Customer Service agent in an office with laptop

Product support transformation

Today, product support is going through significant transformation, from ‘do it for me’ (assisted help), to ‘do it yourself’ (self-help), to ‘care in-built’ (real transformation involving proactive problem solving).

Cognizant’s VP of Technology Practice, Yoosuf Mohamed said, “Today’s support scenario is a lot more complex. Hence support transformation must take a holistic and integrated problem-solving approach. “

The Support Halo paradigm involves collaborative use of in-house systems, social analytics, and device analytics data. It is a 360-degree approach to providing a delightful support experience to end customers, achieved through tight collaboration between product engineering, product sustenance, and product support organisations.

Yoosuf Mohamed

Yoosuf Mohamed

Yoosuf observed, “The impact of this collaboration is experienced by end-customers in every support interaction.”

The SMAC world
SMAC or social, mobile, analytics and cloud, is a world where customer feedback is available on social media channels like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. All this digital data – what Cognizant calls Code Halo, is robust, powerful and continually growing in richness and complexity.

It is also possible to extract “meaning” from data available in devices such as set-top boxes and mobile handsets using device analytics.

Support Halo is relevant in the end-customer support business process, and can involve consumer, product, technical or usage support. It is analogous to Code Halo in terms of the 360-degree view it provides. Apart from this, the Support Halo also factors in past interactions of customers to personalise the support experience.

What is the current state of product support?
According to Yoosuf, many organisations are still in the era of customer contact centers, where support is provided in a reactive mode when customers reach out to the organisations with their problems, and receive fixes. There is no clear strategy on leveraging the Support Halo paradigm. At best, these organisations are trying to improve self-service.

New-age digital companies are adopting the paradigm rapidly and are communicating major issues proactively. They are providing social channels so that users can share their experiences and help each other out.

This effectively reduces the total support cost and customers feel better informed about upcoming changes.




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