Frictionless Customer Service for Telco

How to identify and solve inefficiencies in a lengthy and complex customer service process?

Our client, one of the biggest telecommunications companies in Europe, was dealing with this challenge. After bringing transparency to the process, we focused on three main objectives: operational efficiency, customer satisfaction and compliance. 

To begin with, we analyzed the ping pong between the front and back office, which led to the reassignment of cases. By discovering the root causes of said reassignments, an internal ticket assignment was adequately set up to direct cases more efficiently. Secondly, we focused on customer satisfaction. We realized that connecting customer satisfaction scores to individual cases are challenging due to complex IT landscapes and leaving satisfaction analyses generic. Thus, we created an automation trigger to send out surveys to solved cases, giving tangible tools to coach agents to improve customer satisfaction. Lastly, we looked at the workarounds to meet SLA’s which are taken advantage of. Therefore, it negatively impacts customer service without triggering any alarm. 

The transparency and the improvements in these three areas made the entire process more efficient, leading to frictionless customer service.

Intro

Firstly, the company in question is one of the biggest telecommunication providers in Europe, operating in the international market. Chiefly, they specialize mainly in network provision but also IoT and next-generation projects. Recently they have been involved in building smart cities where everything is connected, for instance, smart trash bins, smart traffic lights, smart traffic management etc. Additionally, in terms of sustainable energy, many projects will reduce waste emissions and water consumption. Together with all these initiatives to digitize everyday things and soon simplify our lives are crucial for future evolution.

Challenges

To begin with, common challenges within the customer service department emerge due to complex customer inquiries. In an ideal scenario, the customer inquiry enters the service cloud system. Consequently, either someone picks it up and starts working on it, or gets assigned to user groups, which then gets picked up by a limited experienced user group. Although for complex inquiries, these cases tend to stay longer in queues, increase the resolution time, and lead to frustrated customers. In other situations, cases make loops due to reassignments between agents. Correspondingly, service-level-agreements play another crucial role in handling cases and could be breached with increasing case complexity. Therefore, Process Mining helps identify the root causes of those breaches to pre-emptively improve the quality of your customer service.

Project Methodology

To clarify, Process Mining enables end-to-end process transparency over multiple systems and layers. As a result, we discovered the combination of cases and tasks helps better understand what happened in low scoring cases and why the back office takes more time than expected. Firstly, the project was built on a set happy path defined with the customer. The process starts with the creation of a case and ends with the resolution of a case. Thus we decided to focus on three main business objectives: operational efficiency, customer satisfaction and compliance. Thus based on these objectives, we analyzed the ping pong between the front and back office, which leads to the reassignments of cases. This in return, is highly undesired. However, their root causes are often unknown, making improvement initiatives challenging.

Additionally, connecting customer satisfaction scores to individual cases are challenging due to complex IT landscapes and leaving satisfaction analyses generic, preventing the ability to coach agents and improve customer satisfaction on an ongoing basis. At last, looking at compliance where workarounds to meet SLA’s are taken advantage of, negatively impacting customer service without triggering any alarm. For instance, agents can resolve cases one day before the SLA breach. Afterwards, the ticket is reopened and handled.

In addition to uncovering inefficiencies, Process Mining is enriched by an intelligent automation component that triggers actions in multiple operational systems. Therefore, by combining tasks with cases in one holistic overview, the number of cases and potential SLA manipulations can be identified. By default, tasks prevent cases from being resolved; however, it is proven that this can be bypassed. Correspondingly, another valuable asset is to deliver automated reporting on non-compliant cases for high-quality change management. There are standard compliance breaches but also company-specific.

General Findings

Specifically, the backbone of process mining is the process transparency generated by your as-is process. Therefore, looking into case management, it was a complete surprise to the customer how non-standardized their process was.

Complete process flow 

(All data is anonymized and randomized)

Reassignment rate

Markedly, whenever more than one person is involved in resolving the ticket, the cycle time increases, and customer satisfaction decreases. Therefore, internal ticket assignment needs to be correctly set up to avoid losing any time assigning to the right person and getting back to the customer as soon as possible.

Reassignment Dashboard

(All data is anonymized and randomized)

Customer Satisfaction

To demonstrate, this dashboard’s primary purpose is to understand the correlation between high customer effort scores and specific process patterns. As a result, we were able to identify the ideal process that led to a happier customer and identified the areas where the customer has brand promoters and for which product type the customer tends to be more demanding.

Survey Analysis Dashboard

(All data is anonymized and randomized)

Action flow and automated reporting

On the account of observing a low receiving rate for surveys, thus made the analysis and the statistical power of the insights hard to grasp. Therefore, we built an action flow which depicts the cases where the issue was resolved, and the customer was not contacted yet for a survey request, and a survey is sent out.

Next Steps

Most important, is that the company has decided to add process mining to their long-term strategic goals to create transparency over their processes. In addition, continuously monitor the reassignment rate and the potential improvement in customer satisfaction due to better internal ticket assignment and higher outreach for survey fulfilment. To clarify, the real value of process mining was delivered on a limited scope and has shown the company its great potential to expand horizontally in the organization. Therefore Process Mining will become a central hub for transparent information, root cause analysis, and automatic reporting by making it part of their strategy.

Is your company looking to increase customer satisfaction while optimizing its customer service process? Let us help you.

With our expertise and as translators of data to actual business value, we help companies create transparency in their processes therefore delivering true business value. Thus not only do we do this for customer service but across a range of different industries, companies and processes.

Therefore, check out our Resource Library for articles on Process Mining and browse through our Customer Success Stories showcasing our customers and the projects and processes we have optimized.

Let’s work together to optimize your processes.

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