2020 further accelerated transformative trends in the mobility space. Changes include electric vehicle adoption and the shift to mobility as a service and mobility on demand. Auto manufacturers, car rental firms, ridesharing providers, and public transport operations are all responding to this new market and, in support, the underlying model is changing from product to service to customer experience.

In this blog I look at CSS Corp’s new focus on the mobility industry with a dedicated practice.

CSS Corp SMART Mobility to capture sector opportunities

In 2020, CSS Corp created a dedicated mobility practice, SMART (Secure Micromobility Autonomous Ridesharing Telematics) Mobility. It comprises the company’s customer care, technical support, and inbound and outbound premium support services with digital engineering offerings in analytics and insights, automation with cognitive bots and virtual assistants, agent dashboards, and custom app development.

CSS Corp also brought its geospatial services into the SMART Mobility practice. Here, it delivers spatial analytics and insights, data services such as collation and modeling in support of autonomous driving, as well as mapping and content development, enrichment, and maintenance for navigation and 3D maps.

CSS Corp won a key contract in 2020 with a multinational auto OEM and a luxury vehicle brand. The majority of the current work for sector clients is in L2 and L3 support, where it handles complex cases and white-glove support for the premium customer base. It also takes over special projects around vehicle buybacks and recalls. Typically, these customer interactions are longer calls at around 10-15 minutes, or even complex cases over several days involving contacts with owners, dealers, and service technicians. It also has sector clients in auto and truck parts manufacturing, logistics and transport software, roadside assistance, and ridesharing.

Subsegment variations with differences in recovery paths

The multiple verticals within mobility had different impacts during the pandemic and they are recovering at different speeds. For example, the slow pick-up of business travel negatively affects the car rental space, while ridesharing shifted to food and essentials delivery. In new vehicle sales, the differentiation is between markets and vehicle types; for example, the growth in China auto sales, the increase in power, sports, and recreational vehicles in the U.S., and the 54% share of electric in new car sales in Norway.

For traditional OEMs, the strategic focus on margin expansion drives the need for premium CX, with one-to-one customer care, personalized and contextual presales, sale, and post-sale interactions; and, in some cases, offering luxury experience across the customer journey.

Automotive resembling the high-tech vertical

Over the last few years, IoT and changing customer preferences propelled high-tech brands to support the entire connected home ecosystem and add direct-to-consumer sales. Similarly, automotive companies need more advanced technical support infotainment systems and are exploring sales without franchise dealers, following the Tesla model.

In this environment, CSS Corp developed the Agent 360 dashboard, a single analytics dashboard to help agents navigate customer interactions. Agent 360 includes agent analytics, API integration to automate the information for recalled vehicles, service appointment scheduling, connected vehicle data for self-diagnostics, knowledge base, and SOPs and agent manuals and guides. It has the functionality to segment the owner and vehicle.

Creating enhanced CX for an auto brand with Agent 360

For the multinational OEM with sales in over 190 countries and several thousand dealerships, CSS Corp led a consultative approach with a CX transformation roadmap and process optimization design. The client wanted support to handle complex interactions in the buyback, Lemon Law action, and VIP customers while facing volume spikes and data challenges.

CSS Corp trained its team in the specific brand and automotive standards and activated intelligent routing based on skillsets. It deployed pre-built automotive workflows in the Agent 360 dashboard with customer context, omnichannel engagement, recall integration, connected vehicle data, single integrated KB with articles pulled from multiple sources such as parts manufacturers, dealers, and insurance providers. It also implemented intelligent virtual assistants to assist agents.

It also enabled a mobile assistant with visual IVR, the customer support app and integrated sales offers and performance analytics within the app. It delivers analytics and insights on customers, customer journeys, and operational information based on VIN and vehicle usage details. Further, it provides geospatial engineering services in data management and LIDAR mapping for autonomous driving.

As a result, over 18 months, CSS Corp is on course to deliver ~80% reduction in basic inquiries through automation, reducing call abandon rate by 25%, improving AHT by 30%, and automating 100% of the case allocation.

Challenging established BPO players

As a newcomer in the automotive space, CSS Corp is building up its sector client footprint on the back of recent wins, particularly the luxury segment with nearshore delivery. It targets high-level support opportunities with concierge services, where the live agent is enhanced by the unified desktop and virtual assistants and bots for quicker and accurate resolution. It also looks to take over industry-specific processes such as automation of back-office admin processes. A challenge here is that automotive players often operate under strict regional legal frameworks such as recall rules and expect CX services providers to have an extensive industry background and strong security capability. For the latter, CSS Corp plans to utilize its security experience in B2B network support.

CSS Corp is also looking to address needs for CX infrastructure modernization, such as assisting OEMs in moving from their legacy and homegrown CRM systems to cloud-enabled platforms and its Agent 360 unified desktop. One such opportunity is with a tier 1 auto parts manufacturer. Another area is building the virtual assistant and self-service with live agent triage in an OEM client’s mobile app.