Customer Service
Background
Providing your customers with the quality of service they expect is key to the success of your business.
Whether you are being asked to perform to agreed KPIs or you simply need to develop and maintain that competitive edge, customer satisfaction and your insights into it are the heart blood of day to day business performance.
The Financial Services industry is not exempt from Murphy’s Law – if something can go wrong, it will!
Against that background, the quality of your Customer Service – and the customer’s perception of that quality – depends on:
- you knowing that something has gone wrong
- you being able to resolve the problem before serious damage is done
- your ability to proactively inform the customer of problems
- the quality and timeliness of your response to customer queries
- your documented performance against agreed criteria and metrics (KPIs and SLAs)
Customer Service Issues
Improvements in Customer Service revolve around three issues
- reducing errors and delays
- providing transparency into causes, status and resolution
- allowing quick and accurate resolution
Today’s transaction infrastructure is complex and heterogeneous. A single business transaction involves multiple system transactions, transcends the front, middle and back offices and is the changing responsibility of diverse groups and departments as it works its way through the business. It is hardly surprising that Murphy’s Law has multiple opportunities to prove its validity!
Each step in the process and each transition between those steps is a potential source of error and delay. At the highest level, you need an overview of all current transactions, consolidated to provide a summary of the general health of the system. Using a Dashboard type interface, you want to see the percentage (or number) of successful, delayed and failed transactions. Depending on your requirements, this view may be differentiated by transaction type, SLA classification or even by customer priority.
Issue Resolution
Once a problem transaction has been identified, you will need as much information as possible to ensure speedy resolution. The monitoring instance needs to understand the detail of each step, the expected inputs and outputs and the relevance of the steps and their sequence to the overall transaction. Drill-down functionality is required to view the detail of a processing failure and manual intervention must be supported and triggered automatically, where appropriate.
Speedy, effective resolution is what makes your Customer Service better than your competitors’. Sometimes the underlying cause is of a technical nature – something is broken and needs fixing, fast. Another time, you are faced with mismatching or simply bad data. Maybe the issue is caused simply by the out-of-sequence processing of a sub-transaction, say in a back-office system. Whatever the cause, you need reliable identification of the problem and help in getting it fixed. That help might involve the creation of a workflow instance for manual intervention, correction of bad data using agreed business rules or simply the recognition that disparate IT transactions are part of a single business transaction.
And when the problem transactions have been identified, the underlying causes have been found and the steps have been taken to ensure the speedy and effective resolution that your customers have come to expect of you, you will probably want detailed Resolution Reports to demonstrate to your customers that – once again – you and your team have provided first class service in line with the agreed KPIs.
PaceMaker Solution
PaceMetrics offers products and professional services to address these business issues and to ensure that your Customer Service is always better, faster and closer to your customers’ needs than anything your competitors might offer.
PaceMaker is a non-intrusive, real-time monitoring system that provides full transparency into every business transaction. A powerful Rules Engine defines the business logic to support different transaction types and to recognise the subcomponents of each transaction as they are processed by multiple sub-systems. An easy-to-use Dashboard provides configurable views of processing status across the business. Drill-down functionality allows immediate access to the detail of any transaction. Rules-based resolution can be applied to issues where it is appropriate and workflow instances can be automatically generated where manual intervention is required. The inherent escalation and reporting functionality of the underlying workflow infrastructure can even be integrated into the monitoring process itself. Transaction processing statistics – and even the transaction detail itself – as well as resolution history, can be captured for documentation and reporting processes.
Price Verification Server Solution
PVS is the PaceMetrics Price Verification Server, which can be integrated into an overall solution to ensure that prices used are valid, complete and correct. The Rules Engine determines how price inconsistencies are handled and resolved, workflow tools can be integrated to initiate and to coordinate manual processes. The PVS Dashboard provides a single view of the entire price validation life cycle and allows instant drill-down to facilitate problem resolution. Key parameters can be saved to facilitate analysis of and reporting on the validation process.
Professional Services
Best of breed tools alone are not sufficient to guarantee the successful rollout of end-to-end Customer Support solutions. The PaceMetrics Professional Services team ensures that the tools are implemented so as to reflect the nuances of your business and to ensure your competitive advantage. A wealth of experience across all areas of the financial services industry, combined with a structured implementation methodology, ensures that our customer service – and the customers’ satisfaction – is every bit as good as yours!