Technology has made it simpler than ever to build and maintain relationships and maintain high standards of service. Imagine relying only on manual practices to track and maintain service level agreements. Perish the thought! Without customer workflow, automation and service agreement tracking, overcoming manual errors and lapsed support dates and times can have devastating consequences.
There may be multiple sources of service requests: phone, email, even hand-written notes from other employees. It’s easy to lose track of an occasional request, no matter how much you value good customer service levels.
Lost or misplaced information can generate delays in responding to such requests and may violate contractual commitments for service level agreements. The daily managing of requests and resolution timelines is a challenging balancing act for support teams, which can result in poor outcomes if promised service levels are not maintained.
Steps to Avoid Oversight Issues or Service Level Agreement Cancellations:
- Establish specific workflow escalations that automatically identify tickets that are about to exceed specific service levels (i.e. if a ticket has not been responded to within 2 hours, email a supervisor to react with urgency).
- Utilize powerful reporting tools to allow management to track and measure their success in meeting these timelines, define problem areas, and make improvements where necessary.
- Losing your value as a provider is not an option! Automated service agreements help keep pace with rapidly changing business requirements.
- Customers invest in Service Level Agreements; therefore, they must be reliable. While we hope issues don’t arise, when they do, steadfast and consistent customer service is vital.
- Focus on speed, value, and guarantees. Automating your service agreement can monitor the progress and notify users before a breach.
- Expectations and requirements tend to change, be in a position to adapt accordingly.
- Ensure actions are triggered at different times in the life cycle of the requests. Critical jobs have higher priority. Automation software can prevent the routine jobs from getting added to the queue, and re-route accordingly.
- Always remember that the service agreement is a commitment between the provider and customer. They need to be monitored.
According to “Understanding Customers” by Ruby Newell-Legner, it takes 12 positive experiences to make up for one unresolved negative experience.
The pressure is on, whether you are in technical support or equipment maintenance. We live in a time where customer satisfaction has never been this vital. Business is being transformed and automated service tracking is just one rung on the ladder you need to climb. Get the most out of your customer support teams with workflow automation and service tracking.
For more information check out this free article about the benefits of workflow automation: https://novosolutions.com/cr/manufacturing-customer-support-workflow/
