Introduction and challenges
Customer care has been considered a “necessary evil” for a long time: its highly operational processes must deal with a large number of exceptions and special cases, making it difficult to standardise operating methods and tools. The increasing speed of product catalogue renewal, the significant changes in customer behaviour (rapid online purchases by customers with high expectations), the diversification of sales channels and their digitalisation, and increasingly volatile demand are now forcing the downstream supply chain and more particularly customer service to develop their model and tools.
Improving execution agility by speeding up end-to-end processes, enabling management flows by facilitating visibility, and sharing information with the customer (internal or external) are now a necessity. A number of initiatives make it possible to achieve operational excellence: process standardisation, more efficient tools (from APS systems to process robotisation), refocusing teams on value-added tasks and processing high-value exceptions.
How we can help
Argon & Co supports its clients in improving their customer service:
- Improvement of shortage management processes and customer priorities
- Standardisation of customer care processes
- Promotion of a Lean office approach to increase efficiency and reduce process cycle times
- Review of the customer care organisation and its interfaces: roles and responsibilities, skills management
- Robotisation of administrative processes (RPA) and re-orientation of the customer care taskforce toward higher value tasks
- Implementation of control tower processes and tools for sharing visibility with internal and external customers
- Improvement of “after-sales” processes (handling of complaints, management of return flows, after-sales service management, etc.)
- Implementation of logistics collaboration initiatives with customers (in connection with the supply chain and sales functions)
- Implementation of management indicators and dashboards
- Development of the service offer (implementation of higher value-added services, and development of customer personalisation in logistics operations)