Can companies benefit from case solving automatization while maintaining customer satisfaction?


Most companies already have implemented some parts of customer care. Building customer service teams is an essential point for companies which operate in travel, telecom, banking or insurance industry. Customer service teams have new challenges and opportunities that come with the technology.

In the era of digital transformation and global competition, customer experience has become a key business area and a base for building customer-centric strategies in organizations. The rise of mobile and social technologies and the associated information explosion have resulted in an unprecedented opportunity to develop deeper customer insights and an evolved approach to handling customers. Creating a positive customer experience has moved beyond the traditional customer touchpoints to include all customer interactions, both direct and indirect.

The ability to react quickly and accurately to various customer behaviors whenever they occur is critical to business success. It helps to enhance brand image, increase customer loyalty, and drive revenue growth. To achieve this ability, companies must focus on gathering comprehensive information from all touchpoints and generating insight to fully understand their customers and to create holistic customer profiles. Used effectively, such profiles are invaluable tools for improving marketing effectiveness and precisely targeting customers for upselling and cross-selling. According to a worldwide IDC survey, “ensuring that all company employees, business partners, and suppliers have a unified view of each customer” is the second biggest challenge in delivering a superior customer experience[1]. Leading customer-care departments use complex customer profiling to deliver exceptional customer experience at the point of service, no matter whether a call center, live chat window, or social network.

When a customer interacts with a customer-care team, the 360° customer view helps to make the interaction as efficient as possible and simultaneously enhances the customer experience. For example, when a customer contacts a call center and reveals his/her identity, the call center agent should automatically receive the full customer profile at the beginning of the conversation. The profile should include basic information such as name, age, location, relationships, contact history, current interactions with the company, and the total value of all purchases. The source of the profile may be, for example, the customer-care system. Accurately selected and well-structured information about the customer helps the agent to conduct the conversation smoothly, get to the point quickly, and solve the respective problem or suggest the best next steps.

The key to creating a superior customer experience in the digital era is to think omni-channel. Omni-channel is fundamental to outlining the way a business and its resources are organized in relation to the 360° customer view in today’s digital era. The omni-channel approach focuses on end-to-end customer experience and includes every touchpoint a customer uses to interact with the business. In practice, omni-channel mainly entails the possibility for the customer to utilize a variety of channels to inquire about a product, find pricing and sourcing information, ask customer care questions, respond to feedback and/or complaints, and have a single point of contact for his/her journey across all channels before, during, and after purchase. This ensures a consistent brand experience and makes the customer’s journey and engagement seamless, regardless of the channel or device used.

Customer retention and brand loyalty are among business’s main goals and should be built at all levels of interaction and through all available communication channels. Customer care may also be integral to increasing brand loyalty. Well-designed, integrated loyalty programs and acting proactive can significantly improve the customer-care experience. A proactive approach begins with collecting information on customers, which provides the basis of the 360° customer view. Experience, feedback, and suggestions collected from different channels and many systems should be integrated under one customer-care system. That enables complete personalization during every interaction across the whole purchase/service lifespan, i.e. quick and accurate customer recognition, relevant communication style, and personalized message during issue resolution.

Furthermore, to satisfy and retain customers, businesses should not only react to customers but strive to achieve high level of Zero Call Resolution. This means anticipating customers’ needs and addressing potential issues before customers contact a business.  A proactive approach can significantly reduce unnecessary traffic and operating costs, while improving the performance of customer support. More importantly, being proactive across numerous platforms, improve brand loyalty. Obviously, positive customer experience — as defined by proactive customer loyalty initiatives — comes at a high cost, particularly when personalization is taken into account. Indeed, the most intensive business processes relate to customer experience. Almost every customer-facing business process involves several cross-functional activities and engages different departments and information resources in a company. In order for a business to excel in the arena of customer experience, the business's automation of relevant processes is essential.

The goal of automating these processes is to integrate all customer touchpoints and provide an intuitive and streamlined experience for customers across the omni-channel. Furthermore, as customer-facing processes and preferences for certain channels/touchpoints change quickly, the automated process must be agile enough to react to changes in customer behavior instantly and seamlessly. The automation of processes involved by a customer-care system enables agents to recognize customers across all channels, address them with personalized messages, and categorize cases based on configurable rules so they can be resolved without human interaction. The benefits of automation are significant in terms of time and cost efficiency, as well as information relevance and availability. From the point of view of a customer automated business processes benefit with faster case handling, more accurate information, and better customer service. Consequently it results in increased customer satisfaction and loyalty.[2]

To discover more about Customer-Care Essentials: 360° View of Customers, Omni-Channel Experience, Customer Loyalty and Key trends in Customer Service please read the IDC WHITE PAPER at

[1] IDC's EXPERIENCES Survey, February 2015

[2] IDC White paper: Customer-Care Essentials: Can Companies Automate Case Solving While Maintaining Customer Satisfaction?, November 2016