Rising demand boosts need for semiconductor firm to build integrated customer experience

Insights

• The semiconductor industry is experiencing high demand due to technological advancements, prompting the need for improved customer service.
• A leading semiconductor manufacturer’s legacy customer support system led to long resolution times prompting it to adopt technology transformation.
• Transitioning to a modern customer experience center significantly improved efficiency for the company.
• Automation-first was established as the first principle to be leveraged for all opportunities of process improvement at the customer experience center.
• Adding more features to the customer experience platform, such as automated customer engagement and a comprehensive learning portal, further enhanced customer satisfaction.

The semiconductor industry is experiencing a substantial increase in demand, driven by generative AI applications, requirements from the automotive industry, 5G, and internet of things (IoT) technologies. This surge in demand is great news for the manufacturers, but it also highlights the need for improved customer service.

Historically, as a business-to-business (B2B) entity, the semiconductor manufacturing industry had limited direct interaction with end customers. Consequently, their customer service was not as efficient as that of customer-centric business-to-consumer (B2C) companies.

Case study

A semiconductor manufacturer decided to rethink its customer service medium to provide better service and improve customer relationships. This semiconductor leader specializes in designing and producing a wide range of semiconductors and integrated circuits, including analog chips, embedded processors, and other semiconductors. The company serves a wide range of customers globally, such as electronics manufacturers, automotive companies, and industrial equipment makers.

While the company sold some components without modifications, its main business focus was on designing and manufacturing customized components. This required collaboration among engineers from around the world, speaking different languages, and the semiconductor company. However, the company’s legacy customer service wasn’t able to keep up with the rising demand for semiconductor components. Modernizing their legacy processes and systems became a necessity and the company partnered with Infosys for their customer engagement needs. The company worked with Infosys to bring about 360-degree customer experience in a business process as a service model, with Infosys handling the entire customer experience lifecycle.

The pain points

The Infosys team and the clients’ experts assessed their existing customer support system to understand what made it reactive and slow. The problem was that the company hadn’t changed how it handled customer service in decades. Despite advances in the digital landscape, the semiconductor manufacturer handled all its written communication, from initial queries to purchase orders and invoices, exclusively through emails, and they managed customer calls separately through call centers. With this fragmented approach, the company struggled to track customer interactions and provide a joined-up service to their users.

The other challenge was in connecting customers with the engineers when they needed customized components. Despite having multiple centers to handle calls and over 12,000 engineers proficient in various languages, it was taking too long to resolve requests. Without an advanced call routing system, the company’s operators struggled to connect the customers to the right experts.

Technology transformation

Legacy processes and systems transformation often require a complete switch to new processes and technologies rather than just a facelift, as in this case. The joint teams from Infosys and the client concluded that the customer support platform had to change in two key ways:

1. Transition from call centers to customer experience centers
2. Bring in automation to accelerate the time to market for customers

Transition from call centers to customer experience centers

A call center focuses solely on voice calls, while a customer experience center uses multiple channels to interact with customers. While this is the obvious advantage.

To achieve this transition, the semiconductor company required a unified customer tracking system and strategically located hub centers.

Source: Infosys Knowledge Institute

Unified customer tracking system: The company had their customer requests coming in through the Americas, EMEA, and Asia, in eight different languages, including English. And these requests were also coming via varied channels such as live chats, emails, and phone calls. The company handled them independently of each other and mostly through agents’ mailboxes. This system was inefficient on many counts, from lack of centralization, time consumption, manual errors, to limited visibility. The company needed a unified customer tracking system that spanned the lifecycle of a customer query from beginning to closing.

Since no off-the-shelf solution met the company’s needs, the Infosys team decided to leverage ServiceNow as the platform of choice for this customer. The ServiceNow customer experience platform offered several benefits including:

• Intelligent routing connected calls and chats to customer support agents based on input language and area codes.
• Created an integrated a case history that tracks the initial customer query from the first touchpoint through subsequent interactions. Tracking and expediting customer requests became easier for agents with an easy access to the customer’s history.
• The new system helped clear a backlog of 3,000 cases for the company.

Strategic locations for contact centers: The Infosys team chose multiple strategic locations that matched the time-zones and business hours of the customers. Though it was challenging to find and train bilingual agents to handle requests at these centers, today Infosys has a team of 300+ customer support agents covering the 10-plus customer languages across multiple time-zones and types of requests.

Leveraging automation to accelerate time to market

Automation-first was established as the first principle to be leveraged for all opportunities of process improvement at the customer experience center. The Infosys team constantly went back to first principles when confronted with a problem statement that was process related or that could bring about customer experience improvement.

As an example, historically, the client maintained the purchase order, invoice, and procurement details internally. Once the customer support system stabilized, the company entrusted Infosys with maintaining these details. However, this was a slow, manual process at the company. When the purchase order requests came via emails in various formats – PDF, word, or even plain email body - the agents had to key them into the SAP system, often leading to errors. This process was slow and led to errors – and was ripe for automation.

Infosys leveraged an automation solution to extract purchase order information from varied formats and updating the SAP system. Working along with the client, the Infosys team automated the complete post-sales engagements.

Continuous improvement journey

The Infosys and client teams further collaborated to make the customer experience journey, more proactive by including:

Automated customer engagement

• The payment alert engine automatically detects unpaid invoices and sends reminders to clients.
• The survey participation feature directs clients to the survey immediately after closing a ticket, ensuring timely feedback. Reminder emails prompt customers who have not responded to the survey within 24 hours. This feature has helped the company's decision-makers generate rating reports quickly to make changes to their products and services.

Learning portal and FAQ

The team developed a self-service portal for customers, which includes informative videos, a dynamic knowledge repository, and an extensive FAQ section. This means customers can often answer their own queries, from design questions to placing orders, without having to interact with a customer service agent.

The journey continues with the two teams looking for improvement opportunities and bringing customer delight in the operations.

Achieved benefits

The new customer experience center has brought tangible benefits to the semiconductor company, including:

• Query resolution time improved from 62.4% to 80%.
• Global agent performance improved from 76.3% to 91%.
• Global contact center responsiveness increased from 73.2% to 92%.

Source: Infosys Knowledge Institute

With the post-sales automation, the team cleared over 1,700 pending purchase order workflows for the client, saved 25% in full time equivalent costs for the client.

Customers expect their histories to be well-maintained and transparent and agents to pick up where they left off. So consider pulling together all your customer service interactions into a unified function to track a case across email, chat, and calls. Give users the ability to solve their own problems via a portal that offers dynamic self-service support content. And finally, prioritize user experience by streamlining processes and minimizing friction.