Delivering Extraordinary Customer, Dealer, and Employee Experiences

Contact center agents in manufacturing organizations face a difficult challenge. Customers and channel partners expect swift, expert resolution for a wide range of issues, ranging from product ordering and sales support to break/fix scenarios and warranty claims. While they endeavor to meet and exceed these expectations, they’re often unable to deliver because they lack visibility into process, parts, and customer history across OEMs and channel dealers. They can be stuck in the middle, between the pressing needs of a customer and internal processes that make resolving issues less than instantaneous.

Too often, the result is that employees work under stress while customers and partners deal with delays, sometimes with significant financial implications. To change this, organizations need a modern platform that both embraces AI and is fundamentally engineered for the complexity of manufacturing data environments, often by connecting equipment telemetry data with customer interactions.

Accelerating Operational Efficiency with AI

The manufacturing industry is embracing AI, largely due to the significant business value of automating processes and fully supporting predictive maintenance. In the contact center, these advancements can convert into dramatic improvements in experience for both customers and employees.

Even the most expert reps spend much of their time on repetitive tasks—such as navigating multiple, disparate systems to piece together a full history—a prime target for AI automation. AI is also helping contact centers go beyond what was previously possible, including making telemetry data from sold equipment available to agents and automated systems to better support customer requests. By exceeding expectations, AI powered contact centers turn customer touchpoints into opportunities to drive customer loyalty and product usage.

Industry Expertise, Specialized Solutions, and Microsoft Technology

At Hitachi Solutions, we help manufacturers move toward a fully AI-powered contact center seamlessly by combining our deep domain experience, our 100% focus on Microsoft technology, and highly performant solutions we’ve developed through years of contact center modernization projects.

The foundation is Microsoft’s Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) solution, built entirely on the secure foundation of the Microsoft cloud. Using Dynamics 365 Customer Service and Copilot for Service, this solution centralizes data and operations.

Manufacturers move away from disparate systems and toward a true, 360-degree view of their customers and install base, a critical step toward effectively leveraging AI. In addition, Hitachi’s proprietary Consolidated Data Model and specialized solutions build on our industry expertise, with capabilities that specifically address product, sales, and service data. Our contact center solutions,

like Intelligent Call Wrap-up, which simplifies post-call administration for representatives, streamline the automation of key workflows, delivering demonstrable value faster.

What Does This Mean for Customer and Employee Experience?

Dramatically improved customer experience

Customers and partners need their issues resolved swiftly and securely, reducing downtime and contributing to overall satisfaction and trust. Our approach achieves this in specific, measurable ways:

• Faster resolutions
  When contact centers have centralized data access, customers see their issues handled on the first contact more often. This improved resolution rate also frees representatives to focus more on customer contact, reducing wait times.
• Informed and efficient support
  Integrating equipment telemetry data with customer interactions allows automated systems and agents to provide faster, more informed responses to product issues and break/fix scenarios.

Happier, more fulfilled employees

For representatives, a modern CCaaS solution means trading tedious administrative tasks for high-value interactions.

• Reduced administrative burden
  To ensure regulatory, warranty, and SLA compliance, manufacturers need to ensure every customer and partner contact is notated and reported accurately. That can put significant burden on representatives and create reporting risks due to human error. Automation relieves this burden, allowing reps to focus more on relationship building and critical thinking.
• Data visibility and confidence
  When representatives have access to comprehensive customer and product histories, they can handle more customer and partner issues quickly. This improves their sense of success and confidence, improving job satisfaction and making the change to AI-powered customer service a source of empowerment.

Making AI in the Contact Center Make Sense

In manufacturing contact centers, AI can empower representatives to meet customer and partner needs more quickly, securely, and reliably. To learn more about our approach to CCaaS implementation and contact center modernization, contact our team today or click to learn more about our 4-week assessment.