“The customer service market pays too much attention to the participation layer”

The customer service market focuses too much on the receipt or participation layer, and will eventually be automated to a large extent through online self-service or AI chatbots. On the contrary, companies should pay more attention to “middle-station chaos” and cross-departmental coordination to truly improve customer experience.

This is the view of John Ball, who was appointed as the Senior Vice President and General Manager of ServiceNow’s Customer Workflow Business Unit in December last year. Ball joined the company from Salesforce. He was recently responsible for the supplier’s AI Einstein platform, but also has 25 years of experience in customer service, AI, and analytics.

As we recently discussed with ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott, customer and employee involvement is the key to a supplier’s organic growth strategy. The main product ServiceNow offers to the market is workflow, a platform that allows companies to coordinate and automate tasks across multiple departments to “get the job done.” Ball considers the customer workflow business as a key driver of growth as part of it. He believes that improving middle-office operations through the Now platform can improve customer and agent experience.

Ball explanation:

What I see in the customer service market is that the market and all suppliers are obsessed with what I call the participation layer, which is basically the receipt of requests. For example: I have a question, what is my order, status, etc. But they did not actually follow up to provide an end-to-end customer experience, which requires what I call operations.

If you consider a task that is not super simple, you must arrange a series of tasks to complete the work. If you consider the participation layer, the receipt of requests, it will increasingly turn to online self-service or support by AI chatbots.

Yes, this is very important. You need to meet the customer where they need it, but this is the place where they request to enter the black hole, the middle office, where all these different departments are talking to each other via email, Slack, chat , Phone-this is the image of the swivel chair, this is where the customer experience collapses.

ServiceNow promotion

Ball believes that ServiceNow is in a unique position to address this challenge, given the company’s workflow proposition. The company has long believed that its single data model and platform-platform approach means that it can help buyers coordinate the work of multiple business functions, which is clearly a good response to this customer service challenge. Ball said that ServiceNow’s customer workflow department now has more than 75 customers and annual contracts worth more than $1 million.

Bauer uses Lloyds Banking Group as an example to illustrate the performance of this in practice:

Lloyds Banking Group is a good example. Payment business is something that most consumers and businesses have not considered. But the payment operation is quite complicated-you may encounter payment disputes, you may have someone misuse the routing number and send money to the wrong person, etc. There are hundreds of people handling these requests.

So the request came in, and in Lloyd’s old world, it was very messy-that’s why we call it the middle of chaos. You have 16 different steps, spanning multiple departments, and they must log in to six different systems. We break it down into two steps in an action system.

Now they are tracking a bunch of different KPIs, but for simplicity, Lloyds now has a 70% reduction in resolution time. This is important for several reasons. One, the customer experience is better. As you can imagine, when you encounter payment disputes or payment problems, your anxiety level is already high, so you don’t want to wait. So the faster the problem is solved, the happier you will be. This is a good example, just logging the request is not enough, you actually have to go all the way and get the job done.

Ball believes that although the ultimate goal is clearly to improve the customer experience, the agent experience is also important. He believes that this directly illustrates the ambition of “digital transformation”, because the organization should consider the end customer, but should also consider improving operational efficiency. He added:

If you are innovative, you will have both. We all know that customer service is also a function of how happy these agents are. If they are doing numbing tasks all day long and they are not very happy, then when there is interpersonal interaction, it will penetrate into the actual interpersonal interaction.

Impact of COVID-19

Ball explained that this customer service market has seen tremendous growth before March 2020, but the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the company’s changes, especially when we see the shift towards direct-to-consumer and everything-as-a-service Time. He said:

When the pandemic began, millions of customer service agents went home overnight. Therefore, companies that actually invest in modern digital customer service perform well, but if they only worry about the participation layer, they still can’t get the job done. When everyone is at home, you need a mobile system to handle the work flow to actually complete the work.

So I think everyone realizes that it is time for modernization. Therefore, I think the demand for a great end-to-end customer experience will definitely accelerate. This is where you have to do the whole thing, you can’t just deal with the engagement.

The core of all of this-Ball said this is a common struggle for buyers-is to consider the business process itself. Doing this requires work on the corporate side to understand how work flows in their organization and how to streamline processes to better deliver better results for customers. He added that even with the most powerful tools and the most powerful technology, if you don’t think about the business process, it will be “a mess.”

Unsurprisingly, Ball believes that ServiceNow’s platform can help customers play a key role in achieving this goal. He explained:

I also think that an important reason why we have an advantage here is that Lloyd’s payment business will be different from Kiwibank’s payment business. You must have a flexible platform that enables you to adapt to your customers’ specific business processes.

Therefore, one of the main features of the platform is that we have a low-code/no-code setting. It is supported by App Engine Studio and is part of the underlying platform. So what you can do is you can design your process intuitively, and you can actually use process optimization to find the bottleneck and improve it. The important thing is to start with something very specific and make sure your process is running well. This usually involves integration into multiple systems, which is why we are talking about being a platform platform.

We are not going to replace the core banking system, nor are we going to replace the core insurance policy system, but to make the work flow really go smoothly throughout the end-to-end process.

My point of view

Ball obviously takes a very ServiceNow-centric view, but I think his core argument is an important one. How many times have you lodged a complaint or inquiry on the website and encountered a chatbot, only to find that your request has disappeared in the abyss? Showing a front end that customers find attractive is very simple, but if you don’t follow up on the work behind the chatbot (or anything else), all work to provide usable tools will be quickly cancelled. Enterprises are complex, and silos are the norm. But we now live in such a world, if you really think about a great customer experience, you must connect these midpoints instead of relying on disconnected communication methods. If buyers only consider the front-end, they miss a trick.