Smart businesses need smart assistance

In order to excel in the 21^st century, businesses need more effective assistance options for their end-customers, helping them to interact in new ways or to move to new channels. Konecta is successfully using digital experiences and technology to do this.

At a time when every type of business sector and every type of business is getting to grips with digital transformation, the topic of learning and training has to be at the top of everyone’s agenda. This involves much more than helping employees to adopt new technology and new ways of working – it’s also about helping customers to embrace new ways to interact with you – for example, steering them towards self-care options, reducing contacts, or providing the option of smarter, faster or richer digital interactions.

To do this for customers, brands must themselves understand how to teach people to learn – in other words, to make their customer education approaches smart. That’s easier said than done, especially for brands or sectors with multi-generational or demographically-diverse customer bases.

At Konecta, we’ve been leading on these issues for a long while, using our own practical, sector-specific experience, expertise and insights in digital solutions and digital transformation to support our clients’ customers on their own learning journeys. We know in practice how to teach people to learn because we excel at it every day, in multiple geographies and multiple sectors. So, let’s give you some real-life examples from our experts on the ground.

SMART ASSISTANCE IN the 21^st CENTURY

The essence of what we do at Konecta is to partner with clients to deliver outstanding customer experience, and a key part of that is providing smart education solutions for our clients’ customers. We use our expertise to create engaging digital learning approaches, deploying a wide range of innovative technologies to provide an effective learning experience.

A good example of this is the e-learning approaches we have developed for managing inbound, outbound and back office.

Rather than relying always on the traditional approaches – such as emails or links to FAQs – we’re now providing some clients with a mix of video, multimedia and interactive content. This can be composed, assembled and customized according to customer type and needs. Most importantly, this smart content is dropped into a traditional customer care or management process, revitalizing the process for the consumer to make it seem new and engaging. For instance:

• After a customer care contact where a customer asks a question about something, they could be sent a relevant video with instructions
• Before the customer is sent their monthly invoice (e.g. for a telecoms or utility contract), they could receive multimedia content explaining how to read the bill – reducing the likelihood that they need customer care afterwards. For an Italian telecoms client, for example, we developed and configured a tool with interactive questions presented to the customer, aimed at understanding their actual needs. Based on the answers given by the customer, the tool generated ad hoc feedback, offering up an answer designed specifically for that user. Questions can be submitted in the form of multiple choice answers, mini scenarios, videos or games, and tools can be designed as responsive applications so they can be used from any device.

FOUR KEY QUESTIONS FOR CLIENTS

When we suggest and develop smart education for clients in different sectors, we approach it from the perspective of four key questions, which we will explain below. We would recommend these to any organization or brand thinking about their approaches to end-customer education.

1.     WHY: With the examples above, the reason to smarten the education approach for end-customers was to engage and enthuse them about using the service or understanding its potential. Rather than being confused by, for example, a new format for invoices, they would feel educated and empowered. 

2.     WHAT: Or in other words, what do you want to educate your customers about and what will you provide for them? Generally here, we are likely to be talking about the use of interactive elements, in the form of ‘micro-pills’, in which various key customer topics are presented and illuminated. It could be how to read a bill, or register for a service, or anything else.

3.     HOW: This question digs into the detail of how best to educate and engage customers – what formats will you use, what duration (e.g. seconds or minutes), how will you share them (e.g. through notifications, email, web); in what format (e.g. avatar, cartoon), and what the actual content will be. In some cases, there will also be choices to make around language provision.

4.     EXPECTED RESULTS: It’s important the client has clarity on what they hope to gain from smarter education approaches – it could be greater self-care capacity, leading to fewer contacts; greater clarity for the customer, leading to fewer recalls); greater engagement, leading to reduced churn; or higher customer value, leading to higher sales or average revenue per user (ARPU).

A MIX OF FORMATS

In going through these questions with clients, our smart model focuses on digital technologies that facilitate practical application, such as scenarios, gamification, simulations and more. 

Digital content is, of course, central in this, with a wide mix available to our clients and their customers, including:

• Online/offline multimedia courses

• Software simulations

• Scenarios contextualised to learners' reality

• Cartoon-style courses

• Branched scenarios

• Gamified content

• Troubleshooting

• Digital guides.

Video is also a powerful element in our smart education model, including:

• Inspirational/emotional videos

• Video tutorials (Chroma key, Webinars, etc.)

• Interactive videos.

Documents back up this digital and video content, so that all clients and customers have access to a comprehensive range of supporting resources, including:

• Infographics

• Checklists

• E-books

• Podcasts

• FAQs

Tests and gamified experiences add to this rich mix, and provide another powerful element for ensuring that learning experiences are active rather than passive. Careful design and integration of virtual tours, learning games, assessments and quizzes all help to engage and empower customers, getting them ready and confident to implement everything they have learned.

FOLLOW-UP: OTHER KEY ELEMENTS 

In delivering these smart education solutions to clients and their customers, two other elements are key to delivering outstanding results – both of them linked to follow-up and continuous improvement.

The first of these is well-designed and assiduous monitoring. No smart training approach is complete without rigorous performance reporting and monitoring, using a KPI-based system. In this respect, we are always highly focused on selecting the most effective KPIs that get to the heart of what clients and customers are looking for.

The second key element is feedback. Integral to our smart training approach is the creation of an interactive business community to gather end-customer insights and feedback, which we use to adapt to their needs, inform and steer our innovation and continuous improvement approach, and surpass client expectations. 

There’s one final element to remember too: that the endpoint is to offer outstanding customer experiences. We’ve seen brands and their providers develop digital learning approaches that have plenty of creativity but they forget that they’re there to facilitate results for the client, not just ‘wow factor’ moments for client presentations! Smart education is only smart if it remembers this!
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