We're pleased to have Cognizant as our Diamond Sponsor at Appian World 2013. A Fortune 500 company, Cognizant has one of the largest pools of BPM experts in the world today, and offers a full complement of BPM services aimed at realizing significant business benefits to their customers. Dileep Srinivasan, VP & Venture Leader at Cognizant Social, presented "Turning Contact Centers to Customer Experience Centers." He explained how enterprises can succeed in connecting with digital consumers by transforming the customer experience.
A minute has undergone a drastic change. In just one minute, there are 6 million Facebook views, 100,000 new tweets, 30 hours of video uploaded to YouTube, and 100+ new LinkedIn accounts. All of these social interactions come together to create your digital profile.
What is BPM's relevance today? BPM is about Technology, Process and People, in that order. Social BPM is evolution. Social BPM has inverted the initial concept of BPM to place people & interaction in the center of process optimization. With this focus, social BPM can help improve processes across sales, marketing, and service.
Srinivasan turned his focus to service -- specifically, contact centers. In contact centers today, a customer calls because of a defect in the product, processes, technology or people and not because the customer wants to "have a chat." However, fewer than 1% of Millennials will actually let companies know they have a problem through call center or email. Today's customers are empowered buyers and demand a new level of customer service.
Dissecting a Call Center
According to Srinivasan, 50% to 60% of inbound calls within financial services firms are driven by banks' own errors. Preventable first calls are inquiries as to when a statement is coming, the status of payments, or when a transaction will be posted to the customer's account. The second category is repeat calls, which occur when the customer is not serviced sufficiently the first time around or needs to check on status of existing service requests.
Another example is the auto industry. The average number of calls per day for an auto manufacturer is 6000 -- 20 calls per day per agent, 24 minutes per call. How can organizations lower this number and prevent customer dissatisfaction?
Shifting Call Centers to Customer Experience Centers
Lower costs and improve the customer experience by shifting the paradigm from traditional calls to digital outreach. Instead of putting emphasis on the customer service process, which leads to bad customer experiences, invert the model and put emphasis on predicting and preventing issues to begin with. Through process optimization and automation, organizations can spend more time on prevention, which leads to benefits:
Customer-Facing System of Engagement
Manage all the various customer-facing touch points (such as forums, blogs, communities, chat, etc.) through worksocial to replace core call center functionality. This results in reduced call volume and demand mitigation.
Employee-Facing System of Engagement
Take the processes and knowledge from the core call center functionality and use worksocial to improve and increase effectiveness, and optimize the processes. Worksocial combines multiple employee-facing touch points such as knowledge management, communities, and wikis.
The Transformed Customer Experience Center
Customer-facing touch points, core call center functionality, and employee-facing touch points all come together with worksocial into one customer experience center which allows analytics of text and sentiment.
Alena Callaghan
Web Marketing Manager
