Context

Customer Service

Although every organization is different, there are many common underlying issues facing customer service departments around the world today, all of which reduce operational performance and support satisfaction. These especially surface with regular high-volume customer service processes and order fulfillment. 

Fortunately, SimplyAsk provides unique software solutions – including our Symphona platform and consulting services – that can help customer service and order fulfillment teams optimize their work, helping them reap massive time and money savings while improving customer satisfaction. 

SimplyAsk can help with the following common customer service problems:

Customer Service Challenges

Handling Volatile Request Volumes

Most organizations face fluctuating customer service request volumes across different hours of the day, days of the week, and weeks of the year. In general, there are two components of request volume volatility: daily or seasonal fluctuations.

The most common type of request volume fluctuation is intraday (volatility at different times of the day). This volatility occurs when customers are more likely to make requests at certain times of the day, like during peak business hours. Although this is a common issue, there is no easy solution. Employee shifts are generally longer than a few hours, making it difficult to solve with only a resource-based approach.

Alongside daily volatility, some organizations with seasonal operations face intramonth fluctuations (volatility across different months of the year). For example, campsites receive significantly more booking requests in the summer than during the winter. As a result, they must manage this request volatility to provide good customer service. 

Managing High-Volume Customer Service Ticket Assignment and Routing

When customer service departments receive large volumes of requests that require follow-up action and support teams expand in size, a bottleneck always occurs — managing task assignments to ensure the correct support agents are assigned the right tasks. At first glance, this issue seems simple; managers simply need to route incoming requests to the appropriate agent. However, with large volumes of request types and specialized support agents, this process is nowhere near being simple.

Keeping Customers Up-to-Date on Status Changes.

Customer service agents update request statuses, add comments, and eventually close and resolve issues. However, despite these activities being common and frequent, customers are often left without knowing about the progress made towards their request. In worst-case scenarios, customers do not know when their service request is fulfilled and closed. This lack of notifications for customers reduces service experience and overall satisfaction.

Order Fulfillment Challenges

Low Organizational Productivity and Inefficiency

Having human customer service agents manually processing every order can be extremely time-consuming, especially when faced with high volumes. Alongside its time-consuming nature, manual data entry also heightens the risks of miscommunications and inaccuracies — increasing fulfillment times and negatively impacting brand image.

Poor Inventory Control

Poor inventory management raises numerous issues within the order fulfillment process, generally originating from a lack of real-time information. Operations teams commonly use inventory data to forecast demands and shortages to make mission-critical decisions, such as purchasing inventory without overstocking or understocking.

Overstocking inventory can significantly impact profitability, especially for organizations selling physical products with limited shelf lives or market seasons. Understocking products can also have a tangible impact, as insufficient inventory can damage brand reputation and force customers to consider options from competitors. Any of these situations can cause significant, long-term impacts on your organization.

Customer Dissatisfaction

Consumers today have high expectations regarding order processing visibility, delivery tracking accuracy, and resolution time. For organizations with vast resources and large technical teams, fulfilling these expectations is easily accomplished with internal capabilities. 

However, a lack of resources or investment in new technologies causes many organizations to often fall short of meeting these consumer expectations. By providing customers with a less-than-ideal service experience, they are more likely to take their business elsewhere. 

Solutions

How SimplyAsk Helps Customer Service

Strategic Planning and Architecture Design

If your organization feels its current infrastructure and architecture is failing to support customer service processes, SimplyAsk can help plan and execute your new infrastructure and architecture goals. Our team will help clarify your goals, plan resource allocation, and account for potential risks.  

SimplyAsk develops infrastructures with scalability and flexibility in mind, ensuring our solutions can adapt to your evolving organizational needs and accommodate growth. We select technologies that enable seamless expansion without sacrificing performance or reliability. 

Application and Data Migration

If your organization is still using old and inefficient legacy systems for your customer service processes, SimplyAsk can help modernize and centralize your digital systems and data architecture, such as your CRMs, ordering systems, and support systems. Our migration projects typically follow a phased approach, where we perform a comprehensive assessment of existing systems to create a detailed migration roadmap for your organization, including activities, milestones, and resource allocation.

By using our Symphona Migrate tool and our AI-powered conversion tools, SimplyAsk can dramatically expedite the data migration and transformation processes while managing fallouts and ensuring data integrity and compatibility. 

Process Optimization and Automation

Improving Customer Service

Symphona’s products provide a complete customer service solution, including:

• Customer request collection and inquiry resolution using Converse
• Automatic follow-up task resolution through Flow and Serve
• Intelligent task assignment to human agents through Serve

Converse agents use NLP and generative AI to speak organically and manage a large level of simple and complex requests. By leveraging Converse’s generative agents and their conversational AI capabilities:

• Your organization can more easily collect customer requests and answer inquiries, such as updating account information or booking appointments. 
• Your organization can handle a higher volume of requests while maintaining and enhancing customer satisfaction. 
• You also reduce strain on human support agents, allowing them to focus on more complex tasks. 

By using Flow’s automation and AI features to automate common low-complexity and high-frequency customer requests:

• Teams can automatically fulfill follow-up tasks, eliminating manual effort and freeing support agents to handle more complicated issues. 
• Automations can resolve customer issues faster than traditional manual methods, providing a better support experience.

Organizations can flexibly use Symphona for a complete customer service process overhaul or a longer-term phased approach. Since Symphona is modular, you can use any of our products on your own terms. 

Improving Order Fulfillment

Orchestrate order processing from start to finish with Flow’s advanced workflow automation capabilities. Implement advanced order fulfillment flows while managing business exceptions as they occur through Resolve. 

• Automatically validate business rules, send outbound emails and text messages, integrate with existing internal and third-party systems via API, and more as part of your cutting-edge order fulfillment workflows. 
• Combine manual and automatic steps to upgrade and modernize existing processes. 
• No-code editors enable both technical and non-technical team members to make modifications to workflows with ease.

Manage and automatically triage business exceptions (fallouts) generated by workflows using Resolve:

• Errors in manual and automatic business processes are inevitable, from simple issues like unavailable downstream APIs to more advanced ones related to failed validation checks. 
• Resolve integrates tightly with Flow to reduce exception resolution effort and help your organization focus more on your core mission.

If your organization has created customer service agents through Converse, you can also set up some of your order fulfillment workflows within your agents so that customers can ask an agent for their order status and receive real-time information. 

Alongside these two products, Symphona offers automatic email report generation and advanced dashboards for KPI tracking, so you can have a birds-eye view of your organization’s order fulfillment processes. Flexibly scale Symphona depending upon the size of your order fulfilment. 

Overall, for every aspect of your organization’s customer service systems and processes, SimplyAsk solutions can help modernize and optimize them so that you exceed customer expectations and retain loyalty while lowering costs. Contact our sales team today and get a free consultation on how your organization can use SimplyAsk solutions.