Today’s customers are hard to please. Value-savvy, socially engaged, and better informed, their demands are higher than ever before. When it comes to customer support, they want choice in the way they engage with your organization. Some prefer to call your 1-800 number. Others choose to send a quick e-mail, use live chat on your website or post a question on Social Media channels such as Facebook or Twitter. What’s common across all of these channels is the ‘full-service’ aspect of customer service, i.e. interaction with a service agent is required to resolve a service issue.
As consumers we tend to become more and more liberated in our everyday lives, and the idea of ‘self-service’ becomes increasingly prevalent in many aspects. Extending this approach to customer service is a natural progression of the traditional high-touch model. What if I could sneak a peek into the status of a service ticket, browse through the company's knowledge base myself, or quickly create a new service ticket on my own?
Micah Solomon, a customer service and marketing speaker, strategist and author, highlights the desire for self-service as one of six major trends in customer service and even goes so far as to predict that
“companies that ignore (self-service), pursue it reluctantly, or violate the basic laws of its implementation will be left in the dust.”
We at SAP have worked hard to make sure that our customers can satisfy this desire and are launching a new cloud-based self-service support portal, named SAP Customer OnDemand Support Portal.
Figure 1: SAP Customer OnDemand Support Portal
This new solution provides your customers with the choice they expect from you. It allows your customers to get hold of your service organization without the need to interact with an agent, by simply using a branded web page (Figure 1) to create a new service ticket, to look up status of existing tickets (Figure 2), or to browse your knowledge base to find a possible solution themselves (Figure 3).
Figure 2: List of existing service tickets
Figure 3: Let your customers search for solutions in your knowledge base
And to make it easy for your customer service reps to respond to support portal requests, we’ve neatly integrated the portal with our cloud-based multichannel customer service solutions, SAP Social OnDemand and SAP Service OnDemand. Incoming tickets from the Support Portal are added to the ticket queue just like those from any other communication channel, enabling straightforward and fast ticket handling for your service agents.
What’s new about this is the consumerized user experience, both for your customer and for your service agents, which revamps the traditional portal approach. And rich customization capabilities ensure that the look and feel of your company's support portal matches your Corporate Identity.
With the SAP Customer OnDemand Support Portal, your customers can now take full control over their relationships with companies. Micah Solomon highlights Customer Empowerment as another key trend in customer service:
“(Your customers) are expecting businesses to respect that sense of empowerment—and they lash out at those that don’t. They expect that your company will make itself easy to contact and will respond to their comments at a high and thoughtful level.”
Show your customers that you understand and accept their desire for empowerment and offer them an easy way to do business on their terms. Putting the ‘C’ back in Customer Service will bring you a big step towards every company's top priority: maximum customer satisfaction.
If you want to learn more about SAP’s cloud solutions for Customer Service, feel free to reach out to me @kaipetzelt or visit us at www.sap.com/cloud.