10 Best Practices to Resolve the Most Common Pitfalls When Implementing a Customer Centric Management System

The opportunity to create value beyond the product or service your company sells can potentially make or break the long-term relationship you are looking to foster with your customers. Without looking at the bigger picture, your enterprise’s investments in branding or digital marketing become muted.?

This is the principle behind McKinsey’s lesser-known “loyalty loop” that replaces the commonly-known “marketing funnel” as the industry’s north star: customers will only continue doing business if the end to end of their past touch points with your organization, as a whole, was positive. In other words, a completely refined customer experience (CX). This does not mean perfection from end to end, but rather requires empathy and common understanding to be better every day, week, month, and quarter across all types of surveys, telemetry and analytics.?

Today’s market demands for ease of use, reliability, security, and efficiency are a given.??Customer-centricity is no longer optional—it is expected.

Combined with the internal pressure to innovate and become competitive while remaining profitable and complex, this focus has pushed many stakeholders to implement Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions quickly trying to “fix” a short-term need with technology that never fulfilled its promises.

In reality, most with a technology-first (or IT centric) focus fail after throwing away budgets and implementing messy organizational changes, reaching a point of confusion and disillusionment where the investment never had a return and promises never became reality. Data never fully utilized or discovered. Business units looked at as technical functions instead of managed services for a customer.?

Within just this past year, most customers I’ve talked with across various maturity levels were in this scenario across all types of industries, from MSPs to financial organizations, from public sector to healthcare. The most common statement was, “Yes, I know that customers want simplicity, but we are not simple, we are not ready and what they are looking for is not simple either.”

It is easy to understand this mix of frustration when looking at key numbers, like?this survey from Qualtrics?which shows that 80% of business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) organizations are inexperienced at developing CX programs. Similarly,?this Medallia study?finds that more than two-thirds of consumers say that, within the past year, they have avoided a brand because of a bad experience.?

Despite this, I still find that exceptional CX is possible when technology is well implemented, in context with user expectations, along with translation of technical features into practices. Data is then allowed to be modeled and mapped to strategically digitize your operations (both, people and process) in service of the business while enabling for automation and personalization.?

Technology is not the goal but rather an enabler of our goals. Recognizing that and understanding that the customer must be at center of your process, brings the picture into focus. There is no secret potion to make CX work well with technology, but there are best practices I have learned over the past decade implementing, consulting, and architecting all types of customer-centric solutions. Below, you can find a summary of the top 10 best practices to avoid the most common pitfalls:

1.????Don’t make it all about technology: No judgment: I’m a geek too! Some of us can talk about technology nonstop. Typically, though, this is not the user’s point of view. Their main goal is to get on with their lives as soon as their needs are met. They truly just want to forget about your “website” or IVR or portal as soon as possible. This?proven observation?is where design thinking and user experience (UX) principles come in. Technology is great when it resolves things, but it is useless and at worst a hindrance when it is there for its own sake—and even when that’s just customer perception, for them, perception is reality.

This is why it’s essential to?empathize with your customer personas. Be on their shoes.

You don’t need a dedicated CXO (Customer Experience Officer) or dedicated team for this when starting out, and your organization can take baby steps to get there. From the customer’s view, it’s never about the latest patch or top-of-the-line server processors or a cool new AI translation or the ITIL-defined record types. It’s not about an incident, a request, a work order, a task or a change. They don’t care unless they are technologists like you.?

Our job is to build a bridge to simplifies their experience yet allows the back-end reality (which is inherently complex, hence point #7 below) to exist transparently, no matter what touchpoint the customer is dealing with your company.?

In the past, given its nature, a lot of those tailored experiences were focused only on generating leads, e-Commerce, or retail, often forgetting that loyalty is created post-purchase.?

2.????Differentiate Systems of Engagement, of Record, and of Action:?A typical dilemma stakeholders face is, “are we using generalist or specialist tools? Does it depend on the department or discipline? How do we decide this without playing favorites? Is Finance above Project Management given its natural control to our budget?”

The best practice is to be flexible enough to accommodate different levels of maturity, focus, and needs for each internal organization while keeping some sort of order and service excellence with a focus on improving. In fact, many companies have multiple systems of engagement that specialize on a contact method, always sitting at the top level.

Often, people want to make contact through different methods to access or request something, whether that’s issue resolution, order placement, or get a status update. This can take many forms: contact center technology, SMS, social media, AI chatbots, FAQs, e-Commerce, or even an in-person experience. I think we can all agree the days of enforcing a single contact method are over. Not everyone wants to always call or chat or self-serve or even have someone visit them.

The same applies when using systems of record. No mature company could, or even should, have a single system of record. For instance, by nature, the Finance team could have a single piece of data that the Product team will not ever care about, IT will get confused about, or the HR team will ever need to know, but that the Security team needs to expose to an external regulatory entity.?This is related to?Hick’s Law.?As a result, each system will look very different because they were built for a single purpose, whether off-the-shelf or custom-developed. Not even IT has a true single system of record: not every bot can gather the same type of data from a PC, nor can every monitoring system catch the same type of events, nor the same team have the same writing access. You get the idea; it is better to have multiple sources of data than just one, but accessing this data from different points of view is critical.

Still, data is useless if it does not become reliable information.

It is recommended to have multiple sources of truth and engagement, but to harness them into a usable “ultimate” dashboard that allows you to look back, measure success, and execute decisions while ensuring excellence at all levels of the organization, you need a?single system of action?that integrates all of this data and makes it easy to map ways of working.?

For us in technology, we are in the middle of that, where you integrate information that moves the workflows across those systems of record.?

This could be something as simple as an employee changing their home address, or as complex as relocating an office from one city to another. All those actions need to echo across multiple systems. A simplified yet scalable system of action must be able to not only integrate easily with those external systems of record but also to work both ways, communicating when the data changes because the customer asked for it to be changed.

We must recognize that the organizational silos (along with their multitude of systems of record) were?virtually created given the complexity of a process that needed to be done; often, when supporting a customer, we over-communicate them without needing to.

Our institutional complexity should be transparent for our customers, and the only way to achieve this is via allowing this complexity to exist on a single system of action that is contextual and relevant to my user persona.?

This fosters a place where you can personalize where you work, operationalize your teams, communicate beyond your immediate office, share information and visualize the bigger picture of the process your customer is dealing with, so there’s less time spent “fire-fighting” or planning and more time spent doing.

3.????Build an integrated source of truth:?No matter how many data sources your organization has, or how complex they are, data needs to be translated into information that is moving the business forward and exists in context. Having a “landing pad” is not enough, we need to challenge the data that is flowing and how it relates to work. Otherwise, it makes no sense to have it. Have you ever wondered why you need to track “X”? And on that “X,” are those attributes being used by several support teams, business organizations, auditors, or customers? Or are those there because they have always been there? Was it there out of the box? And once data is there, you must manage it. When this fails (another big pitfall!) either because of lack of integration or updates, people distrust the system.

It is essential to?have a common place to structure and relate data?from every product sold, in inventory, and installed. Then, relate this data to your customer base and how they are affected by technology and process. Thankfully, we resolved this many years ago with something we called Configuration Management Database (CMDB). As a best practice, do not limit its potential, as it is no longer used for IT only purposes as it was in the past. Keep an eye on how to translate this information into real-time business and customer impactful decisions. This allows you to personalize experiences too! If you focus only on the daily transactional cases, resolver teams are not empowered to resolve more, confusion and doubt creates apathy given will have no context of who they are talking to, what products they have installed, how data is managed or secured and how are they related to your portfolio. This confuses people in both sides of the equation. Having a database of reusable data models allows service to be accurate and not just a perception or SLA. Remember: the technology is simply the enabler, not the director, and by default, technology has a LOT of information that you might want to simplify. Which takes us to our next best practice…

4.????Simplify before you automate: Whether it’s features, attributes, fields, UI actions, email notifications, or—most importantly—processes, these all influence your organization’s nimbleness and efficiency. Another pitfall is to not disable what is not needed, because it came “out of the box”. It can get overwhelming quickly, and it has?been proven, it doesn’t help anyone. A metaphor could be a new car: if you don’t take the plastic out and adjust your mirrors and seat, you could end up in a crash quickly. I’ve witnessed disappointed service desk managers telling me stories about how agents kept adding data in available fields that destroy relevant leadership reporting (therefore making incorrect decisions), customer escalations due to a second level team that never looked at an issue because data was in the wrong place or even worse, executing the wrong workflow by having too many UI actions.

One-size-fits-all implementations for customer service do not really exist, since not every company sells the same things or operates or is managed in the same way. You must listen to people first—both your employees and customers—and understand their needs to create “essences” or persona-based journeys which make business processes relevant. That may also mean turning off certain things that have come pre-enabled. It also means that, before automating a process, you will need to study it, benchmark it, challenge it and strip it of unnecessary data or steps in the workflow.

5.????Create incremental value: Start small, yet scalable. Enterprise SaaS implementations can get quickly overwhelming, even if done correctly. The pitfall, however, is trying to fix it all on day one. Find value first on what horizontals or fundamentals customer centric organizations have in common internally, as opposed to the edge cases. From there, isolate the top requests or simplest resolutions. Once this is defined, focus on the data models and architecture that can enable this to be digitized. Take into consideration the?Pareto Principle?when implementing these new ways of working.

People have the answer, which is why you must?study and analyze both quantifiable and qualitative data.

A dashboard will never give you an individual perception or feeling, and an interview will never tell you what is wrong with the overall picture.?Never underestimate the “watermelon effect”, where metrics are green but people are unhappy and a direct effect to your bottom line and employee productivity.

6.????Look past the first contact: Innovation has replaced “call centers” to contact centers in order to accommodate for multiple systems of engagement. One major attribute of moving from an immature?contact center?to a mature?service desk?is focusing on the “first contact resolution” metric: how much are you resolving at that first level without the need to dispatch the record? This is important, but it is not when the interactions usually end. In this sense, the concept of “single point of contact” has disappeared. The customer value chain is inherently complex and varies per company, industry and maturity level. How you order a new service, resolve a service or modify a service can have many pathways and all must be modeled accordingly. Over the past decade, research firms and many technology consultants have become laser focused on this due to the attractive cost saving attributes of “shifting left,” the popularization of self-service technology, and the onset of AI and machine learning (which is great!) but in return, what happens after that first contact has been ignored.

We must?look past the log-and-route and first-call focus?if we are customer centric.

CX takes into consideration?every?interaction our customer deals with, especially when sending a ticket to another group is needed, as evidenced with the?Peak-End rule. This is where many customer relationship management (CRM) tools fail to address these needs: they are either too focused on the first contact or busy generating leads/sales and not what happens after the sale, for example, when there is an issue at hand. The same applies if the contact center was unable to resolve on the first call. This makes the second or third interactions (which happen shortly after the first one) handled by your customer operations teams feel disjointed, siloed, and difficult to resolve due to the nature of the framework. Many processes require these extra steps to exist, even legally, particularly with certain industries like finance, healthcare, or the public sector. Still, by ignoring later interactions, we ignore the loyalty loop. For example, if you need a loan approval, or a prescription to be processed, or a state benefit fulfilled, none of these would happen on your first contact.?

These afterthought solutions are not only short-sighted: they also generally do not feel native. Eventually, you may start to realize many more limitations, such as lack of real-time operational health, loss of personalization per customer (not everyone is entitled to the same support!), and a lack of native workflow mapping and orchestration. The risk is more than poor customer satisfaction—it is frustration and inefficiency that drives customers away from your product or service, thus affecting your revenue. How many times have you called a 1-800 number to get support for a guarantee and finish pleading with the automated voice on the other end to get you to a live agent???And how many times, when you finally talked to someone, were you told that a new ticket had to be created somewhere else? Or that your product was no longer supported? Or that they had to escalate the issue and you never heard back? Now you don’t like the brand, and it was not because of the product, but rather the after-purchase experience. You cannot help but feel that the main reason for that call was to help train the automated voice response system and service desk, and that your needs came second.

7.????Infuse Service Management best practices:?

Now that we’ve covered listening to people, defining value, simplifying processes, instituting a single system of action with a common source of truth, and going beyond the first interaction, how do we manage work? How are our customer operations teams supposed to have structure when everything is siloed? This is where Service Management comes in, and we can expand it above and beyond technical teams into what we call Enterprise Service Management (ESM). A service is defined as “a means of enabling value co-creation by facilitating outcomes customers want to achieve, without the customer having to manage specific costs and risks.”

Think about your portfolio of products and services that surround those. An integrated CX approach takes ESM into consideration because, as discussed, it cares about the interactions the customer has, and is directly (as explained in point 6)?and?indirectly affected by them, too. Think about the last time you were hungry and went to a restaurant. After waiting to be served, imagine if the waiter told you that they could not help you because the oven was not working, or the payment system is down, or the scheduling software glitched and there were no cooks in the kitchen. You never touch those systems or even should know about them, but they clearly affect you.

In asking where the value is, as well as where the costs and risks are, there are obvious benefits to combining Service Management practices with CX. Even so, some people misunderstood these and see them as mutually exclusive principles, so they try to re-invent the wheel on how to manage a service—an unnecessary and resource-wasting endeavor. This formula has been tested and proven right for over three decades when implemented correctly within the precise context. Although it started in IT through ITIL, there is a wealth of best practice information in terms of ownership roles, process standards, lifecycle of records and expectations within communication, transparency, and provision of services.??

When we get this right, we can?move past merely keeping up with the service and instead elevating the service?and getting back to focus on better experiences.?Less firefighting, more enablement.

Many workflow tools attempt to do this. While they don’t explicitly say this, my belief is that we are democratizing Service Management principles across organizations, especially outside of IT, since many IT organizations are mature enough to tackle this. ESM is a complex framework to resolve needs versus a short-term solution. Leverage a problem record to understand the root cause of an ongoing issue or track changes to your customer install base or enable a re-usable knowledge base across types of work. Similar as manufacturing, resolving supply and demand is not easy. It may be simple enough to prototype an idea on how to manage a service: put some telemetry in a board and draw conclusions. Trying to make it scalable with hundreds of teams governed by the same excellence expectations, however, is hard.

In conclusion; do not limit?Service Management processes to your IT teams (ITSM) and, when implementing them, do not expose them to your customers. Most do not care about how complex your organization is. They just want to know you got enough information from them so you can resolve their issue and that you are fully qualified for doing it so. See?Postel’s Law?for more on this.

8.????Map personas and re-engineer your process: An issue, request, or even common interaction with your customer being resolved is the direct result of a mature process flow, backed by a phenomenal knowledge base and a single database (CMDB) ignited by multiple systems of record. Another big pitfall is to assume whatever you have done in the past with your previous systems of record will work (or should work!) the same way in your new system of action. Similarly, it is a mistake to assume that whatever is out of the box for your system of action is applicable to your company as-is (see point 4). Yes, there are best practices to align to, but that will only take you so far.

As part of any transformation, you need to?translate features to business value and re-sync with your processes and people.

Before implementing a new workflow tool, invest in mapping the new processes and re-engineer them as needed. Shiny new technology with the same old processes is the same mess for less. Maybe roles might change, or a step can be automated and the others need to have a different order. Maybe not all new features apply to your company. Challenge the process. Not everything is ITSM. This is your opportunity to be creative and leverage other frameworks like design thinking and agile. Take advantage of the new canvas. It is crucial to leverage the new mentality of ESM and CX, infusing those frameworks on how to achieve efficiency and service innovation and being able to contextualize them to your industry and company.?Embrace your complexity.

How would you know what things to turn off or on? At the end of this re-engineering, make sure to have a list of requirements for your implementation that only apply to your use cases. Don’t over-engineer or solution for things that are just not there today. Participating in this is not only a smart investment for your ROI, but even a learning opportunity.

This is one of the biggest pitfalls I’ve seen: skipping this step has costed companies millions of dollars in continuous ad-hoc fixes (not iterations), development time, and customization or re-engineering of the platform (changing the purpose of features) instead of the process, making it non-upgradeable and difficult to maintain—and many times affecting your licensing.

9.????The potential of "Case": Having the flexibility of keeping simplicity for your customers yet allowing for the ESM complexity?of your operations is the “business case” for this record type to be the “frontman” of your company.

Remember: part of?a great overall experience is keeping you informed throughout the resolution process without over-communicating the internal complexity.?

Yes, this is also proven.?

Case type functionality in workflow tools like ServiceNow is phenomenal because you can map all types of fields, states, rules, sub-tasks, service level agreements (SLAs), and catalog items (and many more things!) without breaking your ESM principles (which you would do if you customized any service management records like change or incident).

Cases can be literally everything, from an insurance claim to a clinician complaint or a loan operation or a restaurant license. These are especially useful when you have operational teams in a middle office (like a quality analyst on a loan or RMA approver) that can work out of the same case record, without the need to manage multiple record types, while still giving them visibility into what they need to do their work. Always with the assumption that you are not forgetting about principle #3, Case Types are informed and contextualized by a set of reusable data models. The pitfall here is many implementations are done thinking about case as an "empty shell", never leveraging it's real potential due to the lack of awareness of functionality and process re-engineering (point #8) so it becomes another hindrance.

Lastly, the biggest potential of a case type is the benefit of prescribing a workflow that synchronizes with several records while visualizing it in an easy-to-read interface with guided process flows. We call that a “Playbook” and we?leverage the Zeigarnik Effect for this.

Think about the possibilities! Any type of process can be automated only where needed and mapped out without any strings attached while keeping a balance of ESM and CX in place and connecting to a single system of action talking to multiple systems of engagement and record. This can preempt common customer needs and the typical routes it can take when it cannot be resolved at the first level. Eventually, this will pave the way to processes that self-resolve before the customer even knows they had an issue.?

10.?Establish a governance entity: Lastly, this is one of the major pitfalls across all types of industries, company sizes and maturity levels

if there is no governance, there is no consistency, which then cannot guarantee quality and therefore, no trust from anyone.

A business builds and expands on trust, which produces loyalty of their customer base.

For instance, if there is no governance on the CMDB, anyone can do whatever they want to the heart of your system and the phrase “too many cooks in the kitchen” becomes real. What happens if there is no governance on how to manage through all the changes you are executing? How are people getting trained? How are the business units now requesting for demands to modify a process or a new feature in their workflow system? You’ll have developers bumping heads in no time. Chaos ignites. We must enable a single organization that defines what excellence and innovation look like. This entity drives initiatives to digitize your operations, leverage your implementation at its fullest, be agile, and lower the technical and process debt that happens when everyone can be a decision maker, such as customization instead of configuration or ad-hoc, siloed policy creation. Don’t get me wrong—we want data, as we said, from both internal and external users and from all types, quantifiable and qualitative. Yet how we use this data, who logistically owns crowdsourcing initiatives, and what decisions and insights are taking priority is for this entity to decide. Scalability and discovery of new opportunities work hand in hand. Designing a workflow takes iterations, but also a mix of ingenuity, governance, and real-life analysis of data. As you add more functionality, data, and processes, it will become obvious this entity is essential to your existence.

To conclude: people, process and technology have to co-exist. But to build service excellence and CX, these must be done in that specific order.?Allow technology to be a usable tool that resolves for the people, instead of pushing generic technology to people.?

I hope you enjoyed the top 10 best practices I’ve learned first-hand across the years implementing all types of workflow tools.

All of them (and many more!) are incorporated within our Customer Experience Management (CXM) implementations leveraging ServiceNow’s platform for Customer Service Management, ESM and CX principles.?

Let’s start talking on how to simplify, personalize, digitize, and improve your workflows and CX while building for the future. Reach out to talk more.