Multinational Manufacturing Conglomerate
Optimizing Costs With a Customer Service Transformation
Our client is a Fortune 500 global manufacturing company.
What if... transforming the customer service experience using AI/ML could yield huge cost savings?
Business Challenge and Opportunity
When it comes to customer service, expectations have never been higher as they expect their questions to be answered quickly, accurately, and without friction.
Our client was struggling to evolve and conduct business in an increasingly digital world and its customer experience (CX) paid the price. Customer support agents (CSAs) received approximately 2.5 million inbound service calls and emails from customers annually, which resulted in slow response times and massive costs to the business.
In addition, the manufacturer experienced year-over-year double-digit customer service-related cost increases from rising labor costs and a growing number of CSAs required to handle customer inquiries. It needed to reduce live agent costs by shifting customers to self-service and providing proactive order status notifications to reduce contact volume.
Transforming Three Customer Service Scenarios
Using Perficient’s Envision Framework, Journey Science Methodology and customer service transformation processes, our team developed a multi-year strategy and blueprint to enhance service agent productivity, data architecture, the customer experience, and process automation while driving significant cost savings.
Our experts leveraged Amazon Connect and AWS artificial intelligence and machine learning services to modernize and transform three common customer service scenarios:
1. Contain and Resolve Customer Inquiries: Using a chatbot powered by Amazon Lex, Amazon Bedrock, and other AWS services, the system will data mine customer case data, recommend chatbot prompts, and deliver natural, contextual responses created from content found in the company’s indexed knowledge bases and ERP data.
2. Automate Responses to Customer Service Emails: Using Amazon Comprehend for entity extraction and intent classification, emails classified with high confidence will be processed by Amazon Bedrock and AWS OpenSearch to return a personalized, automated response to the email.
3. Expedite Agent Issue Resolution: A virtual agent assistant powered by Amazon Q in Connect — which regularly crawls and indexes the company’s product information management system, SharePoint content, and FAQs — provides automated suggested responses and suggested next steps to resolve customer issues.
Our multi-year strategy for cutting internal costs resulted in $25M in annual cost savings and $61M in projected revenue lift.
Results
A Modernized CX Leads to Big Cost Savings
Our roadmap and GenAI and AWS solution elevated the contact center experience to what customers expect, while also significantly identifying areas to cut internal costs. The multi-year strategy resulted in $25M in traceable annual cost savings and $61M in projected revenue lift.
The modernized contact center and chatbot shifted customers to self-service through proactive email and SMS updates, deflecting 975k inbound customer service calls and emails, which translates to a 39% reduction.
Perficient is an Amazon Connect Delivery Designation Partner. We brought the experience and capabilities required to help our client digitally transform to meet ever-evolving customer expectations while realizing significant operational savings.
