Management Perspectives

Customer services is the cornerstone of building a successful brand and perhaps the most important differentiator for products and services that are increasingly becoming commoditised. From walk-ins and call-centers to deflection to digital and increasing shift to non-voice contact centers and now the paradigm shift that is expected with the maturing of the metaverse and its various manifestations, this paper briefly traces the journey of customer services and the various channels that exist and how they have evolved over the last few decades. All in the quest of providing that exemplar service that will sway and delight your customer to ensure they become your true brand ambassadors.

Customer experience management through an effective and efficient sale and support services constitute one of the most important functions of any industry, especially for the ones which require a direct continuous connect for the products or services that are being sold, often with relationships spanning multiple years. Examples of such industries include banking, insurance, telecom, utility, etc. These industries need to employ a large workforce of customer service agents to ensure that the customers are serviced properly not just to continue the existing relationship but to additionally grow the relationship through upselling and cross-selling of other relevant services/products whenever such opportunities present themselves. Over the years the nature of the delivery of these services has changed dramatically. We will attempt to present how this industry has shaped up in the last several decades as well as try to analyse some of the future trends that are emerging.

Customer services, initially, was a completely voice-based in-house function as it was thought that only the employees of an organisation can best support its customers. However, this meant that organistions needed to carry a large workforce of people on their payrolls which over the years seemed to have an impact on their profitability. Organisations tried to reduce costs by way of outsourcing some routine non-core customer voice services activities outside of their organisation. Simultaneously, the outsourced companies also started moving up the value chain and gained expertise in the domains, through which they were able to expand the service lines and take on more complex calls. This outsourcing was restricted to onsite, though, because of issues with diction, accent, culture, security, etc. So, while this strategy helped reduce the costs for the organisations to some extent, the full benefit was not being realised because of the continued high cost of onsite call centers. With the advancement of IT and ITES as well as technologies such as VOIP, this was also addressed gradually through ‘near shoring’ whereby call centers in nearby countries that had somewhat similar cultures could provide the same quality of service at a much-reduced cost.

With continued cost pressure, there was a need to further optimize the customer service costs. Hence, apart from call centers (which is a completely synchronous channel), non-voice contact channels started getting precedence as an alternate lower-cost alternative. Initially, nonvoice was serviced through channels that were completely asynchronous like through posts and emails, but gradually we saw a proliferation of semi-synchronous channels emerging in this space, which included chats, SMS texting, social media like Facebook, Twitter, etc., and more recently Business WhatsApp.

Along with this, a very important channel of service was emerging which has now become the mainstay of customer service which is selfservice. By exposing many of the processes to end customers that were typically available to agents only for which these customers had to call or mail these contact centers, power to view and in many cases add/modify/delete capability to these databases was placed in the hands of the customers. Of course, proper checks and balances were imposed to maintain the sanctity and security of the data. So, earlier, for a duplicate bill, customers perhaps would have to write or call, today the customer has to just go into his MyAccount portal or mobile app and be able to download the bill in a fraction of a second. To get a refund, a customer would have to call to find out the status; today the entire workflow is made visible to the customer on his My Account page with perhaps, periodic updates on SMS or WhatsApp.

A parallel theme that was also playing out was automation in its various manifestations. So while contact centers were moving from normal IVR to dynamic IVR, voice IVR, visual IVR, etc. along with technologies such as biometric voice authentication, the call center agents were being aided with technologies such as RPA which allowed capital-light non-invasive integration of disparate applications which were required to service customers more efficiently. Mash up composite screens to display data from various applications, copying data into various applications automatically instead of individually copy-pasting them, automating repetitive tasks by co-bots while agents attended the next call, suggesting next-best-action for agents, etc., all helped to improve the productivity of the call centers. While initially these automations were handled by the technology experts, today we see a multitude of Low Code No Code technologies available which allows the agents themselves to create such co-bots to aid them in their work dispensation. 

As mentioned previously, a major stumbling block for moving call centers to low-cost countries is the diction, accent, and in the manner-of-speaking a language in a particular region or country. Today along with spelling and grammatical correction we get to see the instantaneous feedback on the tone of our response/message for written communication. This is especially useful for communicating via letters, emails, chats, etc. In the future, realtime voice synthesisation can be a solution where we auto-correct and auto-convert the voice of an agent, or even transliterate, to match the vernacular nuances of a country or region. Google’s Project Relate, focused on helping people with atypical speech to be better understood, can be extended to create such a solution. Similarly, UK’s Speechmatics claims to have done some stellar work in this area to recognize accented English. Think about, an agent in an outsourced country speaking in English with a particular accent that gets converted into not only a British or US accent but more specifically, into a Scottish or Yorkshire accent, all on the fly!

Customer expectations and preferences are however constantly shifting, which is one of the most difficult challenges in the support and services industry. From instantaneous redressal of their complaints to one-of-a-kind tariff plans, customers nowadays demand more personalised services with immediate gratification.

While the present state of evolution and journey of contact centers have been outlined above, more exciting vistas are presenting themselves in the form of the metaverse, which perhaps will be able to bring about a completely new paradigm for contact centers. How will the metaverse aid us? In the new world where customers are largely managing their “ownthing” through self-serve. They will come to the contact center only for such activities which are non-routine and for which they have not been able to find the solution to their problem in the FAQs. This then presents the golden moment of truth to provide that differentiated empathetic service that will make them the organisation’s voluntary brand ambassadors. We know segmentation of customers is important and that is where the concept of avatars becomes important. We can think of creating personas or avatars of experts for each customer segment and curate the common issues or queries that they face and by leveraging virtual agents we try to provide that level of differentiated service in a 3D immersive way. Say, for example, you need to file an insurance claim for your damaged vehicle. You can use your portable device, which can be as simple as a mobile phone app, to converse with an agent and send the agent a 3D rendition of your damaged vehicle in real-time, discuss the damaged areas, which costs will be reimbursed, and which won’t, and get an instantaneous redressal. The options for leveraging the metaverse to provide such differentiated and hyper-personalized customer services are immense.

The metaverse is expected to have a profound impact on customer sales and services just as mobile phones did on the communications industry globally. Companies will perhaps set up virtual contact centers in the metaverse in the future, where customers will be able to connect with agents to take sales and service to the next level.

For contact centers, getting the right resources in a particular location has always been a real challenge. Thanks to digitisation, we have now more choices about how and where to provide the service from across the globe. But this is just the beginning of that journey. Eventually, digital interactions will be able to provide a much richer experience than just talking to some unknown call center agent. Today we can have live transcription which allows us to capture the conversations, search for the relevant topic across all knowledge bases in real-time to be able to respond appropriately to customers, and action items automatically and route them to appropriate teams using desktop-based automation. However, with metaverse, we may be able to do this by moving participants into a 3D space. We may create an avatar of ourselves which will be a digital representation of us, to connect with agents who will also be avatars of specialists in their respective fields, all in a virtual space that mimics the feeling of being together in real life. This feeling is often referred to as “presence,” and organisations are working actively in this space to create a digital world that both replicates and augments our physical reality. The term was coined in 1992 by Neal Stephenson, an American writer known for his works of speculative fiction.) Research and development in computer vision, display technology, audio, and sensors to capture facial expressions, eye movement, body language, touch and feel, are being experimented with. A key feature in the metaverse is the use of spatial audio, which makes speech sound like it’s coming from the direction of the person talking. All these will work together to bring to life the experience of “true presence”, so critical of customer experience management. This presence can provide a surrealistic experience that no voice call or even a video call can match: Picture a virtual setting where your car is being serviced in a garage and you can observe the work from your home while experts of the car company, who perhaps live in different locations, are brought in to a visualize a 3D model of the vehicle’s engine to understand why it’s making an abnormal noise. Or imagine you are entering a service center of yore trying to talk to a service engineer to explain your issue with your router or mobile phone. In the virtual space, you’ll be able to interact and discuss the issue, perhaps use haptic devices to repair it also. (Like we have Alexa today in every home, maybe we will have robotic arms in every home of the future to do these kinds of work!) Similarly, for a utility company, it can be a meter reading which you are disputing on a bill versus what is displayed in the meter or for discussing the cost of a new connection where you need to estimate the line charges from the nearest pole, and you literally walk the talk and the estimate is done, instantaneously.

While many of these can be accomplished by our ever-evolving phones and tablets, the more advanced use cases will require either augmented reality (where a digital layer is superimposed on top of our physical environment) or virtual reality (which is a completely immersive experience). The hardware for these kinds of captures is in the works. We may have some virtual reality glasses and headsets and haptic devices to control our avatar, but more refined and less conspicuous tools will be required to create this kind of magical customer experience. For example, today there is hardware available that enables users to create high-fidelity virtual objects using their cameras to take photos from their standard-issue phones in a matter of minutes. These objects can then be transplanted into other virtual environments or overlayed into real environments for say, checking how a particular piece of furniture will look in your living room before you go and buy it online. Similarly, newer mobile phones now track 30,000 points on our faces via infrared sensors. While this is most commonly used for Face ID, it can now be connected to create (and stream) a real-time, high-fidelity avatar of a contact center agent who can virtually assist multiple customers at the same time, like we do chat services today. Long term, the goal is a light and comfortable device that you can wear at ease, switching between AR and VR whilst enabling natural interactions between yourself and other metaverse users. Developments in this space are happening at a rapid pace and AR headsets are beginning to look more and more like normal glasses. The much sleeker, lighter, and more capable, Microsoft HoloLens 2 (as compared to the previous version) can help connect in real-time and work together on a holographic canvas overlayed in your physical environment to quickly resolve issues on the spot. While pricing is prohibitive at this time, it’s a matter of time and scale, before it becomes affordable.

The culmination of this is for the virtual world and the real world to co-exist, with immersive interactions between the two providing that superlative customer experience. Along with the software, the hardware, networking, interoperability standards, security, and privacy concerns are hurdles to overcome.

We’re nearing a threshold at which the technology is beginning to truly transform customer experience management. The metaverse may feel like an empyrean world as of now, just as IoT was two decades back or the internet a quarter of a century ago, but as technology continues its precipitous journey, it will evolve into what feels more like an extension of our physical world. Customer sales and support services and customer experience management will never be the same again.