Managing multi language, multichannel customer service

Businesses today operate globally, but need to provide a local service if they are to deliver the customer experience that consumers rightly demand. That means providing information, answers and support in local languages, at the time that customers want it, and of course through their channel of choice.

Managing global customer service is therefore a challenge, particularly for web-based businesses who don’t have physical branches. The customer experience is a key factor in winning and retaining business, whatever sector you operate in. Organisations need to ensure that their operations are efficient, effective and consistent wherever the customer is located.

Eptica customer Easyroommate is the perfect case study on how you can balance delivering a local service with increased efficiency. Originally founded in the US nearly 15 years ago, Easyroommate is now the world’s number one flatshare and houseshare website. It operates in 37 countries and 12 languages, matching potential tenants with available flatshare or houseshare accommodation. With Easyroommate, landlords can advertise rooms or property for rent, while tenants can search for accommodation or post details of their requirements.

With user numbers growing by 30% over the last year, Easyroommate needed to scale operations to provide fast, consistent service to customers. It selected Eptica’s multichannel customer interaction suite as it provided a multilingual, multi-brand platform for both Easyroommate and sister brand Vivastreet, which provides local online classified adverts in 19 countries. Eptica has been rolled out across the email and web channels for both brands.

Eptica’s software is used by 60 agents split between Easyroommate’s main contact centre in London, outsourced partners and teams in Africa, Asia and Latin America who provide local language and time zone support. The platform provided by Eptica ensures that, no matter which part of the extended customer service team a customer interacts with, they’ll get a consistent, high quality experience.

On the web channel, Easyroommate has deployed Eptica’s intelligent web self-service. This enables customers to ask questions online, receiving instant answers that mean they don’t need to switch to other channels. After implementing Eptica calls have reduced by 75% and emails dropped by 15%, despite a 30% increase in users. Over half (53%) of all interactions are now via web self-service, which is available in eight languages on Easyroommate sites for the UK, France, Italy, Spain, USA, Australia, Mexico, Brazil, Netherlands, Poland and Germany.

Easyroommate now uses Eptica Email Management to handle its 20,000 monthly emails. This has dramatically reduced the average time to answer, more than halving (58%) it from 48 hours to 20. 80% of emails are now answered within 12 hours. All incoming emails are now automatically analysed and sent to the agent with the best skills to answer them, along with a suggested response in one of 11 local languages. Average time to answer Vivastreet emails has reduced by 66%, to 12 hours, allowing agents to focus on providing a personal service for complex enquiries via the phone channel.

The new Eptica implementation has increased First Contact Resolution rates to above 90% and has provided Easyroommate with greater management control of its operations. It can now analyse all its customer interactions to spot trends and potential issues in real time, enabling it to optimise the customer experience at all times.

On the web the customer experience is vital to growing your business, by retaining existing customers and winning new ones. As Easyroommate’s experience shows, multichannel, multilingual and multi-brand customer service is at the heart of global success.

 

Extending retail customer service

The retail landscape is now extremely complex. In an omnichannel world companies need to provide excellent, consistent customer service across a growing range of channels. However retailers don’t always have 100% control of every part of their operations. Logistics are outsourced to courier companies, contact centres can be run by third party providers and the infrastructure behind some new services (such as energy, insurance and banking) are handled by specialists in that industry.

Additionally, as retailers seek to increase their range of products they are turning to marketplace style operations with third party merchants selling through them. Operations such as Amazon Marketplace, eBay and now Rakuten Play benefit by offering consumers greater choice without retailers needing to hold inventory of less popular products.

However as far as the consumer is concerned they are buying from a particular retailer – so they rightly expect the same high level of service across every channel irrespective of whether it is provided by a partner or the company itself. Reflecting this, eBay has just introduced new standards for sellers, including new mobile friendly pictures, a new returns policy and international delivery tracking.

With retailer’s ecosystems widening, what can they do to ensure that the customer experience is consistently high, whoever is delivering it? Here are four ways that Eptica believes technology can help.

1              Extend your knowledge
Many retailers have centralised their existing customer service information into a single knowledgebase that is available through web self-service, chat and to contact centre agents answering phone calls and emails. Extend this so that your partners can access either the whole knowledgebase or just relevant parts to ensure they give a consistent, efficient service that reflects your brand values.

2              Joined up workflow
If there is an issue customers don’t care who is to blame – they simply want a solution. So join up your customer service systems with your partners to make it easy to escalate consumer queries to relevant staff. Make sure you have monitoring in place to ensure they answer within your stated timescales and in a professional manner that reflects your brand values.

3              Provide clear information
Make it easy for consumers to see what is happening across the customer journey by providing clear information on the entire process. For example include the ability to track a delivery by a logistics partner without them having to leave your website. This reinforces the customer experience and shows your ownership of the journey relationship.

4              Monitor and enforce
Your brand is precious, meaning it is vital that partners don’t tarnish it. Put clear standards in place that they must adhere to and, in the case of problems, make it simple for customers to escalate complaints to you directly. Monitor social media for any issues and ensure they are dealt with quickly, rather than seen as someone else’s problem.

The extended retail landscape offers increased choice to consumers and greater efficiency for retailers. However it is vital that customers receive a consistent, high quality experience across every channel and partner if it isn’t going to negatively impact your brand.

Delivering the right customer experience

There’s a lot of talk about the need to provide consumers with a superior customer experience. But how do organisations begin to implement a customer experience programme, who should be in charge and how does it differ from existing customer service activities?

Eptica’s own research has highlighted a pressing need to improve the customer experience. The 2012 Eptica Multichannel Customer Experience Study found that UK businesses are struggling to deliver an adequate customer experience with the websites of 100 top companies only able to answer just over half (53%) of customer questions. While this is a slight improvement from the 50% answer rate of 2011, email performance actually declined. 39% of emailed questions were answered successfully, down from 48% in 2011.

Clearly companies need to improve their experience, but where do they begin? Outside In: The Power of Putting your Customers at the Center of Your Business, a new book from Forrester Research, aims to help by providing a start point for organisations starting on the customer experience journey. Co-authored by Harley Manning and Kerry Bodine, it begins by defining what the phrase customer experience actually means.

Essentially a good customer experience has three components:

1. It meets customer needs (so delivers what the customer wants)
2. Is easy (there are few barriers to customers meeting their needs)
3. Is enjoyable (customers are engaged during the process)

While there are hundreds of frameworks for delivering the customer experience, Manning and Bodine boil it down to six key disciplines:

1. Customer experience strategy – set a strategy that links with business goals and is shared with employees
2. Customer understanding – create practices to ensure that everyone understands customers and their needs across the business
3. Customer experience design – ensure that every customer interaction, across every channel is consistently high quality and meets customer needs
4. Measurement – record and monitor the quality of the customer experience
5. Governance – manage the customer experience in a disciplined and accountable way
6. Culture – create a system of shared values and behaviours that focus all employees on delivering a consistently great experience to customers

Many organisations are already working on some of these disciplines, but bringing them together into a cohesive programme is vital to the successful implementation of customer experience strategies. And as Eptica’s research shows, there’s a growing need for improvement by businesses if they are to win and retain customers moving forward.

How good are UK insurers at successfully delivering the online customer experience?

Insurance is an industry that has been radically changed by the rise of the internet. The move online has increased competition, particularly with the growth of price comparison sites which have slashed margins and made customer loyalty a thing of the past. But moving to this new, multichannel, customer-centric and low margin world is proving to be a major struggle for many insurers still hampered by legacy systems and paper-intensive, manual processes.

The scale of the problem is highlighted by new research published today as part of the Eptica Multichannel Customer Experience Study. It found that the online customer experience provided by UK insurers has deteriorated over the last year, with less than half (48%) of basic online questions now answered satisfactorily and insurers able to respond successfully to just 30% of emails.

Poor performance continued when it came to email response times. On average it took insurers 30 hours, 6 minutes to answer emails, double the 14 hours of previous research.

The research evaluated 10 insurers active in the motor, life, travel, pet and household sectors. They were tested on their ability to provide answers to 10 routine questions via the web as well as their speed and accuracy when responding to enquiries sent via email, and links to social media.

Overall the study uncovered huge differences in performance:

• One insurer took over 2 days (49 hours) to reply to an email – although another responded in just 1 hour 18 minutes
• The two highest scoring insurers answered 7 out of 10 questions asked on their websites, while the lowest scored just 2 out of 10
• Insurers are still wary of Facebook and Twitter. The study found that social media use has increased dramatically – 50% of insurers now provide links to their Twitter accounts and 30% have Facebook pages (up from 10% on both networks in 2011), although this lags behind other sectors.

You can see the full results in this infographic and read more about the methodology here.

In the era of diminishing margins, increasing market competition and all time low customer loyalty, the insurance industry is at a critical juncture. Delivering an improved customer experience through efficient contact centre and back office service delivery is critical to success.

Based on its experience working with award-winning insurers such as Ageas Insurance Services UK and Domestic & General, Eptica is running a sector-specific webinar where it will discuss the advantages of multichannel customer service to improve efficiency and customer retention. Click here to register for the webinar, which will be held on Tuesday 19th and Thursday 21st February 2013.