The future of customer support

Innovative, customer-focused organisations have set a new standard for customer service globally. The combination of disruptive market entrants, the current experience economy and digitally enabled ‘always-on’ culture has led to a rapid rise in customer expectations.

As a result, organisations must rethink their approach to the traditional customer support function if they want to future-proof their business. Opportunities to optimise services include:

• Using emerging technologies and cost-effective, customer-centric business models.
• Turning reactive customer support functions into business units which proactively monitor challenges their customers might face and take responsibility for helping them achieve their desired outcomes.
• Upselling and cross-selling when the opportunity arises.

Transforming their customer support function allows organisations to remain competitive, increase the customer lifetime value and activate a new sales channel, turning the traditional customer support function into a core revenue-generating business unit.

Context and introduction

Customer support is a key touchpoint throughout the customer journey. When a customer has challenges with a product or is generally dissatisfied with the level of service provided, the company’s customer support function is the first point of contact.This is a critical moment of interaction and can make or break a relationship which a customer might have with a company’s brand or product. Many organisations invest significant amounts in their sales and marketing functions to attract customers, only to then lose customer loyalty through an inadequate support experience. In addition, organisations often underestimate the potential of customer support as a revenue-generating business unit.

New standards of customer experience, brought by fresh technology and disruptive organisations, have revolutionised customer expectations. Modern customers demand more, expecting seamless and user-friendly access and interactions – and they are increasingly willing to switch brand if services do not meet these new standards. There are two main drivers for change in the market:

1. Customer expectations are changing

• Customers now expect customer support functions to be proactive, immediate, and personalised; 37%¹ of consumers expect a same-day response.
• The volume and rate of incoming support requests are continuing to rise; a recent Deloitte survey found that over half (53%)² of participating companies expect their total contact volume to increase over the next 5 years.
• Consumers’ digital expectations now include omnichannel services to enable easier access to information and greater consistency during the customer journey (see figure 1). However, these must be managed properly; 87%³ of customers find it frustrating to repeat themselves or provide the same information across multiple channels.

2.  Customer experience is critical for customer retention

• Customer service is a key component of customer support; approximately 40%⁴ of customers who switch brands do so because of poor customer service.
• Customer experience is a brand differentiator; customers consider the quality and speed of customer service to be the most important factor in building trust for a brand³ compared to other factors, such as price or product quality.

In response to these market drivers, organisations are asking important questions in relation to their customer support functions, regarding (i) efficiency, (ii) creation of additional revenue and (iii) the overall experience. We have outlined the following methods, informed by our experience, which may help organisations improve these areas.

1.  How can we increase efficiency, cost-effectiveness, and compliance?

• Applying self-service technologies to manage the rising number of support queries and re-direct customers through the right channels, based on customer tiering and query types.
• Automate processes to identify and address compliance challenges and report adverse events faster, by means such as:
  
  • flagging any interactions involving adverse events (ADE)  immediately to a specialist agent.
  • allowing a customer to return a faulty product, submit it for inspection or prepare a submission of the ADE to the respective authority.
  • providing voice recognition and analytics via platforms such  as TrueVoice^6, which extract ADE information from calls and load it into a safety database.

• Allow chatbots to support simple queries in multiple languages, reducing the need for agents in specific local markets – namely, those with a small customer base.
• Centralise back-office activities and create a Centre of Excellence (CoE) to enable efficiencies and standardisation, while allowing local markets to retain ownership over the nuances required to serve their market effectively.
   

2.  How can we use customer support as an additional sales channel?

• Train support agents to listen actively, identify opportunities to upsell and cross-sell and build their knowledge base of your products and offerings.
• Work closely with the sales team, monitoring customer accounts for potential opportunities and providing feedback to help sales representatives through a dedicated Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool.
• Consistently reach out to customers (e.g. every 3-6 months) and determine customer needs similar to a traditional telesales team.
   

 3.  How can we improve our customer experience to satisfy an increasingly demanding customer?

• Improve your customer journey by focusing on the moments that matter for your customers, taking into account your omnichannel strategy and customer preferences.
• Prioritise customer retention; acquiring a new customer can cost five times as much as keeping an existing one.⁵
• Analyse complaints data to reduce demand for support, improve customer experience and allow for continuous improvement. Effective complaints management can: 
  
  • improve customer experience Net Promoter Scores (NPS),  reduce operating costs, decrease Average Handling Time (AHT), ensure compliance to regulatory requirements, and increase customer agent satisfaction.
  • inform the creation of a single-source knowledge management platform to learn a user’s preferences, provide recommendations, and anticipate future requirements.
    
  • enable preventative action through a root cause analysis as well as provide valuable feedback into product development.
    

The customer support function of the future resolves simple queries through low-cost digital channels, whilst higher-cost in-house agents resolve complex queries. This model is outlined in figure 2.

To build a future-proof service delivery model, many organisations are taking on a ‘shift left’ strategy (Figure 2) which maximises the use of technology and self-service tools to address the majority of low-tier incoming queries, allowing more time for high tier/care services.

This approach inherently reduces cost and improves the customer experience as well as the quality and efficiency of internal processes.

Shifting customer contact to lower-cost channels such as self-service tools, chat/voice-bots and lower-cost customer care centres, allows organisations to reduce the cost to serve for lower tier customer segments and simple queries, in order to focus on priority customer segments (e.g. top-tier accounts) and high-care queries (e.g. adverse events reporting). Thus, organisations can reduce cost while improving customer experience and compliance.

In the next article of this series, we cover customer-centric support operating models, the customer care agent of the future and outsourcing considerations.

If you have any questions, or would like to discuss your approach to customer support and experience, please do not hesitate to get in touch with one of our experts below.

Contribution/ Author:

Henriette Bucher
Manager, Consulting
Deloitte Switzerland