You always want to provide a positive, nurturing experience for your customers through every step of their journey. But despite your best efforts, sometimes issues still arise. When this happens, it’s critical to figure out a resolution that not only addresses the overall problem, but deepens your customer relationship in the long term. This is why having a proper escalation management process in place is essential.
Customers want to feel valued, and if an organization is not meeting their needs promptly and satisfactorily, it can lead to frustration, and eventually, to churn. At Totango, we understand the importance of resolving escalations, which is why we have developed the Resolve Escalations SuccessBLOC, which includes all of the features and tools you need to quickly and effectively address escalations and keep your customers happy. In this article, we’ll take a deeper look at what an escalation is and how the Resolve Escalations SuccessBLOC can help you not only prevent churn but also increase customer lifetime value.
Escalation vs. Risk: What’s the Difference?
It’s important to understand that the escalation of a customer’s issue does not necessarily mean that the customer is at risk for churn. While escalation and risk can go hand-in-hand, they are different and should be treated as such.
A customer escalation is a support situation where the customer’s initial attempt to get support meets a barrier or fails and has to be passed onto the next stage of the support process. For instance, the customer may have attempted to resolve their problem using a chatbot but didn’t get a satisfactory solution, or, they may have reached out to a human agent but weren’t able to connect with a representative within an acceptable amount of time and gave up. This may cause frustration for the customer, but if handled correctly, it can actually be an opportunity for you to have an open conversation with the customer and improve their overall satisfaction with your company.
A customer who is at risk, however, is already dissatisfied with your product and/or company and is likely to churn. Perhaps a feature that they need isn’t working properly, and/or they have had one or more support tickets go completely unanswered. Whatever the issue, it has caused the customer to lose faith in your product and your brand, and you now have to work very quickly to show the customer that your product offers value and your team is committed to their satisfaction. To help prevent this from happening, Totango’s Detect Risk SuccessBLOC is designed to give you instant visibility into customer signals and critical events that may indicate a customer is at risk of churning, so you can proactively engage when needed to avoid mishaps and seize opportunities.
How the Resolve Escalations SuccessBLOC Works
The Resolve Escalations SuccessBLOC gives you all of the out-of-the-box tools and automation you need to drive, monitor and resolve your customer escalations. Using this SuccessBLOC, you will have instant visibility into the status, severity and types of open customer escalations as well as automation tools to help you continually push the escalation process forward and ensure a quick resolution.
Key Features
- Easily identify customers who need to be prioritized and escalated quickly.
- Become more proactive and data-driven by creating a system that automatically drives your escalations.
- Better manage your customer portfolio and ensure you are taking a proactive approach to assessing and responding to customer issues.
Customer Experience Canvas
Each SuccessBLOC includes Totango’s revolutionary Customer Experience Canvas, which is a no-code, shared visual workspace that enables your team to design, build, run, measure and iterate on any customer journey in real time. While each Canvas can be customized to include the steps and features you need, the Resolve Escalations Canvas comes pre-built with workflow templates designed to help you identify and investigate the issue, plan your steps, take action, and monitor the process all the way through to its resolution.
Scorecard Visibility and Insights
The SuccessBLOC also includes a Scorecard where you can monitor key metrics and gain insights into escalations and how the resolution processes are progressing. Some of the metrics pre-built into this module include:
- Number of customer escalations
- Escalated accounts by CSM
- Number of overdue escalation tasks
- Average days to resolve escalation
- Accounts at risk
- At risk contract value
Transform Customer Complaints into Customer Success
Escalation is a fact of business life, but if handled correctly, it can also be a chance for you to grow trust and confidence with your customers and leave them feeling more satisfied than they were before the escalation. And Totango and our Resolve Escalations SucccessBLOC are here to help. Request a demo or sign up for Totango for free today to see how we can help you transform customer issues into customer success!
