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Seamless Service – by Samsung’s Erbil Topgül

Samsung Turkey’s director of customer service management, Erbil Topgül, explains how his brand keeps its customers happy and loyal with a specific set of principles

Seamless Service Samsung Erbil Topgül

Amid growing competition, companies are seeking new ways and solutions that would enable them to outshine their competitors. By taking a proactive approach and putting customers at the heart of their campaigns, companies stand to create an advantage by providing customer-oriented, sustainable actions through technology and the products and services they offer. This will evolve socio-economical dynamics and create permanent changes in customer habits.

Undoubtedly, smart mobile devices are playing a critical role in this change, especially given their status as tools for communication, work, payment, entertainment and education. We are so integrated with our devices that there is a term that defines the fear of being without your smartphone: ‘nomophobia’ (no more mobile phone). This era of communication drove the need to establish a new customer service strategy, ‘Seamless Service’.

The contribution of technology and artificial intelligence to customer satisfaction

We developed the Seamless Service feature to ensure excellence in customer satisfaction by providing all the necessary information to employees, and we use AI technologies to simplify tasks and provide efficient services. The idea is to scale up our operational excellence while delivering the best experience to customers.

In this regard, we are perfecting our integration of AI technologies, such as speech-to-text, conversational IVR (interactive voice response) and robotic processes, to offer unforgettable experiences to our customers.

Effective strategies in excellent customer experience: the Seamless Service approach

Exceptional customer experience is the result of an uninterrupted, fast and easy service. This is accomplished by first establishing customer negative and positive points, which will help pave the path towards Samsung Electronics’ critical success. Ensuring a consistently excellent customer experience requires customers to be involved in every step of the process, as their feedback is key in helping advance our features.

The best example of this process is Samsung’s Smart Service concept, which we currently use across all our mobile devices’ authorised services. We redesigned our processes to meet market demand by studying customer feedback and holding focus groups to quickly identify malfunctions on-site. We then sought to provide instant solutions by using AI support, which helped change our service into a ‘service experience’.

At Samsung Electronics, we benefited from AI and cutting-edge technologies while running and evaluating these processes across our call centres and services towards addressing customer problems to ensure their satisfaction and heightened recommendation scores.

We also regularly commit to research to perfect our experience and present customers with seamless, 360-degree, turnkey solutions. We also simultaneously run various surveys, ranging from traditional CATI (computer-aided telephone interviews) to SMS surveys and online to IVR surveys, towards creating an ideal culture across all contact points by analysing customer experience.

Moreover, we use various evaluation methods to guarantee service quality at call centres. For example, a quality unit formed by experts regularly evaluates all interactions to maintain the utmost quality. Apart from that, all the calls are tracked via a speech analytics tool that alerts operational management when necessary.

The results have been encouraging

We are aware that when customers purchase a Samsung device, they also gain access to services that make their lives easier. As such, it is gratifying to be recognised and rewarded by authorities for our Seamless Service strategy and leading applications.

In 2021, Samsung Electronics Turkey received the most prestigious award for innovative aftersales customer experience at the International Customer Experience Awards, taking the Gold awards in the Best Customer Services and Customer Experience Transformation categories and the Silver award in the Call Centre category. That same year, we also received two Gold awards for Best Customer Experience and Best Customer Experience Transformation at the Turkey Customer Experience Competition and the Gold award at the Samsung Quality Awards.

Our accolades continued into 2022. First, we were granted the The Company That Adopts Customer Satisfaction as a Principle award during the 25th Annual Consumer Awards, the only government-supported award organised by The Ministry of Commerce in Turkey. We also won the Gold award in the Best Customer Service category and the Silver award in the Best Use of Technology category during the Turkey Customer Experience Competition.

We are grateful for such incredible recognitions that drive us to continually raise the bar of customer experience and service, which was the main element behind the development of our Seamless Service features, among others that are designed around the happiness and satisfaction of our customers.