Riding the Surge: How Exotel Manages Customer Service Waves

Surges, periods of dramatically increased usage, are challenging for service providers. For brands with large consumer bases, such as utilities, travel, banking, and e-commerce, surges during events like marketing campaigns or power outages can impact their image and customer experience. Proactive planning for these surges is crucial.

Organizations often struggle with two primary resources during surges:

1. Human Agents: Finite and costly, making scalability difficult.
2. Telecom Infrastructure: Physical lines that can be underutilized, resulting in fixed costs without ROI.

Industry Use Cases

1. Online Streaming During Cricket Season: Fans face access issues, leading to dissatisfaction if they miss crucial moments due to connection problems and when they are trying to reach the service provider. 
2. Power Outages During Heat Waves: Customers need timely updates from utility companies during outages. Lack of communication can damage the company’s reputation more than the outage itself.

Technology Playbook for Improved Customer Experience

In my experience, the typical technology playbook (will write about the processes in a separate article) to improve customer experience is broken into the following 3 stages and result in about 25-40% improvement in NPS across brands and use cases:

1- Proactive Communication: Inform the customer, thus letting them know you are aware of the issue and are working in a time-bound manner to resolve it, including guiding them to digital platforms (app, website):

» Outbound Messaging: Send targeted messages via SMS, RCS, WhatsApp, or email.

»Voice Broadcasts: Use automated calls for critical issues.

2- Inbound Call Management: having shaped the demand, implement a waterfall model for call handling:

» IVR Systems: Provide customer-specific information and options.

» Chatbot Deflection: Use GenAI-based chatbots or voicebots to handle queries.

3- Enhanced Live Agent Support: give them all possible information beforehand about the customer

» Live Chat Agents: Manage multiple chats with proactive information.

» Live Voice Agents: Ensure agents have all the necessary information to reduce average handling time.

» Callback Messages: Use automated responses and ensure timely follow-up.

Balancing Technology and Empathy

Striking a balance between automated solutions and live agents is key. Empathy remains crucial, especially in training contact center agents to handle customer interactions consistently and empathetically.

By the way, these solutions can fundamentally help create a 24×7 customer engagement platform.

Exotel’s Role

Exotel has been working with multiple customers across various industries to manage these peaks, providing greater capacity to handle extraordinary demands. By leveraging Exotel’s solutions, organizations can ensure a seamless customer experience even during high-demand periods, maintaining service quality and customer satisfaction.  And often, they are able to convert these into opportunities to shine with their customers rather than just address this as a basic duty. 

By adopting these strategies, organizations can significantly enhance their surge management capabilities, ensuring better customer experiences and more efficient use of resources.