‘Customer is the king’ could not have been
more apt in any era than the one we live in. Customer has become more aware and
has multiple mediums of communication and has a tremendous impact on the way a
company is perceived. The onus is on the service providers to accord an
experience to the customer based on all the information that the customer is
disseminating on various platforms. Customers expect service provider to be aware
of their likes and dislikes, deliver customized services tailored for them and
gove ongoing support
Challenges for a Triple Play Communications player
In telecommunications, triple play service is a marketing term for the provisioning, over a single broadband connection, of two bandwidth-intensive services, broadband Internet access and television, and the latency-sensitive telephone (Definition- Wikipedia).
In telecommunications, triple play service is a marketing term for the provisioning, over a single broadband connection, of two bandwidth-intensive services, broadband Internet access and television, and the latency-sensitive telephone (Definition- Wikipedia).
Mediums
of delivery is changing and integration of data to give a personalized service
is the key
- Threats from other mediums such as mobile TV and TV on internet is jeopardizing the cozy relationship that the cable TV providers had with the viewers.
- The incumbents are getting in on the act with apps of their own, that has become a sticking point dragging out major programming negotiations.
- The digitization wave is making the content available on the internet and the young generation is more inclined to watch on the internet on the go than tune in to the cable TV. A triple play communications player already has the internet play and digitization is one of the key strategic areas for them.
- This poses the other question of bringing all the data on one platform to give a single view of the customer and provide the customers personalized services.
- Creating partnership for content and keeping partners happy is a key aspect of the triple play companies
- Triple play companies provide cable TV, internet and home phones services under one umbrella. “Cooptition” or cooperative competition is the way forward for triple play companies. According to Cablevision Systems Corp. CEO, James Dolan, Netflix traffic is taking up 40% of his data traffic and figured “we’re not going to try and shut that down. We’re going to do the opposite: we’re going to offer the best Netflix experience.” In June, Cablevision was ranked the second-fastest Internet service provider in the U.S. after Google Inc.’s Fiber in delivering Netflix traffic, according to an index posted by Netflix.
- This is putting more pressure on the players to monitor services provided by the partners on their platforms and gauge how they themselves can upsell and cross-sell.
- The new age triple play companies have to bring content, commerce, CRM and collaboration tools in one platform.
Triple play Communications player Objectives
- Produce higher quality “craftsmanship”, greater reliability, and higher levels of service in labor force, with attendant increases in customer satisfaction which allows us to increase subscriber life
- · Quality assurance to drive a reduction in service calls and repeat service calls
- Preventive plant maintenance to reduce service impacting events
- Higher percentage of triple play (Cable TV, Internet and Home Phone) to drive lower churn and cost to replace revenue
- Fully featured product set in home at valuable price, up front, means less incentive to change service level, reducing transactions and points of failure
- Integration with various social media platforms to give a more personalized services to the customers
- ATG Web Commerce offers a complete commerce software platform that enables delivery of a personalized customer buying experience across all customer touch points, including the web, contact center, mobile devices, social media, physical stores, and more.
- To further enhance the customer experience, ATG Web Commerce offers an integrated set of software-as-a-service (SaaS) commerce services that provide the flexibility and intelligence to target the right visitors at the right time with the right offer in the right channel to drive high-value sales. Through these services, a company can engage with customers at the point of interaction through personalized recommendations, targeted promotions, and guided assistance.
- ATG webcommerce solution compares very well against competing commerce platforms such as IBM Websphere, MS commerce, Hybris and others.
- ATG has good functionalities in core commerce areas such as Product catalogue, Product visualization, Shopping cart management, Multi-channel support, Personalization, Rich internet applications, Multiple deployment, Web 2.0 and social software integrations, Mobilestore support, international customer support, Integration capability and Tech architecture.
However, there are few important features
are not available outside of the box (OOTB) and hence become critical for
evaluating the webcommerce platform. Some
of the important functionalities not awailable with ATG Webcommerce are:
Contact Center
- Distribution of agents based on configurable
assignment rules- In ATG CSC, the concept of
ticket is generally used to refer to what is worked upon by an agent. A ticket
can be created, reassigned, escalated or closed. If we have to manually create
and distribute tickets/work items it has to be customized, and will be quite
complex
- The agents must be able to receive incoming emails via
their personal work queue- Custom work needed
to make sure agents receive emails when new items get assigned to them
- The solution must be able to automatically send an
acknowledgement for an incoming email- Custom solution required.
- The solution must be able to create a case based on an
issue from an inbound email- Custom solution required.
- The solution must be able to monitor agent and email
queues- Custom solution required.
- The solution must provide the monitoring for the
transactions and necessary reporting based on agreed SLA- Custom reports need to be built. SLAs
can be configured to escalate or to automatically reassign or close tickets as
necessary.
- The contact center executive should have access to
call scripts which will guide the agent through the calls and should support
branching logic- Custom solution required.
Agent Enablement
- The application should be configured to allow agents
to login into all partner network applications automatically without re-keying
username/password into these applications- Custom
solution required for sigle sign on.
- The application should be configured to automate the
manual processes for certain activities like Product Catalogue Marketing,
Event, Campaign Info- Custom solution required.
- The solution should be configured to implement
workflows to remove the need for agents to remember which applications to look
into for different kinds of information- Custom
solution required.
- The solution should be integrated with knowledge
management system to help quickly resolve frequently-occurring issues- Custom solution required.
- The
solution should be
configured to load
all the pertinent
information about a customer into context and share it with all
the integrated applications to reduce re-keying- Customisation has to be done to integrate to other applications
based on the protocol
- The application should be configured to support
automatic screen population via CTI (Computer Telephony Integration) and/or
IVR- With little configuration this is possible
OOTB
360 Degree Customer View
- The application should be configured to fetch / load
all customer / account
and transaction information from id/contract/application number with
partner network- Custom panels and data fetch
layer has to be written to fetch data from different sources and show it on the
screen.
- The application should be configured to allow the up-selling
and/or cross-selling- OOTB if the backend uses ATG Product
Catalog otherwise custom components have to be built.
- The application should implement single customer view
by accessing the latest data from CRM & Billing- Customisation needed to pull data from CRM & Billing and show it
in Custom Panels.
1.
If enabled Commerce Service
Center can be used to manage Multi site ATG Commerce implementations, which
means agents can handle requests for multiple websites using one ATG CSC
implementation
2.
Agents can search for Orders,
Customers and lookup information in the Product Catalog.
a.
Order/Customer (Profile) – SQL
text Search
b.
Product Catalog - Endeca / SQL text Search.
3.
Agents can help end customer
create/modify Giftlists and Wishlists. They can also help a customer to buy
products from their gift/wish lists.
4.
Customer service agents can
help end customers return items already received or exchange them for other
similar items. In the process agents can also help with refunding any amount
that the customer has already paid.
5.
Customer service agents can
help customers with scheduling orders based on an Order template. This is a
feature that is heavily used in the B2B scenario
6.
Agents have access to a
promotion browser through which they can help calling customers with promotions
that are applicable for their current purchase and provide information about
the discounts that they would get when one or more promotions are applied.
Agents can apply the promotions as part of the purchase process for the calling
customer
7.
CSC Agents can approve orders
that are waiting for approval based on their authorization and appeasement
limits. Business users can configure agent specific appeasement limits through
BCC
8.
CSC Agents can be
granted/revoked an access to parts of the servicing application based on their
authorization levels
9.
CSC can be configured to send
emails using templates at different stages of an Order based on whether the
Agent created a new order for a customer, modified an existing order, approved
an order, etc., It can also be extended to configure new templates as needed
10.
CSC can be integrated with
Click-to-call to enable customers to initiate phone calls with agents. Click-to-call
adds JavaScript icon/link to the customer facing webpages using which a
customer can enter a phone number that the Live Help On Demand Webcare system
or an optional telephony (CTI) system uses to return their call. CSC presents
the agent with the customer’s order information and profile, allowing the agent
to assist the customer with their order
11.
When the customer uses the
Click-to-call facility from the customer facing web pages, based on the ATG
user profile, all the relevant information is passed on to the agent who is
serving the customer. This helps in loading his screen with relevant
information – Profile Id, Order Id, List Pricelist Id, Sale Pricelist Id,
Catalog Id, Site Id
12.
CSC Agents are always working
in context of a Ticket
13.
Using ATG Ticketing, Tickets
can be created, cloned, modified, disposed as duplicate, escalated, reassigned
or closed
14.
Tickets can be created manually
or using automated methods.
15.
TicketQueues can be maintained
at Organization level and can be polled and refreshed across multiple agent
screens
16.
At any time Agents can work on
multiple Tickets on different windows without affecting each other
17.
Tickets can be linked to
Customers. More than one ticket can be linked to customers to know about
history. Agents can search and retrieve already existing tickets
18.
ATG CSC usually sits on top of
an ATG Platform/CA stack and so it’s assumed that the storefront is implemented
in ATG
19.
Commerce Service Center is not
a framework but an application built on ATG framework with deep roots into ATG
Core and Commerce
20.
Commerce Service Center doesn’t
support B2B – Orders that contain Purchase Orders, Invoice request,
Organization info etc., are not editable by customer service agents, even
though they are available for read only access
Specific
ATG Web Commerce platform for a triple play company
Design
pattern 1
The Design pattern 1 depicts a light weight
orchestration engine customized within the middleware that receives the order
from CRM and then orchestrate the order to provision the service in the network
and in the billing system. This design pattern is implemented primarily for
light weight orchestration.
The Light weight but Robust Workflow engine
built within the Middleware receives the order and then based on the workflow
defined for the product would orchestrate and fulfil the order. A Sample
Lightweight Workflow that needs to be orchestrated across order item is depicted
below
Design
pattern 2
The design pattern 2 depicts a dedicated
and robust Order orchestation engine that receives the order from CRM via
middleware and then decomposes the order and orchestrates and fulfils the same.
The orchestration engine here is more robust and integrates seamlessly with
Inventory system and a workforce management system
ATG CSC is primarily focused towards
Ticketing and Customer Service associated with a StoreFront and its not an
entirely standalone Customer Service system. So we may have to load all the
data into ATG's user profile management system for it to work and the Customer
has to buy the Commerce Platform even though its not going to be used - Order,
Product Catalog, Promotions all those areas would not be used if its going to
be used a simple ticketing system like Remedy.
- Superior
customer experience by allowing the user to choose out of
multiple channels , chosing most appropriate at any given time, and to
flip between others by exploiting the best capabilities of each channel
- Effectively
and consistently engaging with customers to optimize their whole
experience across online, retail stores and call centers by offering a
more event-based personal customer experience.
- Analyse and improve the customer experience
with real-time analytics and business reporting features
- Convergence
of online and offline channels to differentiate a triple play’s brand
- Seamlessly
help customers across channels, from Web to e-mail, contact canter, mobile
devices, social networks and more
- Offer
flexibility in altering pricing and billing models to adapt to particular market
conditions, the aspirations of different demographic groups, and even individual
customer requirements
- Drive
repeat business by integrating Web marketing and email campaigns with Web
store content
- Increase
revenue by turning the service center into a sales center
- Empower
service agents to quickly and accurately handle customer questions with
knowledge management tools
- Deliver
personally relevant information to each customer at the right time
- Allow
Business users to combine unlimited variations of virtual product and
customer data to deliver personalized
relevant products,services,devices,promotions and content to end
Customers
- Allow
business users to deliver Web commerce experiences without having to
predict their path, set up scenarios, or engage IT
- Deliver
superior, just-in-time, personalized, and consistent customer service
across the full lifecycle
- Present
the catalog / content in multiple languages, as well as present pricing in
multiple currencies
- Get
started quickly with pre-built, out-of-the-box templates and experience
cartridges for the most common use cases
- Integrated
management of multi channel experiences like Web, Mobile, and
In-Store in the hands of business
and marketing teams, Bringing
together unlimited variations of content, product and customer information
to power smarter, richer buying experiences
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