Data Driven Experiences is the solution to CSPs Customer Service Issues

An experience oriented service mindset requires moving away from a transactional focus on efficiency

Communication service providers struggle with poor customer service . Existing legacy telephony and IVR systems were designed to work well for customers with basic, straightforward requests. Anyone with a non-standard request is likely to suffer through multiple calls, transfers, and other friction in resolving an issue.

Today’s customers use more channels to connect and they have higher expectations. But the experience from communication service providers (CSP) is not holistic. Agents are often specialized in a narrow field and often have limited access to prior context and therefore are not well equipped to administer next-best actions for a customer, leading to inconstant experiences and multiple contacts. According to JD Power , the best wireless customer-care experiences are increasingly ones that involve only one human being.

Nearly 90 percent of companies have a Chief Experience Officer or similar position, but most CSPs are not setting them up for success. CSPs need to move away from channel-oriented transaction-processing call centers and towards a more customer-centric conversation center that connects the organization to the goal of outstanding customer service.

Average handle time means nothing

Every CSP appreciates long-standing customers but most do not have the tools and processes to access customer backgrounds during an interaction. For example, if a high-value customer who has not reached out for assistance in many years suddenly calls five times in one week, the system should flag the anomaly. CSPs should offer proactive outreach to solve these problems and keep high-value customers. Data-driven artificial intelligence is the answer.

CSPs built customer-service systems with a focus on cheap and fast transaction processing. Everything was about efficiency, outsourcing, and specialization. The result was highly efficient yet extremely poor customer experience. In the old world of limited competition, poor experience was not a major issue. Market saturation, more competitors, and new entrants mean CSPs today need to change their mindset from efficiency to experience.

One area in which that may already be happening is hiring. As competition increases, CSPs are faced with the great resignation wave. Finding the right people to handle specialized call-center tasks is becoming more difficult, so CSPs are recruiting people outside of traditional backgrounds. While these employees may not have experience in technology, they do know good customer experience and often have higher levels of empathy.

CSPs increasingly understand that good experience leads to better profits, lower churn, and better analyst ratings. It is time to prioritize customer-driven metrics. Instead of figuring out how quickly a customer got off the phone, new metrics focus on how satisfied a customer is with the experience. If a representative spends an hour with a customer, resolves all the issues, offers empathy, and saves a truck roll or a disconnect because they figured out the problem, that is a success and a cost saving.

CSPs need to create a care ecosystem focused on the customer with the next generation of tools for the next generation of good experience. For example, a customer should not have to repeat their information multiple times when they interact with a service or cross channels. If they started with a chatbot that used artificial intelligence to try to answer questions and were then transferred to an actual person, that agent should know who they are and be prepared with the basic nature of the issue along with suggested resolution paths.

Care at the core of everything

One downfall with today’s customer service is silos of experience across care, sales, marketing, and field service. Context from care should touch sales, marketing, operations, and field service. CSPs operating in business-unit silos often result in sub-optimal customer results. Care needs to part of a unified model across the experience lifecycle. A customer walking into a retail location or contacting a call center or chatting online should have a consistent and contiguous experience across all touchpoints. This requires the business and technology to connect rather than operate as separate entities.

Many CSPs are dealing with aging legacy systems and are now being forced to modernize. Using a billing system oriented process that is more than 20 years old cannot be the foundation for stellar customer experience. Updating these process and value streams often involves modernization and cloud. The inflection to modernize end of life applications is another synergy that can compliment & super charge an experience modernization program to data driven care and data driven customer experience

In many instances, CSPs need to transform other areas such as Customer Relationship Management (CRM) because their current systems have a limited upgrade path. Since many billing, CRM, and other systems are already moving to the cloud, CSPs have an opportunity to investigate new possibilities, vendors, and providers that can allow them to upgrade from their legacy processes, tools and experiences.

Building a data foundation

Technology is kicking off major change-management programs impacting care, marketing, sales, operations, and field service. CSPs are starting to better understand how data can super charge each process domain. Leading CSPs understand data drives experience and efficiency, with a centralized data core forming a context across all functional domains. This creates synergies across initiatives while reducing cost and risk and allows for a more seamless experience.

Demographics are shifting and digital natives expect companies to deliver experiences on par with the best technology and apps. For example, two years ago companies could get away with spending a small portion of marketing budgets on digital channels like Google and Facebook but digital marketing with Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple now take up at least half of marketing budgets, and they do not operate like agency-driven television ad buys. CSPs have to build the technology to work with these companies so they can buy the appropriate ads.

Customer metrics are the only ones that matter

The goal is to create a seamless customer experience but this is largely impossible if sales, marketing, and operations all have their own platform and data sets. Disconnected initiatives will not lead to a better customer experience.

It is not enough to appoint a Chief Experience Officer or Chief Digital Officer or even Chief Data Officer if connectivity and funding across the organization are not addressed. Field service, retail stores, chats, calls, sales, and marketing need to be unified in experience and context. Many CSPs concentrate on aggregating systems around a single vendor but fail to unify the customer experience through a central data core that leverages AI.

Ultimately, customer metrics are the only ones that matter and technology needs to support these measurements. Human-to-technology processes should seamlessly augment human-to-human interaction, because customers want a human connection. They want the company rep to know who they are. By prioritizing the creation of a data and AI core, CSPs can ensure a unified experience across marketing, sales, operations, and field service.

Creating a new data driven care model

This unified system, which we call the Context Core, incorporates proactive care, maintenance, and chat using IVR and ACD intelligence for real-time feedback and assistance to agents. Data- and AI should drive and enrich every interaction across all channels seamlessly. Only this mindset will support the end-to-end customer experience. Capgemini is working with CSPs to help manage the move to a unified data- and AI-driven customer experience often starting with on the care ecosystem that is in so much need for a refresh.

Every CSP wants to become data driven. CSPs have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to truly transform and create a data driven care ecosystem to establish the next generation of customer centricity for the next generation consumer.?

For more information, please contact:

Goutham Belliappa – Capgemini lead for Data and AI Engineering

Arun Santhanam – Head of Telco, Capgemini NA

Special thanks to Neerav Vyas - Head of Data Driven CX for his inputs