Business transformation driving the need for CX

Customer service is no longer a cost centre. After a new product launch, no longer do we find any lag in similar products being offered by competitors. Given the pace of business transformation brought about by new age companies, customer experience (CX) can go a long way in not only new customer acquisition but customer retention too.

To understand how Customer Experience has evolved to play a strategic role in improving the competitiveness of enterprises, Abhishek Raval spoke to  Joe Gagnon, Sr. Vice President & General Manager, Cloud Solutions, Aspect; Sanjay Gupta- Managing Director, South Asia and Middle East, Aspect Software and Jagannath Narendran, Sr. VP, APAC & Middle East, Aspect Software

Customer Experience (CX) has been a topic of discussion in the past, however it has been progressively gaining mindspace. What has changed?

Jagannath Narendran, Sr. VP, APAC & Middle East, Aspect:
There is a game-changing technology transformation underway, which will continue to evolve. Uber, Airbnb and Facebook, today being the world’s largest transportation, hospitality and media company respectively is a sign of the changing times. So, there is a paradigm shift happening in how people choose to transport, stay and consume media and in the midst of this transformation, the only differentiator an enterprise will have is creating customer satisfaction.

Customer service is seen as a cost centre. However the company that continues to see customer service as a cost will not last long. Customer experience (CX) is clearly the key differentiator for either market share growth or revenue share growth because customers have choice today. Flipkart and Snapdeal is giving a tough run for giants like Amazon. The organised retail which used to so big in India has completely changed today. The kind of experience from these e-commerce firms is appealing. They can completely decimate the competition.

Even a single instance of bad customer experience can prove to be a fatal for any company. One of the airline companies, they had a passenger whose baggage got lost and thus it was delivered late. He shared the experience on social media. He had a large follower count on Social platforms. Then it became a PR nightmare for the airline. They also noticed a drop in ticket sales.

Joe Gagnon, Sr. Vice President & General Manager, Cloud Solutions, Aspect:
The expectations of the customers and the capabilities to meet them have never been as nearer as now. We are ahead of what we wanted. A lot of the constraints in starting companies no longer exists. So, capital, customer access and manufacturing is easily available. So, once the constraints are removed, the velocity of change happens at a different pace.

Airbnb is a result of these changes. They seized the spare capacity in housing. Uber tapped the vacant space in passenger cars. But why now? Given the product similarities, customer experience is the single biggest component to stand out as differentiator in the market. After a new product launch, no longer do we find any lag in similar products being offered by competitors. Given the pace of competition, customer experience can go a long way in not only new customer acquisition but customer retention too.

We are working with a large automobile manufacturer in USA. They have been using our technology for their contact center. But in a traditional way and thus wanted to re-imagine their customer service as a tool to be used for marketing. We have been working with them on the idea of building a convenient car manual. The plan is to make it SMS based. One of our customers is a third party insurance company, who uses our contact center platform. They are undertaking a workforce management overhaul exercise together with contact center with the self service element included – to create an integrated consumer experience platform. This helps them to solve queries asked by the customers in the best possible manner. We want them to start off by having a question into the text tool. It can be twitter, SMS or otherwise and to be able to then query against the insurance database. Simple queries get answered instantly but in case they cannot be answered quickly, the system alerts the agent and he takes over.

How do you justify buying a customer experience solution in terms of RoI?

Joe Gagnon, Sr. Vice President & General Manager, Cloud Solutions, Aspect: With respect to one of our customers, the number of consumer interactions, at first used to be only in the form of phone calls. Approximately a million phone calls a year. The number doubled to two million interactions a year, which decreased the customer service costs by twenty percent because we were able to deal with the questions differently, on various communication channels and more effectively as the company grew, so we were able to track all of the metrics, utilisation, number of interactions. This is RoI driven.

We are in the early stages of a pilot with a utility measuring the RoI of using our customer experience platform for scheduling a customer service visit in their maintenance and repair business.

With the proliferation of the tools available for customer interaction, how do you make sure the customer query is resolved?

Sanjay Gupta- Managing Director, South Asia and Middle East, Aspect Software
We are doing a contextual transfer on the transaction the customer is doing on our system. he started interacting on a different channel and the query got resolved on a different channel altogether. If a conversation started on an SMS, or a mobile app or a disposable app followed by a call from the customer, the conversation can resume without the need for the customer to repeat whatever he shared on the other channels.