Given the emergence of digital technologies, customer expectations are evolving rapidly. It’s imperative for organisations to keep pace with ever-evolving expectations to maintain their market position and ensure profitability. So much so that customer service is the key differentiator that sets successful organisations apart.
A Forrester report highlights that brands with superior customer experience bring in 5.7 times more revenue than laggards. A similar finding suggests that 96% of customers say customer service is essential in their choice of loyalty to a brand.
Clearly, constantly reviewing and improving customer service needs to take precedence in your business strategy. This is where Business Process Management (BPM) can add value. By helping you drive improvements at the process level, BPM can help you ensure significant improvement in customer service.
How BPM elevates your customer service
We look at five ways how BPM can help improve your entire customer experience:
1. Focus on value-adding activities: A quick way to enhance customer service is by analysing processes at the task level to see the value they add to the process. Each task in the process can be classified into either of the three categories: customer-value-adding (CVA), business-value-adding (BVA) and non-value-adding (NVA). CVAs are the tasks that add value to the processes that directly affect customer satisfaction. To understand CVAs, consider the tasks for which customers are willing to pay. BVAs are the tasks that add value to the business. Think of tasks related to compliance and regulation. Lastly, NVAs are tasks that don’t add any value to the customers or the business.
A BPM tool that automatically shows the NVAs in your customer processes proves to be a game changer. Using this data, you can eliminate the non-value-adding activities, which helps you free up your time to concentrate on activities directly linked with customers.
2. Identifying Low-Rating Customer Processes: With process mapping and analysis, you can get insights into customer processes with low ratings. Closely evaluating these processes will help you understand the factors contributing to poor customer ratings. Fixing these pain points will help you see measurable results. These findings can also be used and applied to all customer processes.
3. Improving Customer Query Handling: The efficiency of customer service operations depends on a mix of human and defined processes. In the absence of clear documentation, customer calls are not handled effectively. This negatively impacts the customer experience. With BPM, you can standardise your processes related to customer records, complaints, etc., and make them easily accessible to employees. This empowers customer service representatives to address customer queries and issues effectively and even offer a personalised service experience to customers.
4. Removing service delays: By helping you identify and eliminate process bottlenecks and non-value-adding activities, such as repetitive tasks, double handling, etc., BPM removes service delays and automatically improves the efficiency of the customer service processes and operations. Elimination of process waste also helps in the proper allocation of resources, which helps to fix any lag in the service.
5. Customer Service Process Automation: Using BPM, you can get insights into tasks in customer processes that are information-intensive and highly manual. You can then understand which of these tasks are suitable for automation and can be run without the requirement of human touch. Automating these tasks also helps to eliminate any human errors that may occur in traditional customer service processes. For example, customer ticket allocation, query segmentation, call allocation, etc. Using automation for such processes also improves staff efficiency, as they can focus on priority tasks.
Choosing the Right Business Process Management Software
Done right, BPM can play a crucial role in helping you fill the gaps in the customer processes and increase the efficiency of your customer service. A lot depends on selecting the right BPM software.
End-to-end BPM software like PRIME BPM comes with an in-built methodology and is based on quality management principles, such as Lean Six Sigma, that helps to create standardised and accurate process maps for your customer service processes in minutes. Using these maps, you can quickly identify process bottlenecks. It also comes with an in-built analytics engine that automatically shows the percentage of customer-value-adding, business-value-adding, and non-value-adding tasks in the process.
PRIME BPM also enables a centralised repository for all customer processes, which proves valuable in having a single source of truth for customers. Furthermore, the software has a low-code, no-code automation module to get you started on your automation journey.
Want to know more? Click here to know the full range of capabilities offered by the end-to-end PRIME BPM software.
Wish to try how PRIME BPM helps you enhance your customer service? Get access to a free license of PRIME BPM Premium.
