Why aligning customer service and IT is the key to happier customers

All working companies arrange operations into departments with distinctive duties and targets. IT groups give attention to steady software program enchancment and system reliability, whereas customer support groups throughout each aisle work arduous to maintain up with altering buyer expectations and troubleshoot issues confronted by clients. customers in probably the most environment friendly method doable.

Whereas it is probably not apparent on the floor, these departments share a standard aim: cut back downtime. The roles and duties are completely different, however the shared aim stays.

Nonetheless, in most corporations, IT and customer support groups hardly ever cross paths, not to mention collaborate. Within the age of digital transformation, each groups have undergone huge technological modifications in recent times, however too typically proceed to function in silos. This divide is exacerbated by the very instruments and techniques meant to assist.

Silos damage each customer support and IT

Image this: A buyer experiences a failure with the self-service portal on their insurance coverage firm’s web site and submits a customer support ticket. An agent receives the ticket inside their assist desk system, and as soon as they notice that the problem seems to be rooted within the back-end expertise, they navigate to a separate inner assist desk system to create a ticket. ticket with the suitable IT workforce. The ticket then enters an incident queue.

As soon as the incident is resolved on the again finish, a developer updates the customer support agent by means of a separate inner communications platform. The agent should then concurrently entry your ticketing system and assist desk communication platform to gather data and relay it to the shopper. The multi-step course of creates pointless friction in resolving the problem, whereas slowing down each the substantive response and communication with the shopper.

Even with all of the instruments at an agent’s disposal, they typically discover themselves navigating throughout disparate techniques and duplicating data throughout platforms. Nonetheless, key particulars, corresponding to whether or not the shopper’s concern is a identified incident and the way lengthy it should take to resolve the problem, aren’t instantly accessible. This lack of easy communication causes a series response of delays that in the end lead to dissatisfied clients.

It is crucial that customer support brokers have a streamlined technique of escalating customer-impacting outages to IT whereas sustaining full visibility into the shopper ticket. Organizations already acknowledge that damaged collaboration processes between customer support and technical groups result in elevated downtime, in addition to slower response and backbone instances. A unique perspective is required.

How can we empower customer support groups with the visibility and knowledge they should shortly reply to buyer inquiries? Y escalate expertise points from the entrance line when the administration workforce is unaware of a customer-impacting outage?

The shopper is vital

It is time to acknowledge clients as one other, and generally crucial, signal of system efficiency. Whereas customer support groups already do that, technical groups will profit as properly. If IT can view buyer inquiry information as a real-time reflection of the well being of its digital property, it might probably higher perceive the blast radius of a problem, prioritize it accordingly, and intervene earlier than the impression is felt extra extensively. . Reaching this requires an built-in method.

Each customer support and engineering groups have a powerful want to interrupt down silos to enhance the shopper expertise. As soon as either side of the aisle can come collectively round real-time buyer information, two-way communication, and a totally built-in instruments stack, groups could have what they should act as a unit and resolve points sooner. Breaking down the limitations between customer support and technical groups will unlock new ranges of collaboration, benefiting not solely CS and IT, however finish customers and the group as a complete.

Justin Shie is CS at PagerDuty