What is post-sales support?

Post-sales support or after-sales service is a service that you offer after a customer has purchased a product. Anyone who sells a product can offer after-sales support — be a retailer, manufacturer, or service provider. Usually, after-sales service includes support regarding product warranty, usage, repair, or upgrades. Post-sales support is as important as the product itself and can make or break your business. For some customers, after-sales service can be a crucial factor influencing their buying decision.

Benefits of post-sales support:

Assisting organizations in maintaining high customer retention rates is the fundamental motivation behind after-sales service. It ensures customers get as much value as possible from their purchases. A great after-sales support program can help you build brand loyalty. And when your customers become happy, they become your repeat customers! Not just that, they become the biggest brand ambassadors recommending your product through word of mouth, bringing you more sales.

Challenges of post-sales service:

Serving multiple customers simultaneously: Managing various customers simultaneously (during peak hours) is a crucial challenge. Companies must keep a buffer and pay overtime to their resources to manage the extra workload.

Slow response time: Hold time can be due to numerous reasons, be it new hires, complex processes, or frequent process updates, but no one likes the hold time; we all know that.

Limited support window: Due to budget limitations, many small or medium size businesses offer after-sales support in specific time windows. Customers who need help beyond that time window may feel frustrated, especially when they have an urgent requirement.

Inexperienced customer service: Because of high attrition, there are constantly fewer experienced resources in the team. New hires lack in-depth process knowledge, so the First Call Resolution (FCR) rate is low, and the hold time is high.

Call transfers: Every time a call is transferred to another agent or supervisor, the customer has to repeat the issue/requirement. When a customer has urgency, it makes the situation worse.

Role of BOTS in streamlining post-sales support:

24×7 support: An order tracking bot provides all order delivery details to the customers at once. The chat widget prompts the customer to ask, “where is my order?” Or “I want to know my order status?” This bot works 24/7 and automatically responds to the most frequently asked customer queries about order delivery with high accuracy.  

Warranty Support: This is possibly the most common after-sales service companies provide for almost every product. Warranty services include repairing and replacing the products the customers bought for a selected period. For example, BestBuy in the USA offers multiple warranties and tech support membership offers along with the products. Customers may have different queries related to its coverage, option of extending the warranty, warranty term, etc. A bot can respond to customer queries related to the warranty of the products sold by the retailer easily.

Installation Support: Though most products come with an installation manual, customers may still have installation queries and need support. A bot can easily handle simple questions, while complex queries can be transferred to human agents during the conversation.

Product Features / FAQs: A bot comes in handy to answer any product feature-related queries. It can also integrate with OEM applications to pull updated details. For example, a customer may ask how many Android updates the mobile phone is eligible for that they have purchased.

Technical Support: Most retailers dealing in software-based/IoT devices (think CCTV cameras) have to keep a team that provides technical support for the products sold by the company. Customers connect with the technical support team for any product issue, which understands the problem, opens the tickets, and directs it to the relevant department. A bot can do this job without any breaks. It asks the appropriate queries to the customer and, based on the response, decides the issue type and offers a further course of action. Accordingly, it registers the customer’s request and forwards it to the right team. The customer receives information such as the time to resolve the issue, the following steps, etc. The customer always has the option to ask further queries, or talk to an agent anytime during the conversation with the bot.

Product Return / Replacement: Though retailers provide streamlined solutions for any return or replacement, there can still be exceptions, and due to that, customers have to do follow-ups, raise complaints, or have simple queries. This requires the companies to have support executives to manage such scenarios. A bot can handle this situation independently and efficiently by accessing all the details related to customer data and all possible solutions. Apart from this, there are other areas where the bot can help engage with the customers, such as upgrades, exchanges, offers, etc.

Conclusion:

Today, no one likes to be on lengthy support calls, pressing the IVR keys, waiting for a live chat agent to respond, and waiting endlessly in the ques. The voice bots/chatbots facilitate seamless live communication and provide customer support 24/7. Bots help companies save time and money, offer a smoother customer journey, reduce consumer stress, and help grow your business.

At IGT Solutions, we have implemented multiple chatbot and voice bot solutions to help our customers optimize their costs, improve customer satisfaction, and provide round-the-clock support.

Author:

Manish Arora is Manager Consulting at IGT Solutions’ Intelligent Automation and Conversational Bots Practice. He is an Automation expert with 14+ years of experience across Travel, Telecom, BFSI and Retail domain. With a strong background of Digital Transformation and Hyperautomation, Manish has extensively worked on elevating clients’ experience by helping them at various stages in their Automation journey. He can be reached at manish.arora@igtsolutions.azurewebsites.net

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During the guest stay, however, the industry for the most part depends on human interaction to provide the customer delight element. While this has worked well over the years, with the onset of the Covid pandemic era, these same human interactions have become challenges – both for guests and the hotels in question. The first wave of the pandemic saw the shuttering of many properties as part of government initiatives to minimize the risk of Covid spread. While the realities of the situation are not lost on anyone, it did pose a challenge for the hospitality industry as a whole, which has huge overheads, and often not enough liquidity to afford to shutter properties for months on end.

While sanitization and spacing measures have brought a bit of parity to the equation, the challenges that come with face-to-face interactions do continue. Looking beyond the Covid aspect of things, many business guests prefer to minimize the waiting period they have to endure at the front desk, and the tedious procedure of raising complaints when something is not right in their rooms. Conversational automation tailored for the ‘In-room’ stay of guests can help solve these issues and help improve guest experiences across the board.

Most leading hospitality companies have mobile apps, loyalty programs, and virtual assistants in some shape or form. Many of these mobile apps have quick links to FAQs, can provide directions to the property, and help with check-in. Adding conversational automation to the mix can ease the guest experience on these apps. When a guest is at the hotel the Virtual Assistants can answer any questions that come in: What time is breakfast? What time does the pool open? Can I have a late checkout? Virtual Assistant answering these queries can provide guests with an instant and reliable medium where they can fire off these questions and get the details they need at the moment – alleviating the strain of searching through a mobile app or website for answers, or the load on call centres where any guest calls would land, or even the in-house staff who can instead focus on providing greater service experience at other touchpoints.

The scope of guest experience that can be delivered by these conversational assistants – either as chatbots, mobile applications, or voice assistants on Alexa or Google devices in the rooms – is quite varied. Listed below are some ways that conversational assistants can help during the stay of the guest at the property:

• Guest Stay Management: Just imagine being a guest arriving at the hotel lobby post a long flight, and being able to check-in on your phone without the hassle of stopping at the front desk. Similarly, a chatbot can speed up any updates related to a guest stay, such as notification that the room is available, or reminders about the property’s check-out policy.
• Cross and Up-selling: Piggybacking conversational assistants with machine learning algorithms and integration with guest loyalty profiles can allow them to cross and up-sell services to the guests. Through the analysis of previous interactions with a guest, a chatbot could send relevant offers at the right time, such as special offers at the restaurant or spa.
• Ordering and Tracking: Chatbots can also be used to order room service meals – all the way from providing the food menu, to enabling guests to click and order with integrations to the hotel’s systems and payment gateways to accept payment. The chatbot can also update the guest on how long the meal order will take and proffer custom recommendations.
• Special Requests: Chatbots can be trained on the amenities provided by the property so they can receive and pass on special requests from guests to the relevant staff – from extra pillow requests to anniversary special arrangements in the room. Chatbots can even be used to set wake up calls or notify guests of any spa, golf, or dinner reservations they may have made.
• Complaints and Ticketing: Guests often have complaints about their rooms or some aspect of their stay. Chatbots can be integrated within the back-end systems so that maintenance is receiving those complaints about leaky showers, or lack of toiletries.

Responding to guest requirements in real-time, while the guest is still on the premises to benefit, boosts satisfaction and creates great experiences. Conversational automation, either through voice assistants or chatbots can provide hospitality companies with the perfect vessel to ensure these improvements in guest experiences.

IGT Solutions has a robust Intelligent Automation Practice with over 4 years of delivering excellence in process and conversational automation, with a special focus on enhancing customer experience. The practice has deployed solutions around bookings and cancellations in the hospitality space, alongside FAQ chatbots. The team has also partnered with hospitality clients to build voice bot solutions for guests calling in to the contact centre. Through the delivery of conversational automation, IGT has helped clients achieve 35% channel deflection, 15% IVR containment, 20% increase in CSAT and 25% improvement in Net promoter scores.

Author:

Nandhagopal Muralithar is a Senior Business Consultant at IGT Solutions’ Intelligent Automation and Analytics Practice. With specialized experience of 7 years in Digital Transformation Consulting across Travel, Hospitality and Retail domains, Nandh has worked extensively on the front edge of process and conversational automation technologies, designing and delivering innovative back and front office automation solutions.

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Before Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
Depending on the procedures, protocols, and infrastructures of each institution, steps to process debit or credit card fraud significantly varied. Still, certain steps used to be followed, namely, collection of disputed transaction data from the web-based core banking system; gathering and investigating of information associated with the claim; and processing of the debit/credit card fraud disputes via CMS – card management system.

Without the help of technology or automated solutions, every single step would be conducted manually, from data gathering and data processing to decision making. For some banking institutions, transactions could be handled by batch, while for others, they needed to be resolved separately. This traditional method was not only time-consuming, discouraging, repetitive and overwhelming for workers but was also prone to more errors. Given the fact that there were thousands of card fraud claims per day, it was a challenging task for financial institutions to ensure accuracy and speed through conventional techniques, most of which were based on human intervention.

After Robotic Process Automation

Data Gathering: Collecting information on disputed transactions is the first and foremost step bank employees have to follow. Robotic Process Automation (RPA) solutions can help navigate and log into the web-based system of the bank, select a date range, and export the transaction data. To gather additional information from numerous internal databases or public domains to give a holistic view of customer data for fraud analysts robots can be utilized.

Data Processing: After relevant data is captured, Robotic Process Automation (RPA) can assist bank employees in removing duplicates, and formatting and refining data to make it fit for use. When this automation solution is combined with Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies such as Intelligent Document Processing (IDP), Text Analytics, and Machine Learning (ML); the robot can track activities, collate payments, determine anomalies, and identify fraud patterns. Apart from freeing up humans from repetitive and monotonous tasks, RPA also ensures higher accuracy and enhanced productivity, as it can self-learn from previous cases, thereby reducing time spent on subsequent disputes at most.

Decision Making: RPA has revolutionized the back-end operations of banking organizations, and debit/credit card fraud processing is not an exception. The automation solution has been able to significantly reduce costs while easing financial employee workloads, as well as increasing the quality of fraud processing and minimizing the number of human error-related issues. While the issues faced by financial institutions in detecting and processing fraudulent card transactions may continue in the future, Robotic Process Automation, more or less, can empower efficiency in resolving these challenges.

About IGT in RPA
IGT Solutions has an extensive experience in back/front office automation leveraging Robotic Process Automation (RPA) as the means to automate business processes which are high volume, repetitive, prone to human error and come with stringent regulatory compliances. The tasks can include queries, calculations, reports and maintenance of records and transactions.
IGT has a team of RPA specialists who have successfully automated processes for some of the major players across industries.

Author:

Himanshu Gandhi is a Project Manager at IGT Solution’s Robotic Process Automation (RPA). He has 14 years of diverse work experience as a Senior Consultant and Project Manager for Digital Transformation across Airlines, Food and Beverage, and Banking industry. He can be reached at Himanshu.gandhi@igtsolutions.azurewebsites.net.

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So how is the travel industry coping with this shock? Airlines that are functioning have reduced capacity by 90% on international flights. Many have freezed their hiring as well; steps are being taken to cut costs. This extreme response that is generally expected in war like situations is making the travel industry rebuild a framework that addresses short-term triage for the situation we face, and also balances long-term planning.

While it is too early to tell how things will pan out in the future, the only way to combat the challenges is to follow a phase-wise strategy.

Phase 1 (Reaction and response) – In the initial phase, organizations were occupied in reacting and responding to the challenges that COVID-19 brought with itself. By implementing work from home, this phase resulted in companies assuring their customers of the steps they are taking to ensure business continuity.

Phase 2 (Redirection) – In this phase we see a dip in customer demand. Markets slow down and companies are focused on providing business opportunities to its existing and new customers. This is a crucial time where competition is high, as businesses reach out to new customers or other businesses.

Phase 3 (Recover) – While this phase can last a few months or quarters, business however, starts to recover and so does the economy. Overall, this phase will see new demands, and businesses must be prepared to offer new solutions to its customers.

Phase 4 (Opportunity) – The decisions taken in phase two will have an impact in phase four; there will be scope for strong investments and collaborations as companies start to rebound. The world will recover and the market will be better equipped to handle future disruptions from its learning.

The first phase is over, the impact has been acknowledged and decisions taken from now will have a long-term impact on a business. At this stage, any decision that paints a company in a corner must be avoided. Creating a multiple solution plan and having two-way options is the key. While consumers are in survival mode, their appetite for things will change. They will be more skeptical, which is why, offering new solutions and building resiliency is highly imperative at this point. The travel industry needs to maintain focus on demand simulation without compromising on customer satisfaction.

Areas that the travel industry must be equipped with post COVID-19:

• Analytics

The use of technology has been amplified because of COVID-19. Technology is being adopted by most businesses so they can sustain and this might even push the society towards a different future. This is the time for an organization to deploy analytics to deliver real-time information that aids in decision making. It’s time to acquire and analyze data based on travel and customer sentiment so that it can be integrated with predictive and other forms of analytics to take realistic measures. Analytics will help you examine lead indicators that can help you measure your customer’s comfort level and their plans of resuming travel. Analysis of a user’s spending activity for example can help you build a solution plan.

• Conversational Automation

A crucial learning from COVID-19 is that having a self-service capability is very important. For travel customer, having to wait in a queue for getting their queries addressed can add to the stress. With the help of conversational automation, which involves the integration of chatbots and voicebots; brands can assign large chat and call volumes and also ease the pressure off your team members.  This allows customers to cancel, refund or re-schedule their tickets or hotel stays on their own and also gives them control.

• Back office Automation

The COVID-19 pandemic has made the travel industry look at business from new angles. It’s time to accommodate adjustments and even creativity if we want to make it to phase three. While the world is able to keep in touch with updates through social platforms, organizations need to take it up a notch if they want to rebuild customer confidence during phase 3 of recovery. Investing in centralized applications by using back office automation, powered by Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, can show significant cost benefit. Automation can help process congested back end queues and help speed up the claims and other processes.

Preparing for the future

While work from home is not new to many of us, the new way of working amidst the pandemic has given us the ability to adapt and deliver our responsibilities from our homes. Companies have restructured the way they work, thanks to technology.  It has equipped us to function in this shutdown scenario and target new customers through various online communication tools.

While we will return to good health and so will our economy, competition will intensify and new disrupters can emerge. Businesses need to keep an open mind and should be willing to infuse innovation into their ecosystem.

IGT Solutions is helping organizations get through the current scenario with its technical capabilities. With cutting edge technologies that can provide custom advanced analytics solutions, we are helping businesses transform their digital journeys at this time.

To prepare for this new way of working, brands need an operating model that can ensure business continuity and pave the way to new ideation. IGT is equipped with the right tools, partners, procedures, framework and experts that can bring operational efficiency to your business through RPA. Our technical solutions help you stay connected with your customer and optimizes business processes which can help you retain your customer’s trust.

Author :

Gurmeet Oberoi is a researcher and writer of change tactics and technologies in travel and other verticals, she frequently posts across the digital ecosystem. With 9-yrs of experience in communications and marketing, Gurmeet has a passion for travel and reading among other things. She can be reached at gurmeet.oberoi@igtsolutions.azurewebsites.net

The post How can travel industry build business resilience post COVID-19? appeared first on IGT Solutions.

Characteristics of Back office and Conversational automation

Back-office automation is a technology through which software robots or ‘bots’ can learn from data and apply this knowledge to resolve problems independently. It can create a spectrum of solutions with next-to-zero downtime because of its machine learning capabilities and algorithm-based solutions. While back-office automation involves the use of software bots, conversational automation, on the other hand, in simple terms, offers virtual assistance in the form of chatbots. These chatbots are smart and capable of handling specific tasks with the help of Natural Language Processing (NLP). They can understand and learn through environments, user journeys and conversations.

Primarily, automation mixed with human intelligence works in tandem towards decision making support. However, each area of automation has a unique role to play. With increasing competition in the travel industry, the challenges are not far behind. In fact, some pain points that travel industries face can be solved if automation is applied.

Let’s look at those pain points and learn how automation can make them pain-less.

 Online reputation management

Customers take to social media to share their experiences and grievances. Travel brands have understood the need to maintain their online reputation and have hired digital teams to monitor their online presence. Automating daily monitoring of your social media platforms will ensure you are not caught off-guard. Travel brands can use back-office automation’s ability to read and segregate information into relevant buckets based on the type of issue of the user. It also has a high degree of flexibility to search brand mentions all over the web, view multiple reviews and comments and identify best suggestions based on pre-scripted notes. By logging into one window, one can quickly personalize and respond on several platforms in minutes and take control of the online presence.

 Maintaining service standards

In an era where customers can switch brands easily, it is imperative to maintain a superior standard to retain them. Just like famous food brands follow precise measurements of ingredients which are universal to all their centers, travel brands can similarly have a rule-based system designed through automation to maintain an indubitable standard for themselves. RPA bots can emulate solutions that are consistent with every assignment and match the requirement of the job. Back-office automation can help create standard operating procedures that can help you track project progress, keeps you up-to-date with the latest data and can communicate critical milestones.

 Dealing with duplicate entries

Organizations use their online platforms such as website, social media etc. not just for brand presence but also as lead generators. It is not in our control when over-enthusiastic customers share their information several times, hoping to get a quicker response. What is in our control is using back-office automation to sift through the duplicate entries from a database and centrally apply changes to eliminate any discrepancy in interdepartmental exchanges across locations. Back-office automation works fast and leaves no room for friction, which could have been the case if done manually, thus reducing rework and maximizing profits.

 High influx of queries

For any servicing brand, online customer service channels like website chat, social media chat etc. always remain open. Many travel companies are prepared to handle a set number of queries; however, during unforeseen times, like a hike in volumes, they face a challenge in responding to the questions promptly. Missing out on your customer queries can result in losing out on business. With messaging becoming a preferred medium of customer service in many countries, conversational automation is being integrated by many brands. Because of its 24X7 availability and rapid responses, conversational chatbots can yield better customer experiences with their intelligent ability to detect keywords, changes in tone, and adjusting to a user’s behaviour.

Regardless of the business type, automation can increase the accuracy of your business process. To increase business opportunities and handle multiple issues simultaneously, travel brands are broadening their horizons by recognizing the potential of automation. At IGT, we strive to take your business to the next level by understanding your business needs and developing the right automation strategy for you.

IGT’s Automation Centre of Excellence offers an array of automation solutions through its RPA and conversational automation capabilities.

Our proprietary automation methodology – ‘iTRIP’, is designed to take the customers from an initial exploratory stage in their automation journey to a BAU Automation Factory Setup, thereby setting up a Centre of Excellence for enterprise-wide cross-functional adoption.

Travel companies must begin with the endgame in mind, aligning company goals with the right technological investments should be a priority. As the industry operations become more complex, integrating automation solutions can be a game-changer.

Read more about the methodology, processes and the engagement model that we follow to deliver automation projects to a large customer base.

Author :

Gurmeet Oberoi is a researcher and writer of change tactics and technologies in travel and other verticals, she frequently posts across the digital ecosystem. With 9-yrs of experience in communications and marketing, Gurmeet has a passion for travel and reading among other things. She can be reached at gurmeet.oberoi@igtsolutions.azurewebsites.net

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