Three common mistakes businesses make when looking to transform their customer care center

Every company is racing to transform their customer care not just from a cost perspective but also from a customer experience perspective. In fact, Gartner predicts that 89% of businesses are expected to compete mainly on customer experience. They have also predicted that by 2019 more than 50% of organizations will redirect their investments to customer experience innovations. According to American Express, 70% of consumers say they have already made a choice to support a company that delivers great customer service, and millennials will pay 21% more to do business with companies who excel at customer service. Given these market realities, businesses have no choice but to transform their customer care to grab market share. This article highlights 3 common mistakes businesses make when they jump on the bandwagon to transform their customer care.

1. Choosing just a Technology Platform instead of an end-to-end Solution – with so much hype in the market about conversational AI and other technology platforms, businesses think that a conversational AI platform is a panacea for their customer care problems. However, in real life, a technology platform is just the tip of the iceberg – it is necessary but not sufficient. Technology is the means to the end but not the end itself. The end goal is not speech recognition or Natural Language Processing (NLP) using the latest and greatest AI algorithms, rather the end-goal is to exactly understand what the customer is asking for and respond with the most appropriate answer. One may argue that once we extract the intent from customer conversation, we should be able to respond with the appropriate answer. Extracting intent is not difficult but extracting the “correct” intent is tricky and based on our experience, typical techniques used to extract intent do not always perform well in complex environments.

It's all about the end-to-end solution and not just the technology platform

Furthermore, even if the intent extraction is close to perfect, that is just the frontend of the customer support system. Customer queries tend to be truly diverse, and hence the system has to search a variety of backend systems to retrieve the right answer. To make it worse, the backend systems vary from client to client. That is typically neither the forte nor the focus of technology providers as the backend integration requires customization, and that is something every technology company wants to avoid. As a result, when clients invest in a technology platform and think that would solve their customer care problem, they simply miss the point. 

2. Thinking System Integrators will magically solve all Integration issues – many clients realize that technology platforms are enablers and not the final solution. Therefore, they sign up with system integrators (Sis) and think that SIs will magically solve all integration issues. What kind of integration issues? Let me give some examples. First, the backend systems are diverse in content and technology. For example, for a manufacturing company, some information is available in the systems of records, some in technical specs, some in FAQs, some in tutorials, some in historical records, etc. and integrating with all these different sources of information is not just technically challenging, but also time-consuming and expensive. Other than sources of information, there are different CRM systems, like the Salesforce, Dynamics 365, Oracle CRM, etc. that need to be integrated for an end-to-end solution. If voice calls are supported, there are various IVR/PBX systems from vendors like Genesys, Avaya, Cisco etc. that also need to be integrated for achieving the end goal. Some clients would like to have the contact center on-prem, some on public cloud, some on private cloud, and many on hybrid cloud. There are thus various combinations of backend systems that need to be integrated even before the first customer call is supported by the digital contact center. All of these integrations delay clients’ go to market and cost clients a lot of money. Many a time, the solution provided by the Sis is far from being optimal.

System integration for an end-to-end customer care solution is complex, time consuming and expensive!

There is also the complex integration with the business processes of the client. Business process varies from client to client and the variation is even greater across industries. For example, business process of customer care for a manufacturing company is different from the business process of customer care for financial industry which in turn, is different for customer care for healthcare industry. This is again an area where the clients bank on SIs for implementing the business process on top of say a conversational AI platform. This is not a forte of the SIs as the typical SI folks are not domain experts, and as a result, the implementation of business process, requires client SMEs to work hand-in-hand with the SIs, resulting in higher expenses and longer time to market.

3.      Assuming System Integrators will address Operational issues – once an end-to-end customer care center is implemented for a client, there are many hiccups once the platform is deployed in practice. These result from unexpected situations in practice. For example, if the customer care center, based on speech-based conversation (in contrast to text conversation), expects the client to speak out a long alphanumeric serial number and the accent of the customer is such that the AI-based speech recognition system fails to capture the right serial number, there can be operational challenges from automation perspective. There are other situations, where client uses mixed language (like Hinglish – where some words are in Hindi and some in English) and that too with unclear accent, the operations may face unexpected situations. These cannot be fixed without the support of SIs who again charge a lot for these “change” orders, not to speak of the time spent before such operational issues are addressed.

Furthermore, when some customer queries cannot be resolved online, an appropriate field service agent might need to be selected first, and then scheduled to visit the customer at the job site to resolve the issues. Unless this operational part of the service resolution is addressed with an end-to-end system, more services would be needed from an SI – again costing more money and time.

Operational challenges in customer care need to be addressed in a holistic manner as not all customer issues cannot be solved online.

Given the above challenges faced by a client in rolling out a digital contact center, clients should consider a “productized” solution that:

-         provides an end-to-end customer care solution and not just a part of it

-         comes pre-integrated with the backend systems, and does not depend on SIs to do the integration and

-         comes with robust operational support and does not need intervention of SIs to fix operational issues

If you are considering a digital transformation of your contact center – regardless of the state of maturity of your contact center, reach out to almawiz.com for a productized customer-care solution - right out of the box.