Tata CLiQ enhances its performance across key customer experience metrics with KPIs from Tata companies

Published on December 02, 2022

In line with its cultural pillar of ‘Benchmark and Better the Best’, Tata CLiQ sought to re-assess its customer service functional maturity. In December 2021, the company approached TBExG to learn about best practices and to benchmark against other successful Tata companies, across key customer service performance metrics.
The company was keen to understand the following KPIs:

1. Customer service agent profile and associated costs at the contact centre
2. Ratio of inbound contacts to transactions or inbound contacts per order on its portal across voice/chat/email engagements
3. Average handling time for inbound voice/chat/email queues
4. Service levels for inbound voice/chat/email queues
5. Repeat interactions received from customers on each channel
6. First time resolution for inbound queues
7. Efforts/number of touchpoints agents have to make to resolve tickets
8. Average resolution time/resolution rate

To support Tata CLiQ in this endeavour, TBExG initially shared ‘Benchmarks-on-Demand’, a tool created by the American Productivity & Quality Center (APQC), that organisations use to understand the overall performance of a process or function. This tool helps select up to three discrete peer groups from region, revenue, and industry peer types, and obtain a ‘combined’ peer group.

TBExG facilitated interactions with Tata 1mg, Tata SIA Airlines and AirAsia India, respectively. In the first session on January 13, 2022, Anubhav Mehrotra, VP - HR & Consumer Experience; Nikhil Doegar, VP - Business Intelligence & Analytics; and Siji George, Director of Operations at Tata 1mg, shared their best practices and operational call centre metrics with the Tata CliQ team.

This was followed by another session on January 18, 2022, in which Sonia Bhardwaj, Head - Customer Engagement; and Jyoti Dhingra, Head - Contact Center at Tata SIA Airlines, shared best practices in response to queries raised by the Tata CLiQ participants, along with benchmarking data across key metrics at AirAsia India.

While Tata CliQ was already in the top quartile or even at par with the industry median for 80% of the CS metrics, these sessions helped identify a few more areas to improve upon.

One key metric that emerged for Tata CliQ was Digital Self-Serve %. Even as the company’s strategy had focused on listening to customers’ voices, and working to resolve their concerns better, these interactions helped it identify further opportunities for improvement.

After the interactions, the company has begun developing a self-serve customer interaction model with seamless handoffs that doesn’t compromise efficiency, while delivering a more engaging experience. The core touchpoints explored for this were IVR, chatbots and web self-serve portals.

Tata CliQ has also engaged with external partners for interactive IVR and machine learning-led chatbot experience improvements. Over the past six to seven months, it has been able to improve digital adoption by over 15 percentage points, thereby growing the speed of complaint resolution for its customers.

On the metric of ‘CS process efficiencies and automation %’, Tata CliQ began engaging with partners for potential RPA in its ticket handling processes. It has engaged with other partners to automate after-call work, and deliver real-time intuitive guidance to its agents. This will not just help reduce the average handling time, but will also improve the customer experience by avoiding long hold times, among others. The pilots for these interventions will soon be underway, and the business case for these look encouraging, as well.

With exceptional levels of performance in service, employee churn and other key metrics now, Tata CliQ is well-poised to do even better in terms of its overall CS maturity thanks to the above interventions.

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