Optimized Case Management: Automated, Agile, Adaptive and Across Channels
Case management can be one of the most challenging aspects of customer service. Cases are often complex, long running and involve multiple participants. The quality of your case management solution can affect a wide variety of your customer service metrics, including efficiency, customer and employee satisfaction, and compliance. As you assess your case management needs, it is also imperative to consider the needs of all participants:
- Customers: Today’s customers want transparency. They want to know the status of their cases and receive proactive updates.
- Employees: Employees need the tools and information to work a case efficiently and effectively. At the same time, they seek work that challenges and engages them.
- Organizations: Organizations seek to resolve cases as efficiently as possible, while maintaining high levels of compliance.
To meet all these needs, your case management system needs to be:
Automated—Organizations today recognize that the effective adoption of automation within their customer engagement operations can be game-changing for the enterprise and drive increased efficiency, satisfaction, revenue and loyalty. Automation will continue to play a vital role in the future of customer engagement and in helping enterprises achieve their strategic objectives. It offers tremendous benefits to all stakeholders in customer service. In many situations, cases can automatically be created on behalf of the customer when certain conditions are met, such as a policy renewal or cancelled flight. Automated intelligent routing sends the right case work to the right employee at the right time, based on customer, topic, availability and many other factors.
Once an employee receives work from a case, automating repetitive tasks through robotic process automation frees employees, so they can focus on more engaging, challenging work. Automated knowledge and guidance provide employees with contextually relevant information to help them complete their tasks without having to stop and ask for help. Meanwhile, the organization benefits from automation as this work can now be completed much more efficiently and without concerns regarding compliance. Customers also benefit from improved efficiency and accuracy, and can take advantage of proactive updates provided through automation.
Adaptive—Just as no two customers are exactly alike, neither are their issues. Your case management system must be adaptive enough to handle the intricacies of each unique customer issue. A customer may start with one issue, but suddenly need to create a secondary case before the first one has been finalized. They may have sub-cases, related cases or need to go backwards a step during a case. Each step of a process requires that employees personalize their actions based on the specific needs of a customer. By contextually showing relevant customer data on the screen, employees are empowered to personalize the experience. Additionally, contextual knowledge articles related to the customer and this step in the case process can be dynamically presented to further the employee’s ability to adapt his or her processes for the specific customer.
Agile—Many case management systems can be very rigid in nature, forcing organizations to modify their customer service processes to conform to the capabilities of the system they are using. Instead, a case management system should provide the flexibility to model your exact processes, from steps to conditions, escalations, service levels and more. Further, it should allow administrators to easily modify these processes as needed to provide optimal service. When new information is available, or an important change has been made, alerts should notify employees to be aware of the changes. Another important component in agility is the ability to adjust queues and teams in real time. If a particular type of case is experiencing unusually high volumes, administrators should be able to recognize this condition and adjust which teams are working on that type of work immediately.
Across Channels—Today, we know most customers prefer to use many different channels to communicate, but oftentimes case management solutions do not take this into account properly. Customers who submit an issue via phone, email or Twitter should all have their cases processed in the same way. Likewise, if a case is submitted in one channel, the customer should be able to follow up and receive updates in any other channel. With a unified, omnichannel case management solution, each agent across channels has all the current information about a customer’s case and can provide up-to-date information on the status.
Case management is an integral component of providing superior customer service, allowing your organization to track issues by type and status as they follow designated processes to completion, and guide employees through each step to avoid errors. But not just any case management system will generate the desired outcomes of improved efficiency, compliance and satisfaction. To provide your customers and employees with the experience they desire, choose a case management system that is automated, adaptive, agile and across channels. Take a look at how you are currently tracking and completing customer service issues to see if you’re meeting these qualities for optimal customer engagement.
Contact Verint today to find out how our solutions can help you leverage automation to simplify and modernize your customer engagement operations, drive greater business value for your organization, engage and empower your staff, and deliver world-class customer experiences.
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