalate to a live agent if you have chat set up over time once you know that it's being used extensively you can even handle more complex issues via the ai technology i mentioned earlier how covastic was acquired by milestone and milestone has some great expertise with building powerful virtual agents that are being used quite heavily you can even play around with them on some websites the service catalog is a terrific tool to automate your repetitive tasks it's basically like a menu of standard products and services that are offered for customers to prick from a lot of the cust questions that customers ask are known quantities like you see on the screen out here where you go through a step-by-step process to do whatever it is that they want to get done like a password resets or upgrading their application or purchasing an accessory that goes with the existing product they have when they do a search on the portal they're presented with knowledge based articles that we discussed earlier in addition to that they're going to see these service catalog items as well so a different form would be configured for each one of these items much like a case creation form when you submit that form it kicks off a process and all the tasks associated with it and the task could be spread out amongst multiple people in different departments you can even make them interact with third party applications in the backend so it's yet another self-service channel that can be used to handle a portion of your incoming requests in a cookie cutter way another self-service channel is social media which perhaps applies more to b2c companies who have customers that tend to be active on sites like facebook twitter and instagram integrating with these sites as part of your overall self-service strategy lets you handle all support from a single platform and you can think use things like virtual agent we had discussed earlier on these sites as well so your topics are being made available to more than just your own website all right so to summarize hopefully you picked up a few tips there with that list of self-service channels and how they work individually it gets to be significantly more powerful when you combine all those different tools together so they're all working together as i'm sure you're aware it's impossible to continue hiring at a breakneck pace if your company is on a good growth path focusing on these self-service channels as a primary option allows you to keep those costs down you don't have to worry about constantly training your new employees because they could be using the same information to get up to speed faster than your earlier agents would have created your agents are going to be happier it's going to lead to less turnover and more importantly your customers are going to be happier uh as you can you'll see with the improved csat score because they have other options besides calling or emailing in to get support this slide shows some of the successes that servicenow themselves have had which has been a big factor in their explosive growth the knowledge base helps them deflect easily a quarter of all of their cases just think about that one for a minute the case resolution times have gone down by 40 percent the community is a network of over 300 000 users and what they've done is get their passionate customers to help them take a massive bite out of their support load since they answer questions asked by other customers all this is at no cost to servicenow because they're not paying their customers anything in fact if anything the customers are paying servicenow and providing the support for free so what a win-win situation for both parties here and you can read up all of all of these other statistics for yourself but overall servicenow is combining to deflect more than 90 of all their cases by implementing all these self-service channels in a way where they all work together because they're literally feeding off of each other so here are some real world examples of great websites they cover a lot of different industries so just look at the ones in your specific area check out especially how they're leveraging their self-service channels and try a fun experiment see if you can find a phone number or an email address on their website and how easy or difficult it is these companies have figured out the formula for success and that's to use self-service channels to provide most of their support their support staff are not spending most of their time just simply responding to customer queries as much as helping other agents and other customers get to those answers quicker and customers don't think badly of these companies because they are not able to talk to anyone live in fact customers are happier for it because they don't have to do that because they can get their answers in other ways i mean take uber as an example why does everyone love it because you remember back in those days when they used to wait for a taxi once you got somewhere to the airport and it was worse figuring out how to call one when you were at your customer site or something and you wanted to get back to the airport because you didn't know where you were how to you know get the number for a taxi now you can get personalized service in a few clicks without talking to anyone and that's just a significantly better experience so i'm going to leave you with this spotting thought from the kcs academy for those of you not familiar with the kcs it's knowledge-centered service it's basically a consortium of the largest companies who come together to develop a methodology around knowledge management success is not just the tools used it's a combination of people process and technology and a lot of the success that even servicenow has had isn't simply because of the knowledge management tool within their support department it's also the processes that they've improved their own knowledge basically creating a culture around encouraging their agents to create more knowledge articles assisted service channels may always be needed however your customers should be using self-service as their primary option i appreciate your time today hopefully you found that to be useful please contact us at this link here and we have both process and tool experts who can help you along on your journey to great heights i'm gonna stick around for a bit and open it up to questions from anyone feel free to post them on the chat thank you for your time jake do we have any questions um real quick i thought i was going to stop the recording