Unlocking the Power of “Digital Inside”

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Over the past two years, operators have invested more than $20 billion in digital technology to automate the experiences of their consumer and enterprise customers. This investment has helped operators “look digital”:

• Transactions going through digital channels have soared. For most operators with an online presence, digital now represents 25% of all customer interactions and 50% of all customer touchpoints.

• Mobile applications from operators regularly feature in the “top-20 most downloaded” lists.

• Accenture studies show that the communications industry ranks second only to banking in its digital intensity and its creation of digital experiences for end customers.

However, for most operators, this investment in digital technology has not translated to improvements in the customer experience. In fact, despite digital interventions, Accenture research shows that operators typically rank lower than most other industries on customer ratings.1 And as a result, operators are struggling with high rates of switching and churn.

In addition, consumers’ expectations continue to change. Accenture research shows that consumers want seamless omni-channel interactions and personalized offers, promotions and helpful suggestions that are relevant to them.2

Research has also demonstrated that the ability to utilize agent-assisted channels continues to be important to consumers of all ages.3 In fact, the majority of critical moments of truth for customers involve interactions with an operator’s staff. For example, a service visit or in-store purchase is more important for how customers view a brand than a pre-paid recharge top-up.

However, behavior among customer-facing staff has frequently been driven by the wrong metrics and hampered by legacy technology.

In addition, the technology that these staff use is frequently antiquated. It is also challenging to use, and is not designed to be friendly to low-skilled agents.

In fact, for many operators, the journey to truly being digital is just starting. While operators may look digital on the outside, the usability of customer-facing systems that the majority of staff in all channels use to execute their work has barely improved in a decade.

Unlocking the Power of “Digital Inside”

1 Accenture Global Consumer Pulse Research, 2014.

2 “Omni Expectations: Understanding Consumer Preferences in an Era of Rapid Change,” Accenture, 2014.

3 North American Technographics Customer Experience Online Survey, Q4 2012 (US); cited by Forrester Research Inc., “Your Customers Are Demanding Omni-Channel Communications. What Are You Doing About It?,” 2013.

Unlocking the Power of “Digital Inside”

The inadequacy of the systems that support customer-facing staff has produced a gap between customer expectations and the experience customers actually receive when interacting with humans.

Leading Digital Experience - Intuitive personalized, engaging

apps and websites

- Contextualized content and recommendations

- 24x7 Intelligent virtual agents leveraging extensive knowledge base

Human Interactions- Inconsistent and inadequate

human support

- No ownership of the problem

- Lengthy resolution times, frequently with multiple handoffs

- Irrelevant product recommendations

vsExpectation Gap

Unlocking the Power of “Digital Inside”

Our Service Design business, Fjord, has researched the reasons why operators are falling short of customer expectations. The findings are stark:

Lack of Trust

“I don’t believe the information on the screen“

Stage Fright

“I am in front of customers without the tools to help“

Coping Strategies

“I will do what I need to do to get the job done“

Metrics, Metrics

“I will give my boss whatever numbers he wants to see“

The Art of Misdirection

“I will buy time from customers until I navigate systems“

Unlocking the Power of “Digital Inside”

Employee Impact Uncertainty about the stability of core systems, and the quality of their information

Driven to verify and check and work outside core

Feelings of isolation, being on stage without the right lines

Lack of confidence in front of customers and in ability to solve problems, let alone cross-sell

No use of standard tools to cope with system limitations Extensive manual swivel-chairs and manual errors

Under pressure from conflicting set of AHT, RFT and NPS imperatives

Extensive gaming of the metrics set, driving behavior to meet metrics

Lack of good initial information on customers when they interact

Resort to diverting customer attention until they navigate systems

Customer Impact Continually asked for some information

Long transaction times

Not feeling listened to or recognised

Lack of confidence in advice being given

Driven to switch accross channels to find the right answer

Not being listened to

The information from the last conversation doesn’t flow to the next interaction

The feeling of being gamed and being asked to give good NPS or survey scores

Agents caring about metrics and not their problems

Not being recognised by the operator

Feelings of not being listened to

The research clearly shows that the technology that deals with the most important moments of customer experience isn’t able to give staff the ability to provide the experiences customers expect. Specifically, we see tremendous challenges in:

Field: the doorknock experience

Most field workers we observe have no idea of the customer’s issues when they knock on the customer’s door. They have job and fault information, but no context on the interactions that have gone on before. As a result, they have a poor ability to empathize with customers. And not surprisingly, many dread knocking on that door.

Retail: the waiting experience

In a 20-minute retail sales interaction, customers are either looking at incomprehensible screens containing their customer details, or left alone in a store. Unsurprisingly, when they leave a store, they may have great brand affinity for the device, but for the operator… not so much.

Contact Centers: not showing you know me

For a contact center agent, it is bewilderingly hard to understand why a customer would be calling, or to get that customer’s context and understand what has gone before. The result is clunky, impersonal interaction… far from the perfect call.

Unlocking the Power of “Digital Inside”

The pace of technological improvements in the back office isn’t going as fastas in the front office. The solution is clear. By applying the same thinking, tools and methods operators are using for customers in digital, a step changein performance can be achieved. Some early examples from around the world are starting to show the way:Putting the customer in charge

Interaction notes have been the bread and butter of CRM systems for 20 years. They are often not captured, are captured only in shorthand or are inaccurate. Some operators are starting to view these notes as assets to be shared more broadly, changing the dynamic about how operators remember their history with customers. One European operator is starting to send its customer notes directly to customers, asking them to ‘like’ or ‘not like’ them in a social media style. This is improving the quality of notes, and is giving customers control of their editorial history. One Asian operator is taking the path of communicating all interaction notes to all channels in order to create a more complete experience for agents, and is also using tools like speech recognition to allow channels such as Retail and Field to capture detailed customer information, where previously such collection was patchy at best.

Co-creating value with customers in Retail

The majority of mobile deployments in Retail have been wildly unsuccessful. Staff find the scrunched-up information available on tablets unhelpful, and

both PCs and tablets are too unwieldy for them to use during their walks around stores. Where success has been found, it is with operators in the UK and Asia, who have created beautiful tools enabling staff and customers to sit around a single screen, with customer information available and the ability to work together to resolve problems and tailor plans and offers. Information on customers is thoughtfully shared and presented in the same way as through online channels. There is no disconnect between what customers and staff are shown. Some future directions have also been shown through Accenture’s work with retailer Carphone Warehouse to develop an omni-channel platform, honeyBee, that has radically simplified the customer experience in stores.

Mixing external and internal info

The tools agents use are often filled with out-of-date offer information and price comparisons, and are more complex than they need to be. There is great potential to integrate data from third parties, such as social media, in order to create a unified view of customers. Leading operators are starting to incorporate external and internal information into a single view that allows agents to have a consolidated perspective on what customers see.

Unlocking the Power of “Digital Inside”

Elegant, simple tools

The average service length for operators’ customer-facing staff is less than 15 months. By contrast, the average service length for people designing the systems used by customer-facing staff is over 60 months. Not surprisingly, systems are designed to be more complicated than agents can cope with. Some operators are starting to hide the complexity of these systems, and are instead creating “lite” or “express” versions of these tools, which focus on delivering the most common transactions as quickly and elegantly as possible. This approach is leading to dramatic improvements in resolution time and employee time to competence. One operator saw the time needed for its most common transactions decline by 60%.

These initiatives, while promising, have not been easy to deliver. Moving at digital speed within an operator organization can be challenging. Numerous barriers to execution exist, including:

Management mindset Improvements in customer channels have traditionally been viewed through the prism of top-down management and metric-driven optimization. Doing things differently, and liberating customer data and employees, is a considerable challenge to channel practitioners, who typically have been successful at executing the same things in the same way for 20 years.

Dual mode IT

The technology in customers’ channels is rightly run in a highly disciplined and risk-averse way. There is formidable complexity in making changes, given the interplay between products, plans, network, devices, channel adoption and customer information. Digital doesn’t respect these constraints. Moving fast and agilely with digital, and confidently in the core systems, is therefore a major challenge. So is the significant CAPEX/cost pressure that operators often face when seeking to invest in new technology.

Partners

Much of the work of touching customers is done by third parties on behalf of operators. If you call an operator, you have less than 20% chance of speaking to an operator employee. The outsourced nature of channels has improved their economics, and sometimes their quality. However, the rigidity of the operator-outsourcer relationships makes introducing new methods and technology a real, practical challenge.

Unlocking the Power of “Digital Inside”

The path forward is different for every operator. However, the early research we have conducted points to a common set of themes that innovators seem to be adopting and using to reap rewards:

Service Design Thinking

Having a deep understanding of employee emotions, and how humans interact with channel technology and pain points, requires a different set of skills than most operators have available.

Leaders are heavily using Service Design thinking to go deeper in designing systems than is allowed by traditional workshops and requirements gathering. To truly understand and improve on the end-to-end customer experience, operators need to bring in the perspectives of agents from across the service organization.

Analytics-driven improvements to service design also show great potential to improve the customer experience.

Single Organization

New changes like these are hard to deliver in a business–as-usual organization, where the required incentives and skills are typically not present.

Leaders are setting up different transformational units to deliver this change and to join external digital initiatives with internal ones. Governance and funding models are changing, as companies recognize the need to collaborate across organizations to support seamless omni-channel customer journeys.

An important aspect of the transformation process is new incentive schemes for customer service agents, that reward the desired “omni-channel” behaviors and actions.

Agile

Agile approaches, which have seen extensive adoption in front-end digital systems, have started to move into the delivery of back-end core BSS systems.

Leaders are pushing the envelope with what can be achieved, and the timescales that it can be delivered in. Continuous Delivery and Distributed Agile at scale have started to change the classical release management model. In addition, operators are increasingly looking to plug-and-play, lightweight solutions that sit in front of their legacy systems and require minimum integration effort.

Experimentation

World-class contact centers have always been innovation hubs, with extensive experimentation in how calls are handled. However, such widespread innovation across channels is rare.

Leaders are taking a more extensive approach to innovation and experimentation, and are more rapidly pushing experiments into the field.

Recent examples, such as HP’s and Virgin Atlantic’s experiments with Google Glass, confirm the potential of such an approach.

1 Alex Handy, “Business use cases come to forefront at Google Glass conference,” SD Times, Oct. 27, 2014; Micah Solomon, “Virgin Bets on a Google Glass Customer Service Experience,” Forbes, June 3, 2014.

Unlocking the Power of “Digital Inside”

Operators have shown they can deliver digital experiences that customers engage with and find valuable. They likewise have the tools and resources to deliver digital experiences that employees can engage with. Operators who have started on this journey have seen great benefits in not just “looking digital,” but actually being digital.

All operators need to look for methods for customizing this next digital wave to meet the needs of their own organizations. It promises to be valuable… as well as a lot of fun.

Unlocking the Power of “Digital Inside”

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The use of such trademarks herein is not an assertion of ownership of such trademarks by Accenture and is not intended to represent or imply the existence of an association between Accenture and the lawful owners of such trademarks.

Authors

Inés Guzmán is the lead for Accenture Digital Customer Interaction Services. Inés Guzmán is also the global lead for Digital Customer Service.

John Cassidy is Managing Director for Accenture Strategy – Digital.

Josie Spence is the Offering Development lead for Digital Customer Interaction Services & Enterprise Acceleration Services.

About Accenture

Accenture is a global management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company, with more than 323,000 people serving clients in more than 120 countries. Combining unparalleled experience, comprehensive capabilities across all industries and business functions, and extensive research on the world’s most successful companies, Accenture collaborates with clients to help them become high-performance businesses and governments. The company generated net revenues of US$30.0 billion for the fiscal year ended Aug. 31, 2014. Its home page is www.accenture.com.

This document makes descriptive reference to trademarks that may be owned by others. The use of such trademarks herein is not an assertion of ownership of such trademarks by Accenture and is not intended to represent or imply the existence of an association between Accenture and the lawful owners of such trademarks.