Submitted by Larry Gordon, iYogi
“Knowing your customer” has always been good advice for both sales and support organizations, whether through handwritten index cards or automated CRM systems with popup screens tied to your VoIP phone system.
What if you knew what your customer wanted even before they knew it themselves? That's the promise of Customer Support as a Service (CSaaS), which implements Big Data-driven predictive analytics through a global cloud platform.
Newly evolving customer support models deliver two distinct opportunities. First, reduce costs through support automation, and second, provide better service through knowledge management.
The support automation component handles routine, day-to-day requests – those that can be fulfilled through either entry-level staff or self-service knowledge bases. A majority of support requests are similar in nature and, with an organically growing knowledge base and mechanisms of automated support delivery, they can often be resolved using automated tools. Information collection may not be the only area gaining a benefit – its also possible to automate the process of pushing an app or a bug fix to a customer in response to a specific need or request.
The industry is learning that not all support requests can or should be addressed through these new automated mechanisms. When a request is simple, most customers appreciate a quick and automated fix, but the real value of this system is demonstrated when the support center can provide meaningful, live staff time to requests requiring more time and attention.
In either case, a support organization driven by Big Data, analytics, and the cloud has distinct advantages. When a customer calls, it is possible to know details in advance, on two fronts:
- Customer-specific data, such as whether a caller is likely to need an upgrade, more supplies, or may have made a recent purchase that needs a support contract; and
- Trend-specific data, which allows agents to identify broader analytics that are likely to predict what the customer may require.
This knowledge-centered approach to customer support takes more than a stack of index cards. To accurately gather detailed and predictive data, large amounts of information must be gathered, analyzed, and applied. The CSaaS environment enables the knowledge base to grow organically, creating actionable and useful data that can be applied in real time to both automated and live calls. Gaining deeper insight into each customer has two positive outcomes – it creates an environment where the customer is better served, and generates opportunities for additional revenue streams
