Hinduja Global Solutions
HGS DigiCX^®: Driving Digital Transformation in Customer Experience

The fragmentation of customer engagement across dozens of channels has turned into a highly vexing problem and an increasingly disruptive challenge for businesses in the last few years. A multitude of customer touch-points cutting across marketing, sales, customer service, and even product development are in practice today. In short, customers have moved to the digital world en masse, and companies have not kept up. There are so many ways in which consumers can reach companies, and it’s glaring when organizations aren’t responding adequately the way customers expect. As a Gartner report highlights, 89 percent of executives want to differentiate their brand based on the customer experience they provide, but only 1 in 10 consumers believe that brands are doing a good job. “If there’s one major opportunity for all organizations that want to compete on CX today, it’s managing the increasingly fragmented customer conversations via the web, social, and mobile channels,” says Yashwinee GK, CIO of Hinduja Global Solutions (HGS). “We seek to bridge that gap for both consumers and companies.” HGS is driving a new digital customer experience standard across industries, the Unified Customer Experience Strategy®, that is transforming traditional approaches to call center-led customer engagement.

“Ultimately, a great customer experience system must complement the overall business objectives of an enterprise. At HGS, we understand these opportunities and develop solutions that are contextual and profitable,” adds Yashwinee. Today, CIOs face the challenge of finding an approach that balances the need to create amazing experiences for customers while managing costs. HGS accomplishes this by personalizing a customer’s experience through an integrated portfolio of CX services to provide actionable measures that drive business outcomes.

"HGS optimizes the customer experience and makes brands more competitive by helping customers ‘get the right answer, fast’"

One example is the company’s DigiCX suite of services that provides choices for customers to opt-in to digital channels—augmenting the traditional channels. “DigiCX was designed based on our understanding of the consumer through market research insight and extensive analytics,” states Chris Lord, Global Head of DigiCX, Growth, Strategy and Marketing at HGS.

The DigiCX suite leads with a dynamic self-service feature underpinned by powerful analytics, automation, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) that intelligently and seamlessly integrates representatives to help consumers get answers. It helps companies measure where their customers want to interact and then deploys the right mix of engagement solutions across voice, digital, and mobile channels to provide a differentiating customer experience. “HGS optimizes the customer experience and makes brands more competitive by helping customers ‘get the right answer, fast’,” states Lord.

And the results speak for themselves! For a consumer electronics company, HGS achieved 97 percent resolution rate, reduced costs by nearly 70 percent, and CSAT at 91.6 percent.

Further, the firm achieved 90 percent CSAT and average per contact Net Promoter Scores (NPS) rankings of 9 (on a scale of 0-10) for a consumer packaged goods company which sought to strengthen its ability to connect with more customers at a deeper level. Not only do these success stories demonstrate the efficiency of HGS’ solutions, but they also illustrate its custom built features. This is one of the many reasons that the firm received Frost and Sullivan’s North American Contact Center Outsourcing New Product Innovation Award 2016 for DigiCX. “DigiCX is the ideal blend of self-service, automation, and agent-assistance that’s just right for the client’s business with an innovative design-thinking approach to re-imagine the traditional customer experience regardless of channel or device,” says Lord.

DigiCX is the ideal blend of self-service, automation, and agent-assistance that’s just right for the client’s business with an innovative design-thinking approach to re-imagine the traditional customer experience regardless of channel or device

In a nutshell, HGS’ Unified Customer Experience Strategy® connects the dots in a customer’s journey and creates touch points at every step in order to build a consistent brand engagement experience for organizations, eventually reducing operational cost, optimizing revenue, and improving customer loyalty.

Optimizing the Customer Experience

The firm’s approach is balanced to create “win-win” solutions for both consumers and brands by enabling an improved experience that consumers expect— leading with self-service—while at the same time, reducing the cost for brands and increasing customer satisfaction— NPS. HGS’ design-thinking approach drives CX innovation that optimizes the experiences for consumers—a Unified Customer Experience Strategy® that is channel- and device-agnostic. The rapidly-evolving medium of customer service caused by these digital disruptions and consumer demands force companies to question the status-quo and continually evolve to be ahead of the curve. Yashwinee mentions, “This is why at HGS, we continuously assess our service offerings for features that can be redundant in the near future and invest time and energy in transformation programs to keep our services relevant for our stakeholders.”

The Balance Scale for Bots and Brains

For many years now, HGS’ Unified Customer Experience Strategy® has been assisting clients in optimizing the customer experience, and the latest evolution of this strategy is the “integration of bots and brains” to meet the demands of a tech-savvy generation of consumers. In the past, most customer service engagements start and end over one phone call. Today, conversations might start on one channel and continue on another. Oftentimes on chat, the customer might only respond a few hours later. HGS’ customer experience strategy enables organizations to effectively engage in two-way conversations 24x7. The conversations guide consumers using Natural Language Processing (NLP) and AI so that the consumer is understood and issues are resolved.

“The brains—that is the humans— can seamlessly step into the bot-based discussions to continue the conversation and add value as complexity increases,” says Lord.

An organization’s customer experience service needs to cater to the major paradigm shift that is centered on offering the most convenient approach for its customers. According to Matthew Dixon, former executive director at CEB, 77 percent of customers say that valuing their time is the most important thing a company can do. “We understand that conversations today are asynchronous with the need to start, stop, and continue when it makes sense for the customer. These customers want the right answers fast. The solutions have to be speedy, accurate, empathetic, and effective,” says Lord.

For instance, HGS leverages digital channels for customers and service reps to interact by sharing images and videos, helping them resolve issues on their own. “In the telecommunications industry, a truck roll, or technician service visit, is the most costly and yet least satisfying customer interaction. Sharing images in the course of interacting with a company by text or chat significantly reduces the effort as the context becomes clearer, a picture being worth a thousand words,” explains Lord. It can eliminate the need to send parts, replacement products, and dispatching field services technicians to the consumers’ homes, which saves time and boosts NPS with adequate resolution.

People, Process, Practices and Platform

Through its DigiCX suite of services and Unified Customer Experience Strategy®, HGS is focused on raising the overall bar of customer experience in a holistic manner. “We are actively participating in the technology revolution that’s elevating the overall human experience while staying competitive,” says Yashwinee. The firm’s transformation strategy includes four pillars namely People, Processes, Practices and Platforms. “This coupled with Performance offers the reinforcing loop creating a culture of a learning organization.”

HGS selects individuals who will blend with the company’s corporate culture and values that emphasize customer-centric professionalism, empathy and savviness across mobile, digital and social technologies, and synergize with the technology teams in achieving goals. “Being an employee at HGS, one is deeply connected to the consumer and to the markets we serve,” says Lord. HGS’ skilled and experienced team is well complemented by industry-standard mature process frameworks. The firm’s process defines their program delivery methodology, engagement model, performance metrics, and the risk and compliance measures necessary for effective execution of the projects.

Additionally, the firm has been making the right investments in the areas of data science, AI, AR/VR, analytics, robotics, digital marketing, and social in bespoke solutions for self-help and gamification to enhance their overall capability as a technology service provider and digital leader. To foster research and innovation, HGS has invested in setting up an innovation lab, the iLAB, in the streams of automation, advanced analytics, and data sciences. “The 4 P’s which form the building blocks in conjunction with our in-depth understanding of clients’ businesses, and our engagement and partnership model, enable us to build on our existing knowledge base to add value. Its a continuous improvement process,” remarks Yashwinee.

The firm is set to launch innovative solutions leveraging analytics that can be applied on a plug-and-play basis to make its clients’ customer experience offerings more holistic. “We see ourselves as ambassadors for our customers, enabling customer experience improvements, digital transformations, helping companies better connect with their customers,” extols Lord.