New Normal is often identified with new hope. This means that all business activities that are 'locked' during the pandemic are expected to be wide open in this period. But what about the customer experience?
Regarding this, we will talk directly with Mrs. Sri Safitri, Chair of ICXP & Deputy Executive Vice President of CX & Digitization, about improving the customer experience during the new normal and its impact on business.
Do you think that Customer Experience is difficult to implement during the New normal? Why?
The new normal situation in the business world is certainly not just implementing health protocols. A lot of things are changing that have a big impact on many business sectors. Several things have changed, for example, changes in consumer needs, changes in consumer shopping behavior, and also changes in consumer purchasing power.
Facing a situation like this, every business must optimize its best efforts to be able to ensure business stability both during and after this pandemic condition. The most important thing that needs to be maintained is customer loyalty. Because only with customers can a business run. Therefore, every business needs to think and work hard to maintain the quality of the customer experience it provides to customers.
Not only looking for profit alone, but a business within a company must also be able to help customers face uncertainty by providing better and safer CX during the new normal.
Preparing for the new normal means that we must be able to recognize all the problems and challenges that will come, including having the ability to analyze changes in customers who currently have limited space for movement, both from the customer side and the business people themselves. This change also creates new expectations and higher service standards.
Maintaining the quality of the customer experience in the new normal for every business is indeed a challenge. However, this must still be done to maintain the business going forward.
How is the implementation of CX in Telkom Indonesia and its impact on the business?
Telkom has set CX's vision, namely "To be one of the Most Customer-Centric Companies", with CX's mission "Create a 'WOW' CX for a wonderful digital life, delivered through a digitized enterprise".
Telkom Group manages various customer segments ranging from personal, residential, enterprise, wholesale, and digital customers. In addition, Telkom Group has more than 40 subsidiaries. The diversity that exists in the Telkom Group presents its challenges for us to be able to harmonize to create CX quality by Telkom's vision.
For the entire Telkom Group to move in the same direction towards achieving CX's vision to become customer-centric companies, it is necessary to establish a common framework or framework as a reference. The framework includes defining CX missions, CX measurement metrics, close-the-loop system, CX enhancement, and organization activation.
From this framework, units and subsidiaries reduce it to programs for CX improvement according to their respective scope of work.
Since the Customer Experience Transformation Framework was established in 2017, there has been an improvement in customer loyalty as indicated by the increase in the Telkom Group's Net Promoter Score (NPS) from 2017 to 2021 now.
In addition, the Telkom Group has also been proven to be able to adapt and rise in a short time when suddenly facing a pandemic situation. Telkom Group's ability to quickly adapt to changing situations cannot be separated from its attention to improving customer experience.
From your point of view, how is the correlation between customer-centric habits that have been applied in global companies in building great customer experiences?
Of course, successful global companies prioritize quality over their CX strategy. The 'customer-centricity' culture has become their DNA by instilling the habit to continuously improve customer satisfaction and loyalty.
They apply the 10 habits of customer-centric and continue to learn from the voice of customers as their reference to improve their services creatively, including aspects of using technology.
10 habits that need to be instilled in a customer-centric spirit include:
- Continuously listening to customers
- Consistently following up with customers on their feedback
- Acting proactively to anticipate needs
- Building customer empathy into processes and policies
- Respecting customer privacy
- Sharing knowledge internally and with customers
- Motivating employees to stay engaged
- Acting systematically to improve the customer experience
- Creating accountability for CX improvements
- Adapting to customer demands and circumstances in real-time
One of the important points in the customer-centric habit is from listening to action. Can you explain the stages, ma'am?
In general, customer-centric organizations adopt 10 steps of habits into the system to be implemented by their teams/employees so that this culture is consistently created.
Starting from the habit of 'Listen to Customers', it is an important step that becomes a reference for taking related actions, so that they are in line with customer expectations.
The steps that can be carried out during the LISTEN to ACTIONS phase are by conducting VoC Collection (Listen) through various channels. This VoC is in the form of customer testimonials regarding their experience using our products/services over several episodes of the journey, from exploring to getting support. The results of this VoC then become reference data for us to do further analysis, in identifying customer pain points.
Then, data from customer pain points found in several episodes of the journey needs to be reviewed to determine the priority scale in taking improvement actions to answer/explain the most critical customer pain points.
Currently, artificial intelligence is growing rapidly, what do you think about the role of AI in improving Customer Experience?
Currently, we have entered the era of customer experience that dominates and opens up great opportunities for many technological innovations including Artificial Intelligence (AI). Of course, the role of AI in improving CX is very much, three points include:
- AI makes data more than just readable and interactive data
- AI can provide information according to the preferences of the person who accesses it so that the information conveyed is by the target
- AI allows for maximum and efficient data processing
With the presence of AI technology, of course, the CX strategy is very helpful as long as the company can understand well what are the needs or critical solutions for its customers. No matter how sophisticated the AI system is, what is essential in using technology to achieve an extraordinary CX condition is to return to the human aspect (people).
In your point of view, is it possible to develop artificial intelligence with customer experience in the future? In what form?
The use of AI in CX in the future can be developed with the framework: Sense, Think, Do.
- Sense: We can use AI to deepen customer understanding
- Think: We can use AI to provide explanations, guidance, and recommendations
- Do: Evaluate various opportunities around the use of AI for content creation.
Business leaders need to think about how to implement AI in the process of delivering the best customer experience on these three things for continuous improvement.
Can you share the tips on creating a great customer experience during the New Normal?
There are lots of tips that can be done in creating a 'great customer experience' during the new normal. However, the basic strategies include:
- Get to know our customers/consumers. We must understand what consumers need and the reasons for that need. Qualitative and quantitative surveys/research can be a way to get to know our customers better.
- Have a clear digitization framework. The choice of a digitalization system does not have to be based on luxury/expensive but according to the habits/convenience of our consumers' habits.
- Proactively request customer/consumer feedback so that we can continue to evaluate for service improvement strategies.
- Immediately make a decision and run CX with care and empathy for the situation faced by consumers.