2. Let customers choose their preferred service channel.
IBM has transformed its service organization across 10 business units, swapping out disjointed experiences for incredible customer service and self-service alike. Customers can choose to engage on their preferred channel like the IBM support community, live chat, email, phone, or via Watson chatbot. Agents can then use Slack in critical situations where time is of the essence.
For instance, when a large global brand’s system is down, IBM teams across multiple product areas can easily swarm the problem. Using Slack, support agents bring in other team members to collaborate end to end on the inquiry, easily conversing in real time, diagnosing the situation, and fixing it faster instead of escalating elsewhere. Plus, IBM creates a hypercare Slack channel for new service agent onboarding and training for Service Cloud, dispatch, and field service where they can ask questions and problem solve in real time.
Self-service options like chatbots and customer support communities allow customers to seek answers on their own terms. Communities allow customers to open or check on the status of their cases through digital channels like bots or community forums. And with the combined intelligence of Salesforce Einstein and IBM Watson, customers can receive faster, more accurate answers, pointing them to helpful resources to help with case deflection. Arvind believes self-service options will eventually become ubiquitous among customer, team, and partner experiences alike.
“As consumers, we want to interact when we want to, how we want to,” he said. “We expect that someone has thought about all the data that might be relevant to us.”
To deliver even more capabilities and self-service innovation, IBM integrates with AppExchange ISV partner Copado. Copado’s automated development features prevent downtime, not only internally as IBM’s service and sales production orgs work together, but also externally for customers. These automated activities ultimately allow IBM’s production teams to build better and faster in a less manual way. And rather than making a customer wait for updates, new front-end functionality can be rolled out immediately in a customer community while Copado helps ensure the process is smooth and effective.
