High-tech happiness – putting the personal touch into digital customer operations
Blog: Capgemini CTO Blog
I expect that every one of us have been interrupted at work by an IT issue. More often than not, I’d bet that when something has gone wrong, it’s not come at a good time.
Handling high-tech customer support isn’t easy, especially when pleas for help are multiplied across many callers who each feel like their issue deserves the highest priority. Beyond these fundamental tech requests are other issues that businesses across many sectors must also support. These include delivery status inquiries, product and service initialization, warranty support, return authorizations – and more.
For some high-tech businesses, successfully managing these types of customer concerns can be a challenge. Delivering fast response times across all contact types and channels isn’t easy, especially across a legacy CX platform that struggles to scale with changing customer expectations and needs.
Lack of automation, immature self-help solutions, and even high-contact volumes can undermine program delivery and create a bad customer experience. High tech organizations must understand customer frustration runs high when the resolution path is cumbersome, characterized by poor handoffs between support levels and a lack of personalization that doesn’t recognize the lifetime value of a customer.
Effectively supporting these interactions is vital to the performance, and, ultimately, the brand image of the enterprise.
A seamless, personal, omnichannel customer experience
What’s needed is a unified and comprehensive approach that gives all those people and their individual, vital requests, a single, accessible, and simple point of contact. At Capgemini, our approach creates a support ecosystem where issues are resolved promptly and efficiently, built on – what we call – the Frictionless Enterprise.
As its name suggests, the Frictionless Enterprise aims to remove all the obstructions that impede interactions between people and processes. It connects them seamlessly, intelligently, and as and when needed. It dynamically adapts to each organization’s requirements, and also to the needs of individual disciplines and sectors.
Rather than adopt a “lift and shift” approach, the goal is to change how customers contact support services, and to improve the resolution model used to support them. The solution is backed by global support services that promote greater self-service adoption, process automation, “voice of the customer” analytics, and effective contact allocation and management.
An integrated workforce of live agents and automated support services enables customers to choose the route that best suits their needs, so they have a seamless, personal, omnichannel experience. There are high volumes of repetitive queries that don’t require human interaction, best handled through to AI-powered digital channels. This reduces the cost per transaction, increases accuracy, and provides “always-on” access to service on digital devices.
Better service, happier customers
The benefits can be substantial. Working with some major high-tech industry players, we’ve achieved up to a 40% decrease in cost-to-serve, 20% reduction in customer churn, 35% reduction in alert case counts, and 25% increase in first-contact resolution.
We’ve also achieved 15–20% increases in customer satisfaction. This, perhaps, is the best metric of all. It’s not just because it’s important to have happy customers in general. It’s also because they help to create a more dependable revenue stream, and to sustain the reputation of the brand on which future business depends.
That’s not all, though. Happy customers make life much better for service teams. When transaction volumes fall, and when a greater proportion of them can be handled successfully without human intervention, team members can spend more time providing the personal touch where it matters most.
Work is more rewarding when low-level, repetitive transactions go away. Staff gets more of a buzz when they make a difference on issues that matter most to their customers.
They’re providing a better service, so they’re happier. The business as a whole is doing the same, and at a lower cost, so the executive team is happier, too. And of course, the customers on the receiving end are happier, too.
In short, even IT issues can have happy endings. Who would have thought it?
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