"As organizations strive to succeed in the age of the customer, business and IT professionals responsible for customer service struggle to understand changing customer behavior, re-engineer end-to-end business processes, acquire and deploy the appropriate supporting technologies, and lead and sustain the organizational changes required to make the transition to new ways of working."
Forrester Research Principal Analyst Kate Leggett’s introduction to her recent report “Navigate The Future Of Customer Service” sounds pretty daunting for customer service professionals, right?
The good news? We at SAP get to hear these pain points from our customers loud and clear all the times, so you’re definitively not alone.
The bad news? You have to do something about this – now! Customer expectations have never been higher, and, to quote from the same Forrester report:
“Nearly half of US online consumers (45%) will abandon their online purchase if they cannot find a quick answer to their questions; 66% say that valuing their time is the most important thing a company can do to provide them with good service.”
To tackle these constantly growing customer expectations we at SAP have doubled down our efforts to deliver several new features for our cloud-based customer service solutions, SAP Cloud for Service (formerly known as SAP Service OnDemand) and SAP Cloud for Social Engagement (formerly known as SAP Social OnDemand):
- Monetization of service interactions: Customer service agents can resolve customer issues faster, with the best resolution, by creating new quotes and sales orders from service tickets. In some cases, this means purchasing complementary products or replacing existing products with an offering that has a lower total cost of ownership or a higher return on investment. In addition, the feature recommends new solutions that provide users with the knowledge to exceed customer expectations and improve outcomes. Leveraging fast and flexible integration with SAP ERP, SAP Cloud for Service and SAP Cloud for Social Engagement provide these capabilities at a low cost and in short time frames.
- Seamless customer support through any channel: No matter where customer communication happens – email, phone, Web self-service portals, social media or chat – SAP Cloud for Service and SAP Cloud for Social Engagement can turn relevant conversations into service tickets. An updated call-to-resolution process with tighter computer telephony integration increases agent productivity by ensuring that customer service agents are provided with complete account and contact information. To further increase customer service efficiency, we’ve added more capabilities to the cloud support site. The web self-service portal now supports product registrations as well as business-to-consumer scenarios for end users. These features enable customers to take full control of their support inquiries and free up valuable resources in the customer service organization.
- Complete customer engagement through Social Media: As customer behavior is constantly evolving we saw the need to round out the variety of possible customer interaction channels in SAP Cloud for Social Engagement. Sending direct messages to customers on Facebook completes the list of engagement options with customers. Also, various enhancements to the social media customer profiles in SAP Cloud for Social Engagement allow the agents to become even more specific and focused in their interactions.
- Insight into Service performance: Citing from the same Forrester report above,
“Analytics is improving end-to-end customer experiences”.
The basic idea is that service teams need to understand cost and customer satisfaction metrics throughout the entire customer journey in order to determine the most critical areas for improvement. To that end, we’ve worked hard to advance the embedded analytics by adding more data sources from across the enterprise. And, additional pre-built reports allow service managers to take advantage of a whole range of insightful metrics across all interaction channels.
- Modernized user experience: We fundamentally believe that users of our cloud-based solutions have to enjoy working with our apps. Or, as one of our customers using SAP Cloud for Service puts it:
“When the agents find a system easy to use, that's going to translate into their interactions with customers, and we're finding that to be true today.”.
Intuitive usability and a fresh, modern look are therefore paramount. To that end, our UX team has spent a great deal to modernize the look and feel of all solutions across the SAP Cloud for Customer (formerly known as SAP Customer OnDemand) portfolio:
In a nutshell, the 1305 releases of SAP Cloud for Service and SAP Cloud for Social Engagement deliver many new features and enhancements that support companies in their strategy to become customer-centric enterprises. And since it’s Cloud, these exciting enhancements are available at no additional cost for existing subscribers.
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.
- SAP Managed Tags: