Technology and Customer Experience Deliver Improved Performance During COVID

Todd Sale, Senior Vice President, Customer Experience, Fleetcor

Todd Sale, Senior Vice President, Customer Experience, Fleetcor

When COVID hit in March 2020, professionals charged with overseeing technology and customer experience in their respective organizations were forced to take previously unforeseen actions. In a blink of an eye, global IT and customer care teams enabled mobile workforces while striving to maintain great service in a constantly changing business environment.

Large-scale collaboration was the greatest challenge in the transition as remote work became the norm. At the same time, many companies seized the opportunity to elevate service, engage associates and deliver an improved customer experience.

At the core of this customer service transformation was technology teams and customer experience operations navigating ways to work closely together. While almost every other aspect of operations was paused, FLEETCOR moved all its technology and customer service operations to a virtual environment.

Like many other global organizations, turning to Zoom and other videoconferencing platforms helped users adopt to multifactor and VPN, enabled service support from our associates’ homes, and maintained a small staff on site with extreme social distancing.

For technology-first companies like FLEETCOR, significant technology investments proved to be critical, with redundant systems and an infrastructure capable of deploying virtual and remote enabled workstation images, and a full-stack of ‘remote enablement’ kits quickly.

Apart from maintaining critical levels for key systems and customer service, the pandemic gave companies permission to ‘slow-down’ and double-down on longer-term strategic investments and technology transformation efforts

In addition, the FLEETCOR IT and customer service teams demonstrated an unparalleled commitment to ensuring sales, service, credit and other critical functions remain fully operational without any slowdowns during the pandemic. Specifically, the teams increased infrastructure and capacity needs across VPN tunnels, virtual imagine environments, network throughput and several other areas in days rather than the normal weeks or months.

Apart from maintaining critical levels for key systems and customer service, the pandemic gave companies permission to ‘slow-down’ and double-down on longer-term strategic investments and technology transformation efforts. Taking advantage of this opportunity resulted in modern digital engagement with customers, cloud-based solution offerings, and ML/AI driven decision engines to gather further customer insights.

As businesses settle into the new way of working, organizations also have uncovered ways to deliver increased value for their customers – relying on new tools to improve the customer experience.

For example, speech analytics converting sound to text and enabling broad and narrow analytics has helped companies proactively help associates struggling with the remote environment. Remote learning with self-guided simulations also creates a more knowledgeable associate. Most importantly, new collaboration tools have created more meaningful, authentic, and consistent engagement with associates driving a customer-centric culture.

Remote is here to stay. Nurturing associates is critical to delivering a world-class customer experience for any organization along with having the necessary technology tools. While remote work environments are proven, the flexibility of a hybrid option may be the long-term choice for some. Both remote and hybrid workforces open the candidate pool for companies to recruit outside of their respective geographies. This is increasingly important in a competitive labor market.

Technology and customer experience team partnerships and collaboration are the key to driving operational change and delivering even better customer experience now and in the long term.