Importance of Customer Experience for Business Growth:
Amid intensifying competition, saturated markets, and volatile economic conditions; customer experience (CX) has emerged as a key competitive advantage and business differentiator for enterprises. There is no doubt in the fact that enterprises delivering high quality CX are able to – drive brand loyalty, reduce customer churn, encourage brand advocacy, and hence boost revenue. Also, customer expectations and needs evolve continuously, and when offered with a negative experience, they tend to change the course and loyalty for a brand immediately. The fact that – the cost of retaining customers is comparatively less than that of acquiring new customers, points out the implication of positive CX on customer retention and business growth. Both consumers as well as enterprise customers expect a high degree of customer experience delivery, irrespective of the industry they operate in. The fundamental expectations of customers in terms of convenience, speed & efficiency, and friendly & welcoming service are the basic aspects that drive existing as well as new customers to pay more. Experience is everything in today’s world!
Few Interesting Statistics from Recent CX Surveys:
- 44% of companies believe improving customer experience and satisfaction is the most important business goal followed by improving operational efficiencies (41% of companies) for the next two years, apart from revenue growth.
- Attracting a new customer is 7X more expensive than retaining a current one.
- 49% of customers have made impulse purchases after receiving more personalized experience.
- Customers are willing to pay a premium of up to 13% by receiving a great customer experience.
- 72% of customers will share a positive experience with 6 or more people.
- If a customer is not happy, 13% of customers will share their experience with 15 or more people.
Digital Transformation is the key Element in CX Delivery – KSA Perspective:
Saudi Arabia, one of the largest countries in the MENA region has a young and highly vibrant population. Almost 80% of the Saudi Arabian population is between 18 – 34 years of age group, while 44% is between 25 – 34 years of age. The Kingdom is bolstering of a young and highly tech savvy population with strong presence on social platforms. The Kingdom has over 90% of its population as active internet users, and over 80% of mobile internet usage penetration, which is second to none in the world. The country has one of the highest social media penetrations levels in the world, supported by its high smartphones ownership and internet user penetration levels.
As a matter of fact, ~70% of the population is active social media user; Saudi Arabia ranks #1 in Twitter penetration; 72% of the population is an active WhatsApp user. With favorable demographics of large young, urban, and tech-savvy population, KSA is a marketplace for early technology adopters and also a potential global hub for technological innovation. Also, Saudi Arabian telecom operators were among the first few countries to launch commercial 5G services in the Middle East region; and as we speak, there are a plethora of 5G use cases that are being commercially deployed in the Kingdom.
The highly ambitious Vision 2030 initiative, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) has been implementing several economic and social reforms mainly aiming to reduce the country’s dependence on the oil sector. Since the launch of the initiative, KSA has made remarkable progress by ramping up privatization efforts and improving the country’s business environment and competitiveness. One of the focus areas of the initiative is to develop a digitally-driven economy by facilitating widespread adoption of emerging technologies across organizations of all sizes and industry verticals.
With enhanced digitalization, enterprises no longer offer just goods and services but focuses on offering an experience to customers. While, experience has been the heart of some industries like sports and entertainment, the value of experience have also paved its way to other sectors like retail, banking, and more. This resulted to the emergence of experience economy, which is perceived as the fourth economic offering along with goods, commodities, and services. While digital transformation could have different meaning for different enterprises; in light of CX, it often means Omni-channel presence, multiple touchpoints, and holistic view of customer journey.
Relevance of CX and Omni-Channel Strategy:
Consumers no longer rely only on traditional customer engagement channels like calling to contact centers. Consumers now are more self-sufficient, and increasingly prefer engaging with brands across a widening array of digital channels like email, social media, apps, web chat, and others.
Omni-channel approach represents the next phase of CX evolution with service providers increasingly looking to offer intuitive, intelligent, and seamless experience across all touch-points. In order to maintain a uniform experience across all channels, context based interaction with customers is the key. As technologies and tools empowering Omni-channel service delivery becomes more advanced and mainstream; opportunities are emerging for CX service providers for offering a more personalized service to customers.
Next Generation CX Capabilities:
Digital transformation with targeted technology investment is pivotal for developing an effective end user CX. Next generation technologies like big data analytics, internet of things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML) is facilitating the development of advanced solutions like robotic process automation (RPA), behavioral and predictive analytics, speech recognition, and more. CX service providers are increasingly focusing on deploying automated, intelligent, and self-service tools to cater the evolving needs of clients and their customers. Conversational AI, and chat/voice bots are some of the promising technology-enabled solutions capable of improving customer satisfaction and delivering a superior CX. Few other technologies and applications that are still in the early stage of adoption include real-time natural language processing and sentiment analytics.
Enterprises have been leveraging analytics for a long time to deliver insights for developing strategy. Combining analytics with customer experience is the real game changer in the current and future world. The impact customer experience analytics on the top as well as bottom line is incredible, and cannot be ignored by any industry. The chart below represents the results from a recent survey where 72% of the organizations indicated using customer experience analytics to drive business growth related decision making; it can be also be inferred that those that aren’t using it now will either follow the suite in the near future or perish against the competitive forces of the market.
Case Studies:
- A leading telecom operator implemented an AI powered chatbot for providing its customers with conversational experience through voice, web, and also mobile app. It is capable of addressing both basic as well as more complicated customer queries without human interaction. With the implementation of the chatbot, the company was able to automate 66% of customer contacts, reduce the frequency of customer contacts per customer by ~15% year-on-year, and also improve the net promoter scores (NPS). Also with improved automation, the customer operations cost was minimized by ~19% year-on-year.
- Another telecom company automated several inefficient processes aiming to streamline operations and also improving the time-to-market of new services. The company implemented several RPA bots for automating manual processes. Following the implementation, the company reported a significant savings of around USD 110 Million annually from its customer services business unit.
CCC leading the way in CX management:
Headquartered in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, CCC is a joint-venture between Saudi Telecom Company (STC), the state-owned leading telecom firm, and Startek, a global customer experience management company, based out of the U.S. Since its inception in 2011, CCC has been successful in consolidating its position as a leading CX management company, serving customers not only in the Middle East region, but across the globe. Over the years, CCC has gained strong domain capabilities across multiple industry verticals including telecom, government, retail, technology, banking and financial services, healthcare, travel and hospitality, and e-commerce. The company differentiates itself from competitors through its technology and solutions expertise, end-to-end service offerings, and flexible engagement models. The company serves enterprises of all sizes and is also a trusted partner for several government organizations. The company has more than 5,000 strong workforces with around 1,500 female employees, capable of serving clients in 7 different languages.
CCC has been adopting myriads of new digital capabilities, which helped it gain competitive edge and successfully streamlining customer service and marketing operation for its clients, while cutting down cost. The company has evolved as one stop solution provider, catering to all the evolving CX requirements of existing customers, while also attracting new leads. The company’s comprehensive portfolio of digital capabilities includes and is not limited to social media management, digital marketing, conversational analytics, and chatbots. The impacts of these tools in the business are incredibly compelling for clients. These services have been benefiting clients in centralizing all their social media efforts, improving engagement, better analyze market and customer sentiments, automating interactions, while reducing cost, and delivering quick and round the clock support. CCC also incorporated advanced tools like speech analytics which significantly improved productivity by helping in identifying the root cause around high average handle time (AHT) at process as well as group level. By lessening the AHT, it also optimized operations &support manpower required and thus reduced the overall cost. Empowering its workforce, CCC incorporated workforce optimization tools along with productivity and efficiency management systems like voice blast for shift adherence, HR and personal management, and automatic scheduling. Moreover, strengthening its cyber security, CCC integrated SIEM solutions, email security, and managed SOC solution. In addition, CCC is in the process of implementing RPA, intelligent routing, remote desktop and big data to further improve the customer experience and business effectivity. Also, the company is also looking to configure Omni-channel solutions like virtual customer support and virtual agent.
Shifts in Customer Engagement Channels AmidCOVID-19:
While behavior and expectation of customers were already evolving, the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has proved to be a catalyst for further change. User behavior towards service consumption has shifted dramatically towards digital channels during the ongoing pandemic. CX service providers have faced challenge in setting up remote working environment, working practices, and adjusting KPIs. While, typical voice based service delivery are most impacted during the pandemic, the reduced service levels from regular engagement channels have driven consumers to shift to digital self-service.
CCC has been successful in moving more than 95% of their workforce to work remotely without disrupting the service delivery during the pandemic. CCC’s digital-first resilient model and adoption of cloud, VPN, online attendance system, and virtual meeting/interview solutions facilitated the smooth transition to working from home setup. The company accessed the situation quickly and effectively transitioned new hiring, on-boarding, and employee training programs into a virtual format. Moreover, it also supported the government by working with NIC in the fight against COVID-19.
Conclusion:
Customers have more power than ever before. One sub-standard experience can result in social media outrage, effecting public perception, share value, customer trust, and more. For sustainable development of any business, delivering appropriate CX has become very critical. Along with improving CX, enterprises are also focusing on boosting margins, shortening time to market, reducing risk, and further driving business outcomes. To outshine competitors, CX services providers need to demonstrate their capabilities and values like domain expertise, security infrastructure, and best practices as well as strengthen digital capabilities by leveraging advanced technologies like RPAs, chatbots, and virtual assistants.
Despite several COVID-led challenges, CX service providers have a unique opportunity to capitalize on the ongoing changes by driving greater customer engagement through digital channels, while meeting increased demand and controlling costs. In addition to dealing with the current situation, it is important for CX service providers to mitigate future risks. Assessing the performance of channel mix and evolving those channel capabilities that drives most benefit should be very critical in the future. Also, it will be important to service providers to adapt their operating model and drive more flexibility in operation as well as geographical redundancy.
