How Does BPM Bring Transparency to Customer Service?

Customer Service is the front line contact with the customer. BPM is the main tool used by Customer Service or CRM to guarantee the customer experiences is a positive one every time the customer has a transaction with the organization. Without the correct processes in place, even the best Customer Service Team cannot provide a consistent experience to the organization’s customers. BPM is taking a new role in CRM. A well defined BPM strategy can bring transparency to the CRM or Customer Service effort.

For sometime organizations have been trying to deliver better and better customer service. CRM has focused on capturing detailed customer information, used mainly for sales and marketing to generate further sales. Customer Service on the other hand, relies on employees to resolve customer issues.

In this scenario a customer's experience will vary depending on the employee’s interpretation of company policies. This explains why organizations are still spending a ton of money and not achieving higher customer satisfaction scores.

Customer Service has been an isolated area in organizations that is left on its own to resolve customer issues. The resolution of these issues may involve multiple areas of the organization. Many organizations have not found a resolution to this challenge. This is where BPM can help.

Most CRM or Customer Service systems have been standalone solutions that are used in the front-line of the organization where direct contact with the customer occurs. These systems have limited integration with other areas of the back office. This approach relies on the policies and processes of the Customer Service department and its isolated systems, which relies on manual communications to other areas of the organization to resolve customer issues. The real customer issue may be lost in the shuffle.

By implementing a BPM solution, organizations can define the customer service processes that will involve inter-departmental dependencies and provide a more efficient, positive customer experience at lower costs. BPM solutions are fundamentally different than CRM or Customer Service solutions because these solutions span all areas of the enterprise. These solutions involve the process from start to finish and can incorporate employee tasks, communications functions and other systems to produce efficient, structured customer focused processes.

Think of a Customer Service department that is guided through each step of a transaction with a customer. Imagine a solution where the employee knows exactly what to do and say in every situation. The escalation process to other areas of the organization and to legacy systems was automated so that issues could be resolved with speed, accuracy and efficiency. That's what the BPM solutions like AuraPortal can offer.

It has long been said that organizations need to be more customer focused to capitalize on greater customer loyalty and increased revenue. BPM solutions offer modeling tools that allow the organization to see where the bottlenecks, inefficiencies and communication failures and successes are and allows organizations to maintain or improve these processes.

Traditional solutions do not deliver the necessary transparency to resolve the process gaps in the manual strategy. However, the best BPM technology can deliver solutions that can dynamically adapt customer processes based on situations, customer criteria and business goals, ensuring that customers get the most effective level of service, and that CSRs attain higher productivity. Basically, this type of CRM system is more intelligent than traditional CRM solutions and it is able to use this intelligence to create more advantages for the organization using it.

Such a revolutionary approach to CRM helps change the game when it comes to customer loyalty. By delivering a consistent experience across the customer service organization, companies are able to more quickly influence customer loyalty and experience to drive positive results.

Utilizing BPM also enables organizations to roll out changes in processes more easily than with traditional CRM solutions. Without such an approach, organizations have to rely on training and employee best practices to affect change. BPM ultimately offers transparency, uniformity of processes and greater integration to drive effective business transformation within customer service organizations.

Using BPM to implement a proper CRM solution puts the focus back on the customer. After all, what good are low handling times if the customers are not getting their issues resolved? BPM assures the best of both worlds. It facilitates efficient operations on the part of the service provider, and it provides proper guidance and resolution for the customer, enabling organizations to achieve a high level of efficiency and overall customer experience. Isn't that what CRM was supposed to be doing all along?