Customer service management (CSM) software can provide an exceptional customer experience, eliminate manual processes, give you a competitive edge, and increase growth through renewals and retention

But choosing the right solution for your business can be challenging as most providers offer very similar features. Below, we explore the benefits of Customer Service Management software to help you choose the best CSM solution that fits your business needs.

Benefits of Customer Service Management Software

With a customer service management platform, your business will be able to offer a better customer experience which helps drive customer loyalty. Industry-leading CSM (Customer Service Management) software offers the following benefits:

• More responsive and consistent support. Your team can spend more time helping customers and less time fighting their tools with dedicated support software features like automated workflows, tagging, knowledge base integration, and more
• More effective collaboration. You can reduce duplicate work, keep track of customer inquiries, coordinate responses across multiple teams, and provide up-to-date information to your employees.
• Better understanding of your customers. You can collect, organize, and use feedback, feature requests, bug reports, and use cases to increase customer satisfaction.
• Analytics and Reportings. Using the software's built-in reporting tools, you can see changes in support volume, productivity, size, and type of customers.
• Service scaling. Using organizational features, automation, and third-party integrations, you can manage multiple teams of agents to support an expanding customer base while maintaining high-quality service.
• Self-service capabilities. Self-service portals collect relevant information and resources in one place and empower users to troubleshoot existing issues proactively. Self-service portals also offer ticketing capabilities and could serve as a knowledge management tool giving users access to relevant resources and self-help articles.

How to Choose the Best CSM Software

Selecting a software solution isn't like shopping at a convenience store. You have to be patient and dedicated. The same goes for picking the right customer service management software. If it doesn't work, you don't just return it for a refund or get a new one. Take your time and study carefully

An important thing to consider is whether a provider offers integration of their solution with your existing infrastructure. A cloud-based software-as-a-service CSM system offers you many more integration options via open application programming interfaces (APIs) compared to an on-premise version that is less agile.

To help you with this process, here are eight steps to choosing the best CSM software to boost your customer experience.

1. Understand your business requirements

Ask your customer service team what they like or dislike about their current tools. For example, teams using feature-heavy multi-channel tools for managing support must deal with complex interfaces, advanced features, and additional training. Most teams want software with a simple interface that helps them easily assign requests. Look at your goals; whether it’s improving customer NPS scores, reducing wait times, improving service levels or retention, it’s key to find out how to drive positive change from an operational perspective when looking for the best CSM software.

2. Research the tools that best suit your customers’ needs

Each business is unique and requires a different combination of tools to provide support and resolve issues. Evaluate how your customers want to interact with your service team. Determine how you can add more value to the process and speed response times. Ask yourself if you have the information and tools you need to resolve many customer queries immediately. The tools available include phone, email, live chat, social media, FAQs, and community forums.

3. Get to know the different types of software

It's essential to think about the kind of solution your business needs. Pick an all in one vs. best of breed. You need a solution that lets you integrate different channels into one place. Best-of-breed solutions are cheaper if you only need a couple of service channels. Also, they're easier to use, and you don't have to pay for tools and services you don't need. For larger teams where there are other business units that have their own comprehensive solutions, integration with those systems is key to success.

4. Review software features

You should focus only on the features you need, not the ones most companies advertise. Factors you should consider include the software’s limit on the number of users, ease of use, scalability, customizability, and third-party integration options. Then, develop a plan that includes the set of features that best fits your needs.

5. Consider return on investment

After narrowing down the customer service software you want, it's time to determine which one has the best return on investment (ROI). You shouldn't skimp on customer service software. You should spend the money to get the solution that will give you the most value for your company. For example, suppose you can improve customer retention by 10% and that’s worth $1 million to your business. In that case, spending $50,000 on a solution is probably a good investment compared to other solutions, such as hiring more customer success managers.

6. Read the reviews

You should read online software reviews before signing up. By looking at recent reviews, you can get a good feel for the customer service software's strengths and weaknesses and hear first hand from users of their products.

7. Take a software test drive

You can get free trials or demos from most software providers. Try out the software for free for a few days to see how it works and what features it has. Also, demos give you a glimpse into a software’s features and show you how to use them. The best vendors may provide a proof of concept that would allow you to configure the tool for specific needs and run it internally to determine fit.

8. Make a decision

After your test drive, you should consider what kind of support the vendor provides. If you are looking for best of breed, you should focus on an all-in-one solution that includes consulting services to help you with setup so you can get the best ROI. To ensure you are getting the right solution, you should ask the vendor if they can develop a proof of concept so you can decide if the solution meets your needs. Investigate if the vendor offers on-going support, so you don’t get stuck with a suboptimal solution. Once you are confident you have the right solution and vendor, it’s time to decide.

Try Vivantio

Now that you have gone through these steps, consider using Vivantio as your customer service management software platform. Vivantio's powerful platform can offer both internal and external customer service and support. We enable effortless operations through our service management solutions, empowering your teams to focus on elevating the customer experience for a future-ready business.

For more than two decades, Vivantio has been helping clients optimize their service organizations by leveraging a unified service management platform. To find out how Vivantio can help you with the best CSM software for your company, contact our team today or register for a free demo.

In a world where customer service has become increasingly important, it's more vital than ever to have a customer service management strategy in place.

Because of the weight customer service holds for your company, it’s important that you have the right tools for the job. This is true in either B2B or B2C operations; however, both require solutions that allow you to keep necessary information at your fingertips while presenting an image that evokes a strong corporate brand and trust in your customers. Finally, these solutions need to be scalable to adjust with your company as it grows. 

Understanding how these concepts apply to a concrete interface can be challenging. This article discusses the most significant customer service management benefits provided by a cloud-based optimization platform, including:

• Improving Satisfaction
• Increasing Efficiency
• Reducing Costs
• Adding Value for Both You and Your Customers

Creating an Efficient User-Driven Experience

The central challenge to any customer service solution is ensuring that users are satisfied with the end product. In a B2B environment, this means providing them with the tools they need to perform their duties more efficiently than what would have been possible without it. It also requires ease of use and learning that speaks to the skill sets of experienced veterans and newcomers alike.

Some advanced methods to improve employee and customer satisfaction include:

• Service-Level Management: Many companies prefer to handle service requests in their own way, so your customer service platform should meet them where they are. The ideal platform should include the ability to create custom portals and assign custom roles and positions for those portals you create. Plus, allow easy configuration of multiple SLAs, even customer-specific SLAs, to track and make sure issues are dealt with in the appropriate order and within time.
  
  
• Simple and Intuitive Interfaces: Self-help portals need to be simple and intuitive for customers to be able to find what they need to troubleshoot and solve any issues they can handle themselves. Additionally, consider an interface with roles and permissions that limit the service team’s view to only the most vital information and processes they need to help customers who might have some challenging issues.

• CMBD & Asset Management: Your platform should have the ability to store and house any assets used for your business. Not just physical assets, but things like contracts, licenses, and more - anything that helps attach critical information to customer records that could be essential for your service team. This keeps important information close at hand and easily accessible for when your teams need them.

• Service Catalog Creation: When presenting your products and services to your customers, having an online platform that allows you to customize categorization and presentation goes a long way toward offering a tailored customer service experience.

Having tools like these at your disposal ensures that your company can present the best possible image to clients while keeping team members on the same page. In addition, having these essential features ensures that the user (and, by extension, the client) are kept happy.

Reducing Customer Costs and Optimizing Your Service With Customer Service Management

Software solutions that add to the capabilities of administrative teams are common, however the other side of the coin is to look for solutions that reduce costs across the board. These features keep your company light and mobile, with heightened overheads that prepare your department for any business challenges that come down the road. 

Customer Service Management benefits include freeing up resources to further enhance and build on your customer service experience. This allows you to add more value to your end users and yourselves as a business. The co-creation of value between vendor and customer is vital to overall success in both growth and retention.

Cost reduction comes in many forms, but the most helpful one available through a technology-based service would include:

• Performance Management: Generating quality reporting often requires hiring an in-house specialist or outsourcing the job to an external agency. Either way, having a technology-based solution that delivers accurate reporting allows you to cut that cost.

• Reducing Call Volume: Having a customer service solution that provides clients with self-help capabilities and online ticket updates reduces the need to have them call in. These tools allow administrators to optimize their existing customer service teams.

• Automation: Using workflows to automate certain tasks reduces the burden on the team allowing them to focus on service delivery.
  
• Configuration: Having a system that can be self administered means not relying on consultants to make simple changes to configuration.

Truthfully, any feature boasted by an online customer service management system is a tool towards cutting costs. And any job performed by that platform is a responsibility that no longer needs to fall on human effort alone. The question to ask is whether or not your platform meets your needs and the needs of your department in particular.

Experience Customer Service Management Benefits with Vivantio

Finding the right platform for your customer service management benefits multiple aspects of your company. While it is tempting for companies to find in-house solutions to these problems themselves, the process of doing so often consumes money, time, and energy at a rate that small businesses cannot adequately handle. For this reason, many choose to outsource the job to an experienced partner like Vivantio.

Vivantio's powerful platform offers both internal and external customer service and support. We enable effortless operations via our customer service management solutions. Let us empower your teams so they can focus on elevating the customer experience.

For more than two decades, Vivantio has been helping clients optimize their service organizations by leveraging a unified service management platform. To find out how Vivantio can help you with your customer service management benefits, contact our team today or register for a free demo.

In a world where customer service has become increasingly important. It's more vital than ever to have a customer service management strategy in place.

Using a customer service management platform makes the difference in how customers can connect to your brand. In fact, 95% of customers said that quality customer service makes them feel more connected to a company.

If you're on the fence about using a customer service management platform, look at these customer service management examples to see how  technology is improving the customer experience.

Examples of How Technology is Improving Customer Service Management

Various software and tools can be leveraged within your customer service management strategy to improve the customer experience. Here are a few examples of how technology is improving the ways businesses can manage the customer service experience.

Self-Service Portals

Not all customers want to wait on the phone for answers to their most important questions. This is where a self-service portal comes into play. Self-service portals make it easier for customers to find the answers to the questions they need easily. 

Self-service portals are websites that offer up both information and resources which empower users to find answers they need to resolve their issues. By collecting relevant information and resources in one place, users can troubleshoot existing issues before needing to reach out. On top of that, they can create tickets and review self-help articles to reduce call volume and optimize customer experience. 

If they can’t find what they are looking for in the self-help articles, they can then continue to log a ticket or make a service request to get dedicated support. The self-service portal can capture specific information based on a type of request to pass along to your customer service team to help them route the ticket and expedite resolution.

Third-Party CRM Software and Sales Tools

Another example of how technology is improving the customer experience is its ability to integrate customer service management platforms with other existing customer relationship management (CRM) softwares and sales tools, such as:

• SalesForce
• Zoho
• Monday
• HubSpot

When customer service integrates with CRM software, businesses can completely view the customer journey. From start to finish, customer service representatives can see every touchpoint a customer has had with your company. This makes achieving a 360-degree view of your customers and providing them with the best customer service possible.

Case Management Capability

Case management allows customer service representatives to see every customer interaction in one place. This way, they can provide a more cohesive customer experience by having all the information they need in one spot.

What's more, case management gives businesses the ability to create workflows and processes that are tailored to their specific needs. This means customer service representatives can work more efficiently and resolve complex and simple customer issues faster.

For example, if you're a customer service representative who regularly deals with service delivery, you can create a workflow that includes all the steps necessary to handle the process. This allows you to ensure that each service delivery is handled consistently and efficiently, saving you time and money.

Data Collection Tools

Data collection tools allow businesses to get insights into what customers like and don't like about their experience.

Data collection tools, such as surveys, social media, analytics, registration and subscriptions, can help businesses identify areas where they need to improve. For example, if you notice that many customers are unhappy with your service delivery or the sales process, you can use this information to make changes to your process. Being able to pinpoint where and when issues arise in your existing processes can help you tailor and build a better way to work.

With data collection, you can be sure that you're making the changes that will have the biggest impact on your business. Predictive analysis becomes possible in that once you have collected enough data, you can predict and learn behavior. When a certain kind of request comes in, you’ll know how to jump in to answer. By asking questions in your self-service portal, you can even use existing interactions to provide possible solutions to customers.

Improved Contract Management Systems 

One of the most frustrating and outdated aspects of customer service is the contract process. Customer service management platforms have made this process obsolete by offering better contract management systems.

With a contract management system, businesses can create and manage customer contracts in one place. Additionally, modern customer service management platforms allow users to create unique ticket types and categories which can assist in organizing and optimizing their processes. All of this adds up to customer service representatives being able to quickly find the information they need without having to search through multiple tickets.

Implement These Customer Service Management Examples with Vivantio

Technology is making customer service management more efficient and convenient through self-service, third-party CRM and sales tool integration, case management, data collection, and improved contract management . As a result, more businesses can take advantage of and improve their customer experiences.

If you're ready to get on board, Vivantio, a customer service management platform, offers a wide variety of customer service management features that were explained before, such as:

• Case management
• Automatic customer surveys
• Consolidated customer views
• Countless third-party integrations

For more than two decades, Vivantio has been helping clients optimize their service organizations by leveraging a unified service management platform. To find out how Vivantio can help you put these customer service management examples into practice, contact our team today or register for a free demo.

The results are in. Customer service is a major driver of a company’s sales and revenue potential. About 70% of a customer’s journey is based on how well they’re being treated. If you're running a growing company, you can't afford to continue utilizing only manual customer relations like speaking on the phone or through a chat portal.

With customer service management, you can invigorate the growth of your company by improving the way your customers interact with you. This can result in higher retention rates and help your brand become a household name in your industry. 

So, what is customer service management and why exactly is it important for companies to implement. Below, we’ll provide you with all the answers.

What Is Customer Service Management?

At its core, customer service is the act of taking care of a customer's needs. This could be handling service requests, addressing their concerns, or providing a solution to their pain points.

Customer service management is the process of handling customer service requests and inquiries in an automated way. This can be done through various means such as customer support software, live chat, phone support, or email.

Quality customer service management systems will automate most of the manual tasks associated with customer service so that your team can focus on more important tasks.

For example, a typical customer service management system will allow you to:

• Facilitate customer self-help, reducing the burden on the service team for simple tasks
• Optimize service delivery through workflow, business rules and automation
• Create a knowledge base of FAQs that customers can reference
• Assign and route tickets to the appropriate team member
• Monitor performance metrics to identify areas for improvement

Why Your Business Needs Customer Service Management

Customer service management is a critical component of any organization's growth. If you're new to the concept, here is why you should use a customer service management platform for your company.

Are You Customer-Centric or Internally Centric?

Using a customer service management platform promotes correlates into running a customer-centric organization. A customer-centric organization is one that focused on the best interest of the customer. This includes continuously listening to customers and adapting to their demands instead of chasing profits.

On the other hand, internally centric organizations are more interesting in improving their bottom lines than servicing their customers. Let’s use an example. Let’s say you are in a clothing store and approach the rgister with your items.

Instead of greeting you or asking how they could help, the sales associate asks if you would like to opt into one of their upcoming promotions. This is a clear example of a company that bases their customer service model on maximizing profits instead of customer satisfaction. 

An ideal customer service management system will help you keep track of every customer interaction and ensure that they're all positive, allowing you to focus on making your current customers happy. 

The Importance of Customer Service to B2B Organizations

Customer service provided by a CSM platform provides a variety of lucrative benefits for B2B organizations. The first benefit is customer retention. 

It costs more to acquire a new customer than it does to retain an existing one. If you're not focusing on improving your company's customer service, you're missing out on a major opportunity to create continuity in your sales pipeline.

Next, quality customer service undoubtedly improves customer satisfaction. This leads to customers being more likely to recommend your products or services to others, which can help you acquire new customers through word-of-mouth marketing.

Happy customers tend to spend more money with the companies to which they're loyal. In fact, 93% of customers are willing to make repeat purchases with companies that offer exceptional customer service.

Customer service can also impact the lifetime value of incoming customers. The lifetime value is the total amount of money that a customer spends with your company over the course of their relationship with you.

Using a customer service management platform can help your business leverage continued service improvement to keep your customers satisfied and coming back for more. Finally, customer service has reputational consequences.

Just one bad customer service experience can lead to the loss of a customer. But that's not all—it can also damage your company's reputation, making it harder to acquire new customers.  Providing quality customer service can help you build a positive reputation that will make it easier to attract new business. 

Learn How Customer Service Management Can Impact Your Business

The importance of customer service management can’t be overstated. If you don’t optimize your company’s customer service, your competitors will take advantage. Using a customer service management platform will ultimately allow you to streamline your customer service operations, boost satisfaction and improve your customer experience. This will have a massive positive impact on your bottom line. 

For more than two decades, Vivantio has been helping clients optimize their service organizations by leveraging a unified service management platform. To find out how Vivantio can help you understand what is customer service management is, contact our team today or register for a free demo.

The value of exceptional customer service is undeniable. People will stay loyal to companies that provide incredible customer service. If you’re running a growing organization, the first thing that needs to be evaluated is your customer service model. 

This is where customer service management (CSM) platforms come into play. These helpful solutions allow companies to use workflows to streamline operations, improve customer satisfaction, and boost brand loyalty. In the B2B space, customer service management platforms can make the greatest difference. 

Why is Customer Service Management Important?

The importance of customer service management comes down to customer-centricity. There are two types of companies: customer centric and internally centric. 

Customer centric companies value their customers and offer solutions that will benefit them, even if it's not in their best interest. Internally centric companies are more focused on making sales rather than meeting demands.

Customer service management platforms help companies embrace internal customer centricity. By streamlining critical customer service operations, organizations can better assist customers and improve satisfaction. Customer service management is also key for the following reasons:

Customer Service Management Heightens Customer Retention

Canceling a service is easy these days. With the click of a button, customers can end their subscription to your product or service unless there is a long term contract involved. To prevent this, you need to give customers a reason to stick around.

Utilizing a customer service management platform makes it easier for customers to get in touch with you and have their complex issues or requests resolved more quickly. As a result, they'll be more likely to continue using your product or service.

Customer Service Management Decreases Costs

The goal of any business is to increase profits while minimizing overhead costs. In the customer service department, this means reducing the time spent on each support case.

A customer service management platform allows agents to find answers to common customer questions quickly. This way, they can resolve support cases rapidly and move on to the next one.

Customer Service Management Platforms Can Improve Company Reputations

People are quick to share their experiences with a company, whether they’re good or bad. Approximately 67% of people will consider leaving an online review based on a positive experience. 

However, 40% of them will leave a bad review after an unsatisfactory experience. If you’re affected, new prospects won’t give your brand a second look. Since consumers perform a lot of research before settling on a business, strong customer testimonials and reputations are essential to continual business success. 

Regardless of the customer experience you provide, your customer base will have something to say about it online. Using a Customer Service Management platform will go a long way in building a positive company public reputation. 

By efficiently handing customer cases and automating accurate responses, companies can use CSMs to elevate their reputation and draw more of their target audience. 

Don’t Leave Room for Competitors

There’s no room for complacency in any industry. If you don’t continuously strive to improve your company, your competitors will quickly take advantage. It is said 89% of companies believe they compete with each other to deliver the best customer experience.

The same is true for customer service. If you don’t optimize your customer service department, your competitors will. They’ll attract your customers with promises of better support and quicker issue resolution. Optimizing your customer service department can be done by:

• Using live chat support to quickly address customer needs
• Providing self-help through customer service portals to allow customers to find answers to their problems without the need to contact the customer service team
• Proactively requesting customer feedback to improve customer service
• Personalizing each customer experience using CSM data
• Exceeding customer expectations with prompt and friendly service

Don't ignore the need to implement a customer service management platform. Your entire business may depend on it.

How CSM Technology Can Help Your Customer Service Team

A customer service management platform is a worthwhile investment for your customer service team. By streamlining important customer service operations,, CSM technology can also provide:

A 360 Holistic View of Every Customer

Keeping tabs on a customer throughout every customer service touchpoint is critical in meeting their needs and ultimately retaining them. This is only possible with a customer service management platform.

With a CSM system, you have all the information you need about a customer in one place. This information includes vital insights from your CRM, sales automation process, DevOps, and relevant financial information. 

Has their contract expired? Is a vital system down? Have they constantly complained about the same service?

With a customer service management platform, you can provide them with the best possible experience by addressing their individual needs, directing them to the right department, and eliminating customer service department silos in the process.

Fully Integrated Knowledge Base

Your customer service team can’t be expected to know the answer to every single customer question. However, they can be expected to know where to find the answer.

With a CSM system, you can provide your team with the knowledge they need to resolve support cases quickly. In addition, by automating common customer questions, you can free up your team's time so they can focus on more complex issues.

Omnichannel Interactions

Your customers should be able to reach you through their preferred channels, whether that’s via a self-help portal, email, phone, social media, or live chat.

A customer service management platform makes it possible for your team to interact with customers through multiple channels. This also includes using a self-help portal. Self-help portals allow customers to interact with your brand to find the answers to important questions. If they can’t find the answer, they can raise a ticket and get the help they need. 

As a result, they can provide the best possible experience, no matter how they choose to get in touch.

Predictive Analysis

A good customer service team is always looking for ways to improve. With a CSM system, you can use predictive analysis to find potential areas of improvement.

By analyzing customer interactions, you can identify patterns and trends. This way, you can prevent issues before they happen and keep every customer interaction positive.

Customer Service Centralization

A customer service management platform provides a centralized hub for all your departments that intersect with customer service, such as DevOps, IT, Finance, and HR. 

By placing tabs on all these interactions. , you can keep track of every customer interaction and make sure nothing falls through the cracks.

In addition, centralization makes it easier for your team to find the information they need. They can quickly resolve support cases and provide the best possible experience with everything in one place.

Insights and Analytics

A CSM system can provide valuable insights and analytics that you can use to improve your customer service. By tracking key performance indicators, such as first contact resolution rate and average handle time, you can identify areas of improvement.

In addition, you can use customer surveys to collect feedback and get a pulse on customer sentiment. This way, you can proactively address any issues and make sure your customers are happy.

Service Level Agreements (SLAs)

Manually, dealing with SLAs can be challenging, especially if each agreement is complex and unique. Using a customer service management solution can help organizations manage complex SLAs, get to customer responses faster, and fix unnecessary issues that can slow down the entire process. 

Learn More About Customer Service Management Platforms

If there were ever a way to automate operations to improve service efficiency, a CSM platform would be the perfect tool. Using a customer service management platform can help B2B organizations ultimately improve customer experiences.

If you’re operating in a competitive market where any slight advantage will prevail, using a CSM can help you elevate your customer experiences and take a competitive advantage. This is where Vivantio comes into play. 

Vivantio leverages a customer service management platform to help companies:

• Consolidate customer views into one central platform
• Automate the business process to improve efficiency and provide faster, better service
• To understand if they are truly providing excellent service through monitoring of SLAs and customer surveys
• Access helpful reports and analytics to improve customer service look for bottlenecks or areas where service can be improved

For more than two decades, Vivantio has been helping clients optimize their service organizations by leveraging a unified service management platform. To find out how Vivantio can help you take advantage of customer service management platforms, contact our team today or register for a free demo.

November 1, 2021 - Vivantio, a leading provider of customer service optimization software and solutions for demanding B2B service teams, has been named Best Customer Service Management Platform - USA by Acquisition International's Corporate Excellence Awards. The Corporate Excellence Awards were launched by CV Magazine to showcase companies and individuals that are committed to innovation, business growth, and providing the very best products and services to clients across a wide range of industries.

"Today, every business is a service business. Even traditional companies in industries like healthcare and energy/utilities are rapidly acknowledging their roles in ‘co-creating value’ with their customers," says Greg Rich, CEO for Vivantio. "Business leaders seeking a competitive advantage are realizing that they need to align their organizations so that customer service plays a central role in all their business activities. Vivantio continues to help thousands of users across multiple industries elevate their customers’ experience and I’m proud our company has been recognized as a leader in the field of customer service management platforms."

What sets Vivantio apart is that it empowers its customers to take charge of their service operation and deliver the best possible service experience to their customers. Implementation can be completed in a fraction of the time compared to other enterprise solutions, and through intuitive and easy configuration, not customization, system administrators are in full control of their service operations.

Vivantio is also one of the only solutions that have combined a native CRM module with ITSM processes into a platform designed to enhance and elevate customer support and experience. By leveraging these two technologies, all service teams can now make use of decades of proven best practice to elevate service across the enterprise, not just in IT.

The Corporate Excellence Awards are judged purely on merit with all potential winners assessed against multiple relevant criteria, including company performance over a given period of time, expertise within the industry, sector or region, previous accolades won, and client testimonials or recommendations.

More information on the award and how Vivantio keeps "Customer Service at the Centre" is available in the latest issue of Corporate Excellence Magazine found here.  

Learn more about our award-winning Customer Service Management platform by booking a demo today.

About Vivantio

Vivantio is a leading provider of customer service optimization software and solutions for demanding B2B service teams. By combining the power of enterprise-level software with the flexibility of a cloud-based solution, Vivantio is the only unified service management solution that empowers teams through rapid configurability enabling effortless operations and elevating the customer experience for future-ready businesses. 

Boston, MA, 27 July 2021 – Vivantio, a leading provider of customer service management solutions, is a finalist in the 2021 SaaS Awards Program in the category Best SaaS Product for Customer Services / CRM.

“It is an honor to make the SaaS Awards shortlist, which recognizes our team’s excellence and innovation in developing SaaS technologies,” said Vivantio CEO Greg Rich. “Being shortlisted underscores Vivantio’s position as a leading service management solution that elevates customer experience for a future-ready enterprise. By enabling a fast, configurable deployment with cloud-based flexibility, Vivantio empowers teams to simplify user experience, accelerate responsiveness and optimize for ongoing improvements that drive measurable business value.

Now in its sixth year of celebrating software innovation, the Software-as-a-Service Awards program accepts entries worldwide, including the US, Canada, Australasia, EMEA and UK.

Head of operations for the SaaS Awards, James Williams, said: “Just as SaaS technologies have been vital in pivoting organizational functions to respond to global crises, they will be essential as we look forward to returning to normal levels of productivity.

“The shortlisted candidates announced today, however, have made it through that first round. They represent truly innovative thinkers in the SaaS industry, whether they’re freshly-funded disruptors or established names.”

Final SaaS Awards winners will be announced on Tuesday 31 August 2021 and the program will return in Spring 2022. Hundreds of organizations entered, with international entries coming from North America, Canada, Australia, UK, Europe and the Middle East. To view the full shortlist, please visit: https://www.cloud-awards.com/2021-software-awards-shortlist/

Last year, entry fees donated from shortlisted entrants to the ‘Communication, Collaboration and Conferencing’ category raised $3,555 for the WHO’s COVID-19 Response Fund.

A sister program to the SaaS Awards, The Cloud Awards will soon accept submissions for a new 2021-22 program, continuing its recognition of excellence in cloud computing, with an October deadline.

Winners are selected by a judging panel of international industry experts. For more information about the Cloud Awards and SaaS Awards, please visit https://www.cloud-awards.com/.

About the SaaS Awards
The SaaS Awards is a sister program to the Cloud Awards, which was founded in 2011. The SaaS Awards focuses on recognizing excellence and innovation in software solutions. Categories range from Best Enterprise-Level SaaS to Best UX or UI Design in a SaaS Product.

About the Cloud Awards
The Cloud Awards is an international program which has been recognizing and honoring industry leaders, innovators and organizational transformation in cloud computing since 2011. The awards are open to large, small, established and start-up organizations from across the entire globe, with an aim to find and celebrate the pioneers who will shape the future of the Cloud as we move into 2022 and beyond. Categories include the Software as a Service award, Most Promising Start-Up, and “Best in Mobile” Cloud Solution.

About Vivantio
Founded in 2003, Vivantio is the only service management solution that enables quick configurability, empowers B2B service teams and elevates customer experience for a future-ready enterprise. By combining the comprehensive power of enterprise-level software with the flexibility of a modern cloud-based solution, Vivantio provides an intuitive, flexible and scalable unified service management platform that empowers businesses to achieve unparalleled service excellence. The award-winning platform scales to meet the complex business needs of large, multi-site organizations, to optimize workflows across several departments including IT, operations and customer service. Vivantio is a trusted partner offering cost-effective solutions through flexible licensing. 

Earlier this year, Vivantio's CEO Greg Rich spoke with TEC Analyst PJ Jakovljevc about customer service, technology and the "next normal" in CX (Customer Experience).  Here's an excerpt from that interview that originally appeared here from Technology Evaluation Centers. 

TEC: How do you view the impact of the pandemic on customer service management?

GR:  For most of our customers, there has been little impact as it pertains to service management. After all, we are a cloud provider, so it’s been business as usual. When it came to remote working, the largest pain for those customers was telephony: how do you maintain a service desk operation with everyone working remotely and handle large call volumes? And of course, call volumes went through the roof for IT Teams—people were working in environments that IT had no control over.  

But what we did see was a huge uptake in omnichannel support technologies in order to achieve reductions in call volumes and the ability to self-diagnose issues.
 
Like working from home (WFH), self-service is a technology that many people talk about, but hardly ever adopt. From the outside, it’s tough to really get a grasp on the value it might bring other than just providing another way to log a ticket. But it is far more than that.

Sophisticated self-service technologies provide access to tools, technology, and knowledge that can circumvent the need for a ticket to be logged in the first place. And, if it does get logged, it’s after a process of capturing further information about the issue that allows those tickets to be passed directly to the resolver group most equipped to resolve it, saving a huge amount of time.

For Vivantio customers that embraced self-service during COVID-19, there has been an overwhelming response of “Why didn’t we do this earlier?” Other technologies that rose to the forefront include integration with Teams and Slack. These tools became a lifeline in remote team working environments. Their chat capabilities, integrated with the service management platforms, became a new way for tech and customers to interact.
 
TEC: What software solutions and capabilities have been particularly helpful for your customers these days and how have they helped?
 
GR: Self-service/omnichannel technologies that provide end users with a more robust and enriched service is one. The other two are optimizing service and the ability to do more with less/reduce ticket times/reduce touchpoints. By implementing workflows, ticket routing, trigger rules etc., it allows the technology to make decisions based on the current situation/lifecycle of the ticket.
 
This means the ticket moves through the system far faster, reduces the workload on the team, and gets a resolution to the customer in a much shorter time. We have also seen an uptake in tech-to-tech chat within the solution. Given people are no longer in the same room and able to ask a colleague for help on a particular ticket, the chat feature keeps colleagues connected in real time.
 

TEC: How about some examples of metrics from your customers?
 
GR: We have seen customers, not only in the pandemic but also prior to it, who have been looking to adapt and mature significantly in their customer experience (CX) offerings. The pandemic has only exacerbated that need.
 
We have seen customers increase their capacity from 50 customer service tickets a day to 250 with the same staffing levels. Also, we’ve seen customers improving their on-boarding and termination processes to a single click from a former 27 min process and a 70% reduction in call volume as companies roll out omnichannel self service solutions. These have all been key for customers to pivot and adapt, especially during the pandemic.  

The Technology Aspects

TEC: You’ve been the cloud proponent for some time. Do you think that COVID-19 will be the final blow to on-premises software deployments?
 
GR: I do feel it will have an impact. The way I see it is that, for those still holding on to on-prem deployments, they are doing that for the following three reasons: 

1. They have already invested heavily in technology infrastructure and want a return on that investment;
2. They just don’t feel comfortable with SaaS (laggards); or
3. For compliance/regulatory/security and other reasons. (We recently had an enquiry from the United States Space Force who don’t actually have access to the internet!)

 
For the first two categories, I think COVID-19 has had an impact. For the first group, the need to embrace digital transformation as their entire workforce moves to a Work From Home environment makes access to on-premise systems a logistical nightmare. They either needed to invest heavily in VPN technologies which required huge setup and configuration costs or find SaaS alternatives. It would have been evident quickly that, for those staff members not needing access to line of business (LOB) systems, all the other technologies can easily be provided through SaaS providers.
 
For the second group, they were just pushed over the edge! Like many companies unsure if WFH or hybrid was something they wished to roll out through their business, COVID-19 took that decision away from them and they had to embrace it. Same for SaaS technologies. You see this particularly in education who have had to adapt quickly to switching to remote based systems.
 
Some companies have been smart about adoption too, not just looking to switch their on-prem platforms to SaaS solutions, but making use of Azure and Amazon to host hybrid platforms allowing them to move their infrastructure to the cloud, allowing them to keep the platform private.

TEC: Have you seen AI, bots, big data, or any other buzzword du jour technologies being critical these days?
 
GR: With our customers, I don’t see it so much. I guess it all comes down to service management maturity and how they can elevate service during this time. So, for us and our customers, omnichannel support has been key. But I have seen evidence in other companies—ones where their service operations are much larger (particularly call centers), and they have leveraged chat bots and AI to resolve issues at the point of contact.
 
Big data is huge though and I think this has been a learning point during COVID-19. Again, more pertinent at the call centers or huge service teams using big data and analytics to provide predictive customer insight to drive business outcomes. The ability to pre-empt a customer’s needs or even the ability to provide agents with customized information to personalize the customer’s experience is huge.
 
Also, on the other end of the scale with the smaller companies and AI and machine learning, even without big data, there are massive opportunities for efficiencies and improved service offerings in leveraging these technologies at an appropriate level for their customers and end users. Just adding head count is not an efficient way to expand and improve service, it is the intelligent use of these technologies alongside adoption of best practice that will allow teams to stand out, technology is not the silver bullet but an enabler.  

Predicting the “Next Normal” in CX

TEC: How do you envision customer service post-COVID, now with the hope of vaccines? What will be the "next normal" in CX, to your mind?
 
GR: It will take some time to trickle down but enhancing customer experience based on predictive analysis will become the new norm. How can we enrich the users’ experience and provide them with the best possible outcome based on what we already know? We have learned over the past few years that customer service and customer success are seen as pivotal in the customer lifecycle journey these days. Retention and growth are both driven by CX. The better that experience, the happier the customers.
 
In terms of the new norm, I would say it is the norm that would have happened in five years’ time. What COVID has done is accelerate digital transformation and the need for companies to mature in their CX to both internal and external users. Whether that may be adopting an internal cloud-first approach or ensuring their services are optimized to add value to their end users and customers.
 
Machine learning will be introduced to aid the intelligence and automation of interactions and insights within CX. This automation and insight from machine learning will allow companies to add more value to their customer interactions, improve the customer journey, and allow companies to realize greater value themselves from their customers or end users in increased adoption and loyalty.
 
One of the benefits to adopting Cloud technologies in the CX space (and others) is the ability to not have long term contracts so customers can move relatively frictionlessly. I think post COVID, as more companies adopt a cloud approach, vendors will be looking to tie the customers into longer relationship, not with contracts but with real demonstrable value. This is not just applicable to CX software vendors but also to the customers themselves—they need a CX toolset that enables increased value, loyalty, and advocacy of their customers. The ones who don’t evolve and mature will be left behind in the new norm.  

The full article can be found here.

The idea of a single view into the enterprise has existed for some time as a "holy grail" concept—not just for Customer Service teams, but for IT leaders, and managers looking for big-picture dashboards for better decision-making.

The trouble with realizing this concept has historically been an unreasonable investment in time and treasure to tear-down and rebuild vast enterprise systems. Today's fast-paced mergers and acquisitions activities only compound the technical challenges.

Because our team is 100% focused on Service organizations, we had a slightly different perspective—that has now delivered something of this long-awaited phenomenon. (At least as it impacts complex Customer Service Organizations.)

What does a Unified Service Management Platform look like?

The diagram below outlines how a unified service management platform can begin to provide visibility into customer-relevant data so that your Customer Service organization is equipped for maximum impact and success.

This type of solution can help your team better address all use cases, track and report on the KPIs essential to improved service, and tailor service provision at the individual customer level. This level of connectivity gives service and sales teams a holistic view across the enterprise.

A single view solves myriad problems.

Implementing a Unified Service Management Platform eliminates the need to have duplicate information in multiple systems. Current systems remain the “source of truth” for specific customer data but the integration allows the coherent usage of those sources and functionality across multiple systems.

Direct benefits include improvements such as:

• Support teams that can see the whole customer, not just an individual service/support request. This can have a profound impact on how issues are prioritized and resolved. Furthermore, this data can be used to “prompt” agents or drive workflows and system views.

• Gaining a holistic view of your service operation that can be used to preempt problems, manage hardware expirations, version control, and compliance.

• Providing definitive answers to questions such as: How long does a system outage take to resolve? What number of complaints does it generate? How does the length of a customer relationship relate to the number of support tickets generated? Who creates more tickets—a large or small customer? What is the ROI on our current service spend?

• Better enabling team members to support one another. Improving and speed customer resolution times. Providing management with a holistic view of the service operation to support proactive problem resolution.

Seeing is believing. Ask for proof.

If you are contemplating the value of a Unified Service Management Platform for your team, be sure you are working with a vendor who can back up their claims with case studies in environments like yours.

Vivanto's FLEXBridge™ solution is the key to pulling together disparate "sources of truth" into a single platform designed specifically for CS/CX organizations committed to excellence.

To learn more on about how Vivantio approaches a unified service management platform click here. 

Or you can request a live demo here. 

You've heard them before. You might have even thought it yourself at one time.  But be on the lookout for these 5 Customer Service fallacies ready to sink the unwary when thinking about a service management solution. 

1. "We're not really in the service business."

The term “service business” is going the way of terms like “internet-based business” or “online retail”—that is to say, the distinction is becoming irrelevant! The new reality is, every business is a “service business” today—even traditional companies in industries like healthcare and energy/utilities are rapidly acknowledging their roles in co-creating value with their customers.

2. "B2B Customers don't need a lot of fancy self-service options."

If you’re measuring what’s at-risk in economic/bottom-line terms, it’s clear to see that the risks of not prioritizing customer service are significant. B2B companies are often held to a higher standard across the board, as individual customers have a sense of their financial importance to your business. Service improvements in everything from telecommunications (the first mobile phones) to logistics (overnight document delivery) were spearheaded by the B2B economy, and customer service is no different. Thanks to the easy availability of information regarding alternate suppliers and the ubiquity of customer reviews, the stakes are higher than ever for providing great service—great value as your customers define it.

3. "Providing more self-service is out of our reach (and probably unnecessary anyway)."

In a recent survey of 1,000 B2B decision makers, lack of speed in interactions with their suppliers emerged as the number one pain point, mentioned twice as often as price. And digital solutions loom large in executives’ thinking as a way to make routine tasks more efficient. Some 86 percent of respondents said they prefer using self service tools for reordering, rather than talking to a sales representative.

4.“We could never get all our key systems linked to Customer Service without a huge IT investment.” 

You don’t have to overhaul your enterprise systems or leave yourself at the mercy of pricey consultants to benefit from a “Unified Service Management Platform” like Vivantio. With robust “out of the box” capabilities, Vivantio allows your team to configure processes, rather than solutions that require extensive custom coding. With a Unified Service Management Platform, you can give your CS team deep visibility into adjacent business data that lets them respond and resolve issues exponentially faster.

5. "We'd be better off investing our resources in finding new customers." 

The numbers say no. There is much greater ROI in keeping your customers happy. To start with, when it comes to sales, the probability of selling to an existing happy customer is up to 14x higher than the probability of selling to a new customer. Harvard Business Review says customers who had the best past experiences spend 140% more compared to those who had the poorest past experience.

Want to chart a better course?

Vivantio has been helping clients optimize their service organizations by leveraging a unified service management platform that help you avoid major Customer Service disasters. Learn more on how Service Optimization can benefit your business exponentially. 

Or even better, how about a brief, no-obligation, demo?