New Delhi, December 21: In the dynamic landscape of finance, customer experience (CX) takes centre stage, influencing success and brand loyalty. Explore how seamless, personalized interactions, digital innovations, and a customer-centric approach are transforming the financial service industry.
Join Mr. Rahul Rajpal who is the Vice President – Customer Experience at Aspire in conversation with Mr. Marquis Fernandes, who spearheads the India Business at Quantic India, as they delve into the strategic integration of AI/ML solutions, particularly conversational UI, to enhance customer interactions, it also highlights the successful implementation of an AI-powered chatbot, streamlining customer queries and allowing the team to focus on more complex issues, contributing to operational efficiency.
Mr. Rahul Rajpal leads the Global Customer Experience team at Aspire, a dynamic growth stage Fintech start up in Singapore. With a background at customer-centric giants like Google and American Express, he excels in driving CX transformation, self-serve initiatives, and operational leadership. Rahul’s passion lies in delivering world-class customer experiences and solving complex challenges, demonstrated by his success in building and leading diverse teams across multiple regions. He thrives in guiding business operations through change, even in crisis situations, with a focus on policy strengthening and operational optimization to drive growth and enable his team and partners to reach their full potential.
How do you stay updated on emerging trends in customer experience, and how do you integrate these trends into your strategies to remain at the forefront of industry advancements?
As an avid learner and passionate about Customer Experience, I am intentional about learning key trends and cutting edge practices, evolving in the space of CX. My top 3 ways are:
1) Learn through Industry forums, webinars where you get to meet, learn & share about new technologies and practices including use cases to elevate customer experience.
2) LinkedIn is an important source of learning for me, especially with the evolution of newer technologies including Gen AI / ML.
3) And finally, continuous experiment, learn & evolve CX practices at work and build use cases.
How do you leverage AI/ML solutions, including conversational UI, to enhance customer interactions, and what impact has this had on operational efficiency?
I strongly believe technology enables us with the tools and systems, to predict and pre-empt the customer needs and support them in this journey to make it faster, accurate and relevant when and how they need support from the organizations.
We recently tested & now scaling an AI powered chatbot which is enabling our customers to get faster, relevant & humanized answers without having the need to go to the front line teams. This is a win-win for us, since customers are not having to wait for a human to answer easy queries, while we are able to focus on building a team of specialists to support complex customer queries (going up in the value chain) where bot is currently unable to address those queries.
How have you strategically enhanced policies and operational structures to align with dynamic customer needs, and what impact has this had on creating a more agile and responsive organizational environment?
In today’s fast paced and dynamic environment along with the increased expectations from our customers, we all have to stay ahead of the game to support our customers’ needs in an agile manner by pre-empting the customer needs.
As a custodian of customer experience, we are constantly listening to our customers through various customer listening posts, social media, case reviews, CES data insights, customer verbatim and many more. Using this we are constantly evolving our user journeys by keeping ourselves in the customer’s shoes and predicting customer behaviours to make it easy for our customers. We take this collective learnings and incorporate in our operational processes including product roadmap, evolving our customer support strategy, and continuously tracking the impact of changes in our customer experience and retention metrics.
Can you share insights into your approach to business process improvement within the context of CX transformation?
I strongly believe in an end to end CX strategy to drive CX transformation holistically. This involves both surfaces & support strategy. In surface strategy we focus on Help Centre, FAQs, in app experience, whereas in the support strategy involves from support model i.e. in house vs outsource model, support channels, differentiated support strategy, building tech stack to enable a seamless and a consistent experience for our customers.
CX transformation requires many cross functional stakeholders including operations, sales & marketing & product teams, to come together and work to eliminate customer defects. Among various practices, one of the best practices is to have joint goals among teams for one common objective i.e. elevating customer experience across every touch point and drive customer retention & reduce churn.
What piece of advice would you convey to aspiring professionals and leaders in the field of customer experience?
I would highlight 3 main things that worked for me over the last 27 years in the field of Customer Experience –
1) Be passionate about customers and highly committed to giving the best experience to every customer as they deserve the best experience.
2) Be the champion & custodian of customer experience and build a vision & environment where everyone’s priority is customer first.
3) Be the learner for life & have the quest to continuously learn about elevating customer experience through new solutions & practices. I have always stayed curious about newer and better technologies including Gen AI, Machine learning models & being in the forefront to test & scale, what works best for the customers.
I strongly believe we are at an inflection point where we are witnessing significant transformation in customer experience at scale, leveraging technology & human support complementing each other.
To know more about us / publish your article, reach us at
www.quanticindia.com
marquis@quanticindia.com.
