The customer is always the king, they say. If that is true, a king deserves service befitting the title. The reality, though, is often the opposite. How many times have you been frustrated navigating through call center phone trees and transferred from one CSR to another just to get your complaint registered, let alone get it resolved expeditiously? Consumer oriented companies like banks, insurance companies, telco's, face the challenge of losing unhappy customers to the competition because of poor or inadequate customer service.
Digital automation technologies like BPM, Low Code, RPA and AI can elevate the Customer Service experience to overcome this challenge. Read on to learn more and click here to watch a demo.
Customer Service objectives
First, let's establish some goals for our customer service operation and explore how Digital Automation technologies can help us achieve these goals:
Pleasant Customer Experience
Automated customer interaction across multiple channels, personalized interaction-based customer relationship status, quick resolution of open cases, progress/status updates provided to customer frequently.
Efficient and cost-effective operation
Automated and dynamic case management, Quick response and resolution, dynamic SLA assignment and compliance, automated routing to human Customer Service Representatives.
Continuous improvement
Visibility into open cases and overall customer service operations, insight into improvement areas and agility to implement those changes quickly.
Digital Automation to the rescue
The proposed Customer Service solution leverages the following innovative Digital Automation technologies:
- Appian Business Process Management (BPM) and Low Code Platform
- Blue Prism Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
- Amazon Artificial Intelligence (AI)
- Amazon Alexa
The Automated Customer Service solution
The diagram below depicts the Automated Customer Service solution, powered by digital automation technologies:
Let's dive a little deeper into the value proposition of each of these technologies:
Appian BPM and Low Code Platform
The Appian Platform is at the forefront of the Automated Customer Service. It is the glue that stitches together services from different components to build a unified solution and present a consistent experience to all stake holders. The Appian platform primarily performs the following:
- End-to-end process orchestration
- Flexible case management and workflow
- Configurable business rules
- Prioritization, distribution and optimal case assignment and resolution
- Dynamic SLA assignment, tracking and monitoring
- Modern, responsive and mobile-enabled rich user experience
- Process visibility via records, reports, and dashboards
- Business agility with low code and rapid development
Blue Prism RPA
The Robotic Process Automation platform from Blue Prism, integrated with Appian, adds efficiency and lowers cost by automating repetitive human tasks and provides a quick and easy way to integration into applications with little (or no) traditional integration options:
- Automation of repetitive tasks such as reading emails, PDF and Word documents, maintaining Excel spreadsheets, copy-pasting data, interacting with document management system (DMS), etc.
- Retrieving and updating legacy applications where no easy integration is available
Amazon AI
The Artificial Intelligence platform from Amazon Web Services (AWS) plays a crucial role in automating the understanding of the customer's communications across a variety of channels in order to provide a more personalized customer service. Amazon AI helps us with:
- Analysis of customer intent (i.e. complaint, inquiry, compliment) and topic
- Understanding of the customer's sentiment
- Helps determine the Next Best Action and its associated SLA for case resolution
Amazon Alexa
Alexa, the digital assistant powered by Amazon AI, provides a pleasant, natural language voice-enabled customer experience for common customer service questions, e.g. case status, expected resolution date, etc.
Digital Automation enabled Customer Service
Below is a typical customer service scenario, enabled by the digital automation technologies described above.
1. Customer sends a complaint email
Email read by Robot. No human intervention required.
2. Retrieve customer profile
Robot pulls customer information from the CRM system. No human intervention required. No complex integration needed either.
3. AI based intent and sentiment and analysis
Helps understand the customer's intention, topic and mood
4. Determine Next Best Action and SLA
Based on the data collected thus far, i.e. customer status, intent and sentiment, Appian decision table determines the Next Best Action and its associated SLA.
5. Trigger a case management workflow
Appian's dynamic case management capability provides a flexible workflow to resolve the customer's case within the required SLA, allocate most qualified CSR when required, while providing a 360o view of the case to the customer and Call Center management.
6. Case status/progress information via Alexa
Customer can get case status and progress information thru a variety of channels including Amazon Alexa for a natural language conversation.
7. Case resolution and completion
Finally the case is routed to a CSR for customer outreach, resolution and closure. The customer is notified of the status update.
8. SLA monitoring
Appian monitors SLA's for each case and provides pro-active notifications and escalations for cases that are likely to violate their SLA.
9. Personalized user experience
Appian provides a rich, modern, mobile-enabled and device agnostic user experience.
10. Management dashboards, records and reports
Deep insight into customer service operations via dashboards and reports providing operational visibility and trends with drill down to customer and case record levels.
Conclusion
This automated, personalized and monitored experience can elevate the customer service an organization can provide to its customer while improving operational efficiency and lowering cost. The complimentary set of digital automation technologies like BPM, case management, low-code, RPA and AI come together to help deliver a superior customer service experience in a timely and cost-effective manner.
Click here to learn more about this solution, or visit us at booth 8 at Appian World 2018 in Miami, April 23-25, for a live demo of the above Automated Customer Service solution powered by Appian, Blue Prism, Amazon AI and Alexa.
Amol Mategaonkar, General Manager, India, Princeton Blue, Inc.
Pramod Sachdeva, Founder and Managing Director, Princeton Blue, Inc.
