Customer Contact Transformation: Communications Industry

Delivering a high-quality, branded customer experience is essential to achieving and sustaining high performance. For today's carriers, however, balancing quality and cost in the area of customer care has become essential as customer management expenses are second only to the costs of running the network.

To stay competitive, many carriers have sought offshoring or outsourcing options. Others have faced organizational and/or union resistance to offshoring, but now find themselves at a competitive disadvantage and need to make up ground quickly. In many cases, carriers find themselves with a fragmented and underperforming care organization not equal to the challenge of reducing costs and improving the customer experience.

In an improving economic environment, carriers must retool their care models for growth. Proactively developing a more effective customer care strategy and roadmap for new solutions can help deliver tremendous cost savings and improve the customer experience.

Learn more about Accenture Services for the Communications Industry

Accenture is one of the only providers in the marketplace willing to engage with clients in a way that commits to a targeted outcome. Customer care outsourcers generally contract on a price-per-minute or price-per-call basis and have little ability (or incentive) to transform the customer experience or calling patterns.

Accenture utilizes the best of our consulting, operations and sourcing capabilities to create a committed cost-per-unit.

Unique aspects of the Accenture approach to customer contact transformation include the following:

Paying for results
We typically engage on a price-per-customer (i.e., subscriber) basis to maintain alignment with our clients' cost and performance objectives. This approach drives both parties to work at reducing the number of high-cost contacts, which, in turn, can reduce overall operating expenses while improving customer satisfaction.

Commitment to outcomes
Accenture is committed to customer satisfaction improvements. We can therefore place a percentage of our monthly fees at risk via a penalty/bonus structure. We also can commit to a year-over-year reduction in the price to serve customers.

Taking the monetary risk
In certain circumstances we are willing to place significant portions of our fees at risk based on our ability to achieve our committed cost reductions and we commit to gain-share with our clients when we exceed those goals.

Our customer contact transformation offering is a suite of tools, assets and methods that have been demonstrated to reduce a carrier’s customer care costs by 20 percent or more while improving the overall customer experience, which can lead to better customer satisfaction and retention. We combine extensive consulting experience and industrialized outsourcing solutions into a comprehensive approach tailored to a carrier's needs, economic environment and preferred level of risk. Components of the offering include:

Value-targeting assessment
This one- to two-month assessment looks at the underlying factors affecting customer care costs and customer retention, including customer contact rates, root-cause analysis, call-handling efficiency, costs per unit for handled calls, potential to use lower cost channels, and operations overhead. Based on this analysis, Accenture proposes an appropriate customer care model to meet our clients’ business objectives.

Transformation programs
Our capabilities and market-tested assets can decrease delivery risk and reduce our clients' customer care costs while improving the customer experience. Transformation programs focus on four key potential benefits:

• Contact rate reduction: Reducing the number of calls through root-cause analysis, improving resolution rates and redirecting some types of customer contact to lower-cost channels.
  
  
• Improving call handling efficiency: Improving average handle time as well as overall agent performance.
  
  
• Customer experience improvement: Creation of a customer-oriented service model including segmentation, differentiated treatment and a customer experience blueprint.
  
  
• Revenue enhancement: Improving a carrier's ability to generate revenues from the care channel, including enhancing agents' effectiveness in up-selling and cross-selling.
  
  

Command center
Accenture operates a global command center that provides operations functions such as forecasting, workforce planning, intra-day operations, training, quality monitoring and vendor management. These services are typically bundled into a customer contact outsourcing arrangement, however, they can also be designed and delivered on a managed services basis.

Global Contact Center network
Access to a global network of call centers (both within Accenture and with third-party vendors) optimizes the impact across the network.

Based on our experience implementing customer contact transformation solutions, Accenture can typically achieve up to 15 percent of first-year cost savings for our clients, and then 3-5 percent savings annually thereafter under an outsourcing model.