Sky Solutions is supporting one of the U.S. largest telecommunication providers who has wireline and wireless customers include subscribers for TV, phone, internet services and mobiles. The company has multiple channels for interaction with their customers including their website and online chat, mobile apps and social media, emails, and phone calls to customer service representatives.
This organization wanted to improve customer service efficiency as well as the overall customer service experience of their customers with the help of the Pega platform. Reducing static experiences each time customers engage with a marketing channel would improve customer satisfaction while improving efficiency. Deflecting calls away from their call centers would also lead to significant cost savings. Implementing an intelligent system would allow them to make educated predictions based on cross channel indicators of the customer’s recent activity. Cross-channel integration for customer service would provide a consistent and personalized customer experience.
The current customer service systems were not integrated or intelligent. These design flaws created a significant amount of static experiences for customers which led to long wait times when calling in to customer service. A static experience also adds cost due to the need for more human intervention. Often the experience was also not relevant to the specific needs of the customer which caused customer frustration and an increase in customer turnover. Customer satisfaction was decreasing while call volumes to the call center were increasing and this directly affected their bottom line.
Sky Solutions helped implement a dynamic and intelligent interactive voice response (IVR) system based on the customer’s attributes and interaction history. Customer feedback was recorded and used for improving subsequent decisions for determining the most relevant IVR prompt. The customer’s experience while on hold is now also dynamic. Any messages played during the IVR part of the call are no longer repeated during the time customer is on hold on a call.
A centralized decision hub was built to provide the next best action for a customer and ensures that their experience is dynamic even when they are on hold on a call. The decision hub provides up to 5 possible intents for the IVR and up to 3 hold messages. Apart from the phone channel, this solution was extended to other channels, including their mobile application and website, making the solution truly omni-channel. The customer decision hub was built using the Pega Customer Decision Hub. The solution balanced customer needs with the business objectives of boosting sales and reducing costs. The solution used adaptive models which learnt from customer responses.
With intelligently determined intents for a customer’s engagement with customer service, on-call time was drastically reduced. By reducing the number of calls handled by customer service agents, cost savings of nearly $7 million was realized in the first 7 months following deployment of the solution. With the solution being extended into both the wireline and wireless domains, a unified cross-channel customer experience has now been achieved which has improved customer satisfaction and reduced customer turnover.
