Enterprise customer support involves more than just addressing customer needs. Enterprises have significant levels of interaction across media, require coordination across departments, deliver quality service, and make use of customer data to enhance the experience. As such, enterprises need to consider the following to evaluate customer support platforms:
- Define enterprise requirements for customer support
- Consider the omnichannel aspect of customer support
- Examine the ticketing system and SLA management
- Look at automation and AI
- Check CRM and other business tool integrations
- Take a close look at analytics and reporting
- Assess scalability and administration
- Evaluate security and compliance
What is a customer service platform?
A customer service platform is a unified solution that allows businesses to organize interactions with customers. While an email inbox or live chat is a great tool, a customer service platform is a unified space where businesses can address and organize support interactions from various channels and utilize features like ticketing, omnichannel communication, chatbots, CRM, and more to enhance the experience of their customers.
Customer service platforms essentially unify all customer interactions across channels, allowing agents to respond faster and more efficiently. In most cases, these interactions are placed in an inbox with contextual information for faster resolution. Unlike standalone email or chat tools, a customer service platform ensures that a business has a centralized location and unified data for all customers.
Start with enterprise support requirements.Â
To evaluate customer support platforms, start with the requirements of the enterprise. An enterprise may have upwards of thousands of interactions, hundreds of agents, and dozens of departments to coordinate support across. Some common aspects of enterprise support include:
- Number of agents, tickets, channels, hours of operation, languages, segments, and more.
By considering these aspects, an enterprise can determine the appropriate customer support tools. It is important to assess not only the current requirements but also future requirements when looking at potential tools. For example, a customer support tool that suits a two-agent team may be unmanageable at a twenty-agent level.
Evaluate omnichannel capabilities
Customers may approach an enterprise through email, chat, WhatsApp, social media, phone, and other channels. An enterprise needs to ensure that the customer support platform offers omnichannel capabilities to provide a consistent experience and organize interactions across channels. For example, an omnichannel inbox is a must for support, where customers can view the same conversation history across WhatsApp or email with context. Enterprises should examine the channels the platform supports, conversation synchronization, and accessibility of conversation context.
Enterprises evaluating CCAAS providers should also consider how effectively their customer interactions across voice and digital channels can connect with broader support workflows.
Assess ticketing and SLA management.
An enterprise would typically require a ticketing system, which serves as the backbone of support operations. The ticketing system ensures that every customer has a ticket, which tracks its status, priority, agent, and history. Ticketing systems also allow enterprises to determine routing rules, the criteria by which tickets are allocated, and specific rules for each language, channel, or team.
SLA management is also a key aspect when determining how well the selected customer support platform will manage and organize interactions. Enterprises need to ensure that the selected system can manage service level agreements with alerts, escalation rules, and reminders.
Examine automation and AI capabilities.
Enterprises can examine automation and AI capabilities by looking at self-service features, ticket routing automation, response suggestions, notifications, and satisfaction surveys. Automation can drastically reduce repetitive tasks while allowing agents to focus on more complex customer requests. Features like chatbots also support customers with simple queries, while allowing agents to focus on more complex demands. At the same time, enterprises should consider how easy it is for agents to intervene during chatbot interactions if the customer requires assistance.
Check CRM and business integrations.
CRM and other business tool integrations should be considered to ensure the support operations run smoothly. Enterprises should evaluate the ability of the platform to connect with existing CRM, e-commerce, communication tools, knowledge base, billing system, and any other business tools. Integration allows the customer service system to pull information from different tools, thus eliminating the need for agents to search for information across systems.
Enterprises should closely evaluate the integration capabilities for the level of real-time information transfer, bidirectional data exchange, and unique requirements like APIs.
Review reporting and analytics
Reporting and analytics are critical for enterprise support, where managers need to analyze data to continuously improve support operations. Enterprises should assess the reports available in a given customer service platform and examine the customization options to ensure that the reports align with their requirements. The essential reports in enterprise support typically cover ticket volume, response time, resolution time, first contact resolution rate, SLA performance, backlog trends, satisfaction scores, and other key performance indicators. Advanced analytics can also be extremely useful in highlighting root causes and other problems, such as recurring tickets that can be avoided through documentation or training.
Managers should also determine whether they can customize and design dashboards and reports on a per-team and managerial level.
Evaluate scalability and administration.
Enterprises need to ensure that the platforms they select can scale alongside their operations. The platforms should be able to accommodate more agents, channels, departments, locations, customers, and complexity. Administration tools are also important, and enterprises should ensure that the admin dashboard is intuitive, with appropriate control options. Most enterprise-level platforms offer role-specific access, allowing enterprises to configure the tools their agents need without overwhelming them with other functions.
Administration also covers configuring the tools and features for the enterprise, including setting up routing rules, SLA management, and workflows without requiring technical expertise.
Consider security and compliance.
Customer support can hold sensitive information about customers and the enterprise itself. Enterprises should evaluate a potential platform’s security features and capabilities, including encryption, access control, audit trails, and data retention. These capabilities should align with the enterprise’s compliance requirements.
The security considerations should go beyond a customer service platform to include other applications the enterprise can integrate. Enterprises should also evaluate compliance requirements, including data privacy laws, industry-specific regulations, and legal considerations of the country where the platform is hosted.
Conclusion
Evaluating customer support platforms for enterprise customers requires more than a simple checklist of features. Instead, enterprise managers should consider the requirements of their support operations, including omnichannel capabilities, ticketing system, SLA management, automation and AI, integrations, analytics, scalability, security, and usability. The evaluation process should also involve the managers, agents, and support teams to ensure that the selected platform supports smooth operations, current and future requirements, and continuous improvement.