With high-tech and consumer electronics companies focused on delivering a superior customer experience, it must be a great time for consumers of those products, right? The answer is “yes” when those companies are focused on authentically delivering strong customer experience and “not so much” when dealing with companies who have embraced the mantra, but struggle on execution – both internally and across the product lifecycle.
Delivering a strong customer experience has benefits for the consumer – this should be obvious, but customer experience isn’t about driving customer satisfaction at the expense of product or company profitability; done right, it is about identification of consumer pain points, use of advanced analytics, and delivering an integrated approach across the product lifecycle. Delivering strong customer experience should not be equated with higher costs.
Consider the problem
Certainly no product company sets out to deliver a poor customer experience, but consider the North American consumer who purchases a high-tech consumer electronic device (smartphone, tablet, laptop, TV, etc.). Over the course of the product lifecycle, the consumer may end up dealing with,
- The OEM who designed and built the device,
- The retailer or channel partner who sold the device,
- A 3rd party operating call centers or web sites for product registration and customer support,
- Outsourced repair/ warranty provider for service requests
In this fragmented model, who should be responsible for delivering a strong and consistent customer experience, when each step in the process is focused on maximizing transactional margin, or minimizing costs?
Envision the opportunity
A Customer Experience approach that identifies consumer pain points throughout the product lifecycle, and focuses on an integrated and responsive approach to pre- and post-sales product support will generate higher product margins, reduce overall service costs, and increase customer satisfaction (as measured by CSAT, NPS, etc.). The right solution brings a combination of process, technology, operations and analytics to bear on both direct and indirect metrics, some of which are identified here;
- Manufacturing (quality, cost, feature trade-off, right components)
- Product margins (inclusive of in-warranty and out-of-warranty product costs)
- Customer interaction (First call resolution, Next best action)
- Post-sales support (speed of resolution, service turn-around-time, analytics-based service options)
- Customer lifetime value
Execution framework
Here then are a few of the areas where the participants in this value chain can focus to deliver a superior customer experience, integrated throughout the product lifecycle.
Product Support
- What? Pre-sales product support, Product registration
- Why? Ensure product is right fit for consumer, drive early engagement and product analytics, establish and communicate consumer entitlements
- How? Omni channel product discovery, social media moderated product forums, product registration; leverage multi-channel operations (mobile, web, call center), product content, data analytics
Consumer Point of Need
- What? Product support and knowledge-based diagnostics
- Why? Focus on engaging the consumer at initial point of need, prioritizing First Call Resolution (FCR) over handle time or cost per minute; establish and clearly communicate Next Step when FCR is not possible
- How? Create knowledge base that captures information across the value chain (including social networks, manufacturing, repair operations, etc.) to deliver “Current Best Answer” to the consumer. Leverage current consumer (product registration) and product (remote access) data to improve product support.
Product Service Request
- What? Create authorized service request for consumer (part replacement, repair, buyout/replace) with clear communication on consumer entitlement, next steps, and estimated turn-around-time
- Why? Focus on execution of consumer entitlement and speed of resolution balanced with service option costs and consumer lifetime value potential
- How? Verify consumer entitlement (in-warranty, out-of-warranty) or additional benefits consumer is eligible for based on tenure, known product defects, etc. Present consumer options that balance customer experience, cost, number of touches, speed of resolution. Use data analytics engine to integrate consumer entitlement, “Next Best Action”, OEM and Repair vendor information.
Service Analytics & Operations
- What? Integrated product lifecycle data across product forecasts, sell-thru data, customer analytics, and repair data (initial returns, cost of repairs, etc.)
- Why? Improve “Next Best Action” for product service requests, and reduce costs through improved parts forecasting, repair vs. buyout decisions, and inventory and last-time buy decisions
- How? Highly integrated OEM manufacturing systems, channel and consumer analytics, and repair vendor data. Partner with service vendors for inside the four-walls optimization – inspection, warranty validation, repair, serialized tracking, cost and turn-around-time
Results
The right approach to delivering a strong customer experience for high tech products brings together a combination of customer-focus, technology, operations and analytics to deliver compelling results – to achieve these results, participants in the value chain will need to prioritize customer experience metrics over transactional metrics, continue to invest in analytics in and across the product lifecycle, and dedicate resources to deliver more consumer options & capture customer lifetime value.