Supernova Award Category
The Problem
The cable industry has struggled with low customer satisfaction. To combat negative perceptions, as well as ensure a strong position in the changing marketplace, Comcast is in the midst of a massive effort to transform its customer service and customer experience. The Company will spend $300 million in 2016 alone to improve – investing in everything from new employees to new stores to new technologies. An important part of this transformation is ensuring that our employees have the tools they need to do their job. With tens of thousands of people providing support across hundreds of disparate applications, understanding all customer interactions is extremely difficult, as is equipping the workforce with the right tools that are easy-to-use and consistent.
The Solution
Comcast recognized employees were not as equipped or empowered as they could be to know their Customers. The workforce had no comprehensive history of interactions across critical support channels (call centers, technician home visits, etc.). Comcast realized that understanding the Customer history was the first critical step to delivering exceptional customer experiences and pursued a data overlay strategy. Critical customer data was sought out from every part of the company and published into a new big data platform called “Customer Timeline”. This data platform now serves as a “collective source of truth” for what a Comcast customers’ experience has been. The platform is accessible to all departments and functions, and is helping to drive a new, customer-focused way of thinking and operating. Via the platform, real-time customer experience data streams are leveraged to drive proactive and personalized conversations, as well as more digital interaction with our customers.
The results
Customer Timeline is helping to shift behavior and perception across Comcast. Combined with the company initiative to deploy the Net Promoter System, employees are now more empowered to listen and act on customer concerns. Leaders across the organization now have objectives to call customers back each month, gain a better understand of their interactions with Comcast, and respond to any issues. Timeline has become a centerpiece to that process, as it helps those leaders obtain context prior to calling each customer, and it helps customer-facing employees have informed and empathic conversations in their regular interactions. With Customer Timeline, the entire workforce is held accountable for the experience they deliver, increasing accountability, reducing rework, and setting a new bar for service.
Since launching the Platform, Comcast has made continuous efforts to improve its functionality and UX, including real-time alerts and notifications around “High Customer Effort” and “Product/Support Failure” events that are enabling proactive engagement and new operational support models. Timeline’s rapid pace of business innovation, coupled with the company’s new organizational mindset, is beginning to have an impact on employee and customer satisfaction.
Currently, over 25,000 employees use Timeline daily – approximately 1/3 of Comcast’s cable workforce. Early operational results show increased first-call resolution, reduced truck rolls, and reduced time to review accounts.
Metrics
Over the last eight months, 40,000+ employees have used Customer Timeline to accelerate research and resolution time for thousands of customer escalations. This has improved employee productivity, with certain functions seeing a recoup of 10-20% of their time. Comcast’s focus on and investment in the customer experience, including the launch of Customer Timeline and deployment of the Net Promoter System, has generated a 40 to 50% improvement in NPS customer survey results year-over-year. Key operating metrics such as First Call Resolution and Agent Contact Rate have improved 15% since last year, and customer churn rates are down.
As Comcast built Timeline, it has partnered with several vendors that support many other companies (Medallia, Slack, Remedy, Aptean, Nexcidia, Lithium and ASAPP). These companies have shared Comcast’s integrations with other companies in the industry, as well as other industries.
The Technology
Timeline is built with Hadoop, HBase, AVRO, Nifi, Spark, Kafka on the backend Openstack envrionment. For the front end, Angular.js, Python. Fully integrated with Medallia, Slack, Remedy, Aptean, Nexidia, Lithium, ASAPP and many Comcast products, internal systems and applications.
Disruptive Factor
With Timeline, Comcast is changing the way people can visualize Big Data in real-time. The platform has fully integrated product interactions, back office interactions, customer interactions and network events. While static report views of cross-channel activities with big data are showing up, few seem to have deployed a realtime view of this to tens of thousands of employees.
The challenge was to bring together all data into one place and make it accessible and scalable from many systems. Comcast also built an AVRO Schema that allows product owners and developers to ingest data in a self-service manner so the system can scale rapidly.
Shining Moment
When Customer Timeline is demonstrated to anyone, whether it be internal workforce at Comcast, company executives or representatives of other companies, the response is universally: “This system is awesome! How do we do this too?”
A Regional VP of Comcast Tech Ops said, “Customer Timeline truly is the best platform I have seen built in my 26 years at Comcast. It is a game changer!”