Processes are at the heart of every business – empowering employees to work efficiently and offering customers the best service possible.
In every area or department of business, there are several processes that are essential to productivity and performance. This series of blog posts looks at the top processes across the line of business and asks: what happens if we manage, automate and optimize these? What would the benefits be?
Check out our post on automating the top Human Resources process: HR compliance.
In this post, we look at one of the top customer service processes: customer communication.
The Top Customer Service Process
Customer communication underpins every aspect of customer service. From traditional call-centers to social media to chatbots to VR/AR experiences – how a business interacts with its customers plays the central role in defining what that customer thinks of your business.
In the era of digital technology and the modern world of business, customer experience is as important as ever before. The organizations that have made the biggest gains and proved to be the big disruptors in the last decade are those that have used digital technology to transform customer experience across all touchpoints, including customer communication.
Companies like Uber – which allows customers to rate and offer feedback after every customer interaction – and Amazon – which uses machine learning and natural language processing to offer hyper-personalized experiences – are just two examples of how the customer is now very much at the center of how organizations think.
The reasons for this are clear when you look at the numbers. For starters, it’s estimated to cost five times more to get a new customer than to retain one. What’s more, automating customer service processes can result in:
- 90 percent year-over-year increase in first contact resolution rate
- 83 percent year-over-year increase in customer satisfaction rate
- 62 percent greater average customer profit margin annually
- Over 300 percent annual increase in employee engagement rate
Recent research commissioned by Nintex shows that customer communication is ‘top of mind’ for business leaders. The research found that businesses are prioritizing customer experience (48%) over employee experience (29%) when it comes to digital transformation.
Automating Customer Communication
Automating customer communication isn’t just about the direct back-and-forth between a customer support staff member (or chatbot) and the customer.
One must also consider the finer details of communication: The structured and unstructured data that is accumulated and how it can be leveraged to speed up processes and provide better customer service. What is required is a system that brings all this data together – wherever it is stored – and infuses it with sophisticated capabilities to optimize customer service processes through automation.
We are going to look at two areas that should be targeted to automate customer communication processes intelligently. These are:
- Mobile apps and forms
- Document generation
Mobile Apps and Forms
Customers expect to be able to quickly and easily interact with organizations online and on any device. If a query or process involves more than a few clicks – for instance, waiting for hours on hold on the phone – then this can seriously turn off otherwise happy customers.
With Nintex Forms you can create mobile-responsive and customizable forms, which are easy to use for your customers and can be automated to meet your requirements.
Nintex Forms capture critical customer data and automatically store this in the right place so that it is easily accessible and can be employed as part of process automation. One of the reasons processes break down is due to information silos. These can be avoided with intelligent forms, which ensure customer data is always stored correctly.
Document Generation
Documents make up an integral part of the customer experience journey. Whether it’s signing or renewing a contract, filling out invoices, or creating internal documents, customer support staff spend a lot of time creating, sharing, and waiting for documents. Automating this process can save time, money, and lead to quicker customer interactions.
With Nintex DocGen®, you can bring together the data you have on your customers from multiple sources (whether that is directly from a Nintex Form or from Salesforce or SAP, for instance). Documents can be pre-populated with the correct information, meaning that contracts can be sent out in seconds rather than hours.
The Future of Customer Communication
Mobile apps & forms and document generation are just two of the capabilities of the Nintex Platform. By automating customer communication you can radically transform the top customer service process and deliver more value to your business.
Interested in trying Nintex for yourself? Sign up for a free, 30-day trial today.
