Managing Customer Interaction

The following are combined and integrated in SAP Service Cloud for a more efficient and productive customer relationship:

1. Communications channels
2. Service Level Agreements or SLAs
3. Work Distribution

SAP Service Cloud allows your customers to communicate with service agents through a number of channels, some of which are built in and some which allow integration with third party tools. This includes, but is not limited to the following:

1. Self-Service Support
2. Phone
3. Social Media
4. E-mail
5. Chat
6. SMS (Short Message Service)

A SLA is an agreement between a company and a customer on how long it will take to respond to and resolve a service issue. For example:

1. Bronze: response  within 24 hours, 2 days to resolve
2. Silver: 12 hour response, 8 hour resolution
3. Gold: 1 hour response, 2 hour resolution

Work distribution is a set of rules deciding how to automatically route tickets based on information on the ticket, such as the customer name, geographic region, SLA, status, or any other relevant information. For example, a global chain, with locations around the world:

1. When a ticket comes in from a specific location, we’d like to route the ticket to an agent in that country. 
2. Let’s say the ticket is also high priority. Now, the same ticket is automatically routed to the escalation team.

Let's look at what happens when a customer reaches out to our company by phone.

SAP Service Cloud has a built in phone integration system. Commonly, phone integration is called Computer Telephony Integration, or CTI for short. Most modern digital phone systems have a CTI client that can be configured during implementation.

When the Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) client is set up, phone calls come in through the Live Activity Center. This feature is an interface that allows you to easily view the contact information for incoming phone calls, as long as the incoming phone number matches one of your contacts. This makes the job of the service agent easy, because they don't have to search for the contact or account while they are on the phone; it automatically pops up on their screen.

A service agent can also open the Live Activity Center from the Service menu to search for a history of calls.

No matter how smart your agents are, sometimes they're not going to know the answer to a question right away. Even if they do, it's good to have a repository of documents or articles you can send to a customer if a resolution to a problem is something they can do themselves. That is where the Knowledge Base comes in to assist them.

While SAP Service Cloud does not have a built-in knowledge base, it does allow you to easily integrate with third-party knowledge bases, including the knowledge base feature of SAP Jam.

Using a knowledge base allows your organization to provide your customers with incident-specific documents related to their specific issue. Articles can be published immediately and kept up to date, and can include rich content such as embedded screenshots. Finally, popular articles are easy to find, as your customers can give feedback on the quality or relevance of the article.

The service agent will use SAP Service Cloud to ensure that all customer issues are addressed quickly and appropriately. This may involve escalating a ticket to engage another individual or team. For example, a fix suggested in an email by the service agent does not work. This open ticket can then be escalated by the service agent to an expert or service technician with a heightened priority such that the customer might then get a phone call directly to discuss the problem and it's resolution. Alternatively, the service agent could schedule for an onsite repair, or for the item to be sent in for repair as may be appropriate to further process the open ticket.

Determine the key performance indicators (KPIs) for your service team by selecting from a number of reports of service tickets that are built-into SAP Service Cloud - for example:

1. All Tickets
2. Ticket Backlog
3. Tickets by Status
4. Tickets by Agent
5. Resolution times for service tickets/incidents - Open Incidents; Created vs. Solved Incidents; Incident History

Reports can then be collected into a dashboard for an at-a-glance view of service key performance indicators.

If you would like to take advantage of more complex, enterprise level reporting, you can integrate SAP Service Cloud with SAP Analytics cloud or other third party reporting tools. Here is a link to learn more about SAP Analytics Cloud https://youtu.be/8WpH600Xq0E