The digital transformation is having a profound impact on how businesses engage with customers. Driven by the combination of more competent, digitally literate customers and the digitalized workplace, leading organizations are transitioning from product-driven to outcome-focused support that delivers meaningful customer outcomes.
Today’s digitally native B2B and B2C customers expect not just timely and efficient customer support interactions, but also help accomplishing their goals. They expect the companies they do business with to know them – which products they own, how they use them, along with a complete history of prior interactions. This presents customer service and support organizations with an opportunity to not just solve problems, but drive customer loyalty and satisfaction. But, to do that at scale, you need to inject the right information and expertise at the customer’s moment of need via their channel and/or device of choice.
Here at Coveo we’re seeing more and more of our customers turning to search-powered experiences in their customer service operations to support this transition for two key reasons: conquering the ecosystem of record and upskilling their customer support employees to better service their digital literate customers.
Search, long a key component of knowledge management initiatives, offers a unique opportunity. It acts as the catalyst for unleashing the power of fragmented, disparate information within the customer-facing organizations by offering a support agent and/or customer the most contextually relevant, case-resolving information via the interface of choice.
The Right Information & Experts at the Right Time
A prime example of this is Tokyo Electron America (TEA), a subsidiary of semiconductor and flat panel manufacturer Tokyo Electron Limited. Three years ago, TEA began the evolutionary process of transitioning its customer support group from a product to customer outcome-focused support organization.
TEA’s effort is multipronged and involves new product adoption and managed support services, improvements to contact center and field support processes, and last but not least, implementing supportive technologies. From the beginning, TEA management realized a key would be to hone and increase the skillsets of its field service group – a 500-strong team of field service engineers (FSEs) responsible for going onsite with customers to maintain an array of complex manufacturing equipment.
The goal became improving information and knowledge consumption at the point of customer interaction: upskill FSEs by giving them real-time access to contextually relevant customer, product and service information – stored across TEA’s IT ecosystem – at the moment of need, thus allowing them to better understand a customer’s business, TEL’s diverse products, and therefore achieve the customer’s desired outcome.
One catalyst supporting this transformation is search, which the FSEs now use on their mobile devices during field service calls, to search and access technical documentation, manuals and systematics stored across a variety of data sources. By giving their FSEs intuitive, real-time access to contextually relevant information, costs per service inquiry were decreased, mean time to repair improved by 20%, customer satisfaction rates increased, FSEs became more proficient at their jobs and most importantly, customer outcomes were ensured.
Read more about Tokyo Electron America’s experience and how intelligent search improved their ability to deliver the outcomes that mattered to its customers in this in-depth case study.
