Sales and commercial operations: Customer service

No question about it, superior customer experience (CX) is the differentiator between the consumer goods companies that excel and those that stagnate. But with online orders spiking, demand fluctuating, and customer service centers working to capacity, delighting customers is getting harder – and more expensive – every day.

Inefficient processes across the customer order lifecycle increase cost to serve and impact lead times, harming CX. If you don't have a clear view of the end-to-end order lifecycle – from orders through to delivery and invoicing – you won't understand your customers' pain points. Manually handling exceptions slows down processes and adds to the problem. And without integrated systems across departments, you won't get the accurate metrics you need on fill rates, errors, holdups, and lead times that will help you manage demand or interpret trends.

Another test of customer loyalty is how easily they can interact with your company. They won't use self-service options if the system is clunky and slow. And you won't get repeat business if their orders, issues, and queries take too long to process or resolve when they speak to your staff. Yet by one estimate, 65% of orders are touched five times before they're processed.

Other figures suggest that companies are losing up to 2% of revenue because of unfulfilled or lost orders and as much as 3% when unhappy customers abandon them. You need standardized systems that deliver clean, centralized, useful data to accurately measure and improve CX while keeping costs in line.

Our sales and commercial management customer service offering tackles all of these challenges. We take a holistic people-process-technology approach to measuring and managing CX. And we focus on the intersections in the order management process where mistakes occur to identify and resolve customer issues before they escalate.

First, we conduct a complete assessment of your order processes to understand the current state of your business and correctly segment your customers. Through process mining, monitoring systems, and establishing alerts, we gather analytics that provide insights to balance customer satisfaction with total cost of returns. Then we develop a roadmap to put you on the path of transformation.

The heart of our offering is Cora OrderAssist an artificial intelligence (AI)-based order management platform that embeds business rule-driven decision-making. It forms the basis for a modular, scalable, and interconnected set of technologies that increase customer loyalty and improve productivity. It consolidates data across the value chain, delivering actionable insights so you can ensure that goods are where they need to be, on time, every time. It also enables faster, more intelligent exception management, provides real-time visibility into the supply chain, and boosts self-serve options by improving customer interactions and reducing the cost of managing customer queries.

Our customer experience, sales experience, complexity, and risk (CSCR^TM) framework comprehensively measures CX and provides prescriptive insights to standardize and automate order lifecycle management. It analyzes data from internal systems and voice-of-customer inputs to spot cross-sell and upsell opportunities.

On top of this, our omnichannel end-to-end CX management system uses next-generation solutions, such as machine learning and conversational AI, to analyze channel effectiveness.

Our solution can run all order entry and fulfillment activities, including validations and exceptions management. And 360⁰ customer journey mapping identifies gaps in their overall experience to solve problems before they occur.

We can also run customer service operations for our clients – wherever they're based – to add headcount and digital expertise.

Companies that use our customer service solution generally see a 5–10% improvement in CX and revenue growth of up to 5% through cross-selling and upselling initiatives. They experience renewed customer loyalty, too, with more than 95% revenue retention.

Cora OrderAssist consistently delivers substantial business benefits – vastly improved touchless order entry and self-serve order processing through a data-driven CX dashboard and action engine. Our data engagement platform also provides end-to-end order visibility.

What's more, our CSCR framework standardizes and elevates the end customer and sales experience while reducing process complexity and risk.