Meet The Future Of Customer Service

Here’s what to do when you’ve outgrown your homegrown CRM. 

Managing a large customer service operation is a lot like being the ringleader of a three-ring circus. You have to perform superhuman feats of customer support—all while juggling multiple CRM platforms.  

Now, imagine that each of your CRM platforms is a separate ring. And neither one of them can communicate with each other, much less connect customer service to different parts of the organization, making it that much harder for customer service agents to provide great experiences.  

The future of customer service will be built on one platform, not multiple. One powerful platform that can manage complexity, connect departments, and help agents use fewer resources to provide better and faster customer experiences. 

Outgrowing homegrown CRM 

The CRM market is made up of four segments: sales, commerce, marketing, and service—with service being the fastest growing component of CRM overall. But 60% of that market is still filled with homegrown solutions, and another 20% are legacy solutions.  

That large proportion of homegrown solutions represent the three-ring customer service circuses that are becoming increasingly impossible to manage. This means there's a lot of industry pain that needs to be solved—and a lot of room for a single-platform customer service management solution to address that pain. 

In the service space, most CRM vendors are really only able to provide case-logging capabilities. I call that reaction management. By contrast, a single, cloud-based platform can bring together core capabilities like omnichannel and case management, combined with operational capabilities like service management and service operations. 

This creates an end-to-end experience beyond case-logging that gets to root causes and solves customer problems. 

Connecting departmental silos 

Customer service of the future will tie in to the operational excellence of the rest of the organization. It will encompass end-to-end, proactive self-service, connecting the customer service agent with the back-end operations team or the engineering team that built the product. 

When those teams are connected and working together, they can help agents identify issues and get to the root cause so that they can ultimately fix the issue—once and for all. 

Our customer service management solution on the Now Platform® is unique because users get a platform with a single data model rather than having to integrate myriad data models from different platforms into their customer service workflow. That means organizations can take full advantage of the platform’s core capabilities: machine learning, native mobile experiences, a service catalog that drives self-service requests, a native knowledge base, and the capability to create a self-service portal. 

A foundation for the future 

To lay a foundation for future success, today’s enterprises are investing in a handful of platforms that can support their entire organization. Platforms that are built to grow and evolve alongside the enterprise. 

The Now Platform is particularly powerful because it has the ability to add in third-party capabilities or integrate different data sources to meet the unique requirements of any business. This includes a new virtual data source capability that will allow customer service agents to access external information such as account records that aren't native in other customer service management tools. Additionally, the Now Platform integration hub makes it easy to extend integrations to other third parties, building workflows around them.  

To lay the foundation for the future of customer service, you’ll need to choose a platform that elevates your customer service from request to resolution. For an excellent real-life example, find out how one software company used the Now Platform to reduce backend case volume by 72%, saving $450,000 a year. And for additional research-based insights into the future of work, explore our online publication, Workflow.