Challenge
An emerging e-commerce business retained us to automate its manual processes and improve its customer experience. Like most companies, they were managing their business with some key technology with heavy reliance on manual processes. As the business grew, the manual processes became harder to manage and hurt their customers’ experience. Additionally, processing transactions required multiple touchpoints by their customer service representatives, which raised the negative impact on their customer experience as well as the total cost of the product.
The multi-systems they were using were not stacked, which required the representatives to input the same information in multiple places, manage the account, and then manually process apart from the transaction. Representatives were left to complete many steps, and there was plenty of room for human error as the volume increased.
Approach
To completely address their negative customer experience, we had to analyze the current business operations. Our analysis consisted of mapping out the current state of the business and identifying areas of opportunity to automate and simplify. We engaged the team throughout the discovery process to learn their daily process as well as gain insight into what they would like to see differently. We needed to consult the various divisions, understand their role in the customer experience, and gauge the amount of time each task took from one representative to another. We also reviewed various social media outlets, agency ratings, and platforms to learn customer expectations.
Results
We provided the leadership team with a granular level of insight into their customer and user experience and the various areas where we could improve the operations. Talking through the cost of manual processes and the actual cost helped put into perspective why automation was so important.
- Formulated a product cost analysis
- Workflow cost analysis
- Social media analysis and summary
We began by providing the team with a list of projects to address. Some of it was low-hanging fruit, and other projects would require additional time and resources.
Next, we utilized the process map of the organization and the business requirements to vet an appropriate software solution that would automate a majority of the manual processes.
Lastly, we designed a customer recovery program to inform former customers of the recent changes within the company and gathered their feedback. This company has scaled 12-fold since working with us and continues to grow and succeed.
