Crafting customer experience success in Asia

Since entering the world of customer service via the frontlines at GE Capital some 24 years ago, KV Dipu’s career has seen him take on numerous customer-centric missions. The lessons he learned from his very first role in the field were to lay the foundations for many of the solutions he and his teams would develop over two and a half decades.

Impressive results are a common occurrence in KV Dipu’s professional life. While in a Six Sigma role as a black belt, Dipu shrunk turnaround for GE Capital‘s biggest product line by 99 per cent, reducing a lengthy 48 hours to a lightning fast 30 minutes. He would later fuse his award-winning operational excellence knowledge with his CX know-how to build a platform that grew the business by 600 per cent.

In more senior operations and customer experience roles at GE Capital, Dipu would lead many industry-first initiatives. During his time in the cards and payments division, GE Capital was a market leader for payment option availability.

“We launched the industry’s first end-to-end digitized card acquisition platform, which reduced ‘time-to-yes’ by 99 per cent,” Dipu remarks. The experienced CX practitioner attributes this achievement to three main areas: encouraging customer-centric perspectives, re-mastering processes using six sigma and deploying the right technology stacks.

At Bajaj Alliance, Dipu has continued to innovate and push boundaries. The Indian general insurance company has digitized its customer journey by rolling out an app for retail customers and automated the claim process by deploying artificial intelligence, photogrammetry, live video streaming and conversational interfaces.

“We also launched the industry's first blockchain driven solution for claim settlement and the industry's first Internet of Things (IoT) driven-solution using telematics,” adds Dipu.

Customer experience in Asia during Covid-19

Among the shifts in customer expectations that Dipu says has stood out in reaction to the Covid-19 pandemic in Asia is the hunger for touchless user interfaces.

“Customers have become very wary of touch,” Dipu remarks. “For instance, one sees many folks in elevators constantly figuring out ways to press buttons using sharp objects.  In this context, voice will clearly play a role – if a voice command can help a customer execute transactions without touching a keyboard, that feature is likely to have an edge.”

As companies look to automate transactions to accelerate service time while scaling up, Dipu reminds that the need for humanness and empathy in all transactions has increased, especially given physical and social distancing.

“Customers expect companies to offer a man-machine combo in customer-care interactions rather than vanilla, end-to-end automation,” he notes. “In a sense, work from home has to become bond from home.”

The unpredictability of pandemic is intensifying the need to be tuned in to the voice of the customer, empowering brands to swiftly respond to any new needs. Dipu lists a few ways Bajaj Alliance has done this for customers during the pandemic:

• In response to customers experiencing fear and uncertainty because of the epidemic, the insurer offered a Covid-19 self-assessment feature on its app.
• When individuals were asked to do contact tracing, the Bajaj Alliance app was updated with the Social Trackback feature to assist with slowing the spread of the virus.
• Since neither physical visits to a medical clinic nor home visits have been possible during lockdown periods, Bajaj Alliance’s app launched a doctor-on-chat feature to connect patients with health professionals.

Dipu summarizes: “We met new customer needs by offering new features and delivering basic necessities by replicating activities performed physically on our digital real estate.”

To hear more CX words of wisdom from Dipu check out his session at CCW Asia which will focus on using advanced analytics to better understand customers.