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2 min read

Do You Treat Your Best Customers the Same as Your Worst Customers?

By Staff Writer on 7/21/21 11:17 AM

If you're using one of the big "standard-issue" service management platforms. You might be forced into some very costly Customer Service practices.

For B2B companies, in particular, it is critical to be able to segment the allocation of your firm’s time and attention to your most valuable customers. The issues might include being able to address each customer with individual rules and to accommodate dynamic re-prioritization.

B2B customer journeys often grow complex because they must accommodate the special needs of small percentages of the client base.

Better connectivity and flexibility to the rescue

From a technology and process perspective, segmenting Customer Journeys into standard and specialty tracks can minimize complexity for a majority of clients,

resulting in easier journeys for clients and significantly lower costs. Additionally, customers can realize economies of scale as multiple large complex relationships are facilitated in similar ways to many smaller relationships. Being able to dynamically shift workloads and route customer service traffic without changing the ”sources of truth” or access rules is another way that a flexible Service Optimization Solution can support the kind of transformative processes required.

From a technological standpoint, a solution that can seamlessly integrate across the whole enterprise is essential. In particular, finding solutions that can accomplish this with a minimum of coding and work-arounds will not only save you money, but will help ensure the timely success of your initiative.

Ask your CS/CX platform vendor these essential questions

  • How much will you be able to accomplish in-house?

Don’t leave yourself at the mercy of consultants. The more capabilities that exist “out of the box” the better. Look for solutions that allow your team to configure processes, rather than solutions that require extensive custom coding. Solutions that empower your administrators to make decisions and changes save costs and delays of third-party reliance.

  • How quickly can you adapt the solution to evolving customer or business needs?

Here too, solutions that require custom coding every time you make a change to your system may be cumbersome. What happens as your customer base evolves...or as systems outside of Customer Service change? Look for solutions that allow for simple interface adjustments vs. prolonged customizations.

  • Does your solution allow you to work independent of other teams’ solutions, supporting the necessary autonomy to evolve?

Look for relevant integration capabilities that are easy to understand and develop so that you’ll have maximum flexibility in creating a more rounded solution. (Be careful! Many current technology solutions fall short here. )

Read to learn more?  Why not schedule a free demo and see how Vivantio can elevate your service? 

 

Topics: ITSM ESM Customer Service Optimization flexbridge Unified Service Management Platform CSAT Improvement csm
2 min read

What if you could connect 100% of your CSM, ESM, or ITSM data sources to your service teams?

By Staff Writer on 6/9/21 11:45 AM

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.

Vivantio-unified-platform-tran

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

 

Topics: ITSM ESM Customer Service Management flexbridge APIs Unified Service Management Platform
2 min read

3 Benefits of Managing Your Support Teams on a Multi-Tenant Service Management Platform

By Staff Writer on 6/19/18 9:00 AM

SERVICE MANAGEMENT SOFTWARE ISN’T EXCLUSIVELY FOR IT.

With the standardization of many IT processes, there are many services that provide management solutions to match the needs of your IT teams. But there are other teams that provide key business support. What exactly is stopping them from using the same platform to improve their workflows?

There are many practical reasons for separating your support teams and siloing operations. Many options are great at separating data, but fail to address each teams’ specific needs and workflows. IT will naturally resolve requests differently from compliance or HR.

That being said, your support teams don’t have to be siloed. They will benefit from having a centralized area to coordinate, standardize and automate work. Multi-tenant platforms can provide specific benefits to your operations. Let’s look at a few of them.

 

1. CONSOLIDATED SERVICE REPORTING

Most teams run their own reports, but analyzing a single group does not provide full insight into the overall service output. Departments often work independently of each other, which results in non-standard reporting. This places a burden on your executives when trying to make decisions from unrelated data sources. Collaborative work between departments also often goes unreported. Interdepartmental tasks are mostly handled through email with no method to analyze data associated with each action. This prevents analysis of any standard workflows that involve multiple teams.

Multi-tenant platforms simplify reporting standards to better determine team and organization KPIs. CIOs can benefit from having both a high-level view over each department’s performance and the ability to dive deeper into individual metrics.

 

2. IMPROVED SERVICE MAINTENANCE

Integrations commonly play a large part in many effective service management platforms. They are often used to connect disparate systems in order to get deeper analytics and metrics around your service operations. An example would be a development team that uses Jira integrating with their service management tool to determine which changes lead to an influx of service tickets.

When managing multiple systems for various support teams, the effort of upkeep between all these integrations can become expensive and complicated. Multi-tenant solutions eliminate that risk by offering a single avenue with which to link your various assets together.

 

3. MORE COST-SAVINGS

Many service management platforms will charge on a user-by-user basis through licenses. You might think that more users on one system would drive up costs, but, in fact, individual license costs will often decrease. Multi-tenant platforms will often offer more flexible pricing around their licensing models, especially when overall user counts increase. Effectively blending together named and concurrent licenses to fit the needs of your business will also add to your overall cost-savings.

 

CONCLUSION

In closing, multi-tenant solutions have clear advantages over separate platforms by providing enhanced visibility over organizational performance, an ease of maintainability, and a lower operating cost. These platforms provide the building blocks to design a custom solution per team, while hosting all the data in the same area.

Topics: Service Management SITS ESM Multi-Tenancy