Johannesburg, 08 Mar 2023
The next frontier in CX is delivering an effortless experience for customers. However, businesses must address the ‘messy middle’ in organisational processes to reduce friction and enable effortless experience.
This is according to speakers at an executive forum hosted in Sandton by ServiceNow last week. They outlined how reducing confusion and friction in the customer journey was crucial for customer loyalty and business growth.
Jack Govender, solution sales executive, customer workflows at ServiceNow, said Gartner research had found that 96% of customers who have had high-effort experiences reported being disloyal to brands. “Customer effort has a major impact on brand loyalty, and should be given a lot more attention in CX,” he said.
However, siloed systems and data, and disparate processes, resulted in friction and slowed down the customer journey. “A lot of investment is going into the front-end, customer facing CX systems, but once the customer journey passes that initial engagement, it goes into a ‘messy middle’ – a labyrinth of departments, systems and processes that contribute to a high effort experience. We need to make work flow seamlessly from the front office, through the middle to the back end, and back again, to reduce friction,” Govender said.
Muhammed Omar, country manager, Africa at ServiceNow, outlined how ServiceNow’s low code/no code platform unifies systems and data on a single platform, to reduce friction and offer a seamless internal and external customer experience. As the foundation for all digital workflows, ServiceNow’s Now Platform connects people, functions, and systems across the organisation, even integrating legacy systems.
Customer effort has a major impact on brand loyalty, and should be given a lot more attention in CX.
Jack Govender, ServiceNow
“Legacy technology is not going away in many organisations, but this need not stop them from doing things smarter, simplifying and automating workflows and enabling agility using our platform,” Omar said.
Govender highlighted how ServiceNow intelligently orchestrates automation to streamline workflows and reduce both friction and costs. It also enables organisations to reduce friction by enabling proactive service delivery, such as notifying customers of an outage before they start calling a contact centre.
Jody Roberts, presales solution consultant, customer experience solutions at ServiceNow, demonstrated the multiple tools and features available to transform businesses with digital IT workflows. “One challenge we see is that a lot of organisations still have pre-Covid workflows in place, yet Covid has changed everything. ServiceNow process optimisation helps organisations flag and optimise business processes for productivity, agility, and resiliency as the environment changes,” he said.
“Many people focus too much on the front end engagement layer, when they need to look more closely at how their internal processes are designed, keeping customer experience in mind,” he said.
Govender added: “ServiceNow helps to reduce costs and deliver a seamless services experience with workflow optimisation and purpose-built workflows for specific sectors. Organisations must identify and address the friction, handbrakes and process bottlenecks to improve the total experience for both customers and employees.”
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