Can changing how you triage accelerate how you resolve issues?
Whatever industry you’re in, customer experience can now make or break your brand. As the pandemic drove people into their homes to work, learn, study and play, it also triggered a new definition of value. That’s shaking up the way customers make purchasing decisions.
Take telecommunications, media and technology (TMT), for example. In 2021, half of Canadian households said broadband reliability involved more than speed alone. A further 40% of those same consumers weren’t totally satisfied with technical support’s ability to solve issues the first time around. Even as customer service solutions evolve, those concerns remain. In Canada and around the world today, 52% of households don’t think instant messaging works for complex customer service queries. Meanwhile, 45% of consumers find it difficult to articulate a broadband issue without speaking to someone. These shifting realities have made seamless, friction-free service an increasingly important lever in the industry battle for Canadian wallet share.
Fundamentally improving customer experiences in this complex market isn’t easy. Doing so begs the need to get creative and try something new. At EY Canada, we’re working with leading organizations to address that challenge by daring to ask: can automating the right parts of the customer experience improve consumer outcomes in TMT — and other industries — while also strengthening the bottom line?
The power of intelligent automation.
Heavy customer reliance on the services TMT companies provide — from WiFi to security to entertainment — leaves little room for patience when things go wrong. Service providers can overcome that hurdle and set themselves apart by employing new tools to eliminate friction from the triage and solution process for customer issues.
Case in point: at EY, we’re enabling one major TMT organization to standardize and automate diagnostic tools across a large-scale workforce by using process re-engineering and intelligent automation. First we drew on our in-depth knowledge of field operations to break down existing tech support processes and silos. Then we designed a new diagnostic solution to create valuable results. Introducing EY Field Optimizer.
Grounded in leading technology, EY Field Optimizer works automatically behind the scenes to gather diagnostics any time a technician is deployed into the field to solve a customer’s service or equipment issue. By the time that technician arrives on site, the interface has populated a dashboard with data and surfaced the next best actions required to resolve the customer’s challenge right away.
Connecting diagnostic data from disparate systems like this allows technicians to make informed decisions with confidence and provide effective issue resolution. Not only does this approach resolve customer service visits in less time, it lowers the chance of repeat visits. Because the tool stores the data for future use, that resolution can create a veritable treasure trove of insights to apply against similar problems that pop up in the future.
Better resolutions can lead to better business results.
Two years into a transformational journey to improve customer experience by resolving issues quickly, EY Field Optimizer is helping reduce average handling time on service calls. This is helping generate more than $5 million in annual cost savings across technical support operations.
The upsides come in all shapes and sizes. In this particular case, automating how insight is gathered has reduced service truck rolls by 18%. It’s also shaved about six minutes off every truck roll that does happen, unlocking millions in savings. Technicians are now solving problems through easy access to a single interface that replaced eight different legacy tools.
Using automation to help technicians spend less time diagnosing problems gives them new opportunities to actually solve issues for customers quickly and efficiently. It makes their day-to-day work safer by eliminating the need to juggle riskier tasks — like multitasking while driving — and creating more time between jobs. That’s a proposition that holds a whole lot of promise beyond TMT alone. Any industry with field operations — for example, power and utilities, oil and gas, or mining — could stand to gain from applying automation in a similar way.
All of this ultimately impacts the way customers experience your brand in action. That counts for a lot in an environment where a service provider’s ability to solve issues efficiently can translate into a truly meaningful currency: customer loyalty.
