The future of customer experience: Personalized, white-glove service for all
Posted in Aktuellt, Customer care / Kundvård on augusti 28th, 2020 by adminThe future of customer service is already here. Laptops silently report impending performance issues, triggering a remote fix before the user even realizes there might be a problem. Vehicles send proactive maintenance notifications and communicate directly with manufacturers to speed up repair response when a problem occurs. The next horizon is for customer service to be completely customized to each individual: when a customer calls a contact center, the agent can pull up a profile detailing the customer’s every interaction with the company, from previous service calls to payment schedules to marketing segmentation.
Such personalized service can be compared to the “white-glove service” long associated with high-value customers and transactions. Characterized by attention to detail, convenience, speed, and emotional fulfillment, this high standard of service offers solutions, products, and services that are tailored to each customer’s specific and unique needs. It is central to a customer-first mindset and made possible by the availability of data and advanced analytics to track a customer’s individual journey in real time.
Yet very few organizations are providing this level of service today. There are two primary reasons for this. First, many believe it to be prohibitively expensive. Second, building a comprehensive customer profile requires a high level of cross-departmental visibility, which in turn necessitates enablers such as organizational structure changes and IT investments. To offer high-touch service to everyone, customer service can no longer be an isolated department; it must be tied into every business unit that interacts with the customer, including sales, marketing, product design, collections, and the front line.
The good news is that white-glove services offer a high return on investment. In fact, they present an opportunity for significant cost savings because they accelerate the resolution of contact center issues (or prevent issues altogether) and deepen customer trust and loyalty, thereby supporting retention and tailored cross-selling. And, while such services require technology investments and shifts in organizational structure, these investments and shifts will soon become mandatory as companies compete to meet customer expectations. All functions will benefit from the enterprise-wide visibility required to build comprehensive profiles of individual customers.
Implement organizational enablers
Building a mature customer service capability means building well-informed individual customer profiles—which, in turn, requires the customer service function to have visibility into the end-to-end customer journey and play a vital role in managing the customer relationship beyond simply resolving issues. To create the necessary transparency and capabilities, companies need a set of overarching, foundational interventions. Organizations can consider all these interventions from the start and pursue them at their own pace.
Facilitate cross-functional collaboration on customer data. Most organizations are unlikely to be able to meet the needs of customers in each of these three archetypes without increased collaboration and integration among the service, sales, and marketing functions, as well as significant IT support. To enable this collaboration, companies need to create feedback loops and break down silos in an effort to facilitate the transparency required to build comprehensive individual customer profiles and shepherd customers through touchpoints with the organization. For example, if customer service knows when a customer placed an order thanks to collaboration with sales, the company can reach out proactively to confirm order status and avoid shipping issues.
Build robust data and analytics capabilities. A major hurdle to building comprehensive customer profiles is establishing clean customer data. Historically, customer data is duplicated, conflicted, and fragmented across the systems and functions at most organizations. Data “sources of truth” are not always clear, and multiple systems may be able to update the same customer record. Furthermore, much customer data is unstructured and, thus, difficult to glean insight.
Building a customer-focused organization means not just implementing one system but stringing together an ecosystem of capabilities and integrating them with business processes. It requires closing the loop on the end-to-end customer journey using advanced customer relationship management (CRM) systems and continuous data curation. The maturity of the available technology, data integration, and organizational setup determines the level of personalization that an organization can provide as a starting point. And companies should establish continuous technology adoption, data-integration initiatives, and organizational restructuring to improve personalized services to customers.
When an issue does arise, functions can work together to determine the root cause of the issue and address it through process transformation and automation to ensure that the issue does not recur. For example, an insurance company was experiencing high call volumes from customers asking simple questions about account details. It used an analytics-driven root-cause analysis to determine the cause of the issue: the company was using a third-party vendor to handle its welcome packages, and customers were not receiving their welcome packets on time.
Proactive issue identification is not possible without data and analytics. Companies can use advanced analytics on available customer data to offer services or products based on the customer’s recent behavior. For example, a credit-card company may be able to use the shopping data of a customer who bought a plane ticket to provide need-based offers such as a lower foreign exchange rate on purchases in certain countries.
Implement change management. Driving company-wide change is never easy, so a change-management effort that is built around a shared purpose is crucial. Companies can start by identifying the right stakeholders, categorizing them by their level of influence and the change in their remit, and mapping them on a change-influence matrix to determine who to involve, who to engage, and who to keep in the loop. Companies need to understand the underlying mindsets that drive employee behavior to determine the right interventions, such as role-modeling and targeted capability development, and to reinforce desired behaviors. The goal is to go beyond compliance and engender true commitment to the customer experience and the organization’s ability to provide white-glove service to all.
A crucial component of change management is empowering frontline employees to resolve issues by making an appropriate offer or presenting a personalized solution. When frontline employees have the proper authority to take action based on an individual customer’s attributes, needs, and situation, they can take ownership of the interaction, determine the root cause of the issue, and equip customers with self-service tools to resolve similar issues in the future.
Customers increasingly expect every service organization to work tirelessly in the background, preventing issues before they arise; knowing when, where, and how to get in touch; and proactively reaching out where necessary. Mounting such a customer service function requires an understanding of customer needs and organizational enablers that facilitate data collection, analysis, and sharing. Organizations that get it right will continue to set the pace for peers across industries.
Source: McKinsey.com, June 22, 2020
By Rohit Agarwal, Raelyn Jacobson, Paul Kline, and Maurice Obeid
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