What is the fiercest area of competition among businesses today? It’s not just acquiring new customers, but instead, customer experience has become the most competitive area that can make or break any company’s success. Customer experience includes both customer service and customer engagement, so this category encompasses a broad field of factors to attend to.

Companies deploy shared services teams to centralize and consolidate operations of multiple units. These teams can help sales, marketing, finance, legal, and other groups and each department is their customer. There are also shared services groups that are available to service many with few people, such as global marketing supporting field marketing or sales engineering with global sales. Most times this is done via e-mail with several people on :CC, spreadsheets, or not at all.

Customer experience, or CX, is essentially the overall impression customers form of your business during their various interactions in the buyer’s journey. It plays a deciding role in their likelihood of not just an immediate purchase but in their decision to remain loyal to your company and recommend you to others. For today’s tech-savvy customers, the experience that they get while doing business with your brand is just as important as the quality of your products, if not more.

Customer service is what makes or breaks a business. Many companies are inefficient when it comes to operating their customer support. Let’s look at the seven types of customer service and the pros and cons of each one.

Digital transformation has transformed the way people interact with brands, software, and making buying decisions. Businesses need to find ways to adapt with these changes and manage the customer journey. Businesses have to continue to provide excellent service and a superior customer experience in these times of transformation. In the case of service-based companies, this requires efficient customer request management.

In this new series of Now on Now blogs, we share how we, ourselves, use ServiceNow products to transform our operations and create great experiences. We hope our stories will inspire you, our customers, and partners, to achieve even greater business value and resiliency from the Now Platform®. For more information, visit the Now on Now Book of Knowledge.