Uthaman Bakthikrishnan, Author at The Bharat Connect

Is Customer Experience (CX) the new brand differentiator?

Gone are the days when people competed on product’s capabilities and pricing alone. Today’s customers have thousands of overwhelming choices, making purchasing decisions challenging to choose.

The entire ecosystem has become commoditized, and how do you differentiate yourself from the pack?

It has to be through Customer Experience (CX) and not just Customer Service. CX is the total sum of customer’s perception of how a brand treats them. These perceptions affect behaviors that lead to customer loyalty.

Do we agree that CX is going to be the differentiator?

Let us look at some of the CX numbers:

Gartner says that 89 percent of companies compete primarily on the basis of customer experience
A Walker study reveals that by 2020, CX will overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator
The Temkin Group found that companies earning $1 billion can expect to earn, on average, an additional $700 million within three years of investing in CX

Bain reports that although 80 percent of companies believe that they deliver awesome experiences, a mere 8 percent of customers agree.

This means that companies have a long way to go. Delivering excellent customer experiences can be a tremendous opportunity to disrupt a competitor and gain market share.

Focusing on customer experience management may be the most critical investment a brand can make in today’s business environment.

How do you provide remarkable customer experiences?

There is no silver bullet to this question. However, there are two critical elements that you should be aware of, and they are:

1. Personalize everything

Personalized experiences win over customers every single time. This means that the company remembers you, anticipates your needs, and delivers relevant and timely information. What does this do?

Forty-nine percent of customers have bought items that they did not intend to buy due to personalized recommendations from brands.

Besides, brands should create a one-view of their customers across all channels. McKinsey reports that only 1 percent of the data collected is ever used, stressing the disparity between the potential of data and the company’s ability to convert it into value.

When you set out to turn data into value, that would help improve customer experience.

2. Focus on the customer journey and not touchpoints

The customer journey is the complete sum of experiences that the customers go through while interacting with your brand – awareness, pre-sales, purchase, post-sales support, and repurchase.

Each journey consists of multiple online and offline touchpoints. While each touchpoint is important, the sum is always greater than the parts. The experiences will have to be consistent, and for that, you need to have integrated systems and channels.

Aberdeen Group states that the companies with the strongest omnichannel CX report an average customer retention rate of 89 percent versus 33 percent for businesses with a weaker presence.

How do you make your life and the lives of those around you better – the customer service way!

Sales are down, the competition is brutal, and we have zero chance of hitting our year-end profit target if we don’t bring down our costs.

This is what your CEO tell you when you meet with him. He further adds the target for customer service is 20%. You have till tomorrow morning to come up with a plan and present.

This wasn’t the first time the costs have been reduced. You did all the possible cost-saving measures and managed 20% savings with automation. You addressed it by not filling open positions, and nobody had to be fired.

The Plan

Within a few months, you are pressed to target another 20% cost reduction. This time it is going to hurt. The agents taking the calls are already stretched beyond capacity. You are 20% lower than your required strength. That’s what your CEO wants to reduce.

You set out to look for more automation to reduce the costs by 20%. You spend the next few hours squeezing out the possibilities, and now you say, “Tada, the numbers seem to work out,” and you are ready with your presentation for your CEO.

You leave for the day.

New day

You get up in the morning, and you realize that all of your automation that you are attempting to do will make your customers wait longer to talk to your agents. You are already getting complaints about the existing system, and people are looking for ways to bypass the whole thing and get to an agent.

You don’t provide that choice as you guess that many of your customers would choose to talk to the agent directly.

You feel that the entire work you did the last evening was wrong. Your system is designed to make your customers spend more time and effort so that you wouldn’t require as many agents.

You have heard some of your existing recordings, and you have figured how frustrated your customers are.

Making your customers work harder and spend time to cut costs on your end is a death spiral. Your sales will go down, and you’ll again be in cost-cutting mode.

So, you start to think, what if I ask my supervisors to take customer calls during peak periods. No way, they are all busy preparing reports.

What if I cut out a lot of that stuff? This looks workable to you. Why don’t I automate the report generation? It’d make things easy for your supervisors. They would be available to take customer calls, and that’d make things easier for your customers.

Everyone is happy

Employees would be happy as they would be working less on mundane stuff like generating reports and work on actionable stuff like improving sales. Customers would be pleased to get the personal attention they constantly sought. The organization would be happy as they have achieved the necessary cost-cutting, while the outlook for improved sales looks promising.

Frictionless customer experience – should this be your goal?

In 2016, an estimated $4.6 trillion of merchandise was left in abandoned eCommerce shopping carts
The US economy loses $3 trillion in productivity annually due to excess bureaucracy
China’s economy as measured by gross domestic product (GDP) grew a cumulative $82 trillion more than India’s from 1987 to 2017, even though the two economies were initially similar in size
In March 2020, about 88% of all shopping carts were abandoned across these verticals – automotive, childcare, luxury, car rental, travel, airlines, fashion, gardening, cruise & ferry, mobile providers, departmental stores, hotel, cosmetics, consumer electronics, retail, sports & outdoor, groceries, pharma, and insurance.

All these are distressing statistics.

Can you attribute one reason to all of these?

It will be difficult, but the common thread would be friction in customer experience.

The most important thing that any and every customer servicing organization should do would be to reduce friction in their experience.

Jeff Bezos of Amazon calls customer obsession the most significant success factor for any organization. Customer obsession is equivalent to zero friction on customer experience.

Jeff Bezo’s famous quote on customer friction is, “When you reduce friction, make something easy, people do more of it.”

How do you reduce friction for your customers?

How do you become a relentless advocate for the customers and minimize customer efforts?

Some pointers that you can look at:

Talk to your customers regularly – this would help you discover friction and act on it.
Remove everything unnecessary or something that does not improve the customer experience – stamp out ridiculous rules and pointless procedures
Provide choices to your customers to reach you. If they want to speak to an agent, so be it.
Don’t offer an omnichannel experience without putting in the necessary infrastructure to address customer needs across all the channels. The experience will have to be consistent.
Have one view of your customer journey so that the customer doesn’t have to repeat themselves whenever they have to interact with you
Promise only those that you can deliver and deliver beyond expectations
Ask them this question, if they are willing to refer your service to their friends or relatives? If the answer is no, there is a lot for you to work towards
Focus on reducing friction one step at a time. Sometimes, friction is not apparent. You will have to put yourself in the shoes of your customer to ensure that their journey

The contactless approach to customer service

In the last year, most things have moved remote and online as far as customer service is concerned. Agents working from home will be the norm from now on, and the customers would want to get in touch with an agent only when necessary.

The contact centers have discovered that moving their agents to work from home hasn’t affected their productivity, and they continue to provide world-class service to their customers.

Customers still demand accessible, high-quality support, but the liking towards speaking with a live agent has come down considerably in the last few quarters.

With face-to-face interactions coming down, most organizations have migrated to multi-channel and omnichannel operations. They are looking at migrating 60% of their customer service to be handled by intelligent apps and automated bots that would be offered as self-service.

The self-service world

What do you need to do to make the self-service world up and running?

You need to get the technology in place and integrate it with your enterprise systems, which would help solve your customer issues.

The most important thing is agents’ ability to access your enterprise systems from a remote location – cloud access or VPN access. Once this is done, look at having automated IVR, chatbots with natural language processing, web self-service, FAQs, asynchronous messaging, SMS service lines, among others.

An example

I use a broadband connection at home. Whenever I have Internet connectivity issues, I was initially calling their customer service and registering a complaint. Once I register the complaint, I get an SMS with a complaint number. Then a support engineer calls me up to understand the issue. After a point in time, they provided me with an app to easily register my complaint.

Once the pandemic set in, they migrated the entire support part of the app into an intelligent application. There is no need for you to speak to anyone as all possible combinations are available in the chatbot itself.

Though it is only a rule-based engine, you do not have to talk to anyone, as every possible combination is captured as a part of the chatbot. They have all the options like:

Internet not working at all
Internet access is slow
I am not able to access a few sites
Whenever there is a power shutdown, and upon resumption, my Internet doesn’t work
Router configuration
A few others

You provide every information needed for the support engineer to address your issue within a minute and with just a few clicks. You get your ticket number with the approximate resolution times.

I can’t be happier.

This is a straightforward example that I have quoted. This is only the tip of the iceberg on what is possible with self-service. Imagine building intelligence to your self-service, and you would be laughing your way to the bank with happy, satisfied, and loyal customers.

Agent Experience is an essential piece in the customer experience journey.

There is very little room for error when it comes to customer experience.

In 2021, as is the case with every year, consumers will care even more about the customer experience than they did earlier when deciding which companies to support or buy from.

Any friction in the customer journey will mean loss of business and potential gain for your competitors.

How do you go about consistently ensuring great customer experiences?

It is an arduous task, but you have technology and tools to help you make the customer experience a genuinely seamless one for organizations and customers.

The most critical aspect of any customer experience journey is your agent, and putting them in the middle of your customer journey would greatly help your customers and business.

Agent Experience – What should I look at?

What is that one thing that an agent is expected to provide when it comes to agent experience?

An agent is expected to resolve customer queries and challenges in the shortest possible time to their satisfaction. How do you make this available?

It would help if you equipped them with all the tools that would allow them to provide resolutions in the shortest possible times for your customers.

Some of the key things to keep in mind include:

Do you provide an omnichannel experience, with agent access to all your customers’ interactions with your brand?
Do you have all of your enterprise applications integrated to allow the agent to pull information together that will enable them to offer resolution in the shortest possible time?
Do you have intelligence built into your systems that allow the agent to access information based on customer preferences and needs?
Do you have frequently asked questions and their responses documented so that the agent can access them easily?
Do you have systems in place to allow your agents to access the right talent by the click of a button to help resolve customer queries?
Have you defined the performance metrics of your agents that are aligned with customer outcomes? People often look at call hold times, and resolution times without giving weightage to the customer’s challenge or issue.
Is your agent training in alignment with your customer experience vision?
Do your agents have the means to provide feedback to the customer service and product management functions on ways and means to enhance to customer experience journey?

As an organization looking towards providing delightful customer experiences, you should invest in these eight areas to make your agents successful and make your customers happier.

Customer experience journey – it is about how you respond to a negative experience!

I was working for an organization where we had many customer relationships. After being with us for two years, one of the customers decided to look at other providers for their needs.

When we inquired, we were told that they faced three issues in the last two months, and they weren’t handled well by our team.

Needless to say, we didn’t want to lose them, and especially after knowing the reason why they wanted to look at an alternate provider.

What did we do?

Our executive management team got together, and we decided to have one of the management folks as the executive sponsor for that account.

We communicated this to the unhappy customer, and we told them to put us on probation for the next 90 days, and they can pay us half the fee that they were paying otherwise during this period.

The offer was irresistible, and they decided to give this approach a try, and we floored them with our service and responsiveness. It has been a decade now, and they continue to be a happy customer.

How did we communicate this story?

We got them to be a part of a webinar that we were doing for our leads and prospects. Their Software Engineering Director was one of the speakers. She spoke about the fact that they decided to discontinue their relationship with us, how we responded, and where we are currently.

You won’t believe we picked up 40 leads from that webinar and a handful of them became our customers. I’d attribute that success to this customer service story.

Why is this experience significant?

80% of customers will switch to another company after just one poor customer experience. So, you compete with your competitors now on pricing and selection and the experience.

Customer experience is being looked at as the product nowadays, as there is little else to choose between offerings.

When you look at customer service, you have to look at them from start to finish and close the loop. It is a given that you won’t delight your customers 100% of the time, but how you respond to their challenges plays a significant role in how they perceive your customer service.

This is what they call the ‘peak and the end’ experience in customer service vocabulary.

The peak is when the customer experiences the strongest positive or negative emotion, whereas the end refers to how the experience concluded.

You must maintain a positive customer experience throughout the customer journey and respond to a negative experience.

Zoho is leading the pack in moving to Tier – 2 and Tier – 3 cities. What can you learn from them?

Zoho has been running their development and support centers from Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities for many years ago.

They started a development center in Tenkasi in 2011 that develops some of Zoho’s products that they sell across the world. Tenkasi has about 500 Zoho employees. Zoho then established a customer support center in the town of Renigunta in Chittoor District, Andhra Pradesh. 120 Zoho employees work out of Reningunta.

Zoho calls these offices Village Offices.

Zoho and village offices

Zoho, just like any other organization, was forced by the pandemic to move their entire workforce to their homes and hometowns. During this time, Zoho ran an internal survey, and close to 40% of their workforce – around 3500 people – said they would like to work closer to their hometowns.

This sped up their village office move. Currently, Zoho is experimenting with ten villages in Tamil Nadu, where 200 of its engineers – 20 in each village – will collaborate and build software for the world.

Once this is set in motion, Zoho has plans to implement a similar model in two villages in Kerala and one in Andhra Pradesh. They are also looking at taking this model to Mexico (Queretaro), the US (Austin, Texas), and Japan.

We are sure that Zoho will successfully implement this model. This would be an example for anyone looking at setting up a satellite office in the villages and Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities.

What are the advantages of this model?

All along, Tier-I cities have been glorified. Your employees want to stay in their hometowns, and work is an eye-opener for most organizations. I guess that is something that every organization should run as a survey and figure it out.

The most prominent reason organizations were flocking the Tier-1 cities was infrastructure – uninterrupted power supply, Internet, transit connectivity, accessibility of airports; and qualified resources.

Now, most infrastructure challenges are addressed even in remote villages. Most locations in places like Tamil Nadu have accessibility to the airport within 100 Kms.

All of the challenges for which organizations were focusing on Tier-I cities are addressed now in most villages. Hence, the move to Tier-2, Tier-3, and villages would make a lot of sense.

Some of the advantages of moving to villages include:

Look at the cost of infrastructure between Tier-I and the village offices. Organizations would easily hive off 50% of their expenses. What about resources? Their standard of living would go up many notches while reducing their cost of living.
Working from hometowns can help people maintain greater work-life integration. They can meaningfully contribute to their villages’ growth by volunteering in community activities, agriculture, and education. Staying with family and staying closer with friends and relatives would also ensure better mental health.
Increase the disposable income of people in the villages by indirectly helping build the economic ecosystem to support your office and its people. This can also help in reverse migration from cities to villages.

What can we learn from the Zoho model?

Zoho has proved that this model works favorably for them since 2011. They have been successfully building world-class products from a facility in Tenkasi and have been supporting their global customers from a facility in Renigunta.

They have now started ten satellite offices in 10 different villages in Tamil Nadu and have operationalized it successfully.

While they were skeptical about moving to Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities, most other organizations were forced by the pandemic to figure out work-from-home and work-from-hometown options. They continued to provide world-class services and products even from remote locations.

This proves that this model works, and every organization should take efforts to move their needles towards villages. This would help the organizations cut costs, leverage skills available in remote areas, help employees have better work-life integration, and grow the villages.

The growth of this nation lies in the development of its villages. The future of work lies in the village offices.

It is time to think smart and help the village economies prosper. It is in your selfish interests to do so as well.

How do you create your customer experience strategy?

Recently, I called up our service provider, who developed and hosted our website. We have been working with them for the past three years. They didn’t update the site’s SSL certificate, and people couldn’t access the site.

All we wanted them to do was to download the SSL and install it. But, we were told that their system administrator is available only later in the night, and they can get it resolved only after a day.

The website not being accessible was a complete ‘NO’ for us. So, we requested them to get it resolved immediately. The response from them was that it wouldn’t be possible.

So, we took it up, and we did the installation ourselves.

What were the issues here?

Employees who did not understand our needs.
The expectation that we would be willing to wait a day for a simple but critical request
Unresolved issue

What would you do with this kind of experience?

Naturally, we have started evaluating other vendors who can provide this service.

How do you get your customer experience strategy, right?

Customer Experience (CX) is the result of every interaction a customer has with your business, pre-and-post-sale. This can be from the moment they read about you in a blog, their visit to your website, their interaction with your sales, product teams, customer service, and support.

While evaluating your customer experience strategy, you should include all your departments and not just your customer-facing roles.

Some pointers in figuring out your customer experience strategy:

Look at your customer support function and look for metrics like Net Promoter Score, customer satisfaction score, and customer churn rate. If you’re scoring below expectations, this would be a good starting point to dig deeper.
Create a customer journey map. It would outline all the interactions between a customer and your business, including any challenges found along the way.
Once you understand where you ought to improve, share this information with your team and train them to handle the service better.
Map out the different ways your customer would feel about their interactions with you. Always act towards delighting your customers and in their best interests.
Do proactive customer service by enabling your customer success teams to work closely with your customers to prevent issues, enhance adoption and business value.
Ensure that you have self-service tools, as customers prefer to get their basic needs addressed with chatbots and knowledge bases.
Continuously collect feedback from your customers. Never leave a customer without interaction for more than six weeks.
Track the performance of your customer service and support teams regularly.

These are good starting points that would allow you to define your customer experience strategy and vision. With this in place, you can proactively and progressively keep improving the customer experience function for your customers’ benefit and delight.

The next level of call center growth lies in Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities.

India has been the preferred back office of the world for many decades now – skills availability, mature processes, low-cost, and the ability to scale are some reasons. Most large corporations outsource their customer service, support, and experience functions to India.

In the last few years, the low-cost nature of call centers in India has vanished because of the maturing market and high input costs on human resources, infrastructure, and utility infrastructure. This has prompted businesses to move their call center operations to locations like Philippines and Vietnam. The cost structure in the Philippines is 30% lower compared to India.

The Tier-I locations in India shouldered the entire services agenda until about the mid-2010s, which added to the call center’s cost structure. Towards countering competition from countries like the Philippines, the Indian call center industry in the last 5 to 8 years have started looking at Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities to move their workforce. Currently, about 10-15% of the workforce works from Tier-2 and Tier-3 facilities.

National Association of Software and Services Companies (Nasscom) says that 70% to 80% of the call center employees work from home, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s probably the largest work from home project, anywhere in the world.

This means that most people are currently working from Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities, as they have moved to their home towns that are the hinterlands of every state in India.

The COVID-19 forced work from home, and satellite offices strategy would help the industry in the long-term. It would allow organizations to become competitive and help them retain and recruit the right talent due to its flexibility and quality of life.

Work from home

Initially, it was a reactive response that every organization followed when the lockdown was announced by the end of March 2020. Once everyone understood that this isn’t going to end soon, they started putting together processes to make work from home easier for the employees, customers, partners, and other stakeholders.

With almost 80% of the workforce operating from Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities, call centers continued to provide world-class services to their customers. This made them sit up and take notice that they can effectively deliver services from remote locations.

This has prompted several organizations to look at opportunities to move their workforce to Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities. For example, Zoho is experimenting with ten villages in TamilNadu, where 200 of its engineers – 20 in each village – will collaborate and build software for the world. These feeder officers are situated 20-30 kilometers away from their hometowns.

In a recent survey, the company found out that a little over 40 percent of its total employees – around 3,500 people – said they would like to work closer to their hometowns. This would allow people to save more, remain healthy, and maintain a work-life balance. Living close to family and friends is also good for mental health.

Now, every organization, including the call centers, knows that this model is working. It is only a matter of figuring out what percentage of resources will have to be moved to these locations.

The call centers would most likely move between 25 and 40% of their resources to Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities in the next few years.

What are the advantages of moving your call centers to Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities?

Cost savings – 20 to 30% compared to a Tier-1 location, due to lower facility costs and compensations.

Lower attrition – 20 to 25% lower attrition compared to Tier-1 cities. This would result in better service delivery and lower hiring and training costs.

Better standard of living – less traffic congestion, better health, and better quality of life leading to improved living standards

Happier employees – available for the elders in the families who are not very comfortable moving to Tier-1 cities

Location agnostic – you can hire any talent who is right for your organization without having to worry about whether they are willing to relocate to your location. This also brings in diversity and inclusion by moving work to the workforce.

Moving to Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities is not about setting up physical offices at each of the locations. Instead, it would be about setting up satellite offices in those cities, besides letting their employees operate from their homes.

The most significant challenge is the organization’s ability to scale when it comes to technology, to accommodate multiple satellite offices, and work from home resources.

Cloud-ready technology

Most call centers still function using on-premise technology, and they connect to them using VPN from remote workspaces. This would make it prohibitively expensive for call centers to operate.

The easiest way by which they can promote satellite offices and gain all the advantages associated with it is by moving towards cloud infrastructure for their technology needs.

There are available software bundles, which can help migrate your entire call center to the cloud. So, choose an appropriate option, and you are good to go with your migration to Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities.

Conclusion

While the pandemic has created a lot of havoc, it has also pushed organizations to optimize their costs and resources. This has paved the way for moving work and resources to Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities.

This migration, we believe, will be good for the industry in the long run. It would make the industry move towards a truly global workplace, without worrying about real estate costs, lifestyle challenges, and general living standards.

How do you address the most significant technology and infrastructural challenges in remote working?

70 to 90% of the call center workforce have moved to a work-from-home model or remote working model since the onset of the pandemic.

This move was forced, and organizations did everything in their capacity to move their agents’ homes. This helped them to continue serving their customer needs without massive interruptions.

Organizations faced several challenges – cultural, social, infrastructural, and technological challenges.

We will look at the technological and infrastructural challenges in this article.

Technological and infrastructure challenges

Most organizations had an on-premise dialer or contact center solution. It didn’t make it possible for them to move their agents’ homes. Besides, for the agents to connect to their office systems from home, they needed VPN connectivity.

VPN licenses come at high costs, and also the bandwidth required to access in-house systems using VPN connectivity is reasonably large. Most home broadband connections do not provide this level of support.

Most agents did not have good quality computer systems at home for them to start working at home. Many of them had access to only shared computers, tablets, and mobile phones.

Also, you have to consider the dependency of the entire family on the home broadband availability. It has to be shared between people trying to access in-house office applications, collaboration apps, online schooling, and entertainment needs. Getting additional lines and upgrades was also an issue during the pandemic.

Moving to cloud

The easiest solution was to move its call center infrastructure to the cloud. However, most incumbent vendors weren’t focused on the cloud, and they needed anywhere between 4 to 6 months to get to a basic version of a cloud offering.

This is where we helped most customers by moving their call center function to our cloud offering. We made them operational within 24 hours, with the option to connect to their internal systems at a later point in time.

The advantage with this move was anyone with a browser – be it tablets, mobile, or computers, can access the cloud contact center solution without any hassles. This allowed them to ensure business continuity.

Low-bandwidth connectivity

Internet connectivity from home broadband solutions has low bandwidth connectivity that results in poor call quality with jitters, delays, and choppy voice.

We circumvented low bandwidth issues using a connected method for telephony with regular PSTN connectivity. We provided credentials to every agent that made their voice calling secure and integrated the connected method telephony with the contact center platform seamlessly.

The most significant concerns that call centers have while moving their agents’ homes are overcoming the technological and infrastructural challenges.

You don’t have to worry anymore.

Solutions are available to circumvent most technological and infrastructural challenges.