ke evidence based decisions Using Intuition for Important Business isions. Get Quality Market Research Now. 2023 Question 1 (Marks: 50] Read the below case study and answer the questions that follow MultiChoice pioneers omnichannel support in South Africa to achieve a 95% customer satisfaction. MultiChoice Group (MultiChoice) is an entertainment powerhouse and is Africa's leading media company. The company is passionate about telling stories that are rooted in the unique cultures of the countries it broadcasts in. Through a combination of services including direct to home satellite television, digital terrestrial television, and online video entertainment, it uses the power of storytelling to enrich lwes. Roland Naidoo, Head of Operations, Multichoice, tells Intelligent CIO Africa why the company teamed up with Freshworks to enhance its omnichannel customer service and experience. Multichoice views itself first and foremost as a customer experience organisation. Today, the company serves around nine million customers in South Africa and over 21 million customers across the African continent. Getting to the heart of great customer experience. At MultiChoice, everyone, right from the group chairman to the call centre executive has customer experience on their minds. Over the last flve years, the company has been on a continuous improvement joumey to improve its customer support capabilities. "We had to differentiate between customer service and custamer experience," explained Brendon Emmanuel, Senior Manager - Programme Management, Multichoice. "These two terms are used interchangeably but are fundamentally different, With customer service, the customer expects you to know how to do your job. Customer experience [CX] means that we go one step beyond what the customer expects. We ensure that the customer journey is simplified, that they dor't have to repeat themselves and that their issues are proactively addressed." ke evidence based decisions Using Intuition for Important Business isions. Get Quality Market Research Now. 1 Foland Naidoo, Head of Operations, MultiChoice, said: "My team and I realised that when a customer contacts an agent, whether it's a human or digital interaction, they're looking for consistency, a quick tumaround time and the right answer every time. Omnichannel was the best way to achieve this," Building a seamless omnichannel support journey. Multichoice has been a true visionary in leading the charge for omnichannel support. It was, in fact, one of the earliest adopters of amnichannel on the continent. When evaluating solutions that could bring its vision to life, the tearm had clear expectations. The company needed a platform that could: consolidate each of the multi-channel touch points into a fully integrated channel agnostic helpdesk, track the entire customer journey so that the agent could gain a 360 -degree view of the tustomer, easily integrate with all other platforms and tools already in use so employees didr't have to jump between tools to answer a query and offer a simple, intuitive user interface [Ui] at a cost-effective price. According to Multichoice, Freshworks' impressive suite of solutions made it a clear winner. The company now uses Freshdesk Support Desk, Freshdesk Messaging and Freshservice to link every stage of its customer support journey. Naidoo, who was awarded the Global Change Architect of the Year award for pioneering innovation in CX, belleves that this omnichannel view has been critical in preemptively engaging with customers and resolving issues before they even crop up. 'The amnichannel journey is not a simple or easy one to conceive and execute. The great thing about this collaboration is the flexibility of Freshworks to adapt to the Multichoice journey and cocreate the customer roadmap. The team not only sells customer experience but lives it, we have been able to achieve an incredible amount in very short spaces of time, pulling overything together into one customer service view with Freshworks and being able to integrate with just about any other service capability," said Naidoo, Consolidating every stage of support within a single UI. The Multichoice team's zoal from day one has been to create a single U that provides the customer's details and history, allows agents to perform transactions and ultimately solve the issue within a single dashboard. To that effect, it has brought its existing telephory solution and queue ke evidence based decisions Using Intuition for Important Business isions. Get Quality Market Research Now. In addition, the team's in-house A-powered chatbot, is integrated with Freshdesk so that agents 1 can view a customer's entire history of conversations within the tool. In the back end, Freshdesk is integrated with the customer relationship management (CRM) to entich the database. Internally, Freshdesk and Freshservice have been linked to enable agents to escalate tickets to various departments if needed. 50, what does this integrated setup look like in action? if, for example, a customer who has been disconnected is contacting the support team, the Al pseudo-prediction model deciphers that the customer probably wants to know how much to pay, when to pay, or when they re going to be reconnected. The prediction madel is integrated with Freshdesk and affers these insights to the agent, along with the customer's billing history and due date. Within Freshdesk, the agent can see if the customer has interacted with them at any other touchpoint. If the customer has sent an email and raised a ticket through a walk-in at the store, the agent can merge both to avoid duplication. In cases where it's out of the agent's capabilities to help the customer, the ticket gets escalated to Freshservice and routed to the concerned department. Once that department resolves the ticket, it is reflected within Freshdesk, and the communication is sent out to the customer. Dellvering customer dellight across channels. The omnichannel ecasystem has delivered real tangible results for Multichoice in five key areas: First-contact resolution: Since switching to omnichannel, first contact resolution increased from 69% to 94%. The MultiChoice team has imvested heavily in creating a Natural Language Understanding system to ensure that agents are weil-trained. Agents also have access to an agent assist tool that can provide them with the most suitable solutions for a customer's query. "This approach isn't document heawy. Naidoo said. "It's not a knowledge repository per se, it's simple, interactive and gives you the right answer every time." Average handle times: The average handle time has improved by around 10%. One of the features that contributed to this achievement is the ability to group tickets based on the issue. Citing an example, Emmanuel explained that: "When it's raining, most of the tickets that are raised are about signal issues. The service desk team receives it as a single ticket. When they solve it, they solve all 50 or so tickets in a single shot," ke evidence based decisions Using Intuition for Important Business isions. Get Quality Market Research Now. 22: 23: 24 2023 1 Support channel distribution: Opening up a wider range of support channels has led to a higher adoption in more cost-effective channels. "Around seven years ago, call-centres accounted for around 80% of all incoming queries. Today, it's actually swung the other way and 80% of queries come in through digital channels," observed Naidoo, Proactive issue resolution: Every single ticket that comes in is tagged and categorised based on different phases of the customer journey. "The categorisation of ticket properties helps us gain a bird' s-eye view of which part of the journey our customers face the most issues in. For example, is it the exploration phase, the payment phase, or the support phase? This allows us to identify recurring issues and solve problems before they happen, " added Emmanuel. The MultiChoice team attributes these impressive results to two things: the maturity of Freshworks' solutions and the customer-first philosophy of the organisation. "We dor't believe in tech for tech's sake," Naidoo pointed out, "For us, it was about understanding the common thread between what our customer needs, what our agents need and what our business needs. We were then able to customise and contigure Freshworks' solutions to set up technical instances that could really wow cur customers," Prioritising complaint department. Firstly, by accepting that no organisation is perfect is the right step from Multichoice to recognize mistakes, failures, and problems. Naidoo said by making sure that we understand all forms of complaints which includes, long call times, escalations, overcharges, can help Multichoice knows which problems need to be resolved first in order to keep the customers happy and recommend Multichoice to other customers, If these problems are not prioritised, customers will opt for other services in competitors and thus failure by Multichoice to service their customers. The future of customer experience. Multichoice continues to be a trailblazer in delivering superior customer experience. For its next chapter, the company plans to go deeper into Al and bot assistance through predictive customer ke evidence based decisions U Using Intuition for Important Business isions. Get Quality Market Research Now. chapter, the company plans to go deeper into Al and bot assistance through predictive customer 1 engagement. Emmanuel said: "This will help us tap into real data sources to quickly and officiently expand our support operations, while keeping an eye on future growth opporturities." Q The hidependerit list tute of rderatien (Pt) ind 2003 Page 5 ot 11 21; 23; 24 ser3 "The omnichannel experience for us has been a revelation. We don't see it as multiple channels, we see it as a single channel located in different places. This helps us provide consistently high quality support at every customer touch point," said Naidoo. Source: Bowen, M, (2023) Muitichoice pioneers omnichannel support in South Africa to achieve 95% customer satisfaction, inteligent COO Africa. Available at: https://www.intelligentcio.com/africa/2022/01/14/multichoice-pioneers-omnichannesupport-in-south-africa-to-achieve-a-95-customer-satisfaction/ (Accessed: 26 May 2023). Please Note the following for of questions : Marks will be awarded for the quality of your paraphrasing of concepts and definitions, Le., you must in all questions write in your words and support each paragraph with literature, theory, and in-text references. - When providing an example, you will receive more marks for your own original examples or from the case study provided, than for examples from the textbook, from your lecturer or elearn. Q.1.1 Naidoo argues that the future of Customer service relies on Artificial Intelligence (A) (10) and bot services. Discuss the role of Al in the Customer Service excellence