Customer service has seen a radical shift over the last decade. It has transformed from a business-controlled activity, which was cumbersome for a customer to avail at times, to a customer-controlled activity, which is, today, one of the most important aspects of a business’ operational strategy. This change has brought the activity from the rear end of the business’ sales cycle to being supplementary at each step of conducting business. The empowered digital customer wants to be informed about every aspect of the business.

The customer service space was already going through transformation, and the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic has further added new dimensions to this change. For e.g. – the customer service employees, who have traditionally always worked in the office model, got the opportunity to work from home. To cater to their specific needs, the customer service software and solutions have been molded, which has shown promising results. This has prompted deliberations on making the new system permanent in many cases, bringing about a major disruptive change in customer service operations. 

Figure 1. Changing needs of customers

The right approach to ensuring customer satisfaction 

Customers, strategy, organization and technology will evolve customer service organizations over the coming five years. Formulating the right strategy is of utmost importance when it comes to deploying customer service operations in current times. The overall operations should be interconnected. A siloed approach hampers experience as a disappointing result in one part might undo the great work done in the other parts of the service in the company. For instance – a customer whose query was not resolved via the self-service channel might experience repetition of queries in subsequent attempts, which can be frustrating and dent the reputation of the company. So, the logical way to counter this is to have a system that takes the whole company view of operations. This will not only maintain continuity when query passes from one part of operations to the other, but at the same time, will also reduce a lot of rework, ultimately helping achieve the target of providing enhanced customer experience.

Another benefit the integrated approach delivers is seamless customer service. By making use of the past engagements of the customer, subsequent interactions become seamless. For e.g. - an integrated system would eliminate the repeated activity of address confirmation by different teams in a company if the customer has already availed service from the company in the past.

To achieve such a level of integrity, a big pre-requisite is to have a collaborative relationship between product experts, customer service agents, and technology and field experts with a strong commitment to change, strong collaboration across functions, and company-wide transparency.

Figure 2. Customer Experience Management Market (Fortune Business Insights, 2021)

Enablers of a customer-first service center

While an integrated approach is a necessary condition to achieve collaborative functioning, it is not sufficient for developing a customer-first unit yet. With customers interested in getting clarity at all the stages of their service or product processing, it becomes imperative to have avenues for them to feel more connected to the system for creating trust, which is seen as the major driver of business growth today. As trust might take a long time to build, while it can end up in tatters with just one bad incident, organizations are very careful with this crucial aspect. To enable a framework for customer inclusion, some of the avenues that should be employed are:

a. Customer Engagement Unit

The aim will be to personalize customer experience where each individual customer is handled based on the context. Humans and artificial agents can be employed based on the situation, which will enable proactive as well as reactive communication approach accordingly. It will be a place where the individual departments like marketing, sales, customer service will remain synchronized, so that even if the organization is siloed operation-wise, the shortcomings do not affect the interactions with customers. This will help in maintaining a consistent experience delivery.

b. Analytics

Here, the aim is to leverage the experiences in customer engagements to come up with swift and accurate responses. This will take into account the interactions with the customer, journey taken by the customer, and alternate responses for the given situation, to give a holistic view of customer service experience.

c. Chatbots and Virtual Customer Assistants

Chatbots and Virtual Customer Assistants can help engage better with customers.

Chatbots, the conversational interface that are generally basic in nature and based on pre-fed decision tree-based information, can provide resolutions to the end users. Virtual Customer Assistants, more advanced than chatbots, have artificial memories and can form relationships with customers while sometimes acting on customer’s behalf to query with the internal teams.

Focus has now shifted to achieve zero-touch self-service platforms, which are becoming the preferred form of service for both - customers and organizations. These channels are mostly automated and Artificial Intelligence (AI)-driven, and aim to improve customer experience and responsiveness while having minimal human interference from the organization’s end. As a result, the customer care agents are able to avoid repetitive tasks and employ their experience for problems that can’t be handled through the self-service mode. 

Helping organizations understand their customers better

Wipro Enterprise Operations Transformation’s (EOT) Contact Center Transformation vision aims at making the contact center a value delivery hub that runs lean and agile operations, making it a consistent revenue generating function. The key technology themes governing this transformation are – cloud, speech analytics, internet of things, bots, NLP etc.

Wipro EOT partners with leading customer service software companies, to deliver transformational journeys to customers through the combined strengths of the vast experience of Wipro and the comprehensive technological capabilities of partners that specialize in contact center transformational services.

Wipro’s Cognitive Customer Service solution, which is built on the SAP business technology platform, helps in providing clients with high-quality customer interactions that are personalized and contextualized with the help of latest technologies like artificial intelligence, machine learning and robotic process automation.

Vartul Mittal
Vartul Mittal is a technology and innovation specialist at Wipro.
Vartul focuses on helping clients accelerate their digital transformation journey. He has 14+ years of global business transformation experience in management consulting and global in-house centers in intelligent automation, advanced analytics and cloud adoption.

Vishal Yadav
Vishal Yadav leads transformation go-to-market activities for iCORE, Wipro with a special focus on alliances. He manages growth marketing and demand generation initiatives for automation and new-age SaaS platforms and solutions.