Tailoring customer services

By Bae Jung-hee

A customer-oriented company is constantly challenged to achieve the seemingly impossible mission; delivering customer service which supports corporate brand promise, meeting or exceeding customer’s ever-increasing expectations, managing operational, financial and reputational risks, while achieving ever more operational excellences.

This requires an unrelenting focus on continuous improvement ― but managing changes can be an unwelcome distraction from achieving demanding customer service levels. Customer service executives will be bombarded with new ideas, hot topics and trends from the media, colleagues and consultants. Selecting what to focus will become very challenging and important.

Deloitte Consulting presents customer lifecycle-based customer service approach to proactively manage important customer interactions with a customer-oriented company, at every step and through every stage of their lifecycles. This enables the company to align cost-to-serve with the potential value of the contact and the customer, differentiating services levels where appropriate. This in turn allows the company to maximise the value of the customer to you.

We have identified five important strategies to focus along the customer lifecycle.

Strategy one: self-service

Self-service is the ability of a customer to either partly or fully complete their service or sales need without speaking to a human. Typically this is enabled through online service or via telephony channels such as push-buttons or speech recognition.

Self-service also encompasses a range of other processes such as check-in kiosks at airports, automated teller machines at banks and self-service check-outs at supermarkets.

Increasingly customers are using mobile devices to access these services. The explosion of smart phone and tablet PC is changing the way customers interact with companies.

Organizations that are successful in this space are keeping things simple, with applications that are easy to use and cleverly marketed.

Customers must know about the application and then actively choose to download it, and more importantly continue to use it. Companies need to consider the ‘stickiness’ of the application. Before launching, companies need to ensure that mobile device self-service application has been well designed, has a well thought-out marketing strategy, and has a clear purpose in wider channel and customer strategy.

Strategy two: authentication

In today’s marketplace, customers can be interacting with companies from anywhere in the world, at any time. Responding to the risk this poses to data security, over recent years Deloitte Consulting have seen a surging interest from organizations hoping to find new ways to protect both themselves and their customers’ details ― this trend follows a range of high-profile examples of fraud and lost customer data, occurring both in the private and public sector.

Organizations leading in this area have realized that it is no longer good enough to have adopted contact identification and verification (ID&V) processes, both from the ground up and enterprise-wide. By developing risk-based processes that use customer segmentation (who the customer is), and looking at customer demand types (why the customer is calling), organizations are able to create more robust, customer-friendly experiences

Common authentication solutions include something the customer knows (e.g. password, date of birth), or something that customer has access to (e.g. smart card reader, SMS text), or mixture of these measures. However, increasingly more robust processes that strengthen security but also maintain customer experience are being considered. Typically this type of authentication involves utilizing something intrinsic to a customer that cannot be stolen (e.g. fingerprint or voice-print).

Strategy three: profile-matching

Profile matching is an emerging tool that helps organizations match customers with contact center advisors with whom they are more likely to have a positive experience and outcome. It operates, in concept, similarly to an online dating service, matching customers and advisors based on a defined set of variables. The match criteria can be based either on demographic data such as age, sex or location, or a product or service match, where the contact center advisor is a known advocate of a product/service.

When this type of context is combined with such elements as the customer contact history, it is also possible to further enhance relationships by trying to connect the customer to someone with whom they have previously had a positive experience.

However, this strategy is at the early stage of use. Much like the challenges faced with complex skills-based routing, it has the potential to cause problems in workforce utilization efficiency if applied too broadly.

Creating simple matching strategies based on customer and advisor segmentation is the key to understanding and unlocking the potential benefits profiling matching can provide. Organizations that have embraced profile matching find their advisors are more empowered to provide genuine help and knowledge ― which in turn fosters increased customer spend, greater customer loyalty and brand advocacy from customers.

Strategy four: sales-through-service

Inbound service interactions are the most valuable form of customer contact, and some organizations have found that customer service contact centers have become their largest sales channel.

To making the most of these contacts, organizations must be able to determine the ‘next best action’ to take, often in real time. This requires a consistent view of transactional data such as customer history and value, predictive models for churn and purchase propensity and customer lifetime value, business rules that apply policies or commercial priorities, and a decision engine that can combine these factors to calculate the best course of action.

It is true that many organizations still have a reluctance to ask their employees to sell. However, experiences has shown that by developing the ability to engage in a manner that is relevant, dynamic and personal to each individual customer, customer loyalty can be increased at the same time as increasing revenue.

The key components of the approach are:

●Decision based upon information of customer lifetime value – for example, long term view on customers allows informed decision on discount rate for customer profitability and company affordability

●Continues update of information and models – by updating the model with newly acquired data on customer response pattern to marketing activities, better decision can be made

●Using decision engines to drive and coordinate holistic customer contact management, not only inbound recommendations but also outbound 1:1 communications

●‘Next best action’ is not necessarily a sales offer, but it can be a proactive customer service message

Applying these techniques will allow companies to treat each individual customer with highly tailored messages and actions, aligned with their needs.

Strategy five: social media

Social media includes technologies like micro-blogging via Twitter where a person ‘tweets’ brief thoughts and opinions, sites such as YouTube and Flickr, which allow users to share photos and videos, and RSS (Really Simple Syndication), which acts as an aggregator of personal news and other media.

Social media continues to expand at lightning speed, and becoming accepted channels for business. As consumers become more empowered by mobile devices and easy to access internet, the line between customers and companies will continue to become more blurred. Social media represents a transition from monologue to dialogue between an organization and its customers. To be effective, it should not be seen as an intrusive campaign, boasting about product, but rather a conversation between equals.

Organization leading the way are including social media in their end-to-end customer service strategy, operational processes and integrating it within their multi-channel proposition.

The following four behaviours are keys to a successful social media channel strategy ― constantly listen to feedback; respond quickly; communicate open and honestly and prepare to respond in public

Social media is and will continue to become an integral part of how customers choose to interact with a company. Having a clear strategy and the right operational processes and behaviours are critical to ensuring social media is a positive experience both to the companies and their customers.

A further development in the use of social media as a customer service channel is Social Network Analysis (SNA). This involves analysing the relationships between individuals in a community, then classifying individual customers by the influence they wield over other users in your network ― for example trend setter, followers, outliers, and so on.

Once you understand the aspect of your customers, you can put the information to use as with “sales-through-service” by using it to drive the decision about the “next best action” to take the next time when you interact with that customer.

In conclusion, companies can improve customer value by providing differentiated interactions throughout customer lifecycle. The above mentioned five strategies will help the companies to provide tailored message and experience in effective and efficient ways, aligned with broader corporate customer strategies such as customer segmentation, customer service delivery channel strategy, and service level and content

This article was contributed by Deloitte Korea.