Introduction
Customers are the revenue streams of any service or product-based industry.
Therefore, the best way to maximize profit is to ensure that your customers are satisfied and happy with your services and you are able to retain them. Moreover, you want good feedback on your organization’s profile to attract new customers.
For this reason, it is important to have a seamless customer support system in place. Today, the technological world is moving towards AI and automation.
With the help of machine learning software, a lot of industries have revolutionized their working model. If your customer IT support is failing to keep up with the new trends, it is time to revamp obsolete systems. With ITIL, you can ensure a robust customer support system that is available 24X7 and offers the best solutions and top-of-the-line customer interaction experience.
Additionally, automation tools like ITIL will help you save on employment and training costs and maximize your resources. If you think this is the right time to develop an ITIL customer system for your organization, this is just the article for you. In this article, we will talk about how you can improve customer experience through ITIL.
What is ITIL?
Let’s start with the basics, like what is ITIL?
The ITIL framework is basically a framework that's used to deliver, support, and improve IT support services. ITIL stands for Information Technology Infrastructure Library, which means it is a collection of best practices that you can incorporate in order to improve your IT solutions and ensure customer satisfaction.
It is important to note that currently, ITIL is one of the most accepted practices for improving IT support services. To understand how important ITIL has become, it must be mentioned that huge organizations like IBM, Microsoft, VISA, etc., have adopted the ITIL framework in their systems.
The best thing about ITIL is that it is dynamic in nature, which means it keeps updating to keep up with the changing trends. The ITIL principles were laid down in the late 1980s when certain rules and principles were compiled to form the first ITIL framework that helped in delivering the best IT support.
Today, we are working with the ITIL chapter IV, which was released in 2019. The latest chapter focuses on automation technology to ensure that your customers don’t have to wait when any incident occurs.
The primary objective of ITIL 4 is to create a robust solution for digital businesses. ITIL 4 has conceptualized the current technology at our disposal as well as the technology of the future. This ensures that your support system solution doesn’t get obsolete.
How does ITIL support customers?
Now that we are through with the basics, it is important to know how ITIL actually helps your organization in customer support. Whenever you bring a customer on board, you establish a relationship of duty and obligations with him. Your primary goal is not just to sell the product but also to ensure that the customer doesn’t face any difficulty with the product and that he has a seamless experience.
If you are a product-based company and you sell printers, for example, it is quite likely that your customers will face technical issues at some point. In such a situation, the customer will expect you to respond promptly and offer him a solution as soon as possible. Moreover, if your customer is a business, it will expect to get back on track quickly.
Also, a technical issue can arise at any time of the day. Therefore, you will have to ensure that your customer support is available round the clock. With ITIL, you can develop the best IT support practices to reduce your cost, automate support and ensure availability 24X7. Additionally, you can develop an IT support system even for software or SaaS-based products.
What are the benefits of ITIL?
ITIL best practices are not just applicable to customer experience. You can even use this framework to manage your internal employee relationship and provide them with the best system to work with. Let’s look at some of the areas where the ITIL best practices framework is applicable:
- IT Asset Management: A company’s assets are not just its physical and intellectual properties but a lot of other things too, which must be protected and managed efficiently to ensure smooth operations. Assets like old data, software packages, hardware, etc., require efficient management.
Such digital assets need regular upkeep and upgradation. With ITIL's best practices framework, you can ensure that your employees get seamless access to such assets. This will also help in keeping track of such assets and preparing a comprehensive report as to which ones require replacement and updates.
- Incident Management: Incident management is of paramount importance if you want to maintain a good image of your organization in the industry. ITIL helps in keeping track of unplanned events and putting a system in place so that such events are resolved at the earliest. Additionally, ITIL practices also help to restore the status quo at the earliest, thereby leading to a good customer retention rate.
If you do not have a good IT support system in place, your customers will face repetitive incidents, which can hamper your company’s image.
For example, if you have developed a business e-commerce website for your client, and the website keeps crashing frequently, your client will face huge losses, and he’s very unlikely to return to you with more work. Therefore, ITIL ensures that unplanned events are resolved at the root so that such problems don’t arise in the future.
- Knowledge Management: Another great facet of ITIL is that it facilitates knowledge management, which means that you can put an organized system in place where general query support is provided. An automated query resolution system will help in customer and employee support. You can use ITIL practices to set up a library with all the relevant questions so that the end users can resolve standard issues by themselves.
ITIL tips & best practices
Let’s take a look at some of the best ITIL practices that will put you ahead of the competition:
Communicate the value
You cannot establish a robust ITIL framework if you cannot communicate its importance internally and with the clients. You have to understand that ITIL has wider applications than simply fixing the “IT issues” within the organization and externally. The wider goal of ITIL is to establish a seamless connection with your clients and employees.
Streamline incident management
A major software issue can lead to delays and, in some cases, even shutting down entire business operations.
Therefore, the best ITIL practice is to streamline the incident management process to ensure a speedy resolution. For example, if the software that scans the boarding pass and cross-checks with the available database malfunctions, the flights will get delayed, thereby leading to a huge loss to the business.
In such a case, you can club similar incidents together and ask your team to work on them all at once so that multiple bugs are removed immediately. Working on similar incidents separately will only increase labor and time and reduce efficiency. Similarly, do away with the practice of marking an issue resolved simply when an engineer has worked on it. Make it a common practice that an issue is only marked as resolved when it has been completely solved.
Record all the incidents in one place
Whoever uses your ITIL support system must have different channels to reach out to you for ease of convenience. Therefore, you can enable chats, messengers, email, etc., in your system so the incidents can be reported at the earliest.
However, you should store the data from different routes in one place. This will allow you to have seamless access to past and present records and save time by eliminating the need for continuous back and forth.
For this reason, it is recommended to deploy an IT helpdesk by Scribe, which will just use one tool to access all the support requests and channel them to the appropriate team or authority.
Self-service options
You must not consider your clients and employees as laymen. In this age of information, every client has become smarter. Such clients can easily follow your suit for minor incidents.
Therefore, it is ideal to have a self-help guide in place so your client doesn’t have to wait for your response to resolve trivial issues. Additionally, it will also save you time and resources because you will be able to focus on incidents that require your immediate attention.
Why ITIL is a must-have for customer service success & how Scribe's template can help
To sum it up, ITIL is crucial for any business that wants to give their customers the best service possible. By using the ITIL framework, companies can make sure their customer service is top-notch and available 24/7. Scribe's customer service training template is a great tool for making this happen.
It makes it easy for trainers to create effective and engaging training materials that teach customer service teams how to handle customer interactions, measure success and align with ITIL best practices. The template has everything you need, including lesson plans, handouts and interactive activities, and it's easy to customize to fit your business's unique needs. So, if you want to make sure your customer service is the best it can be, definitely check out Scribe's template and align your training with ITIL best practices.
