Customer experience optimization involves adopting a customer-centric mentality with a focus on using data to improve your interactions with customers across all channels, seeking a deeper understanding of their needs and to enhance the journey across all touchpoints. 

How would we define a customer-centric mentality? 

Customer centricity is the ability to understand consumers and make business decisions based on their needs. It’s putting the customer at the center of everything you do.

So how then do we improve the customer experience?

Improving customer experience comes in many forms, including:

• Meeting customer expectations.
• Increasing customer engagement.
• Surprising users (in a good way).
• Individualized or personalized experiences.
• Helping users navigate to where they want to go more quickly.
• Providing novel or new experiences.
• Speeding up transactions.
• Reducing confusion.

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What affects your Service Desk’s image in customer experience?

When users feel that they are not getting the appropriate level of (functional, technical, or informational) support from the Service Desk, this function can appear to be more of a liability than an asset. Important reasons for this perception can include:

• Not setting proper expectations with users concerning service desk customer service functions, which in turn leads to users forming their own opinion of what the service desk does; usually this includes handling a lot more support than the service desk is officially tasked to do.
• Unclear definition of collaboration between organizational business objectives and the service desk related to customer service and support functions (who handles what function and at which tier or level).

What is the key to building a valuable Service Desk?

With the right guidance, the Service Desk can transition from being seen as a liability to becoming an asset to organizations and provide top-notch customer service. However, for that to happen, three important components have to be in place:

1. Necessary executive support must be obtained for the Service Desk. This involves the financial, managerial, and technological support needed to facilitate the Service Desk in providing high levels of customer service.
2. Service Desk responsibilities must be clearly communicated to customer service agents as well as to end-users. This clarifies user expectations of the level of customer service the Service Desk can provide on issues.
3. Clear end-user expectations must be defined in alignment with business and technology goals. This is especially true for organizations engaged in ERP (SAP, Oracle, or Lawson), Shared Services and Business Transformation initiatives.

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7 steps to optimize Service Desk customer service and support

Over time, the typical IT Help Desk has been challenged to change into a Service Desk, capable of providing an increasing range of customer service and support services to both internal and external stakeholders. This has in turn led to a business Return on Investment (ROI) focus rather than the IT-centric focus of previous Help Desks.

As a result, the value proposition for Service Desks has expanded to include enhanced functionality, such as handling Shared Services tier-oriented escalation, complex change requests, service level management, metrics, basic portal navigation and postproduction support functions for ERP implementations.

When planned and executed properly, the following 7 steps can help both private and public sector Service Desks enhance their customer service and support functions and become assets to their organizations:

1. Strategic Alignment

Aligning Service Desk functions with your organization’s operational and service management goals and developing a cohesive customer service strategy can enable Service Desks to optimize procedures, reduce costs and improve customer service metrics. This is particularly applicable to Service Desks providing customer service for ERP and Shared Services projects.

2. Empowering Service Desk agents for customer advocacy

Training all Service Desk agents in customer service skills and empowering them to transition from a ‘customer service’ to a ‘customer advocate’ mindset. Usually, agents think of themselves as serving the organizations they work for and not the actual customer they are assigned to help.

To enable these important customer-facing resources to make the transition from customer service representative (to their employers) to becoming Customer Champions, organizations must change how they are seen within the organization and how they see themselves. By doing this, the Service Desk staff is enabled to take on customer issues and navigate them through resolution.

3. FCR Maximization

Maximizing First Call Resolution (FCR) by providing initial assessment of all incidents and escalating to second-level support when required. Identifying common issues and documenting successful resolution procedures in FAQs available to agents can improve FCR while facilitating increased employee self-service, resulting in lower costs and improved customer service.

4. Clear Escalation

Defining and communicating clear and consistent escalation procedures. Many Service Desks operate on a multi-tier problem resolution system. Defining clear escalation procedures for problems can reduce problem resolution time; enhance inter-tier collaboration and deliver an improved customer service experience to callers. This is especially important for Service Desks handling complex support (such as SAP or Oracle ERP and Shared Services Projects).

5. Automation

Providing the strategy, tactical steps and tools for process automation and enhanced self-service. In utilizing telephone, email, portal and other related mechanisms, Service Desks can lower costs through process automation and self-service while improving customer service and facilitating multi-tier cooperation.

6. Frequently Asked Questions

Developing FAQs for different problems and posting them in a central, easily accessed location (portal, SharePoint site etc.). This can improve self-service, help in determining root causes for common incidents and build an advanced knowledge base for continuous learning. Designing, maintaining and building knowledge bases for increased future self-service can also significantly expedite the transition to Centers of Excellence (COEs) while continuously improving customer service standards.

7. Service Desk Integration

Integrating customer service operations, consolidation of Service Desks (as applicable) and alignment of organizational customer service initiatives can deliver financial savings and improve process efficiencies, since both groups require similar training, toolsets, processes, and automation capabilities. In addition, providing standard reports can keep customers well-informed.

Adopting a holistic Service Desk strategy centered on improving customer service can delight customers and end-users while enhancing process efficiency and lowering support costs. A customized evaluation of your organization’s Service Desk strategy and operations can be extremely beneficial in uncovering and taking advantages of new areas of opportunity for the future. To enhance your Service Desk, consider icorp as your solution. Explore more on our website!