To cater to all these customers, you need to think enterprise-wide and ensure a seamless experience catering to their service requests and expectations.

“More than two-thirds of marketers responsible for customer experience (CX) say their companies compete mostly on the basis of CX and in two years’ time, 81% say they expect to be competing mostly or completely on the basis of CX1” - Gartner Customer Experience in Marketing Survey 2017.

Today, delivering a great experience to your customers is imperative. However, the definition of the customer is broad. It includes your employees, partners, suppliers, and other stakeholders. To cater to all these customers, you need to think enterprise-wide and ensure a seamless experience catering to their service requests and expectations.

Enterprise Service Management (ESM) - What and Why

You respond to the needs of your internal and external customers in many forms such as queries, complaints, information, transactions, status updates, incidents, social media posts, recommendations, and others. How you respond to these requests decides the experience your customers are going to walk away with. Catering to ESM use cases entails delivering services that extend beyond traditional IT systems (including ERP, CRM, HRMS, core banking and insurance).

Bad service hurts in terms of revenue, brand image as well as customer loyalty. ESM helps you cater to a broad range of service requests and enable your customer journey, but the question is how.

Think Platform - The Holistic Approach

To manage all your enterprise services, you require a digital automation platform with low code capability. The platform gives you the agility and flexibility compared to fixed responses and processes. It allows you to handle exceptions and enables ad-hoc routing, today and in the future. Further, it offers you visibility and control over your processes and services.

Key considerations while investing in a platform catering to ESM use cases:

1. Low Code Application Development Environment - You need an easy-to-use platform that helps you create applications rapidly. Low code capability, supported by agile methodologies, allows you to create applications at an enterprise scale with better visibility and control.

2. Multi-Experience Form Building – Data suggests that buyers engage with companies on 13 different channels, most of which are disconnected2. You need a platform that supports application development across devices and channels with varying form factors and responsive design.

3. Intelligent Orchestration, Process Control, and Analytics - While choosing a platform for ESM use cases, it’s important to look out for process orchestration capabilities along with analytics and robotic process automation capabilities. These capabilities enable continuous improvement, empower employees, improve efficiency, and enable intelligent decision-making.

4. Contextual Experience with Content-Process Integration - Most service requests bring along with them customer data or documentation, which also needs to be processed. This requires the digital platform to offer content management capabilities and capture intelligent information from the documents for effective request processing.

5. Digital Sensing and Omnichannel Communication – A customer may get to know about your brand through social media, read about your products/services on your website and may reach out to you through email. Customers today need modern communication mechanisms. This requires you to invest in a platform that allows you to intake requests from multiple channels and engage customers through their preferred mode of communication.

6. Straight-Through Processing and Integration-Readiness - Consider, the wide range of service requests you receive each day. And, the various back-end systems and applications you require to process those requests. A digital automation platform with strong integration capabilities facilitates the efficient processing of requests through seamless integration with third-party systems.

To Conclude

In a nutshell, your enterprise service management strategy should aim at delivering a consistent experience for a holistic journey for all your customers, employees, and partners across multiple channels. The trick is in deploying a low code platform that enables enterprise-wide request automation while supporting simple as well as complex processes.

Disclaimer: The views expressed in the article above are those of the authors' and do not necessarily represent or reflect the views of this publishing house