eCare Lowers 20% Costs and Increases Satisfaction by 20%

A European telecommunications company wanted to lower the cost of its customer service operations but worried about the potential loss of revenue from the cross-selling that its traditional call centers did so well. In investigating its options, the company learned that 70 percent of existing customer-service contacts could be delivered through digital solutions that had proved effective in other industries. By migrating part of its customer-service operations to similar digital-care programs with a smart strategic approach, the company lowered the unit’s costs by as much as 30 percent, with no loss of revenue.

E-care involves the delivery of customer service via web-based user accounts, social networks, mobile phone, and the Internet rather than call centers or facilities open to the public such as retail stores or service counters. 

In our experience, e-care must be approached as a one- to two-year multistage transformation, undertaken with the same degree of planning and rigor as a major product launch or other strategic initiative and backed by heavy initial C-suite support. In addition, careful thought must be given to the degree of digitization desired: digital care can be fully self-serve or involve a mix of live customer-service agents; not all options need to be available on every digital platform, and e-care should not be implemented as aggressively where there is significant potential for upselling. 

Digital customer service also provides superior customer satisfaction: our research shows that 76 percent of telecommunications customers are satisfied with a customer service journey that is fully digital, compared with 57 percent satisfaction for interactions through traditional channels (exhibit). When you consider that migration to e-care can, in our experience, reduce call volumes and operating expenses by 25 to 30 percent, its benefits seem obvious.

The problem is that companies from customer-facing industries that deploy multiple customer service channels too often assess the effectiveness of e-care by measuring individual channels, when customers today often move from one channel to another as they try to resolve service issues. 

We find that most successful e-care rollouts have a single, cross-functional team responsible for the effort, and that team reports directly to the C-suite. 

Based on our research and work in e-care transformation, we have identified six stages of a successful digital-care strategy: