MarTech360 Interview With Eng Tan, CEO, Simplr

“CX is essential to making your business competitive and as the economic uncertainty rises, it’s imperative to get right.”

Hi, Eng, can you tell us about your role at Simplr.

As the founder and CEO of Simplr, which is a disruptive customer service solution, I’m responsible for looking at how businesses engage with their customers and how we can move the industry forward. In particular, how do we upend the traditional customer service model and its limitations and make it smarter and faster?

What sets Simplr apart from the competition?

At Simplr, we’re not shy about breaking down old ideas about what customer service is supposed to look like. For example, there’s the traditional BPO model, or business process outsourcing. You know what it looks like: huge cubicle farms with thousands of workers answering phone calls from customers. It’s a costly way of managing CX and it isn’t delivering the quality of care that customers expect. We integrate human customer service agents and AI-powered chatbots, reinforcing and making each other and the customer experience better. Our mission is to empower brands in retail, ecommerce, technology, travel, and other markets with world-class customer service that helps them build loyalty and stand out amongst competitors. 

Also Read: MarTech360 Interview With Wendy Covey, CEO And Co-Founder, TREW Marketing

How and why is customer experience important in order to make any business successful?

Every business puts incredible amounts of work into making their product or service successful and we want to help make sure that all of that effort equates to having enthusiastic and loyal customers. Imagine if a customer that loves your product couldn’t get an answer to their email about the status of an important order? Or if a customer asked a chatbot about a return and the chatbot couldn’t understand their (fairly straightforward) question? These are customer loyalty opportunities that have met a dead end when they should have been delighted brand advocates.

Ultimately, CX is essential to making your business competitive and as the economic uncertainty rises, it’s imperative to get right.

Why are call centers the costliest CX channel to maintain? How does that impact the customer experience?

Call centers are the most expensive CX channel for businesses to maintain because of concurrency. There can only be one human agent on the phone with one customer at a time.  Furthermore, the traditional recruiting, training and ramp model is saddled with waste and unusually high employee turnover. Meanwhile, digital channels allow for one to many communications, either through agents handling multiple live chats at once, or through automation successfully resolving large portions of inquiries. The call center model is quickly becoming outdated as customers become more comfortable with digital channels like text and chat. In fact, twenty percent of Gen Z consumers prefer to start with a chatbot.

When executed properly, digital channels offer brands the opportunity to be more cost efficient while simultaneously producing superior customer experiences. However, we’ve found that digital channels that aren’t backed up by human support can do more harm than good. This is why we developed our chatbot to function in partnership with our network of agents, which we call our Human Cloud. This way, when a customer repeats a question, begins to get frustrated, or has an important request – which are all detectable by AI – they are immediately transferred to a human agent. This is an approach based on an inquiry type called ‘value-based routing.’ The most important inquiries are handled by a human agent which can have significant cost savings since it decreases phone volume while creating a loyal customer.

According to you, what are the most important things in customer service?

When it comes to customer service, the most important thing to consider is the amount of effort that a customer has to put in to get their problem resolved. The metric used to calculate this is called the Customer Effort Score (CES) and it’s been shown to be the number one indicator of long-term customer loyalty. When it comes to improving your CES, the best approach an enterprise can take is to use an “optichannel” method, where the CX process is designed to seamlessly lead customers to their most optimized support channels. Not only does this resolve customer inquiries in the easiest way possible but it is extremely efficient for the enterprise as well.

Can you recommend someone that you would like to see featured on our platform?

Alex Collis, director of operations at Princess Polly would be a great addition to your platform as the company has grown rapidly and now has over 2.2M IG followers. Alex and her team have done amazing things to promote and scale the brand, all while maintaining a positive and consistent customer experience. She can offer your readers tips on becoming a successful online retailer while keeping your brand personality.

What would you like to advise all the aspiring business leaders out there? 

My advice to aspiring leaders would be to question the status quo in your industry and look for inefficiencies that are in need of disruption. One of the most satisfying things about Simplr’s work is that our innovative products allow enterprise businesses to thrive, grow, and compete with much larger companies. Finding ways to empower businesses and level the playing field in your industry is a great way to stay both grounded and inspired while striving to make a meaningful contribution to the world.

Thanks, Eng!