Customer Experience: Tokopedia’s Telescope for Winning Our Customer’s Hearts
Like all other aspects of business, customer experience continues to evolve throughout the years. In the early days, customers with questions or concerns about a product or service would have to make a phone call to the company’s call center. The resolution of a question or complaint heavily relies on the customer service agents’ knowledge.
Today, customer service is so much more than handling customer complaints and questions, it is also about the overall experience. Apart from contact center agents, Tokopedia’s customer experience team also expanded its function towards a more strategic and analytic path. To get a wider and deeper view of what our customer experience friends do, let’s take a closer look.
Scope of work of the Customer Experience — Insights & Analytics Team
Raihan Al Fauzan, CX-Insights & Analytics Senior Lead at Tokopedia, is one of the Nakama who witnessed the evolution of customer experience in Tokopedia. Of course, we should thank technology and other technological innovations for this evolution. Now, the team has four main scopes:
1. Obtain Feedback to Drive Customer Satisfaction
Listening to your customers’ feedback is extremely important. We asked Raihan to rate the importance on a scale of 1–10, and he immediately answered 11. Customers’ feedback is important for two reasons: to increase their satisfaction and obtain feedback for the company to achieve its mission.
The two reasons above complement each other perfectly. Raihan and his team operate the voice of customer program to monitor our customer satisfaction rate towards our products, services, and features. Then, the feedback will be processed into insights and data to be passed on to business units for product improvements.
Not only will it produce good insights for the business units, but feedback can also drive the company forward. Without customers’ feedback, there is no possible way of knowing whether we’re on the right track. As our products and services are there to help and improve our customer’s daily life, every stone should not be left unturned. A single bad experience can adhere to their expectations and make an everlasting perception, which eventually can drive them or other customers away from our company.
Moreover, the team also delivers a session named Make-It-Better Forum to facilitate business units (product, business, and tech) to directly meet with our users to share their experience towards the products/features.
2. Benchmarking
Everybody has their own way of doing something, and some might do it better than others. During a time when we constantly compete with each other, we have to stay humble and learn from each other’s experiences. Therefore, the Tokopedia Care team often conducts benchmarking sessions with other companies to discuss each of their customer experience practices. Benchmarking is a great way to expand our knowledge of innovations, technology, strategies, and tactics that we otherwise might not have known beforehand.
3. Provide Insights by Monitoring Metrics
On a daily basis, the team aims to provide near real-time insights and proactive alerts, which is crucial for several aspects of operations and as part of our crisis control. The insights or feedback can be obtained by monitoring internal-facing or external-facing metrics or channels.
For external-facing channels, the team will refer to complain tickets received, Tokopedia app reviews, and metrics such as interaction traffic, CSAT (Customer Satisfaction) score, and complaint ratio. Monitoring social media is also a great way to gain insights. The team uses social listening tools to collect scattered comments throughout platforms, brand mentions, or other hidden and implicit mentions related to Tokopedia. In addition, social listening tools also help Tokopedia to predict trends among customers, which can later be implemented within the company.
Insights do not only come from our buyers and sellers, but also from our Nakama. Internally, the CX team monitors a metric called eNPS, a scoring system designed to measure employee satisfaction and loyalty within their organizations.
4. Maintain Quality of Service
In the fourth scope, Raihan and his team use quality parameters, live monitoring, and several quality support initiatives to ensure the service quality is up to par. The particular scope mainly concerns the Customer-First Squad (CFS), a term used to call our CS agents. One of the ways to maintain the quality of CFS services is by running simulations to determine loopholes in CFS’ knowledge and broken service processes.
The simulation is called Voice of Customer Day, where the team and CFS team will participate in an end-to-end role play, customer and agent, to test different case scenarios. The main objective of this activity is to find loopholes, broken processes, ping-pong journeys, errors, and more. By doing this activity frequently, the team can anticipate or track errors quickly to prevent issues during service.
More Than Solving Customer’s Issues
In the interview, Raihan expressed that there’s a misconception about what the Customer Service team does. Traditionally, the CS team is only dedicated and associated with handling and solving customer complaints. If a crisis arises or there’s a problem with a product or feature, the CS team is perceived as the team that is obligated to clean up the mess and be the frontline to answer customer’s inquiries.
Now, customer experience is more important than ever, the team is a collaborator of the great work within Tokopedia, and we need someone to closely monitor whether our products or services have met their expectations. This is when the Customer Service team transforms into a Customer Experience team. To be a master in this role, Raihan notes that each member should possess these 4 characteristics: be a good listener, have the ability to prioritize, be consistent for continuous improvement, and be persistent.
The team would have to actively listen to each one of our customer’s feedback, opinion, views, and perception. Through hundreds of feedback, the team will process it into insights and pick ones to prioritize. From there, the journey towards continuous improvement begins, and the team should remain consistent. However, not only consistent for continuous improvement but also consistent in persevering through challenges, ever-evolving customer expectations, wants, and needs.
This shows how much commitment the team has to have to serve our customers and help the company win their hearts. The Customer Experience team should be involved in all aspects of the business for their credibility as strategic thinkers and advisors. Just like a pirate’s telescope, the team will help other functions to predict issues, determine flaws, and compile feedback before a negative situation occurs.
Raihan emphasized that without our customers’ feedback, opinion, view, or perception about Tokopedia, our company would only stand completely still, not knowing where to go, what to improve, or what to maintain. In the future, price and product are not the main differentiators of a company, but the experience will be the reason behind a customer’s loyalty. With a blend of human touch, technology, data, and, of course, the persistence of our Customer Experience team, the journey to win our customers’ hearts will be a smooth sailing ride.
