Deconstructing Customer Delight

Simplify the Reopening of Workplace

In this increasingly digital age, brands are looking to refine the way they interact with consumers online.  The COVID-19 pandemic made digital transformation a top priority for many executives, with an increasing focus on adopting a customer-first mindset. Technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI) are providing organizations with more information than ever before on their customers, but unless they use this information to connect in a way that is positive and of real value to the target audience, the opportunity to establish a long-term relationship will be lost.

Ever-increasing competition in products and services means brands must use the new digital tools at their disposal correctly, in order to appeal to customers on every level to maintain their loyalty. Accurate, prompt, and relevant customer service can win hearts but many companies are getting it wrong. A Freshworks report shows many brands are pushing customers away with customer service that is slow, solution-oriented or lacks personalization.

The Freshworks Service Management Benchmark Report 2021 looked at customer service practices at 3,200 organizations from 82 countries, including Singapore, with 47 million unique service tickets.

The objective of the Freshservice Service Management Benchmark Report 2021 (FBR 2021) was to create a benchmark index to measure key performance indicators (KPIs) for IT Service Management (ITSM). The FBR 2021 encourages organizations to measure their KPIs and benchmark against the index, thus allowing ITSM leaders to decide and act on what levers to pull and ultimately deliver a delightful experience to employees and customers.

Key takeaways from the report include:

Customer Communications: It takes on average 12 hours for the service requestor to receive an acknowledgment from the service desk and almost 20 hours for the ticket to get assigned to a service desk agent.

Automation: The average resolution time drops dramatically by nearly 28% when even simple workflows are automated. 

Adoption of productivity tools: Over 54% of the integrations enabled in 2020 are related to collaboration, remote access tools, and apps that aid productivity. This is a 110% increase from the previous year. Though the pandemic has a role in this growth, the future of service management revolves around breaking down silos between service and operations, with a focus on context-driven collaboration.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) in ITSM: Organizations that actively adopt AI see an improvement across all KPIs. First response and first assign times drop by approximately 35%, and the average resolution time by 46.5%. Data shows that organizations that have adopted AI into their service strategy have begun to reap the benefits. It is important that businesses invest in AI and train bots to empower their agents and boost productivity

Correlation between self-service and productivity: The adoption of self-service tools by organizations has a direct impact on service desk efficiency and productivity. Organizations on average see a 30% reduction in average resolution time when knowledge base (Kbase) articles are adopted.

The context of the survey is the highly dynamic environment businesses operate in today. ITSM is constantly evolving, and while organizations seek to keep up with rapid developments, they need to improve service delivery, proactively adapt to changing needs and drive process improvements.

There are countless different metrics available for leaders to track and measure the performance of service desk processes, but it is critical for service management leaders to know what to track, measure, and benchmark against. The Freshworks survey provides organizations with a benchmark across seven industry-standard Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), using a median across industries, regions, and organizations to create a composite index. These indicators measure customer delight, helping organizations understand their customers’ satisfaction with the services and experiences offered by service management teams.

The indicators are Customer Satisfaction, Average First Response Time, Average Resolution Time, Average First Assign Time, First Contact Resolution (FCR), Resolution SLA percent, First response SLA percent.

The Freshworks survey provides an analysis of the data across 15 industries to understand how industries compare against each other. It also tracked metrics across regions, finding that companies and customers in different countries seem to have strikingly different assessments of their experience. 

Across the benchmark KPIs, there were some perhaps unexpected results. The Americas came out ahead in customer satisfaction and average first response time, while Europe had the best average resolution time and Africa was the quickest to assign tickets and had the highest first contact resolution. Across all metrics, Asia scored comfortably on average, delivering neither the best nor the worst results in any category.

Measuring by country, Singapore’s metrics were typical of the overall Asian performance – neither outstandingly good nor worryingly poor in any of the KPIs.

However, there is an opportunity for Singapore to do better, by accelerating the adoption of technologies that make use of automation and AI. Making sure IT works flawlessly is essential for modern businesses to succeed. Businesses and IT teams, in particular, should master the challenges of remote working by employing powerful yet easy-to-use technologies. While this has been achieved for the most part in the last year, many businesses still have room for growth in this area.

Committing to investment in the adoption of new technologies will see Singapore become a global leader in delivering customer delight.

By Simon Ma, Director & Regional Manager, ASEAN at Freshworks

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