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? 

Let's start with two surprising statistics:

1. Slow response is the #1 deal-breaker: 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.)
2. Today's B2B customers prefer instant DIY tools: 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 tasks like reordering, rather than talking to a sales representative.
   

   Smartly leveraging all your data and content assets to optimize your customer service ecosystem

   To drive better engagement and truly transform customer experience (CX), it's critical to make as much helpful—and current—data-driven information available. (Ideally, in real time.)

   Customers will be happy to interact with premium content that you can deliver via self-service such as video presentations and training.

   Of course this means gaining secure and controlled visibility and access into enterprise solutions that live outside the traditional realm of Customer Service platforms.

   Expanding your customer service horizons to drive robust self-service options

   Tapping the power of a solution like Vivantio—supported by our FLEXBridge™ rapid integration platform—quickly connects your customers to vital real-time resources in a way that drives real customer satisfaction and instant self-service performance.

   How are you measuring up in the self-service evolution?

   Currently, there’s a wide spectrum of adoption of Customer Service Optimization powered by today’s best technology. This spectrum ranges from “pre-digital” organizations—all the way up to advanced CX practitioners who are leveraging the power of AI to anticipate the needs of their customers and head-off potential problems long before their customers become aware of them. (See table below.)

   

Determining where you are, today, and developing a strategy for advancement can be greatly assisted with the help of an experienced partner. Especially one who can share—and amplify—your vision.

If you're ready to accelerate your self-service efforts, speak to one of Vivantio's experts today to discover what's possible with a short timeframe and a reasonable investment.

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. 

In the old view, a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system was used to house data about customers that could be tapped by sales and service organizations to support their efforts. Other systems—with varying degrees of connectivity and access—might house other customer data relating to things like credit terms, orders in-production, contracts, etc.

While some technologically advanced enterprises have tied more of these data sources directly to their customer-facing teams, there is still opportunity for radical improvements in transparency and access—with the aim of improved customer service and satisfaction.

The value of a Unified Service Management Platform

The concept of a single view into the enterprise has existed for some time, but remains something of a stretch goal for most B2B companies who face challenges such as growth through M&A (thereby inheriting disparate IT solutions), large or multi-national companies whose sprawling operations remain siloed, multi-brand/product companies, etc.

Fortunately, for forward-thinking service organizations, there are technology platforms that can—today—provide needed connectivity and visibility into a Service organization (and many of its adjacent systems) in a comprehensive manner.

Visibility and access—without an ERP overhaul

Vivantio's FLEXBridge integration platform offers users a single, shared back-end architecture and consistent user interface across all integrations— while providing centralized reporting and management. FLEXBridge opens up the Vivantio platform to meet future integration possibilities with other vendors—and customer solutions, whether cloud-based on on-premises.

This type of solution can help your team

• better address all use cases
• track and report on the KPIs essential to improved service
• tailor service provision at the individual customer level

This isn't just for consumer-driven businesses

Today, these consultants suggest that “even traditional business-to-business players in sectors such as chemicals and steel [need to make] bold moves to build dynamic shared digital ecosystems around customer needs.”

Several ways to leverage an "über API" to optimize your customer service

There are several ways a Vivantio/FLEXBridge solution can quickly integrate your solutions—both cloud-based and on-premises tools. Here are three examples:

To learn more or request a live demo, click here.

Today, every business is a service business. The future success of one’s business is tied to customer experience. Now available on demand, Vivantio Vice President of Technology Andrew Stevens presented a 35-minute webinar showcasing Vivantio’s new enhancement, FLEXBridge™, which allows for seamless integration with virtually every other essential tool for a complete customer experience ecosystem.

Watch it now on demand. 

As part of the complete customer experience ecosystem, Vivantio's Unified Service Management Platform integrated with FLEXBridge enables B2Bs to:

• Gain comprehensive visibility into virtually all data that touches any part of the Customer Journey
• Use no-code technology to simplify bi-directional data integration and mapping
• Track and report on the KPIs essential to improved service
• Tailor service provision at the individual customer level

Boston MA (May 5, 2021) -Vivantio, a leading provider of customer service optimization software and solutions, is launching FLEXBridge™, a new integrations platform that facilitates connections between Vivantio’s Unified Service Platform and other line-of-business applications. FLEXBridge allows information from applications commonly used in enterprise service management, customer service management and IT to be made available safely and securely within Vivantio’s Service Management tool.

“With the integration of FLEXBridge, Vivantio continues to showcase its leadership and innovation in the B2B customer service software space,” said Andrew Stevens, Vice President of Technology. “As businesses grow and service management is increasingly digitized, there is a strong need for all related service management and delivery tools to be tightly integrated. FLEXBridge was designed for demanding B2B service teams who prioritize delivering world-class service to their customers.”

FLEXBridge serves as the core of Vivantio’s Unified Service Platform, allowing information from disparate customer service systems within an organization to be shared safely and securely. This new integration will reduce the amount of time, human resources and capital it takes to fulfill customer service requests, resulting in higher customer satisfaction and reduced costs for B2B firms.

Of the many benefits FLEXBridge offers, it is:

• Easy to use: Bridges to other systems are created and maintained using a simple wizard-based process
• Centralized: All administration, monitoring and maintenance is carried out via the web-based admin portal, even when using on-premises agents
• Extensible: Unlike other vendors, the FLEXBridge platform isn’t limited to “well-known” tools – support is available for connecting to in-house developed, legacy and on-premises tools
• Cost-effective: Customers can configure any number of bridges (subject to the bridge type being available within their product tier) without additional cost
• Out of the box: Bridges will include links to CRM tools such as Salesforce, MDM software such as Microsoft InTune, JAMF, and Ninja RMM, and IAM solutions such as Azure and Okta

The innovation of Vivantio’s FLEXBridge platform further underscores that the key to achieving business success is through Service Optimization. Service Optimization is the ability to glean coherent insight and achieve the most efficient use of processes and information—across all disciplines and teams—to provide real business efficiency and optimal service delivery.  To learn how to apply Service Optimization to the latest evolution of business service, please read Vivantio’s latest report here. 

About Vivantio

Founded in 2003, Vivantio is a leading provider of customer service optimization software and solutions for demanding B2B service teams. 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 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.