The Pathway to a World-Class Chat Program

COPYRIGHT © 2012. ALL RIGHTS PROTECTED AND RESERVED.

The Pathway to a World-Class Chat Program An Australian operator begins to transform its digital strategy around customers.

Customer strategy case study

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The Challenge: Defining world class chat strategy

Challenge:

Consumers are undergoing a customer experience revolution. Digital channels and the online medium offer remarkable and convenient new ways to engage and interact with customers. Companies have an aspiration to enhance sales and uplift service while improving efficiency and lowering their cost to serve to mitigate operating expenditures. As a result, the role of the digital channel is changing in order to meet rising customer expectations, moving away from simple information gateway to focus more on complex, transactional based interactions. A leading Australian operator realized that any transformation of its digital strategy would need a strong customer focus. It wanted to create the optimal customer experience and leverage chat as a pillar to better engage customers online. It enlisted the help of Peppers & Rogers Group to identify best practices in chat programs and to design a world-class chat program in order to enhance sales, service, and improve the overall customer experience.

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The Approach: Identify leading practices

Approach:

The evolution of the digital channel from informational to transactional is already underway. To gain a better understanding of the current situation, and to pinpoint the compendium of leading practices, the team created a 360-degree assessment based on strategy, process, people and organization, data and technology and performance improvement. Peppers & Rogers Group examined the current digital strategy and customer experience based on customer accessibility, convenience, enjoyability, and consistency. The team also studied elements of the operator’s current organization, process, information, and technology. It conducted in-depth interviews and surveys with corporate stakeholders and sales and service agents to identify existing vision and strategy, and experienced the leading chat practices first-hand through mystery shopping.

The assessment uncovered five critical issues that the operator had to address in its transformation. First, while the operator already had digital strategy in place, it was focused on product-centric goals. A chat strategy was created to shift focus from a product-centric platform to a customer-centric platform to ensure channel alignment and brand consistency.

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The Approach: Identify leading practices

Second, the operator did not have a clear standard operating procedure nor a defined customer engagement guideline in place to ensure a consistent customer experience. From our experience, chat process is an optimal enabler to sales and alignment. The team created an agent selection model to ensure the right people are in place to serve the company’s most valuable asset: the customer. In addition, training, learning and development, data, and performance management matrices were created to ensure the chat program is staffed with capable agents and has the proper data and performance guidelines to track and exceed expectations.

Third, chat tools were positioned to differentiate customer experiences across customer segments and lifecycle stages, from sales, service and tech support where knowledgeable chat resources deliver consistent, branded chat experiences under an integrated chat experience across multiple channels.

Fourth, a critical path was created to bridge the gap between the operator’s existing capabilities and its goal capabilities. The firm can activate tangible steps to launch quick-wins around its vision immediately.

Finally, Peppers & Rogers Group recommended that the operator prioritize and create a long-term roadmap to operationalize the new initiatives. By creating a comprehensive live chat strategy program plan, the operator now has a clearly defined procedure to ensure brand alignment, holistic sales management and realize customer-centric chat strategy. Together with explicit chat process, a clear organization and competency model, performance reporting and clearly defined KPIs, the end result will the launch of a world-class, customer experience-based chat program, with suitable resources dedicated to ensure the program’s success.

Approach continued:

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Insights & Outcomes: Strategize and operationalize around the customer experience

Insights & Outcomes:

Given Peppers & Rogers Group’s assessment and recommendations, the operator is executing customer experience-based strategy, including aligning recommendations with live chat strategy and program plans, and prioritizing initiatives for deployment. The actionable strategy will be executed to increase online adoption of digital channels, and customer conversion via proactive and re-active chat. In addition, the operator now plans to use real-time data to understand its current state, as well as an independent set of recommendations to build the future digital strategy, designed to engage customers methodically and effectively. All of these steps mitigate the cost to serve while achieving business the objectives of uplifting sales, enhancing service, and encouraging migration to the digital channels.

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