You have been away on an extended holiday or vacation. You are getting stressed about catching up on the work that piled up while you were gone. New web leads have come in but were they passed out to sales reps to follow up? Did those 3 key sales opportunities move forward or are they stuck? Maybe there were customer service issues pop up and some of them may have spilled out into the social media channels.
What better time to have many of those tasks automated so you can focus on what you do best?
Customer Service meets Business Process Management
Good customer service has always been a key component to the success of any business. In the past if you didn’t treat a customer well it didn’t necessarily matter because new customers might not hear about the poor customer service until they experienced a problem themselves.
With the advent of social media, you can no longer hope to sweep the problems with customer service under a “virtual rug”. If a customer has a problem with a company you can be sure that they will post about it on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, anywhere to let others know about their dissatisfaction. Larger companies with a strong social media presence who are watching all relevant feeds can jump in and handle the problem.
However, small and medium-sized businesses can’t always be monitoring social media – they don’t have the time or the personnel, they need to run their business and ensure they get sales. So what can they do to ensure they always give great customer service?
Customers using (BPM) Business Process Management technologies report that by automating customer service requests, they are able to ensure that they can respond immediately and automatically to a problem and put tracking procedures in place so that the problem is monitored and resolved in a timely fashion to the customer’s satisfaction.
Business Process Management applications ‘loosely couple’ business applications enabling organizations to automate virtually any employee-driven business process. They use data within existing systems to make manual processes more automated and bring important information to light.
For example, one company’s customer service representatives were being swamped with a repetitive manual process. Their customers were going to their website and registering to receive containers for recycling. The registrations were arriving by email and the customer service representatives had to manually rekey the information into their CRM system.
They used a BPM tool to set up a series of tasks to automate the entire process. The emails now come in from the website and automatically generate a customer service ticket in the system. A notification of the order is sent to the appropriate customer service representative. If the email is from an existing customer, the refill request is recorded onto their account. If they are a new customer, an account is automatically created and the order details recorded. Additionally the task send out confirmations and thank you messages to the customers for their orders.
Since this automation process has been in production, the customer service representative has been able to focus on real customer service issues and are much more efficient.
The question is “what do you want to automate”? What manual process are burdening your staff, slowing down response time, and inhibiting great customer service?
Thanks to Nicole Laurie from Fisher Technology for inspiration on this article. Check out her TaskCentre overview slide presentation here….
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