Frustrated customers? Here’s how to avoid repetition

We have all experienced it at one time or another. You call a company’s customer service and they are not well informed about who you are and what interaction has happened before. There is clearly a lack of actual and equal information throughout the customer chain, so you have to tell the same story several times to different employees. This also happened to one of the largest Dutch kitchen retail companies. In this blog Jan Willem van Asperen, salesdirector at BPM Company, explains how we streamlined the process again with the deployment of Pega.

In the field without insights 

One of the largest Dutch kitchen retail companies faced a major challenge. The customer-service system had been separated from the field-service system. This regularly caused frustrated customers.  To illustrate, here is a little situation sketch that many people will recognize something in. The customer service receives a notification that a customer’s microwave oven is broken. A service report is created, and the customer is promised a new microwave oven. The field-service goes out, with a new microwave and a paper printout from the customer service. So far, so good. But where it immediately goes wrong is that mechanics thus have no insight into customer history, into previous interactions, they don’t know why the situation is the way it is, and whether there is an isolated problem or whether there is a whole history preceding it.

Chaos complete

So, it could well be that the mechanic arrives at the customer’s places and something is not quite right. For instance, the customer indicates that, in addition to the microwave report, he has also reported a problem with the refrigerator. The mechanic then knows nothing about it. He has to return to head office to hand in his paper printout, with the customer’s remark, to customer service. Of course, if the customer calls customer service before the mechanic has arrived there, the chaos is complete. No matter how good the intentions of your mechanics and customer support staff are, there will always be delays. That is simply the consequence of separate systems.

Two seamlessly integrated Pega applications

We have developed two seamlessly integrated Pega applications, which resolved this problem. Now the customer service and field service applications are neatly linked, and information is continuously synchronised. That means the mechanic can see the full interaction history of the customer he is on his way to. When the mechanic at the customer’s premises gets new information to him, it is a matter of entering a new service notification in the app and the customer service is also informed. This way, everyone in the organization is aware of the customer situation in real time. When a customer calls, you can respond to it nicely. Pleasant for employees and pleasant for customer: he only has to tell his story once and an organization knows who he is and what is on his mind.

Want to know more?

Wondering how we can streamline your processes with Pega? Feel free to contact us.