I See You: Staging Better CX, Using Video

By Mandeep Singh Kwatra, HGS Vice President, Solutions and Capabilities

HGS recently released a white paper on this year’s top 10 trends in customer service. Over the course of the year, we’ll dedicate a blog post to each of these CX game changers. Here, we dissect CX Trend No.3: Smartphone Video Camera Support Is a Gamechanger, highlighting strategies designed to drive the right answer, fast, for your customers—to ultimately result in a higher CSAT and NPS score for your business.

Fade In, Customer Experience Scene One, 1998:

Agent: “Can you look behind that detector box for me?”

Customer: “I see a lot of cables.”

Agent: “Do you see a black cable?”

Customer (increasingly losing patience): “Yes, I actually see four black cables.”

Agent (trying to help, but feeling a bit lost): “Do you see one that is flat?”

Customer: (loud sigh) “No, the cables are all round.”

Cut to Narrator: Most of us have been on the customer end of these frustrating half-hour conversations—trying to explain a problem to the agent who is empowered with the answer and wants to help, but unfortunately has no clear visual representation of the problem. Happily, these days are long gone.

Today, with smartphone video camera support, 3-4 minutes of triage can be accomplished in seconds. By texting customers a simple link, brands can now activate the video camera on a customer’s mobile device to see what they are looking at. It’s that simple. Smartphone video camera support, in combination with messaging or voice support, can accelerate time-to-resolution while boosting customer satisfaction.

If customers are uncomfortable leveraging video, the alternative option is to send a simple picture via SMS so that companies are able to get a better view and understanding of a product issue and communicate more effectively with customers—for example, annotating photos to indicate product issues. This results in key efficiencies for the client—such as better loss reduction as a result of more troubleshooting accuracy and equipment replacement. Real outcomes are cost-containment, better average handle time (AHT), lower product return rates, and improved CSAT.

Customer breaks in (with reminder of who is always right): Sounds great for the business, but what’s the net gain for me?

Narrator: Yes, this video support is focused on you and seeing the brand experience through your eyes. Perhaps no new innovation is better equipped—or applied—to do just this. With mobile cam support, the future of CX is here. According to recent research, the use of video- and visual-based technology will be increasingly favored over BPO traditional and nonvisual digital channels.

HGS has been an early adopter of this solution. According to our own internal research, issue resolution for our mobile cam calls shows a dramatic 76% success rate, with customers sharing images at 78% frequency. Brand education of the channel’s features doubles acceptance rate, with a three-month tracking showing a customer channel use growth from 15% to 33%. Additionally, research indicates that call reasons offer significant upsell—with Damaged/Broken Parts calls coming in at 21% and Part/Product Purchase playing a 12% role in call reasons.

With tremendous upsell potential and high issue resolution, for one HGS client, our mobile cam support drove reduction in handle time and an increase in order accuracy by 30%. The solution innovation enabled more identification of upsell opportunity, for a 9% improvement in revenue, over prior year. But we like to let our customers speak for themselves.

HGS customer: “I can testify to the success of this solution. With my customer service issue, your agent perfectly diagnosed the problem. And that is surprising, as it was so hard to even describe the product issue on the phone. With the mobile cam solution, I was able to transfer photos of the problem to the agent, so together we could visualize the issue and walk through the fix. The HGS agent then let me know he could display the part on the website and order it for me. This agent really did a great job, and now I’m better prepared if I ever need help with something like this again.”

So now let’s try Scene One, again, this time with video support:

Scene Two

Agent: “See that gray-colored detector box next to your coffee up?” Customer: “This?”

Agent : “Yes, make sure the furthest right black cable is tightly connected. It looks loose.”

Customer: “This one?”

Agent: “No, the one to your right. Yes, that’s it. Just tighten it and check your screen.”

Customer: Sigh of relief “Connection is back. Thank you.”

Fade Out

Looking ahead, look to our next generation of customers to lead the demand for this reduced customer effort and optimized service. There are strong catalysts for these adoptions of visual- and video-based services—primarily, the technological advancements and social acceptance driven by millennials and Gen Y.

Source: https://www.teamhgs.com/blog/see-staging-better-cx-using-video/

3 Ways Social Media Can Make (or Break) Your CX

By Scott Yates, HGS General Manager, Operations

Are you taking your social media strategy as seriously as you should? Imagine you’re a Fortune 100 company spending millions on marketing to create and support your brand, but you don’t prioritize social media support. Your customers are driven to your social media pages—but once they get there, they don’t find 24×7 empathy-building communication or proud, positive brand representation, and a fast, solution-focused approach. Instead they are faced with thread after thread of negative customer feedback and lackluster product support. Simply put, you’re doing it wrong. In fact, you’re missing the plot. With this nickel-holding-up-a-dollar approach, you may have just lost 20% year-over-year growth.

Think smart about your social media strategy, and start with understanding the three ways today’s fashionable feedback tool can make (or break) your CX:

1. Ensure your social media presence speaks to a personality well aligned with your company culture, product line, and, most importantly, customer base. This means shifting from a defensive to an offensive social media approach, with more proactive posts addressing brand, product, or market issues. Invest the time and resources to speak in the tongue of your brand and customers. Also:
   • Avoid company siloes so that Marketing and Consumer Affairs are better funded and aligned in their approach. Understand how Consumer Affairs should be in close step with—and even fuel—departments like Product Innovation, Product Development, and Research and Development.
   • Help bolster your front lines, with agent training that includes product and company culture education and a playbook for how to communicate in precise line with your brand
     
2. Treat social media customer engagements as conversations that stand on their own—deserving of response time and colloquial, culturally appropriate tone. More than ever, the art of conversation is not lost. Think of these exchanges more like a phone call than an email. While a shift to digital customer care is today’s new norm, don’t lose sight of the fact that a four-hour response time—much less a 24-hour response time, is not going to satisfy (much less delight) today’s customer. Also, in responses, don’t hide behind a shadowy 800-number—be present and personal, with open communication and practical solutions to customer problems. Don’t be overly cautious about engaging customers with appeasement, as long as you can solve the problem, retain the customer, and not compromise the complainant.
3. Keep the end goal in sight: gaining and retaining customers. Finally, once you have a sound social media strategy in place, ensure that you share the knowledge. This means integrating robust engagement and reporting tools focused on recording and building knowledge from this customer feedback. While this can be labor-intensive, know that these insights are valuable to your future growth and success. Understand the scale and importance of your social media presence. Specialize your channels and align with your CX support. For example, if you have a customer with 25,000 Twitter followers, most likely your trainees shouldn’t be responding. At the front end of support, build in fast research so agents understand the social profile of each customer posting—from their social presence to their troll factor. If a customer engages consistently in a negative way—this contact should likely be escalated to a veteran team member or set aside so as not to build steam.

Source: https://www.teamhgs.com/blog/3-ways-social-media-can-make-break-cx/

How to Automate Enterprises for Cost Takeout and Enhanced CX

The second installment of the HGS India webinar series, “How to Automate Enterprises for Cost Takeout and Enhanced CX,” was held on May 24. At this webinar, HGS Senior Vice President of Business Transformation and Innovation, Ram Mohan Natarajan, elaborated on using automation to find the right balance between cost transformation and enhanced customer experience.

Key webinar takeaways were:

• Industry adoption trends in automation
• An intelligent automation approach leading with bots and brains
• The impact of automation in reducing cost, improving quality, and getting the right answer fast

The webinar takeaways were bolstered by a discussion of both back office and front office processes that can be automated with considerable business impact. The webinar also provided actual examples where automation solutions have been implemented and used to deliver significant benefits for companies across industries.

We also asked some poll questions during the webinar to understand and measure audience opinions about the webinar topics:

1. Per our first poll question, “Is your organisation currently predominantly focused on cost optimisation?,” an impressive 56% of participants said they are focused on optimising cost in both back office and customer-facing processes, with 25% saying that they are concentrating on the cost of customer -facing processes, and 19% of respondents optimising cost only for back office processes.
2. The second poll question “Are you using any of these in your organisation?” signaled interesting trends on technology adoption, with 46% of respondents having implemented RPA in their organisation, 23% using both RPA and chatbots, 15% saying they use only chatbots, and another 15% stating that they do not use of these technologies in their companies.
3. The answers to the third and last poll question “Do you think chatbots will be able to answer most of the queries in the next 2-3 years?” bode well for the future of chatbots, with 56% of webinar participants saying that they do think chatbots’ answering capabilities will strengthen over the next two to three years. Another 19% responded that they don’t think this will happen and 25% state that it will take longer than two to three years for chatbots to have an impact.

The collective opinion sample of the overall poll responses pointed toward a market that has already adopted automation to a considerable extent and is open to increasing that adoption percentage.

During the concluding minutes of the webinar, participants were invited to have their questions answered by Ram:

Q1: Should automated webchat solutions be proactive or reactive?

A: There may be solutions, in some cases, that could be proactive. Sometimes, though, there is learning required—we have to learn, and the system also has to learn. We need to ensure that the data gets captured first and the system is able to learn, and then be able to become proactive. For those of us who have not started off on the journey, it might be easier to pick up what is already available, and automate that. I would not necessarily suggest this for the simpler tasks, but at least the repetitive tasks. And that way you start getting the business benefits and you start moving up the value chain. You’ll be able to churn huge amounts of data for your bot to be able to be more proactive.

Q2: How do these chatbots behave in a multi-language environment with different types of consumers?

A: I don’t see too much challenge these days on multi-language. If you look at even freely available tools like Google Translate or any of those available in the market, they are fairly advanced now. So I wouldn’t consider language as a constraint. Rather it’s about, what you want to achieve? What’s your objective? Is it about customer experience or taking cost out? The journey you take will depend on your answer to that question.

Q3: Are most of the benefits to do with costs or accuracy?

A: This is an interesting question. Many people actually start thinking about their business case first and the first logical thing that comes to all our minds is, “I need to save on my costs. I have got 20 people doing the work. Can I eliminate headcount?” Sometimes it is fascinating to see what impact accuracy can have on automation. You know there are bots today that we have implemented for clients that actually impact millions of dollars. Here we are not talking about saving 10 people, but eliminating human error has a much bigger ramification for the company than actually reducing people. Similarly, we have automated processes at the front end that have to do with building the product for a healthcare client. One mistake there can affect all the claims that come in the future. While yes, automation did save on people doing work, the much bigger benefit was with the impact on the downstream processes. These effects are manifold, compared to the small cost savings that could have accrued just by reducing people.

Source: https://www.teamhgs.com/blog/automate-enterprises-cost-takeout-enhanced-cx/