How Digital Disruption is Transforming Field Service Operations, Optimizing Sales & Service Processes
How is the industry focusing on customer service and field service and how are organizations addressing business challenges?
More and more organizations are accepting and embracing the absolute reality that Customer Experience is an essential differentiator. The global customer experience management accessible market is expected to reach $32+ billion by 2025. Across technologies, deployment models are gaining momentum, however, if organizations are not transforming, then the chances are greater for them to become obsolete. Service organizations are struggling to provide a seamless experience in customer service and field service areas, which is essential for customer satisfaction, customer retention, and visibility across the life-span of the customer. Sales and service leaders are finding it difficult to choose the right software solution for the most pressing challenges and ensuring its impact on bottom-line and revenue growth. Early adopters of digital and cloud technology are employing smart, connected IoT solutions, and mobile applications for field sales and service technicians that drive real-time data, process automation, and faster productivity, which leads to deeper customer engagement.
Why is there a need for organizations to optimize their sales and service processes?
As of today, field service organizations are facing common key issues, irrespective of the industry they operate in. Issues largely revolve around tracking of customer concerns, and of complaints and repairs accurately, along with applying warranties and service contracts to customers’ repairs requests, automatically. Sometimes management of back-office operations (mainly, when the field work is over) become tricky. Moreover, lack of information about service history and unpreparedness of technicians for field work, and inability to capture variety of information about device condition and conduct repairs, add to the list. Insufficient planning and scheduling of field workforce and dealing with external service providers and managing their workload are common issues.
Similarly, customer service organizations also face common key issues, no matter which industry. These organizations are unable to provide support on multiple channels as per customer expectations, with a single view of their case.
Moreover, the inability to answer customer queries, due to lack of information, or lack of a centralized database and failure to meet customer expectation metrics (first response time, handling time, etc.) as per industry standards, is also a serious concern. These organizations also lack collaboration within back-office, sales, marketing, product suppliers and networks teams.
The issues faced by sales organizations, are also no less. The sales organizations are unable to use intuitive sales tools for selling more at a faster rate. They lack complete view of customer data including recent activities, deals, orders and sentiments. Additionally, poor execution of sales cycle from lead to sales quote, results into inaccurate forecasts and pipeline. The core teams lack collaboration on deals with other internal teams such as: back-office, sales, marketing, product suppliers and networks, thus adding to the issues.
What are the key benefits for customers in optimizing their sales and service processes?
The service organizations benefit from unique dashboard of their customers, devices, and associated service engagements. They record warranties and service contracts for customers and devices for automatic assignment and application during service execution. Additionally, for field service, dispatchers can flexibly plan and schedule, manually or automated, demand for field technicians with Gantt chart and map view. Field service organizations capture and record device condition and perform repairs with checklists and. Moreover, they get a seamless and an integrated approach to review, approve and transfer output of the field work to back office ERP system for logistics and settlement. These organizations are also able to create opportunities and generate sales quotes on-demand at the customer site during field work. It is also easy for them to invite and extend field service opportunities to service partners or external service providers integrated into one solution
The customer service organizations are offering omni-channel support with self-service to their customers and process and resolve service tickets together seamlessly with one single view of the case. These tickets are flexibly categorized using a central service catalog with identification of origin of issue, reason for support and resolution offered by support agent to customers. The customer service and self-service applications are integrated with a central knowledge management system to search for solutions automatically from within a ticket and link applicable knowledge articles to tickets for communication with customers.
The sales organizations are benefiting with the adoption of new age customer experience centric solutions. Generation of quality leads with the ease of a button or systematically and converting those into opportunities with intelligent qualification process is highly efficient. The sales team get a complete 360 and a real-time view of customer covering all areas of sales and service. The ability to configure and create sales quote with guided selling, pricing and generate time-critical proposals for customers is a necessity in a competitive age. Sales organizations collect and store relevant information, analyze and take business decisions collaboratively throughout complex sales cycle. The sales applications can render true product inventory and availability from back-office needed in real-time for closing new deals.
What are the key innovations that organizations can leverage?
An Intelligent enterprise business model is the future which holds the key for continued success and is quickly becoming a reality for organization to deliver a superior customer experience. Organizations must engage with customers using front end applications equipped with intelligence aligning their back-end processes in supply-chain, procurement, manufacturing and fulfilment areas.
Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning enabled applications bring light to new channels and intuitive interfaces for customers. Enriched conversation coupled with chatbot for customers is the key to resolve issues efficiently and enable automation.
Organizations can connect devices with enterprise applications across any line of business. Customers can also take advantage of process automation (ordering, targeted offers, contract pricing and quotation, predictive service tickets, etc.), insight driven productivity and new revenue models.
How is Birlasoft positioned for helping customers with transformation in customer experience economy?
Customer expectations and digital transformation are closely linked. Organizations must provide customers with a superior and a differentiated experience to keep customers engaged and offer them simple and relevant information for their needs.
The experts at Birlasoft, listen, understand and act on your organizations vision and business goals with you and your customers at the core. We are primed to help you achieve higher levels of customer engagement that ensure success in an integrated CRM-led digital transformation.
From multiple touchpoints to insight-driven journeys, we help develop an end-to-end customer experience that creates value through better business outcomes. Our balanced IT solution portfolio offers a robust and agile approach, with an accelerated roadmap that delivers innovation and excellence for a successful transformation program.
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