Authored by Mike Stewart, Business Development Director – Digital Automation at Arvato CRM Solutions
In the electric vehicle (EV) era, integrating technology into your customer service operations will be vital in providing the insight you need to meet increasing driver demands and reduce customer effort.
But it will also be key to helping staff support more complex queries across more customer touchpoints, providing the right tailored resolution and realising new efficiencies in the overall cost to serve.
Automation is a key element of this technology mix and there are three ways we’re using it to support our clients as EV adoption rates rise.
Delivering holistic insight
EV customers will lean heavily on vehicle manufacturers, leasing companies and other service providers for support and consistent, seamless experiences will be key to building loyalty, particularly with new drivers embarking on their electric vehicle journey.
Insight will be imperative to ensure the service is personalised and relevant. New touchpoints, from public charging infrastructure to connected car data and online EV communities and forums, are already contributing to rising volumes of data which brands need to process, consolidate and analyse to truly understand their customers and their needs.
Through automation, we’re working with our clients to continually collect and process this information into one unified customer relationship management (CRM) system, so agents working in the contact centre, employees on dealership forecourts or anyone involved in the end-to-end customer journey can access a spectrum of data about a customer at the click of a button, from buying intentions to previous enquiries.
By using Robotic Process Automation (RPA), we can remove any need for manual data entry and the risk of duplications. To support the automation of data processing and comparative insight analysis, there should be a proactive approach to capturing information through digital contact channels and touchpoints and we use structured data capture forms to standardise the process.
RPA can also help to manipulate, convert and enter information quickly into the CRM system at low cost if there are multiple disparate source data systems in place across the customer journey IT landscape.
Providing next best actions
This technology will fundamentally change the interaction from reactive (which is often perceived as negative) to proactive positive engagement.
Building on the 360-degree view of the customer, which is enabled through the CRM system, Artificial Intelligence (AI) can then be integrated to pre-emptively generate ‘next best actions’.
It uses predictive analytics to explore historical contact data, vehicle information and customer behaviour, which can empower agents to immediate requests with tailored advice, information and hyper-personalised offers quickly and proactively, as well as identify opportunities to resolve any future needs and issues.
For example, this insight-led approach can use data on the vehicle, battery and driver behaviour to automatically notify customers when their cars or vans need servicing or maintenance, where the most convenient fast charging point locations are and provide timely details of new finance deals at the right point in the customer ownership journey.
Through proactively providing tailored recommendations and next best actions, brands can improve the customer experience, reduce customer effort and ultimately drive customer loyalty and retention.
Levelling-up customer service agents
In addition to this, automation delivers significant new efficiencies. We use our ProcessAutomate solution, which implements RPA to automate repetitive, high-volume processes – from direct debit changes and finance deal application checks, to processing mileage and vehicle registrations – to free-up agents.
By reducing their simple, transactional administrative workload, agents have more capacity to continually upskill to understand new technology, vehicle features and the charging ecosystem, be able to support customers with more complex issues faster and have the capacity to go the extra mile for them.
This shift in agent focus and capability enables our clients to focus on the high value interactions that drive revenue, customer satisfaction and ultimately customer loyalty.
By partnering with Arvato, we can help you leverage intelligent automation to transform your contact centre and ready your operations for the EV era. Laying the foundations now will put your business ahead of the curve as adoption rates rise in the years ahead.
Learn more about how we can support your business as you transition towards an electric future here – CRMSE@arvato.co.uk