Amdocs leads deeper dive into digital

MANILA, Philippines – Foraying into the digital domain is now neither novel nor optional. Companies who refuse to enter its doors risk irrelevance and a veritable fall from the face of the earth brought about by irate customers, outmoded business practices, and such.

Amdocs underscores the need to embrace the format, and provide businesses and customers alike with digital solutions.

By the company’s reckoning (published in a report), the sectors of banking and financial services, retail, video, and entertainment have greatly transformed the customer experience by embracing digital. In turn, customers are “moving to an online digital experience… taking control of their interactions.”

The same paper cites a study of the MIT Center for Digital Business in conjunction with Cap Gemini Research. The numbers are telling. “Business that embrace digital benefit more than their counterparts with 26 percent higher profitability than their average industry competitor,” the report says. In addition, these companies reported 12 percent higher valuation and a nine-percent increase in revenue as they employed “efficiencies to extract more out of their existing physical capacity.”

However, numbers also paint a sobering reality. There is a pressing need to bridge the gap between the old and utopian digital new.

Amdocs sales director for Asia Pacific Raghuvir Ramanadhan shares in a press conference that only 20 percent of customers complete a transaction when using self-service tools. In fact, 49 percent start with self-service, only to be frustrated and thwarted, so they end up calling a contact center. Surveys additionally reveal that a whopping 81 percent of customers do not feel they are getting a personalized experience when reaching out to service providers.

What’s holding back the “digital consistency,” observes Ramanadhan, is a myriad of problems: complexity or difficulty of use, inconsistency across channels, absence of support across multiple channels, high rates of online order fallout, lack of customer intimacy, and siloed IT systems.

In this age of increasing ubiquity for connected mobile devices such as smartphones, this simply cannot be. So, even as telecom lags owing to inadequate infrastructure, it behooves companies to go digital. “People (will) see you as somebody who’s moving forward, and as someone with foresight,” Ramanadhan underscores.

Amdocs lists significant trends shaping the digital domain requiring companies to shape up or ship out.

First, the advent of the “mobile first” age sees a “proliferation of devices from smartphones to tablets.” This demands the buildup of software primarily for these mobile gadgets first, then only “subsequently make adjustments” for the desktop format to ensure a consistent experience across channels.

Gone are the days of cookie-cutter customer service. Today’s savvy customers expect a more personalized experience online to be able to “shop, solve problems, and self-manage their accounts online.” Not only that, consumers demand that service providers “know who they are when they log in,” expecting only relevant content, products, and services to be pitched their way.

With the earnest arrival of the digital age, the customer has truly become king. Amdocs observes a “shift towards an outside-in, customer-centric view” focused on user experience. Instead of a historical causality of internal systems and processes determining customer interaction, the “onus is now increasingly falling on the organization to adapt to the customer’s needs and expectations.”

Next, the results of a study show that so-called millennials (born from 1980 to 2004) are becoming the largest consumer segment (at 25 percent). This is a segment “with zero tolerance for slow responses and too many clicks…. they care only about experience and don’t think twice before changing service providers.” This should light a fire under service providers.

Today’s business landscape also calls for enterprises to be agile – to swiftly roll out new services and address the competition in as little time as possible.

Amdocs says its portfolio of services “simplify the customer experience, harness the data explosion, stay ahead with new services, and improve operational efficiency.”

The company recently launched its Amdocs Service Design and Create, a network functions/virtualization/software-defined networking solution for service providers who wish to attain service agility. The product enables the design, test, and launch of new network services in weeks rather than months (while) meeting expectations of customers influenced by the “pace of over-the-top (OTT) providers’ service innovation.”

Replying to a question from The STAR, Ramanadhan clarifies that today’s service providers actually possess customer data such as family, age, social media habits, video preferences, packages, and promotions. However, these are not effectively harnessed or readily available in one dashboard. Digital commerce needs are therefore not being addressed or met adequately. Companies can benefit from being able to “monitor lifecycle events and understand the full customer context.”

He adds: “The question is, by having this information, can (they) launch new services? Can (they) offer more?”

The Amdocs executive also allays concerns aired by this writer that the company’s solutions might undercut the considerable contact center workforce. “It’s not taking away something, but making it more effective,” he insists, and continues that the solution is about putting a stop to “a huge productivity loss… (call center agents) could be serving so many other callers.

“It improves productivity, and increases effectiveness of your call because you also don’t want to hang around the phone for 45 minutes. You want to be able to complete the transaction as fast as you can,” Ramanadhan says.

Aside from better intuition in aid of customer service and proactivity, the Amdocs solution indeed makes sense in a world with a glut of information often untapped and unused from a business standpoint. And besides, any timesaving, effort-saving measure is always a welcome idea.

With over three decades of experience and 22,000 employees in over 80 countries, Amdocs last year netted revenues of $3.6 billion.