In Customer Service, as in many other fields, digitization is an unquestionable trend. Not only for the economics and efficiency of serving from a digital channel, but also for the convenience of customers who spend more and more time on social networks, and are becoming increasingly comfortable in the digital arena.
It is the end customers who have changed their habits and begin to consider that the best way to be attended to does not necessarily have to be by calling a company's Call Center.
In this situation, many service providers have already embarked on the path of digitizing their support and customer service processes. Digital absorption is beginning to be relevant for solving problems or very simple queries.
I mean those based on basic "intents" that require a minimum understanding of the client's need and can be addressed in a very simple way to give an automatic and simple response.
A clear example in the telco sector is that of PIN/PUK queries, for the unlocking of telephone SIM cards. The digital channel recognizes the "PIN/PUK'' intent, either by text analysis or by speech recognition technologies, and offers the information to the customer.
Yes, it is a start - effective, simple, but very limited.
And the question is:
Can a digital channel be effective in solving not so simple problems?
My answer is yes. In fact some companies are already doing it. So the next one is: what does it take to do it? I think two things are necessary:
- Centralize the care logic, to make the Customer Service more effective, also consolidating the complete customer journey, in all the channels through which users can interact with the company that provides the service. There is nothing more frustrating than having to repeat to another agent or channel the same thing that you have already explained before, wasting time and worsening the perception of the service.
One of the problems of an unstructured digitization process is the proliferation of different logics for each channel that leads to an unbearable complexity and lack of consistency in the customer journey.
- Orchestrating and automating Customer Service processes, from the root cause of the problems, not from the customers' symptoms. For this, it is necessary to have access to the information of the business and operation systems (BSS and OSS) in real time, to minimize the information that the client has to provide to understand the real cause of their problem and allow the resolution actions to be automated.
In my opinion, only from the focus on the root cause, it is possible to implement a resolution logic for a customer in a digital channel, in which minimizing the interactions or the number of steps and questions/answers is key.
In a digital channel, it is not feasible to carry out a diagnostic process based on workflows from the client's symptoms, asking innumerable questions until "the machine" reaches one of the branches of the decision tree and then tries a resolution. At this point, the client will undoubtedly prefer the human interface of the Call Center.
However, it is feasible to reduce these interactions to a minimum, by orchestrating automatic diagnosis and consulting the BSS/OSS systems in real time, finally determining the most probable root cause of the customers' problem and minimizing as much as possible the information that the customer must contribute in the form of symptoms.
By increasing the capacity for detection and automated resolution of root causes, we provide centralized intelligence to customer service and thus achieve REAL digital absorption, not only of simple problems, but also of more complex ones whose root cause we know and can be automated.
This centralized intelligence, characterized by the set of root causes implemented in the system, makes it possible to have a channel-agnostic Customer Service, that does not lose quality from one channel to another and also guarantees consistency in care.
And that intelligence, why not, can make your digital channel the best of your service agents.
