Five areas where digital can radically improve your customer service

Digital is now the norm for customer service and for internal processes. In fact, we’ve taken a long hard look at our own operations, to ensure they’re class-leading and agile, and meet the constantly evolving demands of the market. And now we’d like to share our experience with you and bring the same benefits to your organization – it’s the very essence of our practice-based approach to consulting.

Our vision is to connect every touchpoint along the customer journey – across the front-to-back-office – to deliver real-time consumer insights and a personalized customer experience. It means combining people-power and technology to create the best of both worlds.

Put simply, our clients expect us to offer global scalability, improved agent performance and end-to-end services that combine people and digital technology to improve business KPIs. Naturally, they come to us with their own, and very unique, challenges but – generally speaking – they fall into five key areas:

1. Eliminate: Deflect to digital by eliminating unnecessary customer contact
2. Simplify: Reinvent service design with new capabilities, reducing steps and time
3. Automate: Resolve service requests by automating expertize
4. Personalize: Proactively steer customers to the right channel and service experience
5. Transform: Empower your people to deliver expert service, supported by AI and Analytics

Digtial Readiness Check - getting digital right for your organization

The first step is to undertake a complete digital health check. This will identify priorities and opportunities for best impact for your business. For example, the adoption of chatbots is increasing rapidly – it’s predicted that by 2025 45% of customers will use virtual assistants.

Chatbot Check-Up

During a four-step chatbot check-up our digital experts will conduct a systematic review to identify optimization potentials of your chatbot(s). A key aspect of this is to ensure a great (and consistently reliable) customer experience. Our team will:

1. Evaluate the positioning of the chatbot in your overall channel mix
2. Take a look at the individual chatbot interactions, including the content and activity on your other contact channels, like email and chat, to identify integration potential
3. Benchmark against market-leading chatbots and any previous chatbot check-ups
4. Define the optimization potential in existing use cases and make recommendations for the integration of additional use cases

The benefits of the check-up include:

• Identification of quality: How satisfied are your customers with using the chatbot? Do the chatbot dialogs really help to clarify customer concerns? These, and other questions are clarified in the check-up.
• Comparison with state-of-the-art Chatbots: We give you an overview of the competition and compare your chatbot to the best ones on the market in order to identify improvement potential and make recommendations.
• Identification of additional use cases: Through a structured evaluation of e-mail and chat communication, we identify additional use cases for chatbot integration.

Tech & Advisory Implementation - positioning your IT infrastructure for digital CX

Your IT infrastructure is the basis for all digitization initiatives. Drawing on our experience of solving complex IT challenges specifically for CX, we can help you to position for the future. In addition to advising you on the best external technology partners for the job, we can also support you through the complete IT harmonization process.

IT System Sourcing Advisory

On the path to digital, making the right IT vendor choice is crucial. Our experience in this area is extensive – we provide the IT infrastructure for 90% of our BPO client base – so we’re ideally placed to provide you with vendor-agnostic support for the entire end-to-end process from search, to evaluation and implementation. Our overall goal is to increase the efficiency of your processes, achieve costs savings (research shows that IT buyers spend more than they need to in over 75% of cases) and operational excellence. There are six steps:

1. Analysis of your current state (including priority actions)
2. Definition of your technical requirements
3. Definition of the RFP
4. Management of the tender process
5. Implementation planning and coordination
6. Monitoring and handover to live operations

Our IT System Sourcing Advisory delivers the following benefits:

• Comprehensive analysis: Comprehensive market analysis provided by our experts and adapted to your individual IT requirements
• Transparent sourcing process: We evaluate the potential systems and vendors to create a transparent basis for the selection of a system that is most suitable for your business
• Efficiency gains for your processes: Increase the efficiency of your processes through the targeted use of IT systems to achieve cost savings and operational excellence

IT Harmonization

IT Harmonization measures can reduce the complexity of system landscapes and also create transparency and agility. Consolidation enables a harmonization of processes and, at the same time, potential cost reductions.

Four steps to project success:

1. Assessment of the current situation: the IT landscape, processes and interfaces
2. Derivation of the target scenario: creation of a catalogue of criteria with all technical and systemic requirements of the IT systems
3. Control of the tendering process for selection and negotiations with potential software partners
4. Planning and implementation of the IT implementation project

And there are added benefits too. These include:

• Cost reduction: IT harmonization measures increase your efficiency and lower your costs by reducing system complexity and harmonizing processes.
• Scaling: A unified IT infrastructure supports expansion, mergers, acquisitions and restructuring.
• Future potential: A future-oriented IT infrastructure enables cloud and big data applications.

Front & Back-End Automation - using automation to deliver efficiency gains and a better customer experience

Automation (AI and RPA) has the potential to deliver significant efficiency gains for both internal processes and direct customer communication, together with enhancing CX. It’s predicted that by the end of 2020, the use of AI in customer service organizations will increase by 143%. We can help you to be part of this trend by identifying and implementing the right solutions for your business.

 AI Support

Artificial Intelligence (AI) can be used in various ways in customer service, for example, in the processing and generation of natural speech of chatbots or voice assistants, in complex data analyses or as support in the service center through predictive routing – AI adds value through fast and precise data processing.

Due to the many possible applications of AI and the complexity often associated with the use of this technology, it is often unclear which problems can be solved. Therefore, the first step is to identify processes with potential for AI and suitable approaches: process automation; customer interaction; analytic solutions; and agent support.

Profit from the benefits: Increase customer satisfaction while realizing cost savings

• Improved Customer Experience: Through AI-based support of service center employees in real time, the customers receive help quickly and according to their specific needs. For example, AI-based text or sentiment analysis helps to optimize the quality and time of customer interactions.
• More efficient internal processes: Through AI-supported automation of processes or AI-based suggestions regarding which customer-specific activity the agent could undertake next (Next-best-action/offer), processes can be simplified, which results in saving time and money.
• Cost savings: Significant cost savings can also be realized through the efficiency gains that can be achieved by optimizing and automating processes in the front and back-end.

RPA Support

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is the automation of standardized and repetitive processes. By automating these standardized processes, you can redeploy your people to process more value-adding customer communications.

With the help of RPA technology, processes are optimized and automated. We can support you in the following three areas:

1. Consult: Derivation of suitable processes and creation of business cases
2. Build: Development, testing and deployment of the RPA Bots
3. Run & Transfer: Maintenance, development and handover of the operation

Profit from the benefits: Increase productivity and efficiency of your processes

• Increase in efficiency: A bot is 3x more efficient than a human being. Through the use of RPA, processes can be performed efficiently and with fewer resources.
• Cost reduction: By automating manual processes, RPA can reduce process costs by up to 60%.
• Quality gain: The bot does not make any mistakes. All of the processes handled by the bot are performed without errors, which will improve quality.

Agile Management - predict, react & adapt to constantly changing customer needs

One of the key challenges of effective CX is how to meet rapidly changing customer needs – ideally proactively! It’s something that’s near the top of most clients’ wish lists.

So we’ve created a Design Thinking Workshop, specifically formulated to meet the unique attributes of customer experience that’s all about developing new solutions in a creative way.

Design Thinking Workshop

With a total focus on customer wishes and needs, our Design Thinking Workshop will provide you with a quick and market-oriented answer to the problem at hand. Within an iterative process, we work together to find ideas, design and implement a concrete use case with the goal of an MVP (Minimum Viable Product). There are three key aspects that will allow you to master your challenges, fast:

• Quick Go-To-Market: Based on dynamic actions, the team will be enabled to deliver real outcomes.
• Practical Orientation: No theory, but interactive and dynamic – the building blocks are supported with creative approaches.
• Customer-Centric: We always have your customer in mind as a common reference point.