Winning the Battle for Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty in the New Normal

This article was written by Paul Joustra, Head of Transformation at Teleperformance.

The more satisfied a customer is, the higher the chances they will make another purchase. And very satisfied customers often become advocates. But since the beginning of the pandemic, a significant change in customer behavior has taken place worldwide. Customers have gone digital — and will stay digital. To ensure customer satisfaction and loyalty, businesses must meet the customers where they are and deliver experiences at the speed of customer demand.

Customer Engagement Trends Are Here to Stay

According to the recently released State of the Customer Engagement Report for 2021 by Twilio, customer engagement trends that emerged last year are here to stay. Among the 2,500 global enterprise decision-makers interviewed by Twilio. 33% Said they would have lost revenue, competitiveness and the ability to meet customer expectations without changing their customer engagement strategy.

Additionally, 87% claimed that digital communication had been key to surviving the pandemic, which now brings us to two realizations:

1. The number of customer engagement channels is increasing — from traditional voice, email, and SMS, organizations have added chat, chatbots, Messaging, video conferencing, etc.;
2. The time to deploy those channels has decreased by 46%, thanks to technology.

At Teleperformance, we have also witnessed two sweeping changes in the BPO customer experience sector in the past year: the transition from voice to digital and the migration from brick-and-mortar to work-at-home. Considering the pandemic, contact volumes increased by more than 300% in some verticals like Retail, E-commerce, Consumer Electronics and ISP’s. Responding to incoming calls while maintaining service quality from a work-at-home setting proved quite challenging.

To help our clients handle those volume surges, we implemented solutions like Voice2Messaging, which deflects a synchronous phone call to an asynchronous digital messaging channel like WhatsApp or Apple Business Chat. Not only did this move help us maintain business continuity but bringing those conversations to an agent’s home via a digital channel instead of an audio channel was an easier course of action.

Optimizing Conversations

Twilio is a developer platform for communications that allows brands to connect with customers anywhere they want to interact — within a single powerful platform. Twilio’s programmable application program interfaces (APIs) allow developers to build practically any digital experience using capabilities like SMS, WhatsApp, voice, video, email, and even IoT, across the customer journey.

Our technology partnership with Twilio has empowered us to engage with customers on any channel, any time, and shift how our agents support them — and this happened very quickly! In fact, in collaboration with Twilio, we deployed a Voice2Messaging solution for Samsung in just two weeks, deflecting 20% of voice interactions to WhatsApp. Our AI digital assistant then automated 90% of those incoming conversations, which saved costs tremendously and improved the NPS by about 5% — a win-win for the customers and our client.

Meanwhile, in CEMEA, we were using a manual outbound process to validate customer issues for a Telco client. At that time, we were doing callbacks for about 50% of the inbound calls. Seventy percent of those callbacks were obsolete because the issues were already resolved. With Twilio’s help, we implemented a solution that sent an automated SMS to the customers, using a bot as well, to verify issue resolution. We only had to do a callback if the customer responded “No.” This solution allowed us to reduce the manual work significantly and optimize the NPS. At the end of the day, we improved our NPS and CSAT while lowering cost and handling time.

To increase consumer satisfaction and loyalty, Teleperformance provides a smooth, integrated customer experience that combines people, processes, and technology.

Explore the Twilio and Teleperformance partnership in our LinkedIn Live webinar with Bruno Barbagli, Global Account Director at Twilio, and Paul Joustra, Digital Transformation Head of Transformation at Teleperformance.