It is a well-known fact that customer service is the lifeline of any business. Customers nowadays prioritize a good Customer Experience and a great service over anything, be it even price or product. This is the reason why big brands like Apple, Amazon, Nordstrom, Zappos and many others are focusing more on providing exceptional customer service.
Since the last decade, customers’ expectations have increased to a large extent and are still increasing. A research by Microsoft suggests that 54% of customers have higher expectations for customer service than they did a year ago. According to a survey by HubSpot, 93% of customers are more likely to be repeat customers at companies with excellent customer service.
Service Desk is an integral part of the overall customer service and plays a significant role in creating Customer Experiences. So when it comes to building amazing experiences for your customers, managing Service Desk Experience is a prerequisite.
Apple is known for providing excellent customer service not only through its stores, but also through online and phone support. Similarly, Southwest Airlines is known for its friendly and helpful customer service. All these companies have focused on managing Customer Experience to build effective service desks and satisfy their customers with their services
In this article, we will explore how you can improve your Service Desk with Experience Management. Let’s first start with exploring why it is necessary to manage experience for your service desk.
Why Manage Experience for Service Desk?
Experience Management for your Service Desk is beneficial for your business in these ways.
1. It helps to identify Customer Issues
When you track and manage Customer Experience for your Service Desk, it helps you to identify various types of issues that customers may face while taking support from your service desk. Maybe some service representatives are rude with the customers, some of them may not be able to solve customers’ concerns, some of them may not have appropriate knowledge to handle customers’ queries and concerns.
Customer Experience Management enables you to identify such issues and work towards eliminating them and thus improving customers’ service desk experiences.
2. It helps to Serve your Customers Better and Deliver Better CX
According to a study by Microsoft, 56% of global consumers have stopped doing business with a company because of poor customer service experiences. Service Desk Experience Management helps you avoid such poor experiences and serve your customers in a better way thus delivering amazing customer experiences.
3. It helps to make Feedback-driven Changes to your Service Desk
When you collect customer insights to manage their experience, you get the right direction to make positive changes into your service desk to make it better for the customers. Through Customer Experience Management, you no longer have to do hit and trial for improving your customer service. Instead, you can take feedback-driven actions and make changes that enhance Customer Experience and increase satisfaction.
4. It helps to Improve Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty
Studies suggest that the customers who have a positive experience with a brand tend to spend around 17% more on the same brand. Customer Experience Management helps you create such positive experiences for the customers and drive loyalty and satisfaction.
The well-known online shoe retailer, Zappos, provides excellent training to their call center representatives to prioritize customer satisfaction over sales, and they are empowered to make decisions that benefit the customer. This approach has helped Zappos to build a loyal customer base that raves about its customer service.
Similarly, the luxury hotel chain, Ritz-Carlton, has a dedicated customer service training program called “The Ritz-Carlton Way,” which focuses on anticipating and meeting customer needs. The result is a highly personalized and attentive service that keeps customers coming back.
5. It Provides Real-time Data to Motivate Service Agents
Service agents are often demotivated due to lousy feedback they receive, reason being, customers do not share positive feedback without being asked, but proactively tend to share negative feedback in the form of complaints and issues. But when you manage Customer Experience, you collect all types of feedback that will include both negative as well as positive feedback.
Positive Feedback lets your service agents know that they are doing the right thing and motivates them to continue putting their best efforts to satisfy the customers. At the same time, negative feedback with proper reasons and insights let your service agents know where they are at fault and guides them to bring positive changes to their approach.
Now, lets’ learn how you can improve your Service Desk with Experience Management.
How to Improve your Service Desk with Experience Management?
- Map Out the Customer Journey
- Collect Customer Feedback for Service Desk
- Analyze Feedback and Make Improvements
- Focus on Employee Engagement
- Use Technology to Enhance Customer Experience
- Continuously Monitor and Improve
Let’s learn how you can follow these steps.
1. Map out the Customer Journey
To provide an exceptional Service Desk Experience, you must understand your customers’ journey. Train your service desk representatives to dig deep to know where the customers’ requests are coming from and what made them raise an issue or initiate a request.
Map out the customer journey from the time they initiate a support request until their issue is resolved. Identify key touchpoints and moments of truth that can impact the customer experience and work on them to improve Customer Experience.
For instance, you are into SaaS product business and a customer complains about his experience with your product that he is unable to use a particular feature of the product. When your customer service representatives worked on the issue, they found that the feature got locked due to some reason. Now here arises the need to do customer journey mapping.
On looking at the customer journey, your representatives came to know the feature was locked because an option was by default selected in your product and the customer was unaware about it. When the customer noticed that the feature he wanted to use was not working, he tried to research on your knowledge bases but couldn’t find any solution to it. After that he raised a request for support.
Now, your service representatives can unlock the feature and educate the customer about the options that are by default selected that caused the problem, and the customer needs to uncheck the options before proceeding to use that feature. This will prevent similar issues from occurring again.
In this case, if your representative handling the issue would not be well trained to map out the customer journey, he would have not easily found out that the feature is locked and the reason behind it and would take more time to resolve the issue. Even if he would have found out somehow that the feature is locked, it is necessary to find the reason behind it so that the same issue doesn’t occur again as it can frustrate the customer and create poor experiences. So it is important for your service agents to map out the customer journey to get a clear idea about the experience that the customers are going through and the reason behind that.
Let us understand this better by studying the case of Airbnb.
Airbnb is a platform that connects people looking for a place to stay with hosts who have extra space to rent. In 2017, Airbnb launched a customer journey mapping project to better understand their customers’ experiences and pain points across all touchpoints, including the service desk.
Through this project, Airbnb identified several key areas where they could improve the service desk experience for their customers.
- Improving the responsiveness and accuracy of their customer support team by implementing a 24/7 chat feature, which allowed customers to get help in real-time.
- Simplifying the customer support process by offering a self-service help center that included frequently asked questions, articles, and tutorials.
- Creating a more personalized service experience by training their support team to understand and empathize with their customers’ needs and concerns.
- Reducing customer effort by providing proactive communication and timely updates on the status of customer requests.
As a result of these improvements, Airbnb was able to enhance the overall service desk experience for their customers, leading to increased customer satisfaction and loyalty. Additionally, this project helped Airbnb to identify opportunities to improve the customer journey across all touchpoints, leading to a better overall experience for their customers.
1. Collect Customer Feedback for Service Desk
To understand how customers perceive your Service Desk, gather feedback from them. Use Customer Feedback Surveys and metrics like Customer Effort Score, Customer Satisfaction Score, and Net Promoter Score, to understand what your customers like and what they dislike. Also use customer reviews to gain insights into the support they receive.
Successful companies like Delta Air Lines use Customer Feedback to improve its customer service offerings, including its service desk. The company regularly surveys passengers and uses this feedback to identify areas for improvement. Delta also has a dedicated customer service team that responds to feedback and works to resolve any issues that arise.
Similarly, Apple is known for providing excellent customer service, and they collect feedback from their customers about their service desk through their Apple Support website.
Amazon is another company that places a strong emphasis on customer service, and they collect feedback through their Amazon Customer Service website.
Airbnb is a company that provides a platform for people to rent out their homes or apartments to travelers. They collect feedback from their customers about their service desk through their Help Center website.
Microsoft is a technology company that provides a wide range of software products and services. They collect feedback from their customers about their service desk through their Microsoft Support website.
For all the above companies, customers can easily rate their experience and provide feedback on the quality of support they received, which helps these businesses identify areas for improvement and make changes to their service desk accordingly.
The best way to collect feedback is by connecting your service desk to a Customer Service Feedback platform. With an effective tool like Zonka Feedback, you can easily trigger feedback surveys post events like just after a customer interaction, after a ticket is updated or closed, and collect insights into the experience your customers received through your service desk at various touchpoints.
You can also add conditions to send specific surveys to specific customers like surveys as per the plans they are using, type of customer, items purchased, country or any condition as per your business requirements. You can also use metric surveys to understand your customers’ experience better and in quantitative form. Some popular metrics you can use are CES, CSAT, and NPS.
- Customer Effort Score (CES) is the best metrics to collect Service Desk Feedback. This metric measures the effort your customers have to make to get their requests fulfilled or issues resolved. A CSAT survey asks the customers how much they agree that the company made it easy for them to handle their issues on a seven-point rating scale.
- Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) Score is a popular metric to measure satisfaction levels of the customers with the experience they have received. A CSAT survey asks the customers how their experience was regarding the interaction they had with the service agent, or the overall experience of getting support from the service desk.
- Net Promoter Score (NPS) is the most popular metric to gauge customer loyalty. An NPS Survey asks the customers how likely they are to recommend your company to their friends and known ones based on the experience they receive.
With Zonka Feedback, you can easily use any of these metric surveys and trigger your Customer Service Desk Feedback surveys to collect meaningful insights about your service desk from your customers.
2. Analyze Feedback and Make Improvements
When you want to make real improvements, only collecting feedback will not work. You have to leverage the feedback collected to make feedback-driven improvements for making your service desk better for your customers.
Analyze the feedback you receive to identify areas for improvement. Use this information to make changes to processes, policies, and procedures that can enhance the Customer Experience.
If you get negative feedback, look for the key areas of improvement. Maybe your representatives are doing their job well, but there is a long waiting time which is frustrating your customers. Look for the specific issues that your customers are facing and take action accordingly.
Here are some of the improvements that you may need to make your service desk better for your customers.
- Improvement in Response Time – Through Service Desk Feedback, you can identify areas where response times are slow and address those areas to improve overall efficiency. For example, if customers frequently report long wait times on the phone, you can add more staff during peak hours or implement an automated phone system to improve response times. Maybe your customers have to go through a long way to reach the option to talk to your customer care executives. In such cases, you should focus on providing easy IVR options to your customers to reach your support executives in the first go.
- Enhancement of Communication with Customers – Customer Feedback can help you identify communication gaps and improve your communication processes. For instance, if customers report that they are not getting enough updates on the status of their requests, you can implement automated email or SMS notifications to keep your customers informed of the progress of their tickets.
- Better Training of Service Agents – By analyzing Customer Feedback, you can identify areas where your support agents may need additional training or support. For example, if customers report that staff members are unable to resolve their issues or lack knowledge on specific products or services, you should implement additional training programs to improve staff skills.
- Personalized Service – By analyzing Customer Feedback, you can understand customers’ needs and preferences so that you can offer more personalized services to them. For instance, if a customer frequently calls with the same issue, you can offer a customized solution or provide additional resources to help them resolve the issue quickly.
- Continuous Improvement – By regularly collecting and analyzing Customer Feedback, you can continually improve your service desk operations to offer better customer service. For example, if you receive feedback about a recurring issue, you can investigate the root cause and implement measures to prevent it from happening again in the future.
3. Focus on Employee Engagement
According to Gallup’s 2021 State of the Global Workplace report, only 20% of employees worldwide are engaged in their jobs. This means that the vast majority of employees are not fully committed to their work or their employer.
The same report found that companies with high employee engagement are 21% more profitable than those with low employee engagement. This demonstrates the significant impact that engaged employees can have on a company’s bottom line.
Engaged employees are more likely to provide exceptional service. Provide your employees with the adequate tools, extensive training, and resources they need to deliver excellent support. Celebrate their successes and recognize their achievements.
If some employees are not able to deliver the expected results, dig deep to know where they lack, provide them with the much needed learning and training they need to handle the service desk better.
2. Use Technology to Enhance the Customer Experience
Technology can play a significant role in improving the Customer Experience. Implement self-service tools that allow customers to find answers to their questions quickly. Provide knowledge bases like blogs, guides, and help articles that customers can easily find and understand to resolve their small issues themselves.
You can also use AI-powered chatbots to provide 24/7 support to the customers. These chatbots can work for you as service representatives and solve many of common customers’ issues.
3. Follow the Strategy of Continuous Improvement
To make your service desk reach excellence and maintain a high level of Customer Satisfaction, follow the strategy of continuous improvement. Continuously monitor and try improving your Service Desk. Regularly gather Service Desk Feedback and utilize it to make data-driven decisions.
Conclusion
Service Desk Experience has a significant impact on the overall CX. With effective Experience Management, you can improve your service desk and make it better for your customers to provide exceptional customer service and support.
Improving your Service Desk with Experience Management involves mapping out the customer journey, gathering feedback, analyzing feedback, focusing on employee engagement, using technology to enhance the customer experience, and continuously monitoring and improving. By following these steps, you can create a customer-centric culture that provides exceptional support.
To collect feedback, you can use an effective Feedback Software like Zonka Feedback which not only helps you create surveys and collect Service Desk Feedback through various channels like SMS and Email, but also lets you analyze it and work on it to close the feedback loop effectively and improve Customer Experience.
You can try Zonka Feedback for free for 7 days and see how it helps to improve your service desk.
