Add Customer ‘Moments of Delight’ with SAP Service Cloud

(3 minute read)

(This blog was written in collaboration with Rohit Agarwal, Solution Architect, SAP C/4HANA)

In the era of e-commerce and the digital economy, it’s very possible that the first people your customers interact with from your company are a customer support agent or a field service technician. And the quality of those customer interactions will only be as good as the tools those employees have to deliver a great customer experience.

According to a 2018 study conducted by NewVoiceMedia, poor customer service is costing businesses more than $75 billion a year; and that’s up $13 billion since its last report in 2016. Clearly, delivering great customer service needs to be a priority.

A common cause for poor customer service is front-line employees lacking the information they need to serve customers efficiently. While service managers may think their service technicians have all the information they need, the reality is that employees in the field often have difficulty finding the most relevant information in the sea of data they receive. SAP Service Cloud can easily address some of these needs.

SAP Service Cloud, augmented with SAP Field Service Management (FSM), provides a holistic, powerful set of tools to meet the needs and expectations of all stakeholders throughout the service journey. It provides the agility needed by customer support agents and service technicians to deliver excellent service.

The solution adds ‘moments of delight’ across all touchpoints: self-service moments, customer service moments and field service moments, as illustrated below:

The following are a few of the improvements and key features that have recently been released or are planned for upcoming releases:

• The ability for an end customer to communicate with a service agent in real time by initiating a live chat communication.
• A guided experience for technicians that provides different workflow steps for different activity types. For example, maintenance activities will have different steps than installation activities.
• Enhanced real-time traffic data used for route calculation ensures that the schedule of the service technician can be planned correctly, taking both historic and live traffic data into account.
• Tools reservation, ensuring that a tool required for the service is available before the service activity is released. This includes the ability to define off-set hours, ensuring that time is allotted for the tool to reach the customer site and that no one else can book it in the same timeframe.
• A mobile-friendly portal for service partners, where partners can add and maintain their profiles, skillsets, certificates, and other information themselves.
• Integration with Litmos enables the Crowd owner to work with the partner manager for better dispatching and quality service through partner technicians.
• User interface improvements in the Customer Self-Service Portal.
• Ability to plan and capture efforts of multiple people working on the same job.
• For long-running jobs, the ability to do partial time-and-materials confirmation and charge the customer for the work completed so far.
• The ability for users to provide feedback on the steps devised on the service moments flow, ensuring that user satisfaction gaps can be addressed.

• A new overview layout design for tickets provides 40-60 layout options that make response editing easier. The new interaction timeline control with card visualization makes it easy to comprehend any ticket by looking at the chronological sequence of notes and responses.

• The Live Activity Center – Customer 360 displays recent transactions, timeline and recommended moment flows, enabling the customer support agent to quickly understand the customer situation and efficiently complete the end-to-end process

• Tight integration between SAP Service Cloud and SAP FSM provides the ability to schedule the service visit for the customer with the best-matching technician based on the needed skillset and location; all in a few seconds.

• Out-of-the-box standard prepackaged integration saves a lot of time and cost during SAP Service Cloud implementation.

• A seamless flow of master data between SAP Cloud for Customer and SAP Field Service Management (FSM).

• The ability for customer service agents to access available promotions while addressing customer inquiries in order to offer relevant up-sell promotions.

As you can see, the SAP Service Cloud solution can be a very effective tool to create a unified service experience for customers, bridging the gap between front-office engagements and back-office processes.  It provides the insights agents and technicians need to stop broken, fragmented experiences that delay issue resolution.

Interested in learning more about the SAP Customer Experience set of solutions? Download our buyer’s guide for a detailed evaluation of the core solutions in the SAP Customer Experience suite to help you understand how it can transform every stage of the customer experience.