Self-service Customer Care App

One platform for increasing revenues, decreasing the costs of customer support and improving customer experience. Example of A1 Telekom Austria Group Case Study.

About the Self-service Customer Care Apps

Why develop the Self-service Customer Care App for the customers

This article will present the benefits of Self-service Customer Care Apps and explain why they truly are a unique platform for increasing the revenues, decreasing the costs of customer support and improving the customer experience.

As a starting point, the following table shows the effects of Self-service Customer Care Apps on money, time and customer satisfaction on the example of telecom companies:

Table 1: Effects of Self-service Customer Care Apps on money, time and customer satisfaction

Money

The data that can be collected via the app for each individual user enables the companies to better target the audience for cross-sell opportunities and to get better at up-selling. Moreover, as the offers can automatically be more personalized, overall subscription upgrades and conversion rates increase which leads to higher profits and better business results. And last but not least, Self-service Customer Care App lowers the call center customer support costs because users can easily resolve most of their problems via the app by themselves or find the answer to their questions within the app. This decreases the need for physical stores, call center services, and agent involvement, and therefore lowers the costs that telecom companies spend on the call center customer support and physical stores. Moreover, if customers don’t find a satisfying solution within the app and want to speak in person with customer support, the app can be a rich source of relevant insights for the call agents which will contribute to the increase of the first contact resolution rates (FCR) and decrease of the costs for call center support. As McKinsey study shows on the example of a large US-based energy producer which spends $200 million a year on the call center support and receives about 20% repeated calls, by eliminating only this repeated calls, the company would yield annual savings of about 40 million dollars.

Time

Self-service Customer Care App supports faster transactions by enabling users to pay the service, upgrade their current subscription plans and top-up their account — all within one application. This speeds up the cash flow for the companies and improves the customers’ satisfaction because they can buy or cancel the service when they want to, wherever they are — they have full control over it, and this is what customers love and value. Furthermore, through the data collected within the app, the companies get priceless insights about the options that could be offered additionally, they get it in real-time, and companies love that because timely placed offers are the most converted offers. Interestingly, according to Fonolo and Forrester, 75% of customers think the option of a call-back is “highly appealing” when reaching out to the call center support, and would use it rather than wait on the line for the agent to pick up and serve them. According to Accenture, 91% of customers are frustrated that they have to contact a company multiple times for the same reason, 90 percent by being put on hold for a long time and 89 percent by having to repeat their issue to multiple representatives.

Customers don’t like to spend a lot of time talking to the call center agent or explaining their issue over and over again to different agents, just the opposite, they appreciate the companies that value their time and in return they reward them with their loyalty and trust. This is also supported by a study made by CCW Digital, from 2019 that shows that customers identify first contact resolution as their number 1 priority when interacting with organizations.

Customer satisfaction

All mentioned above — data-driven personalized offers, personalized interface, quick problem resolution, sending relevant information to individual customers or particular segments leads to authentic customer experience, increases their loyalty to the brand and results in higher customer retention rates. In today’s dynamic environment where customers expect high quality and technology advanced services, companies must offer them innovative and creative products and services in order to grow. The statistics from Microsoft’s State of Global Customer Service Report shows that 59% of customers say that they have higher expectations for customer support than they had a year ago. 70% of global consumers have a favorable view of brands that contact them with proactive customer service notifications. 90% of customers believe that organizations should provide the ability for customers to provide feedback. Moreover, In-app Net Promoter Score (NPS) and Customer Effort Score (CES) provide valuable insight for companies in the creation of new and innovative products and services and contribute to the improvement of their overall ratings and official NPS & CES results. “Users expect that their needs are properly understood and addressed at any of the potential touchpoints and that they are offered an authentic and personal dialogue with a brand at any time. Hence, digital products need to offer a convincing user experience in order to overcome the problem of low involvement, reach consumers, create sustainable enthusiasm for products, and make users become loyal with the brand. Seeing digital products not only as carriers of functions and information but as brand ambassadors, which intend to trigger certain unconscious associations and emotions is hence an important precondition to winning the battle for the consumers’ attention. (van de Sand, Frison, Zotz, Riener, Holl, 2019)

Custom vs. Off-the-shelf Self-service Customer Care Apps

As a custom software development company, we promote custom solutions tailored specifically to each individual client, but of course, custom isn’t always for everyone. There are companies that can work perfectly well with the off-the-shelf solutions, but when it comes to large multinational companies with complex demands, companies that are on top, market leaders and innovators, custom solution is the best, if not the only way to go. As said in one Clutch article: “There is not much space to leverage off-the-shelf software because your competitors are using the same product. They know exactly what you can achieve with it and what your restrictions are.”

Below are a few main differences between custom solution and off-the-shelf Self-service Customer Care solution that supports this statement.

• Although personalization with the off-the-shelf solutions is viable to some extent, it is usually very limited and can’t support comprehensive needs of large multinational companies, while custom made solutions offer limitless personalization options.
• With ready-made solutions companies are forced to implement a limited set of functionalities and can’t steer the app in the direction they want or implement a functionality that the users ask for — this is narrowed down to the defined set of the functionalities that the ready-made solutions offer. Custom made solutions, on the other hand, are tailored specifically to one unique client, and feature set and app extensions are (almost) limitless.
• While ready-made solutions have limited integration options, custom solutions have endless opportunities for integration with 3rd party systems.

Using the leverage

Companies that benefit the most from creating a custom Self-service Customer Care App are large multinational companies that can apply the economy of scope and economy of size concepts to their business. Typical examples of such companies are large international groups with large user bases such as telecom groups, insurance groups, internationally present banks or logistic groups.

By developing a Common Based Technology Self-service Customer Care App, groups can use their size and width to maximize the advantage for the whole Group, and not just its one part, market or brand. Common Based Technology enables several apps to use one code base and therefore developing an app on a group level, for several different markets, opens the door for groups to be more cost effective and fully meet the needs of each particular part, market or brand of the group. For example, since Telekom Austria Group built their customer care app on the Common Based Technology, they could use one code base and introduce 7 unique client apps to the customers across the 7 different markets, without the need to build a new app from scratch every time.

A1 Telekom Austria Group Case Study

About the client

The Telekom Austria Group which offers communication solutions, payment and entertainment services as well as integrated business solutions, generated sales of EUR 4.47 billion in fiscal year 2018. Almost 19,000 A1 employees and state-of-the-art broadband infrastructure enable digital lifestyle and allow customers, companies and devices to network anywhere, anytime. As the European Unit of América Móvil, one of the world’s largest mobile operators, A1 Telekom Austria Group is based in Vienna and is a leading provider of digital services and communications solutions in Central and Eastern Europe with more than 24 million customers, currently operating in seven countries: Austria, Bulgaria, Croatia, Belarus and Slovenia, the Republic of Serbia and North Macedonia.

A1 Self-service Customer Care App

Our cooperation with A1 Telekom Austria Group started with the procurement process where A1 Telekom Austria Group recognized Undabot as the best partner for the development of their strategic project — the self-care platform that would truly enable the “develop once, deploy many” approach.

Today, our cooperation with A1 Telekom Austria Group has expanded and we are happy to provide an end-to-end service to A1 Telekom Austria Group, including:

• Solution design
• UI/UX Design
• Development of Content Management System
• Middleware development
• Android application development
• iOS application development
• Frontend development
• Integrations with 3rd party systems
• Technical consulting services
• Consulting support for external API development
• API testing support

Our development journey started with a two day workshop at our office in which all key stakeholders participated and we agreed on the best cooperation model. We managed the project with 3 different multilingual teams from Austria, Belarus and Serbia and in the process we made some friendships as well. After the initial kick-offs, we sketched the solution design and the architecture of the app, started with the UI/UX design and continued with programing, testing and optimization. The collaboration with A1 was challenging and extensive with some unexpected developments on the go, but we can proudly say that we have overcome all obstacles and successfully launched the first version of the Android and iOS application on the Belarus market in August 2019.

In January 2020, only 6 months after the launch, we can say that the app is actively used by over 170.000 and 26.000 of the users are actively using the app on a daily basis.

From more than 100 features that we have implemented, we selected the top 10 features in A1 Self-service Customer Care App:

1. Top up prepaid account
2. Purchasing new packages and add-ons
3. Purchased service activation
4. Overview of the current tariff status and data consumption
5. List of bills
6. Account switcher
7. Widget
8. Push notifications
9. Customer support help articles
10. Authentication with biometrics

The most interesting and most used feature from the user perspective is Product Details feature which provides detailed information about the products and services purchased by a customer.

Besides that, the customers can also see a visual presentation of their data consumption and can be alerted if they exceeded a particular threshold.

Widget — the most wanted feature requested by users. Currently used by 11.500 users.

By special user’s request, we also developed and implemented the Widget functionality which can be customized by the customers and enables them to see the most important information on their smartphone homescreen, without needing to enter the app.

Also developed and implemented at user’s request is the Account Switch functionality which enables users to overview the status of their complete portfolio which can include the unlimited number of fixed and mobile lines and subscriptions, all within one app and with one app account.

Push notifications can be sent to multiple MSISDNs at once, to only one specific MSISDN or to all the customers on a specific platform (Android or iOS). Push notifications also have the deeplink option that can take the customer on a specific screen in the app.

Under the hood

What makes our solution so different from the others? Except for love and passion that we’ve put into this project, we have also implemented some really cool technology. We’ll list some of if:

• CBT technology that enables several different apps to use one code base which increases the project cost efficiency on the group level
• Custom API change management that enables A1 Telekom to switch on and off some parts of the app without having to release the new update of the app. For example, with this option A1 can change the language of the app without releasing the new update of the app.
• Feature flags that enable different feature set presentation on different markets. For example, the feature requested by Belarus users, the account switch, isn’t needed on the Serbian market because all their services come in packages. Therefore, this feature is flagged and not visible for Serbian customers, but it is fully functional for Belarus customers.
• Atomic and molecular design is used to increase our productivity and optimize the UI/UX design phase.

The app continues to increase in the number of features, to improve customer experience and to expand to new markets.

Thanks to Ana Šeler for the design!

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