How do you evaluate your organisation’s customer service capabilities? The Microsoft Service Sophistication Model framework is a tool to assist organisations in evaluating their customer and employee service experience capabilities.
Many organisations are aware that a contact centre transformation is key to building and maintaining trusting customer relationships. However, many are faced with the same question: Where do we start?
Microsoft’s Digital Contact Center is a platform of customer engagement functionalities that enable organisations to take a transformational approach towards a modern contact center. The Microsoft sophistication model provides a framework to assist organisations to evaluate their current capability and create their unique roadmap towards exceptional customer service.
A key component of this assessment is using the 4+ level digital transformation maturity model (see below) to measure an organisation’s current capabilities. This model can be applied to customer service and contact centre management, giving organisations insight into the level of customer service capabilities they hold and how these impact customer experience, satisfaction and engagement. The advanced capabilities of Dynamics 365 Customer Service can propel organisations through the maturity model to provide exceptional customer service experiences via a modern digital contact centre platform.
What does each level mean?
Level 1: Standard
Those organisations sitting at level 1 must consider what it is they would like to achieve – how sophisticated would they like their customer service capabilities to be? Where would they like to start: with standard communication channels, or something more organised, like a multichannel approach?
Organisations at the first level of the model are operating at a ‘standard’ customer service experience level:
Level 2: Organised
The second level of the digital transformation maturity model applies to organisations that have invested in more advanced customer service capabilities than level 1, such as portals – which can be created via Power Pages – within Dynamics 365 Customer Service.
At this level, metrics are used to improve the customer service experience and remove inefficiencies from customer service offerings. However, the limited capabilities held can hinder an organisation’s ability to fully leverage knowledge management in terms of aggregating or analysing the information into useful, actionable insights.
Level 3: Transformative
Organisations that sit in the transformative level of customer service offerings have a growth mindset – they are changing and enhancing their customers’ experiences to build better relationships. This means that a proactive service delivery method is adopted via tools like unified routing – using machine learning to assign the best-suited customer service agent based on their area of support expertise – and insights and analytics.
Customer service agents are provided with the appropriate tools to understand customer sentiment, such as transcripts, to set the context of current or previous conversations and scripts to assist them in problem resolution. Automation is leveraged at this level, freeing up an agent’s time to focus on more complex cases that require live agent intervention.
Level 4: Innovative
The fourth level represents organisations that are embracing innovation in creating a 360-degree customer view. The vast amount of customer service offerings that this organisation holds means that they can benefit from cutting-edge AI-driven insights to offer advanced case management capabilities. By this stage, a customer’s experience is a seamless transition to agents, and agents experience a seamless transition between channels.
The capabilities that Dynamics 365 Customer Service can offer at this stage aid organisations in leveraging truly connected service operations, allowing them to be profit-centric.
Beyond level 4: Aspirational
Beyond level 4 of the digital transformation maturity model is the continuous innovation and optimisation of customer service support capabilities, creating new opportunities for an organisation. As customer service evolves, capabilities like mixed reality and the metaverse could potentially slot in here to provide a truly differentiated customer service experience.
What level of customer service does your organisation want to achieve?
The Service Sophistication Model is not a one-size-fits-all approach, and can be tailored to suit specific organisational needs. Download the free Microsoft Service Sophistication Model whitepaper to learn more about the benefits of adopting a modern digital contact centre to deliver omnichannel customer engagement. You can also watch our on-demand webinar, Microsoft Digital Contact Center Platform: Delivering exceptional customer experience at every touchpoint. Get in touch today for more information about the next steps towards exceptional customer experiences.