Keeping your customers happy is vital to growing your enterprise. Regardless of how great the product or service you provide is, if the customer is unsatisfied it can lead to major losses for your business. Research shows that 89% of consumers switch to a competitor following a poor customer experience, and up to 60% of consumers are willing to pay more for a better customer experience. No doubt you already employ a great team to nurture your customer relationships, but are you missing a key ingredient when it comes to getting your customers to love you?
Workload automation can help you provide better service and keep your customers loyal.
Speed Matters
Your customers are not patient people. No one is in the modern world—we’re used to being able to instantly move money, talk to people across the globe, or access information on anything at any time. If your company moves slowly in its interactions with customers, they won’t stick around. For example, 75% of people who contact a company for customer support via social media expect a response within an hour. For those using email, 41% expect a response within six hours.
An enterprise job scheduler keeps your workflows moving quickly, 24/7. A tool like Automate Schedule that offers event-driven job scheduling makes it possible to launch jobs based on a variety of triggers, so when your client sends you information in the middle of the night, the file arrival can kick off your subsequent tasks automatically. Meanwhile, your competitors will be letting the files pile up until they can deal with them in the morning.
Don’t Lose Customers to Downtime or Errors
A 2011 Poneman Institute report calculated that the average cost of downtime across all industries is approximately $5,600 per minute. That doesn’t even take into account the effect that delays may have on your reputation and consumer confidence down the road.
If you’re using an enterprise job scheduler, you don’t have to wait until your customers are irate and the money is draining out of your pockets to address a problem. Automate Schedule’s high availability (HA) system protects you from unplanned downtime with real-time database replication to a standby server. If your master server is down, production jobs will continue smoothly on the standby. Meanwhile, you’ll receive immediate notification of the problem.
You’ll also want to be able to monitor individual critical jobs. In a large organization, you don’t have time to watch over everything that’s happening, but if you set up a job monitor you’ll get a notification as soon as a job fails to launch or takes longer than it should—before your customer notices any delay.
Get Important Customer Insights–Without Any Extra Effort
Knowledge is power. Your service will improve with better insights into your current customers and potential customer base. But this data is often spread across departments—sales, billing, marketing, tech support, etc. You know it would be nice to have the information, but who has time to manually compile it, generate the reports, and send them to the relevant parties?
Workload automation can do it for you. Automate Schedule, for example, integrates with Informatica PowerCenter and Cloud. Informatica is a great ETL solution for collating data from disparate sources, but its scheduling options are rudimentary. As one Automate Schedule and Informatica customer put it, “Informatica moves data well, but its job isn’t to schedule the coordination of data flows from outside databases… Now Automate Schedule manages the schedule and we save 4 to 5 hours a day and get everything finished on time."
With an advanced workload automation solution, the right people get the right information at the right time--automatically.
No Department Should Be An Island
Often each department operates as its own small enterprise with its own applications, processes, and databases. This is inefficient and can be expensive. The Informatica and Automate Schedule integration is just one common example of how a business might manage processes important to customer service.
An advanced job scheduler with full web services support allows the scheduling tool to interface with the full range of applications you’re using. Web services are language and operating system agnostic, so they can serve as a sort of universal connector for integrating your solutions, including homegrown and cloud applications.
Automate Schedule has a unique integration that allows you to combine Automate Schedule's powerful enterprise scheduling with the business process automation solutions of Automate Enterprise, another product of Fortra. The combined tool, called the Enterprise Process Automation Suite, includes support for several processes essential to customer service. For example, you could automate scraping data from customer emails, or generate a daily Excel report of your Twitter mentions to stay on top of any issues that customers are talking about. These customer-facing tasks will be integrated into your centralized enterprise job schedule and you’ll be able to manage them through an easy drag-and-drop interface that is as intuitive for the customer service department as it is for the IT department.
The Human Touch
You might understandably be concerned with all this talk of automating customer service. Isn’t it important to interact with your customers in person?
Absolutely. For example, a Gallup survey measured how engaged customers were after visiting a bank. Customers who felt they got speedy service were six times more likely to be engaged. However, customers who rated the bank highly on “people factors” were nine times more likely to be engaged.
The thing is, workload automation will help you with the personal touch as well. In fact, if there’s one thing an enterprise scheduler does best, it’s saving you time for the things that really matter. Streamlining repeatable processes frees up employees to spend more time building personal relationships with your customers.
Attract and keep happy customers with an enterprise job scheduler.