As per a Harvard Business Review article, "Studies show that a 5% increase in customer loyalty can increase profits by up to 95% and the cost of acquiring new customers is 5 to 25 times more than retaining existing ones. The high cost of new customer acquisition warrants a customer retention strategy to, not only reduce customer churn but to also drive revenues. Contact Centers have an important role to play in achieving this as customer satisfaction is what ensures customer loyalty. There are challenges aplenty in the workings of the systems in the relatively older contact centers which still rely on IVRs that provide voice-based options and keys-based inputs to select options - these in fact, can sometimes lead to customer misery and not satisfaction. According to “Harris Interactive” survey, 75% of customers believe it takes too long to reach a live agent and the key metric “Customer Wait Time” is a reflection of this challenge. There are other problems that plague customer service operations such as inconsistent experience across channels, security, delayed problem diagnosis, dispersed data, need for multilingual agents etc. This calls for a dire need to re-imagine the Next Generation Customer Support Center. In the context of digital, these should revolve around the three themes of Augment/Empower Me,  Help Me and  Advise Me to each of the personas involved viz. the end user, enterprise and agent respectively. This is what we call as the "AHA moment"- the digital business moment in a contact center 2.0 for tomorrow’s millennials.

From our experience, we have put together a POV on the pieces of the puzzles for implementing the Next-Generation Customer Support Center and illustrated some transformational use cases with the latest AI-based technologies that can be leveraged in making customer service transformation more tangible. We also delve into the metrics impacted due to the usage of process and technologies to manage and retain customers which can help contact centers transform from being a cost center to a profit center.

The prerequisites for a smart and modern customer service organization are to have customer service teams that will fix problems for many customers at once, instead of chasing issues one at a time. They will respond faster to concerns and move beyond operational demands to deliver proactive strategies that drive business growth. In this document, we detail all that and more with AI and cognitive use cases and also understand the importance of data privacy in delivering unique and transformational customer experiences which are critical to enterprise success.

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Sanjay Nambiar - Vice President and Head of Wipro’s AI & Automation Ecosystem.

He is responsible for building AI partnerships, formulating go-to-market strategies and driving service delivery for enterprise clients. With over two decades of experience in client relationship management and business development roles, Sanjay specializes in shaping new offerings and driving business outcomes across multiple verticals including retail, consumer goods, financial services and telecom.