We all know that a product is not only a tangible product, but also an intangible service. But for intangible services, how to judge their quality? Ensuring user loyalty? This depends on the word "service management", which is rarely heard.
Well-known scholars Gränluth and Albridge believe that service management is to "take customer perception of service quality as the first driving force of enterprise management". Customer service is an important mission of the company's existence, and when the service team maintains a good interaction with customers, it will bring unexpected surprises to the team.
According to a foreign survey, 93% of customers are likely to repeat purchases from companies that provide high-quality services, and 85% of customers will be more loyal to brands that respond positively and solve their complaints and consulting problems, while up to 73% of customers will clearly indicate that they may change brands after having a negative customer experience.
It can be seen that in addition to product quality and value, high-quality service is the "umbrella" to ensure customer loyalty, and it is also the key to guide customers to become corporate brand communicators.
In this article, we will explain those things about service management in detail, focusing on the following perspectives.
- What exactly is service management? What's included? Why is it so important for businesses?
- Recommended by 3 key manufacturers of service management software
- Enterprise service management is facing many problems, what kind of service strategy and method should be established?
- What are the measurement criteria for high-quality service management, and how to establish its evaluation system?
Above, this article will give you a detailed answer.
1. What is service management? What is the content? Why is it so important?
Service management is actually how enterprises manage and succeed in the environment of service competition. It is mainly customer-centric, and coordinates the activities between various roles such as customers, operation teams, back offices, IT teams, and managers through software and processes, and plays a key role in enterprise operations for the purpose of quickly, comprehensively and properly handling customer problems and requests. Its main component is field service management, which is mainly to improve the efficiency and responsiveness of the field service team.
From practice, the usual service management mainly includes five aspects: service strategy, service design, service process, service evaluation, and service optimization. The concept of each content is easy to understand, but it is not easy to do it well. In service management, service strategy is integrated throughout the entire service design and process. It is necessary to clarify the service objectives and content provided by the enterprise, so that the corresponding strategy can be formulated and completed on time and efficiently according to the designed process.
For enterprises, customers are the key to success, and good service is a good medicine to effectively inspire customer loyalty. Enterprises should clearly clarify the service demands of customers, such as hoping that their problems can be solved as quickly and well as possible, and then push back their own service methods to develop strategies that truly meet customer needs, and high-quality customer service will also bring more generous returns to the enterprise.
Therefore, the importance of service management is mainly reflected in the following aspects:
- Deliver higher customer satisfaction. High-quality service management can not only properly solve customer problems, but even exceed customer expectations, provide personalized support on the basis of problem solving, obtain a better reputation, and bring higher customer satisfaction.
- Increase customer loyalty and business efficiency. According to relevant statistics, the cost of acquiring new customers is 5~25 times that of retaining existing customers, and good service management is the best way to retain more customers and obtain the best cost-effectiveness.
- Build a better brand reputation. Brand is a valuable intangible asset of a business, and when customers have a strong connection and positive interaction with the business, their perception of the company's brand will be stronger and deeper.
- Leads to higher sales. A good customer retention rate will lead to higher sales for the business, on the one hand, the retained customers will have a considerable repurchase rate, and on the other hand, it will be easier to upsell or cross-sell to them.
- Develop more productive employees. Good service management will not only positively affect customers, but also a positive guide for employees, often employees in this high-quality service environment, work harder, full of motivation, but also more efficient and value.
2. Recommended by 3 key manufacturers for service management
At present, many enterprises have realized the importance of service management and tried to apply modern management software to service management. At present, such software includes CRM software, special service management software, etc., and the manufacturers mainly include Fanxiang Sales Service, Easy After-sales, Ruiyun Service Cloud, etc. The advantage of CRM software lies in the integration of sales and service, which provides the underlying basic platform for more refined enterprise management.
1. Fanxiang Sales Service - Provide lean and efficient services throughout the whole life cycle of customers
(1) Product function highlights
At present, among the domestic CRM manufacturers, the best ones are mainly Fanxiang customers. In the service management process, Fanxiang CRM has created a tool called "Service Pass", which focuses on "on-site service management", formulates corresponding service strategies on the premise of clarifying customer needs, and then provides services to customers through the full-process service platform of Service Pass. Its process is roughly as follows: multi-channel service acceptance→ work order scheduling→ on-site delivery→ cost settlement→ service evaluation, each node is interlocking, interconnected, and mutually restrictive, and the service is more standardized and standardized, so as to ensure the rigor of service management.
For example, in the on-site delivery link, the standardized work steps of on-site service standardize the work content and steps of engineers, and can comprehensively monitor all nodes of the engineer's service process, which not only improves the service level and efficiency, but also strictly controls the service time, spare parts management and inventory. After the service is over, customers can evaluate by scanning the code face-to-face, or evaluate the customer through the WeChat official account. In turn, the fast evaluation and feedback method also allows enterprises to quickly obtain valuable opinions from customers, and the entire service management process is "silky" without dead ends.
(2) Inventory of advantages and disadvantages
Advantages: In general, from the perspective of the whole life cycle of customers, Fanxiang sales service solves a number of core pain points in the field of enterprise after-sales service, such as difficult service acceptance, difficult dispatch, difficult customer evaluation, uneven on-site service level, difficult inventory and spare parts management, etc., and maximizes the value of the five main roles of end customers, customer service, dispatchers, engineers and service directors in the service management business, based on the PaaS platform, seamlessly connecting the pre-sale, in-sale, after-sale and repurchase business. With the whole process of service work order as the core, it runs through the enterprise and connects downstream service providers, making the enterprise service process more lean and efficient, and striving to provide better services for end customers.
Disadvantages: No significant disadvantages
(3) Official website: https://www.fxiaoke.com/ or apply for a free trial
2. Easy after-sales service – the business covers a comprehensive range of specialized after-sales service software
(1) Product highlights
Easy after-sales service is a specialized after-sales service management software, covering a very comprehensive business, such as work order management, spare parts management, settlement management, customer management, equipment management, service network management, etc., in the service mode has made innovations, such as supporting a variety of warranty methods, intelligent dispatch services, users can set up dispatch rules in the system in advance, when the conditions are met, it will automatically trigger the dispatch.
(2) Inventory of advantages and disadvantages:
Advantages: Professional only do one thing after after-sales service, with comprehensive functions.
Disadvantages: Only after-sales service, lack of ability to connect with other businesses.
(3) Official website: http://www.eshouhou.cn/
3. Rayvision Service Cloud – Powerful omni-channel connection to customers
(1) Product highlights
Rayvision service cloud functions are also very comprehensive, can reach customers through a variety of channels, in terms of data analysis, you can view a number of after-sales service data through the data kanban, and conduct multi-dimensional analysis. In addition, it's very easy to use out of the box, and with the help of a low-code PaaS platform, users can build functional modules that fit their needs like a stack of blocks.
(2) Inventory of advantages and disadvantages
Advantages: Low-code, out-of-the-box is its biggest feature.
Disadvantages: The disadvantages are not obvious, but because they only do after-sales service, it takes a certain amount of energy to connect the upstream and downstream.
(3) Official website: https://www.fscloud.com.cn/
3. Enterprise service management is facing many problems, what kind of service strategies and methods should be established?
Although enterprises have realized the importance of service management to enterprise operations and are trying to increase their efforts in service management, they still face various problems, such as poor customer service acceptance experience and low service scheduling efficiency, such as service engineer resource scheduling and traditional dispatching methods, and low efficiency; In addition, the service process is not transparent enough, the spare parts and cost management is not clear, the passive service is difficult to transform into active service, and the product failure, customer satisfaction evaluation, and engineer's analysis performance control are not timely enough.
In addition to the intelligent service management system we mentioned above, the premise is to develop a corresponding service strategy.
First of all, we need to clarify the following implementation points:
- We must be customer-centric, whether it is to formulate a service strategy or in the entire service process, customer-centricity is always the top priority, and the needs of customers must be fully considered.
- The service level should keep up, and it is necessary to fully consider the technical ability, personnel professionalism, software application selection, service system and process and other aspects.
- Service efficiency should be improved, for example, through intelligent service management software to improve service efficiency.
- To persevere, the improvement of service management level is a long-term process, can not be achieved overnight, so to continue to improve, improve the level of service management, can not three days of fishing and two days of drying nets.
In terms of specific service strategies and methods, it mainly revolves around the following points:
- First of all, develop your own customer service concept, many people think of it as a nonsense thing, but it is not. The customer service concept fundamentally embodies the core principles and values of the company's service, and is the guiding framework for the entire service team, such as helping customers solve problems as quickly as possible under the guidance of the concept, so that customers can get the most value from interactions, or empowering customers to solve problems independently.
- Establish a professional service team. There is a specialization in the industry, and a professional service team can make the work twice the result with half the effort, but it is necessary to clarify the responsibilities of the service personnel and organize corresponding training on a regular basis to adapt to the ever-changing service environment.
- Good team communication. While many issues can be solved by the service team, sometimes support and assistance from other departments, such as technicians, salespeople, or marketers, are needed. Someone once said that the best thing you can do is to involve every department, and the main departments of the enterprise must maintain good communication with the customer service department.
- Choose the right tool support. Choosing the right platform system is crucial because you deal with it every day, and its characteristics are related to the level of service and customer satisfaction. The selection of service management intelligence software should carefully evaluate its characteristics, such as supporting channels, process management, whether there is a knowledge base, data analysis, customer evaluation management, spare parts and inventory management, field service, cost settlement and other perspectives.
- Customer-centric, establish a good communication relationship with customers. The communication between enterprises and customers is essentially the construction of the relationship between people, so the reach between the two should be warm. In the process of customer service, you should always adhere to customer service as the center, for example, when dealing with customer complaints, you should admit the problem, because any time you argue with customers, you will lose; Then be honest about the problem and finally come up with a solution.
Fourth, the evaluation system of service management
Customer service is a measurable activity with data, especially when supported by modern software where everything is quantifiable. A complete service management evaluation system can help enterprises understand the real needs and expectations of users from the subtleties of communication with customers, so as to continuously improve service levels.
So what is the measurement index of service management and what is the evaluation system?
- First of all, look at the number of customer inquiries within a certain time frame, which can help enterprise managers determine the time period of customer activity, so as to make a more reasonable allocation of relevant staff.
- Focus on customer issues categorized by tag topics. Label all customer inquiries accordingly, especially by categorizing them around a few key issues, and see if the number of inquiries about that issue decreases over time, so as to infer whether the service strategy is in place.
- Customers who focus on a certain geography need the most help. Through the system, you can view customer profiles to understand which regions customers need the most help, so as to provide them with reasonable support and assistance, or consider adding localized services.
- Focus on the effectiveness of your customer interactions. Customer interaction is the most important part of the service level, and it is also a key indicator to measure and evaluate the level of service management.
- Focus on customer satisfaction. Customers can rate and rate the service or products of customer service personnel, track customer satisfaction for a long time, and find out the aspects that need to be improved by personnel or products, so as to do further product optimization or personnel training and adjustment.
- Concern issues, average processing time, and response time. For staff, the average processing time of customer issues can reflect their work status to a certain extent, but it is not possible to pursue speed, because this may affect the quality of service, so it is necessary to be careful in the evaluation.
- Focus on first response time. This indicator is often seen as the number one indicator of customer satisfaction, and when a customer asks for help, how often they get the first response directly affects the customer's impression of the business.
V. Conclusion
Service management connects multiple elements such as personnel, processes, and customers of the enterprise, and plays a role in the operation of the enterprise. Every enterprise is unique and needs different service management solutions, so when choosing service management software, you should consider from multiple perspectives, such as whether it is suitable for your own business needs; At the same time, it is also necessary to listen to the voices of different departments of the enterprise, and even end users, such as customer service personnel, warehouse managers, field engineers, etc., so as to choose a product that can make the connection between the enterprise and customers warm.
This article was written by Everyone is a Product Manager Author [SaaS Circle Lao Ma], WeChat public account: [New Growth SaaS Review], original / authorized Published in Everyone is a product manager, without permission, it is forbidden to reprint.
Image from Unsplash, based on the CC0 license.