Author: Pushpendra Vishal Kaushal, (Ex Head of Business Operations, leading startup in building EV infrastructure, Series A)
Automated Customer Care Solutions: Satisfying EV Users
Can Automated Customer care solutions act as boosters for the Electric Vehicle Industry and other IoT-enabled industries?
Problem
The electric vehicle industry is thriving, and it has lately accelerated due to numerous incentives offered by both the central and state governments as part of the FAME Scheme. The government’s drive, along with consumers’ growing awareness of the worsening environmental circumstances caused by pollution from ICE cars, has accelerated the adoption of electric vehicles in India. In addition, as the demand for electric vehicles grows, so does the need for electric vehicle charging stations.
Because electric vehicle chargers are IOT-enabled devices, and take 7 to 8 hours to charge on a slow charger and 45 to 60 minutes on a fast charger, these charging stations are usually unmanned, which means that customers must rely on the instructions provided on the charging stations or contact customer care teams to understand the charging process and begin charging their vehicles when using public chargers. Since the consumer is new to the ecosystem and may not be well versed with the procedure, they may get stuck in one of the few steps that they need to perform to ensure that their car can charge utilizing the public charging infrastructure.
This essentially translates into having a strong customer support structure in place to guarantee that the client receives the necessary assistance as soon as possible; otherwise, the consumer will be disappointed, resulting in the loss of many prospective customers. The difficulty now is determining how to guarantee that the company does not lose out on any of these chances and has as many satisfied consumers as possible.
Potential Solution
The simplest answer that anybody can give to this issue is to have a dedicated customer support crew that is accessible 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and the desired results can be readily attained. The issue is not as straightforward as it seems. India is a varied nation with over 25 languages spoken across various regions. Customers range from auto drivers to high-end automobile owners. If a customer support team is to be created, it must guarantee that the support professionals are fluent in multiple languages and are accessible 24 hours a day, seven days a week, since customers may charge their vehicles at any charging station at any given time of a day.
When we consider the costs involved, it becomes clear that ensuring the availability of the customer support staff to satisfy these standards would be too expensive for an enterprise. Furthermore, the electric vehicle industry requires a great deal of technical knowledge, which is difficult to assimilate into persons with non-technical backgrounds.
Now, organisations can outsource the function to a third party to use the customer support representative base that they may have to ensure that they can cater to the users and do not lose customers. This may help them save some money, but not all of it, and they may end up paying for repetitive queries that newly onboarded users may have. This also implies that they may be sharing technical know-how with a third party, who may use it to serve other customers in the same industry, resulting in happy customers for your competition as well, which no business would want given that the industry is still in its early stages and rapidly growing.
A better solution to this problem is to have an automated customer response system supported by deep tech capabilities that will help close out the customer’s initial or basic queries based on the inputs provided to the system, with queries that fall outside the current set of inputs available with the system being redirected to the inhouse customer support team for further resolution.
This basically means that the customer support team would be free to concentrate on new issues that arise for consumers and work on solutions with the other teams that must be engaged to deliver best-in-class services to clients.
Furthermore, the input database for the customer response system should be updated with new questions received to guarantee that the system’s scope expands over time and that it is able to address majority of the inquiries or concerns presented by consumers.
Benefits
The benefits that these solutions bring along include providing 24*7 availability, retaining the knowledge base within the organization, drastically reducing the customer queries response cost while ensuring minimum customer response time.
The solutions provide full visibility into the new business challenges and help in solving the customer queries and concerns without losing precious time. The deep tech capabilities help businesses understand the customer behaviour and cater solutions according to customer needs by analysing the available data and helping identifying the pain points. The business impacts of changes/updates made can also be easily evaluated by comparing pre and post change data.
Challenges
Businesses must also understand that these solutions are enablers and should not be viewed as silver bullets for customer problems because they will only help identify symptoms and provide initial support to customers. It is the responsibility of the customer support team to be proactive in identifying new and recurring pain points and working with other stakeholders to ensure that the problems are resolved at the earliest.
Also, many companies make their solutions so complex that it is impossible for customers to reach out to customer support teams and communicate their concerns that the automated response system was unable to answer. A small tip to such companies would be that it is fine to let the automated response system be the first line of interaction and answer the majority of the customer queries, but it is always recommended to have the option to reach out to members of the customer support team.
Additionally, consumers may believe that the company is solely concerned with cost reductions and does not care about the customers since they do not want to listen to their concerns and effectively do not want to work on any new problems that the customers may want to submit.
Another challenge is locating a single cost-effective solution that can assist businesses in providing automated voice and chat support across platforms that support multiple languages for customers. However, given the rate at which technology is evolving, the day may not be far away when we will have multiple solutions providing this option, ensuring that businesses have the best solution for their customers and that they have happy customers.
Ultimately, it is the happy consumers that help you establish your brand and propel your company forward.
