5 Steps for Making Your Support Organization More Customer-Centric

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AUTOMATION BLUEPRINT FOR A BETTER CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE

Table of Contents

Introduction ..........................................................................................................................2

Today’s Customer Experience Landscape ......................................................................4

Understanding and Improving Your Customer Journey .............................................6

Step 1: Enabling a 360° View of Your Customer ..............................................................8

Step 2: Accelerating Customer Support .........................................................................11

Step 3: Aligning Engineering and Support ......................................................................14

Step 4: Giving Your Customer a Voice .............................................................................16

Step 5: Deriving Insights from Customer Experience Data .........................................20

Conclusion ...........................................................................................................................23

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Companies are getting disrupted everyday because they lose focus on the person who matters most: the customer.

CONNECTED PROCESS CREATES A BETTER CUSTOMER JOURNEY

Introduction

This boils down to their processes, their technology, their data and their people. Amazon, the world’s fastest growing customer-centric company, has made this a cornerstone of their business. Over the past two decades, Amazon reduced time-to-delivery to within 2 hours in major-metropolitan areas. Gone are the days of driving to the mall; why not just order it on Amazon Prime and find it on your doorstep before you are done with lunch? With customers expecting instant gratification, companies are looking to purpose-built SaaS applications that improve the customer experience and evolve past dated processes that their legacy software was built around. The use of SaaS

applications has taken off in recent years and according to Internet Trends 2017 report, the average enterprise now uses over 500 SaaS applications across Marketing, Sales, HR and Customer Support.

SaaS applications are great at performing specifics tasks, but they don’t communicate well with each other. Between these siloed applications is an inundation of manual tasks required to keep systems up to date and to make sure that work is actionable across teams. So while one piece of the customer experience may have been improved by a specific application, it’s caused unintended challenges across another piece of the customer journey.

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The critical element that is left out of the modern customer-centric SaaS ecosystem is automation. Leading companies are turning to automation and SaaS integration in order to cross the threshold into a fully-integrated customer experience and deliver the power of “now”.

What’s Missing?

Measuring the impact of customer experience transformation

IMPROVED CUSTOMER SATISFACTION

FUEL REVENUE GROWTH

LOWER COST TO SERVE

ENGAGE EMPLOYEES

20% 10 - 15% 15 - 20% 20 - 30%

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Today’s Customer Experience LandscapeBusinesses have a plethora of tools to help deliver value to their customers, so it’s critical to understand how these tools need to be interconnected in order to improve customer experience.

We’ve broken down today’s CX landscape by each step in the customer journey, the SaaS applications involved, the challenges they face, and how automation and integration can alleviate those challenges.

Step 1: Enabling a 360° view of your customer

Step 2: Accelerating customer support

Step 3: Aligning engineering and support

Step 4: Giving your customer a voice

Step 5: Deriving insights from customer experience data

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Account Management and Growth

Customer 360: Surface critical customer data across your SaaS ecosystem for a 360

degree view of the customer.

Ongoing Customer Support

Support Ticket Accelerator: Unlock your support team to

automation work between support and project management tools.

Aligning Support and Engineering

Customer-Driven Engineering: Build products your customers will love by

integrating support and engineering apps.

Operationalizing Customer Feedback

Actionable NPS: Make the customer the center of your business by operationalizing customer feedback through automated, actionable NPS.

Understanding and Analyzing Customer

Experience

Comprehensive CX Reporting: Unlock insights by ingesting data from support platforms and surfacing it in BI and analytics applications.

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3

45

Communication

ProjectMgmt

Support

Communication

EngineeringSupport

Communication

CRMSurvey

Support

Success

CRMSupport

BI & Analytics

Support

Success

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In an ideal world, the customer journey would follow a series of predictable touchpoints, but instead, it’s often a dynamic process. This makes it hard to determine the roadblocks for customer success, how we can leverage automation to improve that process, and where in the journey prospects either churn or increase adoption of your product or service.

The customer journey is never complete for a customer-centric business. The process starts well before a purchase is made and lasts long after successful deployment. Whether it’s marketing, sales, support, customer success or engineering, each team plays an important role in ensuring that the customer is having the best possible experience with your product or service.

Understanding your customer’s journey

The challenge with creating great customer experiences is that customer interactions span teams and applications. This leads to scattered processes, unrealized customer feedback and siloed customer data that slows down time-to-value for customers. This information is critical, but it’s not actionable and it results in each department that touches the customer having an incomplete picture.

What we’re finding is that standalone, disparate SaaS applications aren’t cutting it when it comes to connecting teams and processes to deliver an unparalleled customer experience. Manual work is holding back teams from focusing on delivering value to the customer, and critical feedback is lost instead of being leveraged to produce insights and guide decision-making.

Why do companies struggle with customer experience?

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To help take this challenge head on, here are 5 proven steps to make your organization more customer-centric and deliver a fully-integrated experience to your customers.

The customer Experience Struggle

Scattered Processes

Siloed Customer Data

Overload of Manual Work

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Nearly 80% of repondents acknowledged that their account data is incomplete and unreliable.

55% can’t get any account information beyond name, address, and phone.

The first step in being a customer-centric organization is to create a 360° view of the customer. In its simplest form, think of Customer 360 as a comprehensive view of the customer created by tying together data from each of your applications and various touchpoints in the customer journey.

44% 41%

56% 33%

38%

Have challenges running personalized account based campaigns.

Are losing revenue due to incorrect discounting

Have no visibility into omni-channel interactions for effective customer engagement.

Have little confidence in the accuracy of orders & invoices.

Acknowledged account information is siloed and fragmented and existing technology falls to make information shareable across the enterprise.

49% Admit losing cross-sell and upsell opportunities because of incomplete or irrelevant account hierarchies.

STEP 1Enabling a 360° View of Your Customer

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For most companies, customer-facing teams are operating out of separate, domain-specific SaaS applications. But imagine if there was a constant, bi-directional stream of customer data across applications like Salesforce (all of your instances!), Zendesk, and Gainsight.

This gives teams a trusted single-source of truth for customer data, lets people have more informed customer interactions, and accelerates support’s ability to resolve issues.

Customer 360 Blueprint

MONITOR FOR SUCCESS TRIGGERS

MONITOR FORCRM TRIGGERS

MONITOR FOR SUPPORT TICKETS

Filter for net-new data

Stop Automation

Notify CustomerFacing Teams

Manipulate datafor ingestion

Surface Data In Support Application

Surface Data InSuccess Application

Surface DataIn CRM

New Data Detected

No NewData

AZUQUA’S SOLUTIONCustomer 360

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As the first step in your customer journey, Azuqua’s Customer 360 blueprint offers unparalleled visibility and insight by fully integrating applications, including CRM, customer success, and customer support platforms. This solution monitors for updates within sales, support, and customer success applications and then automatically filters for net-new information so that every application is up-to-date in real time.

20% account growth

0% error rate

100% of manual work automated

Enable customer facing teams to more effectively convert new accounts and grow existing ones by having more informed conversations with customers.

Eliminate human error caused by copying and pasting data across your customer-facing applications.

Remove the headache associated with keeping multiple apps and teams in sync.

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By taking the first step of enabling Customer 360, you’ve now armed your organization with real-time customer visibility. But the work is not done yet. Now that your customer is using your product, you need to dig into support operations and find ways to accelerate your ability to solve complex customer issues.

Forrester surveyed 1,500 consumers and over 80% expect a response within 24 hours

Over 80% of customers expect a response within 24 hours. But some support tickets aren’t easy fixes and require robust project management functionality. The handoff and synchronization between support and project management tools is time-consuming and error-prone. When a support ticket requires project management, the time-to-resolution can be slowed down due to the manual work required to spin up projects, assign tasks, and copy and paste information.

By integrating and automating your support (i.e. Zendesk) and project management tools (i.e. Smartsheet, Wrike, Asana, etc.) you eliminate the manual work required to keep both systems in sync. Now, support tickets are immediately actionable in your project management application of choice.

STEP 2Accelerating Customer Support

37% expect a response within

one hour

80% overall ex-pect a response within 24 hours

16% expect an immediate

response

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Azuqua’s Support Ticket Accelerator solution provides a blueprint for integrating your support platform with your favorite project management tool. You’ll be able to create new competitive advantages and keep your teams focused on mission-critical objectives, accelerating time-to-resolution for support tickets and improving data accuracy through automation.

Ticket Accelerator Blueprint

Support TicketCreated

Filter for Project Tag

Notify TaskOwner

Creat TaskStructure

Assign Project Tasks

Stop Automation

Spin UpProject

Sync SupportTicket Data

Tag Detected

No Tag

Bi-directionally sync progress

AZUQUA’S SOLUTION Ticket Accelerator Blueprint

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30% faster time-to-resolution

0% error rate

100% of manual work automated

Solve tickets more efficiently by organizing project based tickets in your project management application of choice.

Eliminate human error caused by copying and pasting data between your support and project management applications.

Make support tickets immediately actionable in a project management app by automating the busy work.

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Now that your project management and support teams are in sync, you can begin connecting another important piece of the puzzle: aligning support and engineering. Customer-driven engineering provides a conduit between the front lines of customer support and the people building the product. By connecting these two teams you’ll be able to quickly identify product bugs and infuse the customer voice into your product to help guide product roadmaps and engineering prioritization.

It is critical to keep your engineering team in lock-step with support, because some support tickets require unified action from both teams. Without the right process in place, support and engineering would need access to multiple applications, resulting in countless hours communicating back and forth to determine task assignment and gain visibility into issue status.

Customer-centric companies are adopting what is called a customer-driven engineering approach in order to combat the frustrations when dealing with a technical support ticket. This is done by streamlining the communication between the two teams by connecting the applications they use. With this approach, you are able to bridge support and engineering so both teams can work in their application of choice with full task and ticket visibility, making work more actionable and improving time-to-resolution for technical support tickets.

With a fully automated process in place, you can focus on building products your customers will love. This has an immediate impact on two key metrics: retention and revenue. Increasing customer retention by 5% can increase profits by 25%, so it’s imperative to ensure that your customers have a positive product experience.

STEP 3Aligning Support and Engineering

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Azuqua’s Customer-Driven Engineering solution offers a blueprint for better communication between support and engineering. With the power of automation, this blueprint enables your teams to expedite resolution for technical customer issues, solve widespread product bugs, and operationalize the collection of customer feedback for future releases.

Customer-Driven Engineering Blueprint

Ticket Created Filter Tickets By Tag

Stop Automation

Create Engineering Task

Sync Critical Ticket Data

Tag Detected

No Tag

Assign Task to Relevant Team

Update Support Ticket

Engineering Task Complete

Alert Engineering

Update Support Ticket

Notify Support

AZUQUA’S SOLUTIONCustomer-Driven Engineering

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Now that you have improved customer visibility, accelerated support, and aligned support and engineering, it’s time to give your customers a voice. Above all else, it’s their opinion that matters. So why not leverage customer feedback as a valuable data point to continually move your product forward and drive revenue? According to Gartner, 80% of your future profits will come from just 20% of your current customers. This makes the collection, and even more importantly, the response to your customer’s feedback, a critical component of your growth strategy.

STEP 4Giving Your Customer A Voice

Retention and satisfaction are key to driving long-term reults; A CLV supported strategy works to increase both at every available opportunity.

On average 80% of a companies future profits come from 20% of it’s existing customers.

A “totally satisfied customer” contributes 2.6x as much revenue as a “somewhat satisfied customer”.

Retention Satisfaction

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Operationalizing NPS and making it actionable can be an uphill battle, especially if it is dependent on manual processes. You face miscommunication between teams, leading to slower response times and neglected customers. The foolproof way to make sure no customer gets left behind in your NPS survey follow-up is simple: automation.

Lack of Automation Results in:

BrokenBusiness

Processes

SiloedBusinessEnvironments

DisconnectedNPS Data

FracturedUserExperience

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45

40

35

30

25

20

15

10

5

0

3.0%

2.5%

2.0%

1.5%

1.0%

0.5%

0.0%

NPS

Sco

re

NPS Score Churn

Chur

n Ra

te

With an automated NPS solution, you can operationalize the way your organization collects and responds to polarized NPS scores, either positive or negative, so you can get ahead of customers that are likely to churn and turn the customers that love your product into evangelists.

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Actionable NPS Blueprint

Send Survey Survey Submitted

Filter NPS Scores

Update crm Notify Sales

Create Support Ticket

Alert Support

Update crm

AZUQUA’S SOLUTION Actionable NPSAzuqua’s Actionable NPS solution provides a blueprint for operationalizing NPS surveys so organizations can proactively identify problems in their customer journey and improve the way they incorporate customer feedback. This blueprint enables you to identify vulnerable accounts before it’s too late, as well as eliminate the manual steps in your NPS survey processes so you can reach more customers.

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Think of customer support as the frontlines for understanding how your customers are interacting with your product or service. Now that we’ve addressed steps 1-4, it’s time to look at the data and find out how you can make more informed decisions for your product and eliminate friction points in your customer’s journey by surfacing and analyzing customer experience data.

For those who want to take their number crunching to the next level, you have to get your customer experience data into a database or BI tool. The best way to get the most out of your support data is to house it in a single place, so BI experts can comprehensively analyze the data that is most relevant to your business.

STEP 5Deriving Insights From Customer Experience Data

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Break down ticket creation by category so you can see exactly where your customers are experiencing issues when interacting with your product or service.

Visually Analyzing the Data

Optimize support staffing by identifying the time of day where you get the highest volume of tickets so you can streamline time-to-resolution for support tickets.

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Comprehensive CX Reporting Blueprint

Select RelevantFields (Support)

Select RelevantFields (Success)

Aggregate Data From

CX Platforms

Stop Automation

Filter net-new Data

Manipulate DataFor Ingestion

Import DataTo Databse

Surface Data in Bi Tool

Visualize DataInsights

New DataDetected

No New Data

Azuqua’s CX Reporting Solution offers a blueprint for better reporting from your applications. This blueprint enables you to get your customer data from multiple systems into a single place where you can analyze the data with your favorite BI tool to help your organization make more informed decisions.

AZUQUA’S SOLUTIONComprehensive CX Reporting

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Delivering an excellent customer experience is no longer a matter of differentiation -- it is a matter of survival. Companies are realizing that in order to create the next wave of best-in-class customer experiences, they must engage every team in the customer journey - this IS customer-centricity.

However, engaging multiple teams and applications to produce better customer experiences often creates loads of manual work and is difficult to

maintain when silos and divides create disparate views of who the customer actually is.

It’s time to incorporate SaaS integration and automation into your customer experience strategy in order to deliver the power of “now” to your customers. With our 5 step process, you’ll be able to optimize each step in your customers’ journey and deliver an unparalleled, customer-centric experience.

Conclusion

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