Intelligent solutions empowers companies to take full advantage of every customer interaction and leverage that valuable data to drive down operating costs, increase revenue opportunities, and maximize customer satisfaction and loyalty
Improving the loyalty and retention of high-value customers can become an organisation’s biggest asset. A large wireless operator recently implemented Convergys’ Intelligent Interactive Solution to save on costs while increasing the satisfaction of its most valued customers and retaining them.
Possessing a multi-million customer base, the wireless operator received 1.2mn calls a day from customers requesting handset upgrades, waived fees, and other concessions for which special service treatment couldn’t be provided to every caller as the cost was too prohibitive.
The proliferation of customer contact channels – retail locations, web, IVR, e-mail, chat, social media, agents, and mobile devices – made it more challenging for the company to build a consistently superior customer experience.
Bottom Line
By definition, a superior customer experience involves some incremental expense but some customers are more valuable than others, and no business can afford extra costs to retain unprofitable customers. The wireless operator wanted to identify the customers who were most important to its bottom line – those with high lifetime value – reduce expense through improved interactions with the high-value customers and cost-effectively satisfy those in need of special treatment. As the next step, the operator wanted to apply the knowledge consistently across all its customer contact channels.
To implement this strategy, Convergys was selected to deploy a value-based customer methodology. A key component of the Convergys Intelligent Interaction Solution portfolio, Dynamic Decisioning Solution (DDS) is a highly scalable, enterprise-wide, policy management solution that helps improve the customer experience and enables organisations to achieve their business objectives by optimising and adapting to changing customer dynamics in real-time at the point of interaction – regardless of where and how the interaction takes place.
As the first order of business – to define the operator’s policies regarding handset swaps and upgrades – Convergys partnered with the wireless operator to extract, create and centralise service rules that should be consistently applied to various tiers of customers. These rules were based on a number of drivers, such as recurring revenue and cash cost-to-serve, proven to impact lifetime customer value.
DDS
Convergys then deployed DDS to manage the centralised policies across all customer contact channels – including toll-free numbers, retail stores, and online channels. The intelligent solution included a customised rules-based engine that captured events in customer care, billing and service delivery environments.
It evaluated policies related to those events and incorporated the customer’s lifetime value to target effective save offers and actions to high-value customers, while reducing the spend on low-value or high-cost customers. The programme was tested in a trial that covered approximately 10 per cent of the operator’s total markets.
Executing the wireless operator’s real-time business policies, DDS specified customer treatment recommendations based on customer value via automation, or delivered recommended messaging and offers via screen pop-ups to service representatives in the call center and in-store personnel as well as online venues.
“Ensuring that customer service representatives make the right offers to subscribers has a direct and sizable impact on our client’s bottom line,” said Jim Boyce, President, Global Sales and Services, Convergys.
Strengthing Convergys’ claim that enterprises can often reduce their cost to serve by up to 25 per cent when deploying DDS, the projected savings for the wireless operator is expected to exceed US$100mn a year on an ongoing basis, equating to a 20 per cent annual cost reduction by eliminating erroneously issued credits and reducing call handle times.
Customer Satisfaction
The wireless operator was able to maintain customer satisfaction levels among most profitable customers and enforce consistent company policies towards providing special treatment for customers across all contact channels.
By limiting the value of offers made to low-value customers, approximately one million handsets per year – estimated to cost US$99 each – were not offered to customers that did not merit this reward.
While results vary from company to company, the solution provider’s experience showed that intelligent interactive solutions empowers companies to take full advantage of every customer interaction and leverage that valuable data to drive down operating costs, increase revenue opportunities, and maximize customer satisfaction and loyalty. In this case, the wireless operator recouped its initial investment in just eight weeks – even before the trial was completed.
