India’s customer service challenges need a superhuman touch

Overcoming customer service challenges: man holding and smiling at phone in front of a tall building

The inaugural India Customer Experience Intelligence Report suggests that the average Indian spends 30.7 hours—more than an entire day—on hold with customer service every year.

It takes businesses an average of four days to resolve customer issues. Given that two in three Indian consumers start to consider switching providers within three days of an issue going unresolved, that lackluster response time is proving increasingly costly to brand loyalty and retention across all industries.

These findings also resonate with what we hear from Indian enterprises: Customer experience is a known problem with limited solutions. Enterprise leaders recognize that their quality of service can make or break their brand, and that internal silos or disjointed processes often lead to poor outcomes for customers. But for many, the solutions seem too costly to justify or too complex to grasp.

Such solutions have historically required significant overhauls of existing technology infrastructure, not to mention upheaval to everyday operations and far greater demands on talent. When considered at a national or even global scale, these customer service challenges quickly become daunting at best and desperate at worst.

How can India’s enterprise leaders beat the customer experience odds? One way is by using AI to go beyond what’s humanly possible.

Every Indian enterprise faces a choice: Allow mediocre experiences to continue eroding customer loyalty or rethink the way it designs and delivers those experiences.

Self-serve, solve, support

Our research found that 67% of Indians trust AI to offer them customer support, while more than half say their trust in chatbots has increased over the past year. This is significantly more than what we’ve seen in other parts of Asia Pacific, and likely reflects the heavy emphasis Indian customers—particularly younger ones—place on the speed of resolving issues.

How might Indian enterprises go about incorporating AI into their customer experiences? Our team in India has been constantly gathering feedback from a range of human customer support agents locally and globally to answer this.

The results: a range of AI-embedded solutions that assist and empower these agents to do more, faster, without losing the human touch they bring to customer interactions. These solutions generally fall into three categories, spanning both the customer-facing and employee-empowering:

Self-servers that generate guides and other resources for customers, then direct customers to the most relevant resources based on their personal context
Solvers that help automate fixes for customers’ issues, such as chatbots and virtual agents powered by generative AI (GenAI)
Supporters that empower human agents to achieve results for their customers—by summarizing entire case histories and conversations in seconds, for example, giving agents instant context to understand and address each customer’s unique situation

Put AI to work

All of these are available in Now Assist, our family of GenAI capabilities that enhance experiences throughout all aspects of business, from customer service to IT to HR.

However, their benefits truly materialize only for organizations that can connect these various business functions on a single technology stack or platform. Only then can employees have all the data needed to help them achieve the best outcomes for customers—dissolving the internal silos that many Indian consumers attribute poor service to.

At ServiceNow, GenAI is enabling a 10% increase in customer self-service. With Now Assist for Customer Service Management providing case summarization, 54% of summaries were helpful to agents, saving them six hours per week on average.

Large customer organizations, including those whose customer experience teams operate largely from India, could see big time savings to deliver faster, personal service. Such customer experience transformations are not just possible; they’re vital to stay competitive.

With Now Assist for Customer Service Management providing case summarization, 54% of summaries were helpful to agents, saving them six hours per week on average.

Know your customers, know your business

Every Indian enterprise faces a choice: Allow mediocre experiences to continue eroding customer loyalty or rethink the way it designs and delivers those experiences. Those that choose the latter will likely gain market share at the expense of those that insist on the status quo.

To achieve that level of customer experience, India’s enterprise leaders would do well to consider the following equation:

Persona * Experience = Value

First, understand the personas of your customers: their ever-changing preferences, needs, and tendencies. Then, identify what kinds of experiences—from self-service to high touch—will create the most impact for those personas, as well as how to develop a unified approach to technology and processes that can deliver them.

Finally, extend this approach to customers and employees, who become internal customers when they seek help or resolutions for internal issues. The more satisfied employees are with their working experience, the better service they can deliver to customers.

It takes a keen understanding of persona and a steadfast commitment to experience to generate lasting value for customers. AI can (and has already begun to) make both tasks significantly more achievable, even in leaner organizations with stretched resources and talent.

For India’s customer experience crisis to be resolved, leaders must recognize that customer service is business value. When done right, it becomes the business superpower.

Find out how ServiceNow helps organizations transform customer experiences.