89% of customer service and support leaders agree that being a value-driven service and support organization is the most relevant trend over the next 12-18 months.
That's wonderful news. But, how many will be ready to act on it? Action requires access to information, a plan and a decision. The first step alone could create a huge hurdle. How exactly are you defining 'value-driven' service and support? How would such an organization operate? What tools would be needed? This is not an easy task.
Subtonomy, the leading provider for technical customer support solutions for CSPs in the Nordics, can ease the process a great deal through our solutions to empower the Customer Service Organization to become a value-driven organization.
#1. Self-service has many benefits both for customers and telcos
The first big challenge is to increase capacity to deliver value-add service. The easiest and most inexpensive way is to look to self-service solutions. Not only will you free up resources in the service department, you will make your customers happy. Several studies have shown that many customers prefer to solve the problem by themselves, without involving personal assistance and support.
We’ve seen that younger customers have a far stronger preference for chat than older customers, but the youngest age groups currently don’t even look to their telco to provide them with the fastest and most accurate answer to their problems. Instead, they prefer to search third-party information, such as looking up solutions on Google or YouTube.
By improving self-service solutions to deliver value to customers, you might get an advantage over slower competition when it comes to recruiting younger generations as loyal customers. You will also move the customer support from more unreliable sources like Reddit and YouTube to your own support systems where you are in control of the content.
Self-service through chat has come a long way during the recent years, from the simplest chatbots to intelligent conversational AI virtual agents, containing and relaying more data for troubleshooting and suggestions for solutions.
Using Subtonomy’s API, telcos can feed their conversational AI virtual agents, chatbots, self-service, apps and other digital channels with the same accurate, transparent and timely data their CSRs receive. The result is that up to 75% of all tech issues can be resolved without the customer having to call the contact center.
#2. Make CSRs job easier
Next challenge is to enable the frontline to deliver new, more complex types of service. You want to make it easy to provide value-add customer service through a connected Service Rep desktop. For this, you want to enable reps to deliver value to customers with effective systems and tools.
Let us look at one case: Telia Sweden chose a solution that covers both support cases from consumers as well as enterprises, including use of APIs feeding the same accurate information into Service Rep desktop, self-service portals and IVR. This has cut troubleshooting to roughly half the time it took in the legacy environment. Complex troubleshooting in particular has become dramatically easier.
With the new Subtonomy solution in place, all CSRs, but particularly new employees, benefit from greater ease with which troubleshooting is now handled. This is especially true for simpler tasks, and as a result they have become more confident in their professions. Read the full story here >
#3. Demonstrate the business value
The last challenge is to demonstrate the function's value to the business. You can do this through collecting and actioning customer data to improve decision-making across the organization. In order to get internal stakeholders to trust this new approach, you have to demonstrate the value, not just the cost.
For example, how many customers have been remedied by upgrading their operating system? Or upgraded to a new mobile phone with better support for newer and more stable network technologies associated with a pro-longed subscription plan? Or stayed as customers or extended their subscription plan after transparent and clear communication during the support journey? This is just a few ways to actually demonstrate your value to the business overall sales targets.
Great benchmarks can also be helpful. Subtonomy is happy to provide you with successful customer cases from our own projects.