The Evolution to Continuously Win Customer’s Heart
How Customer-Obsessed Culture Bring Us to the Next Level of Customer Care
Customer care is the new marketing.
The quote is very simple, short, yet super true. Why is customer care ‘the new marketing’?
If you consider consumer behavior and their patterns nowadays, you will realize that they started to lose their faith in gimmicky and overstated mass marketing campaigns. They intended to give more trust in what they experience directly with the company and what their friends, family, or the people they listen to have experienced.
So what does it mean?
It means that every best experience you create for customers on solving their problem is marketing. This is why in Tokopedia, we, too, aspire to be known not only for our products, but also for the services that are delivered by customer-obsessed people.
From that point on, the Customer Excellence team is born.
The Customer Excellence Team of Tokopedia
For a decade, Tokopedia believes that ‘Focus on Consumer’ is one of the most important things that have to be embedded in our DNA besides ‘Growth Mindset’ and ‘Make it Happen, Make it Better’, as this DNA can hugely affect the way to win customers’ hearts.
In ten years, customer expectations were growing rapidly.
Unlike ten years ago, customers today expect immediate 24/7 response. If anything, they won’t hesitate to publicly express their dissatisfaction towards a certain brand. As a company that puts customers at the center of everything, Tokopedia empowers Tokopedia Care through the rebirth of the Operations Team as the Customer Excellence Team.
Talking about bringing Tokopedia Care to the next level is far beyond giving a faster response to the customers. It involves a long process of developing customer experience insights and strategy, translating that into a memorable customer engagement, followed by the ongoing improvement in product and services from closed-loop feedback — and the Customer Excellence team is the one that handles the end-to-end process.
The Customer Excellence Team consists of three prominent roles: Customer Experience, Service Excellence, and Customer Engagement.
Let’s start with the core of the circle of Customer Excellence Team: Customer Experience. Providing the best service and creating the best experience for Tokopedia users cannot be done without strong analytics, research, communication, culture alignment, and technology; and that’s what you will find in Customer Experience. In supporting the Customer Excellence Team, strong insights and analytics are regularly provided for further improvements to give excellent products and services for Tokopedia users.
You cannot create the best experience for customers if you are not highly engaged with them, so Customer Experience is also responsible for the communication strategy, the branding, and the service culture. The last important thing in Customer Experience is the user journey and technology innovation. They are continuously innovating to improve the user journey and Tokopedia Care’s technology to serve the customers, including Tokopedia Care’s self-service and smart digital assistant.
In the middle layer, there is Service Excellence. They are the one who provides the best enabler needed by all front-liners to deliver world-class interactions with customers and assuring the best quality level and happiness are delivered for both front-liners and end-users.
Service Excellence Team consistently improves service delivery, service and people development, and all technology innovation to enable each individual in customer care to deliver only the best experience to customers. They are also responsible for establishing a sustainable and beneficial partnership for Tokopedia Care by driving strong governance, partnership with BPO/other tech companies, and also financially and operationally excellent operations.
In supporting the Customer Excellence Team, Service Excellence also provides knowledge excellence with the focus on people, processes, and documentation. They are also continuously improving user and front-liners experience with Artificial Intelligence (AI) to provide an effective, intelligent, and easy-to-use knowledge base. We can say that Service Excellence is our magical ‘enabler’, since they provide all the capabilities needed to make everything inside the Customer Excellence Team deliver only the best.
In the outermost layer, Customer Engagement is part of the team who will be directly involved in customer handling. The goal of this team is not only to meet the customer’s expectations and desires, but also to get emotionally connected with them. They will work with partners as the first layer of contact and provide the SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Oriented) solution for Tokopedia users through various correspondence channels, such as In-Apps Email, Social Media, Live Chat, Dispute Resolution, Outbound Call, and Service Experience Centers at Tokopedia Care Tower as the first walk-in center for Indonesian Technology Company.
They are also responsible for the second layer of escalation to solve more complex issues, coordinating and working closely with all business units (product & tech) in Tokopedia, and recover in a fast and accurate manner for every single service disruption. Surely, the most important role for them is to help the first and second layers in managing the issues from daily customer interactions in both reactive and proactive manners, covering the metrics perspective, customer relationship management model, customer communications, until excellent crisis management.
The complexity of the Customer Excellence Team’s structure is a big proof of how serious Tokopedia is in living up the ‘Focus on Consumer’ DNA, as delivering the memorable experience for customers is a long and winding journey that demands a very strong commitment from top to bottom.
Building the Digital Customer Service
Tokopedia Care is the only customer care in the technology industry who is implementing a full-stack Digital Customer Service. Although we’re no longer focused on building traditional channels such as inbound call, the outbound call capability remains integrated to complete the digital channels solution delivery.
As an Indonesian technology company, Tokopedia keeps transforming into a Super-Ecosystem where AI technology becomes the priority on every Tokopedia’s initiative, including how Customer Excellence Team builds Tokopedia Care service capability. The Digital Customer Service aims to provide a faster, efficient, yet seamless experience to the society, especially to Tokopedia users in getting quick solutions through Tokopedia Care digital omni-channel.
Endless innovation from Customer Excellence Team also brought Tokopedia Care to win a national and international competition in 2019 in our very first attempt:
1 — Top Ranking Performer Contact Center World
- Asia-Pacific Region in Phuket, Thailand: Gold Medal for Best in Customer Service and Best Self Service Technology Categories.
- Global Level in Barcelona, Spain: Gold Medal for Best Customer Service, Best Use of Self Service Technology, and Best Technology Innovation Categories.
- Dream Team Award, an award for a company who invests in training, education, and career plan to support staff development.
2 — The Best Contact Center Indonesia (held by Indonesia Contact Center Association)
- Platinum Award on Best Writing, Digital Media, Technology Innovation, and Employee Engagement Categories.
- Gold Award on Contact Center Operations and Customer Experience Categories.
- Top 10 Winners from 52 participants.
3 — Customer Experience Asia in Singapore
- Get a Silver Medal for Best Omni-Channel.
4 — Contact Center Week Asia Excellence Awards in Singapore
- The finalist for Best in Class Contact Center Over 100 Seats, Best In Class Digital Contact Center, and Most Innovative Contact Center of the Year Categories.
Going forward, the Customer Excellence Team will provide more and more innovation to continuously win customer’s hearts and be a reliable best friend for Tokopedia customers, as we believe it is the ultimate awards that we must win, and on that point we can be the Company’s great differentiators.
The vision is clear. We can be who we are today not only because of our products, but also our services.
