Customer experience: adapting and changing to the new normal post-pandemic

In the past few months, Covid-19 has affected million lives and people’s behaviours towards remote ways of working. Governments across the world are balancing easing of restrictions with infection rates, allowing people and businesses back to a new normality. The saying from Dale Carnegie – “When dealing with people, remember you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but creatures of emotion.” has become even more significant now and businesses should adapt to  changing customer behaviours and service their customers with empathy and care.

In recent months, most of us have had shopping experiences that were never imaged before, from no stock being available to delayed deliveries and poor customer service from companies. Customer interactions with companies are being faced with multiple challenges. Some of the business challenges caused by Covid-19 include:

• Collapse of business models: According to a recent article, with consumers being advised to avoid crowds, it has been estimated that some businesses that do not have sales coming from online sources risk losing their business.
• Struggle to engage customers and employees: The ‘out of sight, out of mind’ mentality will drive a wedge between businesses, customers, and employees with more people being told to work and shop remotely
• Unstable and unclear status of supply chains: 94% of the Fortune 1000 companies have witnessed supply chain disruptions and many also do not know the long-term implications on their operations
• Lack of business tools and training systems: As working remotely becomes the new norm, businesses face huge challenges to transform their aging technology and educate their employees on the new ways of working to boost productivity

Capgemini’s customer centric Covid-19 response helps businesses rebound by infusing agility with Fast Commerce using Upscale, understand customer intimacy using Qualtrics, and continuously adapt to changing customer demands while reinventing service with SAP service cloud. I explain more below…

Fast Commerce: Crisis management for today and tomorrow

Covid, social distancing and lockdown, reinforces the importance of digital commerce and has strengthened its position as the preferred method of shopping Online sales as a proportion of all retailing has been constantly rising since lockdown and has reached a record high of 32.8% in May according to Office of National Statistics (ONS) in UK  data. This clearly shows that people are still buying online.

Capgemini’s Fast Commerce offering is an SAP software-as-a-service (SaaS) commerce platform called Upscale. It creates rich, mobile-first shopping experiences and can be deployed in as little as two weeks. Capgemini has built a cosmetic storefront using Upscale to demonstrate the capabilities for retailers to go to market rapidly.

Some of Capgemini’s fast commerce features and business benefits include:

• World class experience – makes it easy for consumers to discover and buy across channels, launch new products, test markets and popup stores.
• Low Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) – Business to consumer (B2C) commerce platform designed specifically for Specialty Retail, and Direct to Consumers with rapid deployment option.
• Intelligence built in – intelligent AI merchandising and Digital Category Management built in for a personalised shopping experience that is consistent
• Business continuity – orchestrate recovery by selling more and prepare for the post crisis world

Customer Intimacy: Outside-in assessment is important

Covid-19 has increased the importance of engaging with customers and identifying the products and services they need. This can be seen from the changing customer behaviour, and from the changing demand for different products month on month, from toilet roll and flour to exercise weights and bicycles.  Understanding customer requirements and preferences at this time is a challenge that needs to be overcome to ensure customer retention and loyalty. Capgemini’s customer intimacy using SAP Qualtrics provides real-time, actionable customer intelligence information. This insight is essential to drive the business forward by understanding the customer needs.

Example dashboard with social media

Some of Capgemini’s Customer Intimacy features and business benefits includes:

• Drive revenue and customer lifetime value – enables companies to gain insights on purchasing decisions, shopping behaviour patterns, consumer trends and service challenges.
• Boost customer loyalty and advocacy – keep close to customers and changing behaviours, listen to social media reactions and analyse customer sentiment.
• Reduce costs – using survey tools accelerate the customer interaction process and generate actionable insights to invest in the right tools.

Empower Customers: Continued service through crisis and beyond

Covid-19 has caused a fundamental change in business models and a shift to remote practices, which has had a significant impact on the customer experience (CX). One of the biggest impacts has been that organisations have had to find new ways to service customers and maintain high levels of service. For example, T-mobile had to quickly move its 12000 call center workforce remote  during the lockdown restrictions. . Industries such as airlines, hospitality, sports, entertainment and events are dealing with waves of cancellations, refunds and credit requests. At the same time, online delivery services are dealing with a surge in demand, as people adapt to a new normal. Call centres are struggling to cope with the deluge of customer requests and customers are experiencing unusually long waiting times.

Customer service has always been vital in Experience Management. Now more than ever, the importance of customer service is essential to avoiding negative feedback on brand image and retaining customer loyalty. Capgemini’s service offering using SAP Service cloud organisations with unified omnichannel customer service experience enables customer service agents to address customer requests faster and empowers customers.

Some of the features and business benefits includes:

• Faster and efficient service response –by capturing service requests from phone, web, email and social media in a seamless and accessible manner.
• Reduced operating costs – Chat bot functionality allows a 24/7 service to customers; customer service agents can work on addressing complex issues which require human interaction.
• Empowered customers – create a customer service centric organisation, where the customer is at the centre of everything.

Capgemini’s offering will help you close the experience gap and create perfect service moments that turn your customers into advocates.

Conclusion

With every crisis comes an opportunity. By taking the right decisions, businesses can bounce back stronger and seize the opportunity to more than survive by winning more market share. Leveraging Capgemini’s Covid-19 customer centric offers ensures business continuity and will help shape your strategy for the ‘new normal’ post Covid-19.

Author

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Manjunath Harish