Experts insights on contact centers across APAC

State of digital transformation in call centers

The digital transformation of the CX space has become increasingly important in countries across the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region. Accelerated by the Covid-19 pandemic, many brands found that leveraging technology to improve CX is more than a trend – it is essential to remain competitive.

However, the importance of the human element cannot be overstated, even as technology becomes more sophisticated and intuitive. This was reflected in CX Network’s 2021 report, The Realities of Customer Experience in APAC, which found that building a customer-first culture remained the top CX challenge for APAC brands (38 percent of survey respondents).

As countries across APAC move away from pandemic restrictions with the cautious return of physical retail, in-person events and international travel, the way many people now buy goods, services and experiences has changed permanently. In response, new trends are emerging, for example: optimizing the call center experience, to improve interactions for consumers and agents alike, more non-linear CX journeys in which consumers bounce between physical and digital interactions, and 100 percent digital CX journeys.

Also read: Omnichannel experts insights ebook

Amid this drive towards CX digital transformation, the need for personalization, empathy with customers, and retaining the human element remain important. At CXN Live: CX APAC, leaders from fintech provider Humm Group, financial services provider Mastercard, and telecommunications company Dialog Axiata shared their experiences of how best practice digital and cultural transformation strategies have improved their brands beyond the pandemic.

The importance of digital transformation in call centers

Ayelet Mendel-Girin, general head of customer experience for Humm Group

During the Covid-19 pandemic, the Humm Group’s call center volumes spiked the pandemic when customers were unable to visit stores. In response, the company improved self-serve capabilities, which reduced call center staff workloads, saved operational costs, and provided faster, more streamlined CX.

Mendel-Girin explained that the first step was to identify the top 10 areas where self-service could improve CX and form a council from CX, marketing, product development, and call center teams.

“We said, let’s be creative, let’s not just train CX agents, we need to look at how we can build customer journeys,” she told the CXN Live: CX APAC event.

For example, the company started using self-service to improve customer understanding about credit card products and enable ordering without using the call center.

“We looked at product information and how to improve the website Q&As – we built an educational page so customers could better understand how to self-serve,” she said. “We trained our agents, so we had capabilities around digital services, the call center, and marketing campaigns with quick tips – it really helped us move our focus from human interaction in the call center to more self-service across all our channels.”

However, Mendel-Girin said that even with an increased self-service focus, the human touch remains important. She gave the example of using customer feedback constructively to improve call center experiences, rather than automatically taking drastic action, such as terminating staff or moving the call center, in response to negative customer feedback.

When customer feedback was analyzed, Mendel Girin found that many complaints related to business processes, rather than agent behavior. She gave the example of multiple customers calling for help with resetting passwords, which was an issue for the applications team. Once resolved, password resetting issues dropped from being the number one reason for calling to number 10.

“If the product is not working smoothly or if a business process is faulty, improving call center capabilities won’t help in that instance,” she explained. “We have weekly meetings with our call center team, product managers, and marketing managers to look at all the top call drivers.”

Mendel-Girin said call center agents are trained to be empathetic when they communicate with stressed customers: “We need to take into consideration the emotional needs of our customers, even before the processes – empathy is key even in the digital world.”

“We need to take into consideration the emotional needs of our customers, even before the processes – empathy is key even in the digital world.”

Ayelet Mendel-Girin

General head of customer experience for Humm Group

Introducing omnichannel to speed up resolution times

Paul Waddy, head of operations at ShowPo

Despite having 50 percent year-on-year growth and an international footprint that accounts for nearly a third of its business, Australia-based eCommerce fashion company Showpo realized that this success was negatively affecting its customer service.

Paul Waddy, Showpo’s head of operations, noted: “eCommerce, particularly in fashion, is becoming more and more competitive. Customer happiness can differentiate us if we do it right. It is very easy to say, ‘Our goal is to provide great customer service,’ without answering what that looks like. For us, it is fast resolution times.”

Achieving and maintaining fast resolution times proved difficult for Showpo at first as its support teams were split between Sydney and the Philippines. A lack of actionable insights made it difficult to resource, which overall impacted the company’s response times and CSAT scores.

To combat this, Showpo partnered with Zendesk and introduced an integrated, omnichannel solution. The move revealed that the company’s 9am to 6pm support model was leading to missed calls and chats, as well as failure to meet service-level agreement (SLA) requirements. The company also used Zendesk Guide as a central repository for employee knowledge, allowing them to centralize many documents and combat data silos.

Internally, Waddy explained that Showpo uses a Slack integration in the Zendesk suite to spur open and efficient communication. He added that centralized internal knowledge content will help improve collaboration between teams located in the two warehouses in Sydney, the head office and the offshore team in the Philippines.

The combined agent effort helps tackle the volume of requests that come in a three-month average of 14,000 chats, 11,000 calls, and 21,000 emails and still beat its KPIs. For example, Showpo’s agents are able to answer chats within 26 seconds, four seconds faster than their KPI.

In the future, Showpo aims to scope how to use Zendesk to centralize and automate tracking information for shipments, which has previously proved labor-intensive for agents.

Currently, Showpo intends to use analytics gleaned from Zendesk Explore to help restructure the support team with the aim of delivering the best experience to customers. This restructure will be based on expertise, to form dedicated groups for handling live chat, email, social media, and phone inquiries.

“Our goal is to provide great customer service, without answering what that looks like. For us, it is fast resolution times.”

Paul Waddy

Head of operations at ShowPo

Employee engagement

Ian Thomson, head of strategic accounts for Zendesk

The Great Resignation has been particularly prevalent in contact centers, with Ian Thomson, head of strategic accounts for Zendesk noting that for some of the company’s customer base there have been churn rates of 20 percent or higher. To combat this, Thomson recommended that organizations focus on their ability to drive employee engagement and enable their employees to be as productive as possible.

The onboarding process is especially important in driving employee engagement. Aside from all the other things companies would do in their normal work environment to make people attracted to their brand, companies must give their employees adequate tools to make their workload easier to manage.

Also read: Contact centers experts insights ebook

“If you are providing customers the ability to communicate with your brand at their convenience, you need to offer them a choice of channels, including social media messaging. What helps contact center agents is deflection by using social media messaging. Customers not having to talk to someone in the contact center is going to help in terms of pressure and workload,” Thomson noted.

Thomson also explained that having a single pane of glass view for agents is integral to employee engagement and churn reduction. By having a single view of the customer journey, agents have contextual access to the entire customer journey and behavior. This gives them a complete view and allows them to provide seamless, asynchronous online engagement.

Contact center agents are not the only ones reaping the benefits.

Thomson shared: “This view gives customers the ability to request to talk with a human to solve their problem in the moment, meaning customers do not have to call back and can instead get their issue solved immediately.”

Additionally, as those in operations have access to this view, they are able to engage in their own internal organization. This makes it easier for staff to always have the customer in mind, have a complete view of all operations and ensure that tasks are completed efficiently.

New CX strategies for enhancing post-pandemic customer loyalty

Rustom Dastoor, executive vice president, head of marketing and communications, North America, for Mastercard

The global shock of the pandemic caught many brands unprepared for the pace of change required to remain profitable. For Mastercard, it was a mixed picture – eCommerce transactions grew 150 percent, and the value of contactless transactions grew nearly 200 percent year-on-year in 2020, but the brand’s lifestyle offerings were affected by the suspension of in-person experiences, such as concerts, sporting events and eGaming.

Mastercard customers were unable to use their Rewards points to enjoy these experiences – the company pivoted so people could collect and use points for experiences that could take place from home. Customers were quickly able to attend Mastercard exclusive online events, many with opportunities for virtual interaction.

“To do that, we needed technology to reach them and give them confidence to use our products online by delivering trust,” Dastoor explained. “The current number of smartphones in the world has crossed six billion but, while consumers are easier to reach, they are harder to engage – today, the average attention span for a consumer is estimated at eight seconds.”

Consumer engagement strategies in a crowded market included behavioral segmentation, rapid response mechanisms, and leveraging multiple channels.

“Behavioral segmentation allows us to serve customers with their unique needs and behaviors,” said Dastoor. “We are able to target more accurately with the location on devices and we can apply decision science tools to predict consumer behavior and serve people more purposefully. Rapid response mechanisms can help us capitalize on opportunities and multi-channel behavior allows us to meet consumers where they are.”

The aim was to create appealing digital experiences and facilitate online transactions by bringing the brand’s capabilities together.

This involved integrating three layers:

1. The infrastructure layer (data, analytics and technology)
2. The enablement layer (products and services)
3. The experience layer (using platforms, UX and design to bring events into homes)

In addition, Mastercard introduced artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies to detect fraudulent activity, often before the customer was even aware of it, to further build trust and ensure seamless digital CX.

Dastoor said that digital CX always starts with the customer. “It is about what the customer wants, where they are, how they want to be served [and] in the digital era, the consumer journey is not a linear journey,” he said.

“In the digital world, the journey can begin anywhere, and it can take the customer anywhere [and if] at the point of delivery, the customer walks away [such as cart abandonment], you’ve got to find a way to get them back to the table.”

Ramping up omnichannel solutions for loyalty members

Christopher Douglas, director of member services for the Pacific, Accor Plus

When looking to expand the omnichannel model implemented in 2019, hotelier Accor needed to identify the key issues with its current solution. The model contained traditional service channels, namely email and voice, but these channels were very resource heavy, leading to increased response times, overworked agents, and frustrated customers.

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“Customers compare you to the best CX experiences they have had – not just your competitors. You are being compared to the world leaders in CX. You need to have the vision to provide the best CX, as if you do not keep up you will be left behind,” noted Douglas.

For members of Accor’s loyalty scheme, Accor Plus, the hotelier wanted to improve the overall customer journey and provide world-class customer experience.

To do this, the company rebuilt its inbound member engagement. The channels available to customers now include social media, a chatbot, email and webform, live chat, messaging, a self-service help center and voice.

Douglas explains that it was important that the solution gives great EX as well as CX. “We needed to make the channel navigation seamless for employees. As we redesigned all processes from the view of the customer, this also meant backend processes had to be redesigned.”

Since the introduction of the new omnichannel model, customer satisfaction has risen by 23 basis points, with the new channels having the highest satisfaction and delivering the greatest efficiency. Additionally, email response times improved by 352 percent, and call wait times reduced by 40 percent.

Douglas noted that self-service was a very important aspect of the omnichannel model, as Accor Plus wanted to enable and empower customers to find quick answers to simple queries. To address this, Accor Plus implemented a self-serve center equipped with a basic answer bot.

“The knowledge base is a pivotal part of inbound customer engagement as it means members can speak to agents when they want to, not when they need to.”

The augmented help center combines self-service, AI-assisted and agent-assisted interactions, as well as strategic triggered chats on articles that can drive revenue or the most popular support articles to drive channel migration.

Overall, the self-service channels saved a potential 84,899 agent hours in the first quarter following implementation, in addition to saving a potential 16.6 (FTE) hours as a benefit of self-service.

Another aspect of the improved solution is live chat, which uses a ‘follow the sun’ model and utilizes contact center agents in Australia and India to provide 16-hour coverage to its clients.

The live chat is available via a widget across all pages, including checkout and the member help center. There are also chats that are triggered to open automatically on selected pages of the website and member help center.

By using the trigger chat, Accor Plus can measure conversions following the chat within 30 days.

Through the checkout-based webchat, Accor Plus noticed a year-on-year increase of 332 percent in unit sales through conversations at checkout pages. The business also saw a 496 percent increase in unit sales year-on-year through trigger chat on support articles.

Concluding contact centers transformation

The Humm Group, Mastercard and Dialog Axiata demonstrated that despite the challenges of the Covid-19 pandemic, brands can not only survive but thrive in the long term. Striking the right balance between leveraging the latest technologies, optimizing call center experiences, and ensuring all processes are customer-centric and empathetic were the main strategies for success that emerged from the CXN Live: CX APAC event.

Companies such as Dialog Axiata were able to move quickly to more digital CX interactions when the pandemic hit because their digital transformation process started in 2017. For the Sri Lankan telco, focusing on people development, investing in training, and creating a positive work culture with opportunities for career progression was equally as important as technology.

The pandemic accelerated the uptake of online financial services, self-service technology and contactless payments – here, Mastercard in particular was able to adapt, along with quickly developing ways for customers to enjoy experiences, such as concerts and sporting events, from the safety of home. The Humm Group, meanwhile, was able to improve call center CX through a combination of self-service upgrades, analysis of call drivers, and creating a culture where agents are empathetic, particularly when faced with large call volumes.

Customer journeys have changed enormously, particularly with the global rise in online transactions. But whether CX takes place online, in a physical store, or involves a combination of interactions, the one constant that transcends technology is the importance of putting the customer at the center of every decision.

Mastercard’s Dastoor summed up what brands need to do to succeed in the long term: “We’ve got to make sure that when we plan digital journeys, we’re planning for the consumer, not ourselves.”

Therefore, companies should look to the future of customer experience and ensure they are making customer-centric decisions in order to provide seamless customer service.

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