Creating a global online customer service ecosystem to serve millions

Creating a global online
customer service ecosystem
to serve millions
Management Consulting
Software/Customer Service
January 2014
PwC applied its unique Enterprise Co-creation strategy to help
transform a vast customer service ecosystem in response to
consumer demand for new and better kinds of support
Client’s challenge
A worldwide Fortune 100 software and technology company sought to vastly improve its
customer service experience for its many millions of consumers. Recognizing that
consistently positive interactions are crucial to maintaining market share and achieving
higher lifetime customer loyalty, the company was committed to making meaningful
changes. Making those changes would be a true challenge, however, since the company’s
products and services were intertwined with the products and services of other vendors
and channel partners, sometimes leaving its consumers either confused or exposed to
service of inconsistent quality.
Earlier work on the customer experience for individual product lines had been successful,
but transforming the company’s entire global support service was a huge undertaking
that would need to reflect the tectonic changes happening in the technology marketplace
and reflect the changing ways consumers expected to get support. With thousands of
support representatives in more than 40 contact centers supporting over 50 countries, an
overhaul of this scope would truly test the company’s ability to transform itself and its
partners.
PwC’s solution
When the company’s executive of care invited our firm to help reimagine its consumerfacing support, we quickly realized that an effective way to tackle such a vast and complex
ecosystem was to use our “Enterprise Co-creation” approach. A highly collaborative
approach unique to PwC, Co-creation involved opening up frank dialogues not only with
the client’s internal stakeholders but also with its many vendors and channel partners to
share their pain points, formulate hypotheses for new interactions across the ecosystem,
and ultimately conceptualize new, more co-creative operating models for delivering
service to consumers.
A series of Co-Creation workshops were conducted internally and externally. The
internal workshops with all the relevant business leaders let us address each division
internally, while external workshops with the company’s most important partners
highlighted by truly candid conversations helped formulate the outlines of what a truly
transformed customer service experience might look like.
.
The result was a three-year strategy and roadmap focused specifically on providing an
unparalleled consumer experience, with the first step to establish a new ecosystem
strategy framework that focused on the total consumer lifecycle and prioritized the many
good ideas that had emerged.
Next, we brought our significant product development experience to plan, design, build,
and pilot and launch an innovative online support marketplace with multiple service
offerings and established an ecosystem governance framework. From concept to launch,
our professional advisors, especially those from our product innovation and development
competency (PI&D), worked with the client to make sure that the new environment
would be both manageable and scalable.
Impact on client’s business
Within 18 months, we guided the client from concept to launch. Today, global rollout of
the new services is underway, and the three-year overall strategy is in effect, setting the
stage for improved customer satisfaction and lifetime loyalty. Customer satisfaction
scores immediately shot up and continue to rise.
What’s more, costs are down as well. Despite the fact that thousands of support
representatives will ultimately have to be retrained and redeployed to launch the new
platform globally, the company has saved several million dollars in overall support costs
within the first six months of launch, a remarkable result.
Consumers now experience a unique marketplace-like experience in which they can select
support agents based on agent skills, other consumer feedback, language preference and
more. Online support agents are able to build trusted and personal relationships so that
consumers will want to come back for more and will have a more rewarding experience
when they do. It’s a new support paradigm for a new technology marketplace, and it’s
already showing its success.
For more information, please visit
www.pwc.com/us/consulting
Or contact
Casey Kirkpatrick
Principal
(972) 207-4816
[email protected]
Rachel Berg
Principal
(650) 678-6297
[email protected]
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