Creating a customer-centric value chain through Digital Transformation

Customer Journeys and resultant experience has been impacted severely due to the pandemic. When the lockdowns initiated and people started working from home, a lot of our daily habits, rituals, and work-related practices become digital. It affected us both as service providers and as customers or consumers. I believe that this digital-first customer behavior is here to stay. 

After all, what matters to customers is their experience derived throughout the journey when dealing with your brand. It doesn't matter to your customer as to what your processes are, whether your SOPs are documented in a certain way or whether you have a funnel of some sort through which you are categorizing your prospect or customer – what matters to them is their experience, across the channel of the interaction of their choice and at the time of their choosing. That's a big sort of a dilemma. As a company, as a brand, we are used to thinking about the process, while the customers have always been thinking about the experience. There seems to be a big disconnect. No wonder, in spite of massive investments by brands in streamlining their processes and attempts to enhance customer experience, the customer perception conveys a big departure from what brands think and what customers experience.

Digital, among other things, can facilitate in bridging the gap between the business process and customer journey. That's the best thing that digital technology affords us as brands or service providers when it comes to customer-centric value chains is that it can allow us to have much more control of the measurement and hence improvement in customer journeys and hence customer experience. However, there are certain rules that we have to follow which include the cycle of Predict, Intervene, Collaborate, and Integrate.

The following aspects are crucial to creating a customer-centric value chain:

·       The ability to predict in advance what the customer experience is going to be is a crucial advantage in delivering a superior customer experience. However, questions remain as to what this ability constitutes. Is it going to be a score that one calculates, based on a lot of factors? Well, as it happens, there’s a lot of factors, based on the demographic based on the past transaction history, based on their service, complaints that, have come to you or to your competitors. However, the more data points that we collect better becomes our ability to predict the kind of experience we are or can deliver. This is a crucial pillar of the customer-centric value chain. The focus is the customer and not the process itself.

·       Then next is the ‘intervene’ part. Once one can predict, the next logical question is what can be done about an adverse experience about to happen. Being able to intervene in real-time is critical and that makes one relevant as a brand for the customer in that moment of truth. Can we design the systems in such a way that relevant intervention happens at the right time in the journey?

·       The third part is ‘collaborate’. Being able to collaborate in bringing the automation and human experience from both the employee side and the customer side together at that moment. This is also where the human part comes in. So you intervene and then are able to collaborate through an omnichannel engagement system where your employee, with your subject matter expert, can be tagged into that particular moment of truth and become contextualized to what the customer is reaching out there for and imagine the system being able to tag the right subject matter expertise from within the same automation system (for example a chatbot). So that's the collaborative part in bringing the human experience and both from the employee side, and the customer side together at that moment.

·       The fourth part is the ‘integrate’ part. Being able to integrate that flow mix into the core business process and provide seamless and continuous services even if one of the components fails. Once that happens, the great experience can be delivered, so your ERP, the back office, your CRM and when you combine all that together, you get an amazing value chain that's making your customers happy, excited, big advocates a few at the same time, making you money as well.

We all know customer experience delivery through various services comes at the top in the BPO industry. Even though the BPO industry has been facing many challenges in current times, we should keep eye on the ball in order to get through these difficult times. Customer-centric processes are the new normal where we are adjusting our business models according to the needs of the customer.

Traditional approaches, however, do not work when the operation is in thousands of agent’s homes. We witness that a lot of businesses often rely on their documented culture when challenged on how they wish to work. Yet culture is ethereal. Non-physical. Difficult to prove. But there’s little doubt it exists in every Service provider, especially BPO businesses. Service Providers or BPOs typically employ operating culture with a great practical purpose as compared to many other sectors. This may be because of the desired ability to influence the behavior of a large number of associates in an environment with relatively low numbers of managers & supervisors since managing large groups of people requires procedural controls to guarantee steady and predictable output. However, this also presents a dilemma of delivering consistent and predictable, and most importantly positive customer experiences across various touchpoints with different associates and other backend systems participating in the whole journey.

These days, thousands of contact center advisors and back-office staff are working from home with little or no managerial ‘eyes’ on behavior. How can the operation be evidentially controlled? How can Data Security be guaranteed? How can BPOs ensure that the operating culture is consistent, especially in a very dispersed and distributed workforce?

Digital is playing a key role in addressing all these aspects. Systems and practices intertwine together to provide a perfectly monitored, yet more collaborative environment, with virtual assistants (aka bots) not only helping automate tasks to bring efficiencies but also helping keep associates aligned with the culture of the organization. This brings benefits in areas of both experience and efficiency as well as ensuring compliance.

Customer-centric processes are the new normal where we are required to adjust our business models, practices, and processes according to the needs of the customer with a predict, intervene, collaborate and integrate cycle.