Workforce Management and Customer Insights 360 – driving enhanced customer experience

Innovation Nation: Hello Abhishek, Amruta. Thanks for joining me to talk about the technology behind Capgemini’s Digital Customer Operations offer. Abhishek, let’s start with you. What role do our Workforce Management (WFM) professionals play in improving relationships between an organisation’s people and the customers it works with?

Abhishek Barat: Capgemini’s Workforce Management (WFM) experts work across seven key disciplines, including: forecasting, capacity, planning, staff scheduling, activity management, attendance and adherence, real-time management, and performance tracking.

Everything we do here kickstarts at the forecasting and planning stage. We work with our clients during this period to set objectives that will drive all their efforts moving forward – regardless of the metrics being used. This collaboration and objective clarity delivers greater transparency to our clients – from executive decisions to decisions made on the factory floor – leading to increased proficiency, efficiency, productivity, and effectiveness.

Our WFM experts also enable us to detect production issues early, notify the relevant parties, and resolve them quickly before any business disruptions occur. This ensures that our clients become more sustainable and see real business growth through increased collaboration and transparency.

…and how is the WFM platform changing customer operations?

Abhishek Barat: The fact that our WFM processes are automated and integrated makes life much easier for our clients. Product plans are now set automatically, with any changes or updates being handled by automated programs.

The value this automation and integration brings includes enabling our clients to see exactly what resources are available to them in real time. For example, in a call centre, our WFM processes can help our clients see average handling times (AHT) and service-level outcomes, while also enabling them to run day-end, what-if scenarios as they are happening or become available. This enables our clients to plan their agents’ workloads for the next few hours, days, or even weeks – depending on the past behavior of these metrics.

Amruta, turning to Customer Insights 360 – how does the platform work and what impact is it having on customer operations?

Amruta Maheshwari: Organisations already know that data has tremendous value. Our Customer Insights 360 platform consolidates internal, external, and third-party data to deliver intuitive customer visualisations. This helps our clients’ product development teams and sales and marketing teams determine how to better connect with their consumers, and what decisions they should take to ensure they’re offering their customers the products they are looking for.

Backed by an entire suite of digital enablers, our Customer Insights 360 platform enables marketing and analytics teams to industrialise their products and continuously improve their processes, which significantly improves their time-to-market.

Finally, the move towards digital platforms has encouraged more automated market research than ever before. This makes strategising easier and helps our clients deliver products their target customers actually want. This is having a significantly positive impact on ROI, achieved through the accurate customer feedback our Customer Insights 360 platform provides.

Can you give us an example of this?

Amruta Maheshwari: Absolutely. Capgemini recently enabled a global consumer goods company to reduce digital analytical costs globally, manage product volumes better, keep data collection and insights generation consistent, improve marketing and product planning analytics, and keep track of consumer preferences.

To achieve this, Capgemini implemented an industrialised, offshore model into the client’s way of working to give them greater cost benefit capabilities, while catering to the business needs of their different brand teams.

We also established offshore delivery centers for them, created multi-lingual teams to support their non-English markets, and implemented processes and templates that delivered standard reports across their entire business. Finally, we also implemented more automated and standardised processes for delivering volume, velocity, and value across their brand.

This led to almost 900 consumer insight briefs delivered, a 30–50% reduction in turnaround time for different types of customer insight reports, and more than 100,000 keywords analysed to decode consumer intent across categories.

Finally, I have one last question for you both. Abhishek, how will the WFM platform evolve in the next 3–5 years?

Abhishek Barat: With automation and integration efforts increasing year-on-year, it’s possible that in 3–5 years every aspect of workforce management will be available through a single AI-based tool that will need minimal human supervision to operate.

Intelligent bots will also become key insight drivers for many of our clients – answering customer questions, and leveraging this data to generate in-depth reports about what their customers actually want. Real-time bots will also play an integral role in managing adherence, activity management, and performance reporting. This is the next step for workforce management in my opinion.

… and Amruta, what’s the future of Customer Insights 360?

Amruta Maheshwari: Over the next few years, organisations will get their data in near real-time through AI- and machine learning-based technologies. This will lead to customers being integrated into all decision-making, making it easier for our clients to give their customers what they want.

Abhishek, Amruta, thank you for your time today. This has been a really interesting discussion. With this technology in place, it’s clear our Digital Customer Operations offer is a significant driving force in building and improving relationships between our clients and their customers.

Abhishek Barat is part of the Global DCO Solutions team, supporting the team in actioning solutions from a WFM perspective. He has experience working on all the domains of WFM, and acts as a WFM strategic consultant for accounts where WFM support and expertise is required.

Amruta Maheshwari is leads the Advanced Analytics Practice and Intelligent Command Centre for Capgemini’s Business Services globally. She is involved in pre-sales, solutions, go-to market, and capability enhancements for the practice. She leads a team of techno-functional experts who deliver comprehensive analytics’ solutions across domains that impact strategic business decision-making for client CXOs.