Read the below case study and answer the questions that follow MultiChoice pioneers omnichannel support in South Africa to achieve a 95% customer satisfaction. MultiChoice Group (MultiChoice) is an entertainment powerhouse and is Africa’s leading media company. The company is passionate about telling stories that are rooted in the unique cultures of the countries it broadcasts in. Through a combination of services including direct to home satellite television, digital terrestrial television, and online video entertainment, it uses the power of storytelling to enrich lives. Roland Naidoo, Head of Operations, MultiChoice, tells Intelligent CIO Africa why the company teamed up with Freshworks to enhance its omnichannel customer service and experience. MultiChoice views itself first and foremost as a customer experience organisation. Today, the company serves around nine million customers in South Africa and over 21 million customers across the African continent. Getting to the heart of great customer experience. At MultiChoice, everyone, right from the group chairman to the call centre executive has customer experience on their minds. Over the last five years, the company has been on a continuous improvement journey to improve its customer support capabilities. “We had to differentiate between customer service and customer experience,” explained Brendon Emmanuel, Senior Manager – Programme Management, MultiChoice. “These two terms are used interchangeably but are fundamentally different. With customer service, the customer expects you to know how to do your job. Customer experience (CX) means that we go one step beyond what the customer expects. Roland Naidoo, Head of Operations, MultiChoice, said: “My team and I realised that when a customer contacts an agent, whether it’s a human or digital interaction, they’re looking for consistency, a quick turnaround time and the right answer every time. Omnichannel was the best way to achieve this.” Building a seamless omnichannel support journey. MultiChoice has been a true visionary in leading the charge for omnichannel support. It was, in fact, one of the earliest adopters of omnichannel on the continent. When evaluating solutions that could bring its vision to life, the team had clear expectations. The company needed a platform that could: consolidate each of the multi-channel touch points into a fully integrated channel agnostic helpdesk, track the entire customer journey so that the agent could gain a 360-degree view of the customer, easily integrate with all other platforms and tools already in use so employees didn’t have to jump between tools to answer a query and offer a simple, intuitive user interface (UI) at a cost-effective price. According to MultiChoice, Freshworks’ impressive suite of solutions made it a clear winner. The company now uses Freshdesk Support Desk, Freshdesk Messaging and Freshservice to link every stage of its customer support journey. Naidoo, who was awarded the Global Change Architect of the Year award for pioneering innovation in CX, believes that this omnichannel view has been critical in preemptively engaging with customers and resolving issues before they even crop up. “The omnichannel journey is not a simple or easy one to conceive and execute.  Consolidating every stage of support within a single UI. The MultiChoice team’s goal from day one has been to create a single UI that provides the customer’s details and history, allows agents to perform transactions and ultimately solve the issue within a single dashboard. To that effect, it has brought its existing telephony solution and queue management system (Qmatic) within Freshdesk. T.U.M.I. In addition, the team’s in-house AI-powered chatbot, is integrated with Freshdesk so that agents can view a customer’s entire history of conversations within the tool. In the back end, Freshdesk is integrated with the customer relationship management (CRM) to enrich the database. Q.1.1 Naidoo argues that the future of Customer service relies on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and bot services. Discuss the role of AI in the Customer Service excellence. Add some examples from the case study to support your answers. Q.1.2 At MultiChoice, everyone, right from the group chairman to the call centre executive has customer experience on their minds said Naidoo. Explain why it is vitally important for executive management to also have customer experience on their minds. Q.1.3 Naidoo mentioned the importance of recognising customer complaints in efforts to curb customer service failure. In line with the case study, allude and discuss below the reasons that may lead to customer service failure. The market is not properly segmented The customer database is incomplete or non-existent The organisation is managed from the inside out The focus is on attracting new customer as opposed to the retention of existing customer Customer are dehumanised