This document discusses how customer support organizations can be transformed into sales channels by focusing on providing a positive customer experience. It proposes that support teams should prioritize resolving issues on the first call to increase customer satisfaction and retention. The document also describes a customer care transformation framework that uses customer usage data and feedback to identify and fix recurring problems, empowering agents and customers to resolve issues themselves through self-service tools. This framework aims to transform dissatisfied customers into advocates by resolving the root causes of their issues.

1. Why Your Best Salesperson May
Be a Customer Support Rep
With rich data, powerful analytics and integrated toolsets, support
organizations in the communications and technology industry can
achieve a real-time understanding of customer challenges, enabling
them to convert lackluster troubleshooting exercises into rewarding
experiences, and transform dissatisfied customers into enthusiastic
brand ambassadors.
Executive Summary
In the last 20 years, the business world has expe-
rienced the advent of many customer support
innovations, including phone trees, voice rec-
ognition software, auto-dialers, integrated CRM
applications, skills-based routing and community
support, to name a few. These processes and tech-
nologies have helped drive impressive efficiency
gains in support organizations and have led
to rapid, on-demand, higher capacity support
systems.
However, the philosophy behind these innova-
tions is tied to the notion that customer support
is a cost center to be optimized and made
ruthlessly efficient. Sadly, the efficiency gains
resulting from the advance of new and novel
technologies and techniques have come, in many
cases, at the expense of customer experience.
“Call avoidance,” “time to resolution” and other
metrics have created a near adversarial relation-
ship between the support organization and the
customer.
This white paper proposes a reframing of this
critical customer touchpoint, one that repositions
the product support organization in the commu-
nications and technology industry as a low-cost
sales channel. We believe that while new tech-
nologies should be harnessed to efficiently route
calls, provide a multi-channel engagement model,
allow for customer self-service and anticipate
customer challenges, the support team should
be reorganized around customer experience.
The goal: Transform customers into fierce
advocates after a particularly satisfying support
experience. Apple, Southwest, Nordstrom and
many other consumer-facing companies have
turned the support function into a source of
competitive differentiation and brand equity. But
for most companies, these experiences remain
exceptions rather than the intentional result of an
experience-focused support model.
With rich data, powerful analytics and integrated
toolsets, focusing on a meaningful customer
experience does not need to impact the bottom
line. A detailed, real-time understanding of
customer problems, behaviors, likes, dislikes,
churn, timing and other factors must be relent-
lessly pursued and leveraged at each touchpoint
to achieve this goal. Taking the time to identify
cognizant 20-20 insights | july 2015
• Cognizant 20-20 Insights

2. cognizant 20-20 insights 2
root causes in first calls will ultimately drive
higher satisfaction and better customer support
economics. This will require a shift in the way
communications and technology businesses think
about support and the opportunities it provides.
Against this backdrop of customer support, our
Customer Care Transformation Framework helps
practitioners organize all of their competing
demands and solution elements into a consistent,
structured and actionable model. The framework
examines all common engagement models,
including “Do it for me,” “Do it myself” and
“Built-in care,” to help customer support organi-
zations optimize their responses. Understanding
and implementing this framework can help com-
munications and technology organizations turn
their customer support function into a powerful
branding and customer retention tool.
Making Customer Product Support a
Priority
The following statistics vividly portray the state
of support organizations today:
• Poor customer experiences result in an esti-
mated $83 billion loss by U.S. enterprises
annually due to defections and abandoned pur-
chases.1
• Two-thirds of consumers (67%) have hung
up during service calls before their issues could
be addressed.2
• Roughly 71% of consumers were “tremen-
dously annoyed” after being unable to get a
real person on the phone.3
• Approximately 56% were just as annoyed
after having to jump through multiple phone
hoops to get the right information.4
Transforming the support function from a cost
center into a profit center requires communica-
tions and technology businesses to move from
a reactive (i.e., ticket resolution) model to a
proactive (i.e., advisory-based, holistic problem-
solving) one. In this journey, technology plays a
critical role, as a digitally transformed product
support model will ignite game-changing ways of
working for many years to come.
Customers of communications and technology
companies are increasingly turning to mobile
and social technologies for more intuitive and
accelerated ways of resolving customer support
challenges. It has become critical for these
businesses to gain a deeper understanding of
customer product usage scenarios.
The Criticality of Tracking Usage
Patterns
A clear understanding of customers’ product
usage scenarios can be achieved by harnessing
the information that surrounds people, organiza-
tions, processes and products, or what we call a
Code Halo.TM 5
With Code Halo thinking, product
support teams decode the metadata contained in
product usage activities by mapping patterns in
customer support processes to understand and
even anticipate the customer’s preferred way
of resolving issues. This approach helps com-
munications and technology companies achieve
meaningful user insights and use them to build
or enhance products. This forms the origin of
the Code Halo-based support paradigm,6
which
signifies a shift in how products are built.
Based on these insights, product development
teams can focus on reducing or eliminating
customer pain points, thereby providing a more
satisfying customer experience. To achieve this,
service reps must be empowered with the right
tools to proactively provide first-time resolution.
This will ensure that satisfied customers not only
continue to use the product but also become
trusted brand ambassadors and promoters.
Even with this change in the support model, three
key performance metrics continue to be crucial
for measuring customer satisfaction: response
time, resolution time and status updates.
Moreover, first call resolution (FCR) remains the
single most important result that creates delight
in the customer’s mind.
Transforming the support
function from a cost center
into a profit center requires
communica­tions and
technology businesses to
move from a reactive model
to a proactive one.

3. Support call
Online discussion forums
Voice of the customer
CUSTOMER
CARE
Issue
fixed
Yes
Yes
Fix analysis
Top call driver analysis
Ideation
In-product fixesTools
HardeningNew features Software meteringImprove first
user experience
“Do it myself”
tools
Self-Help Tools
“Do it for me”
tools
Care Agent Tools
Product Engineering
Better customer
satisfaction
Improved
Net Promoter Score
Empowered agents
Proactive monitoring and fixing
ProductCustomer
Issue analysis
and resolution
In-product enhancements
Deep understanding of
customer usage patterns
Major customer
issues resolved
Delightful user
experience
Product
Innovation
3
How the Care Transformation
Framework Ensures Customer Delight
Our Care Transformation Framework offers a
seamless experience and delivers proactive
guidance and suggestions to customers. It
reduces customer pain points by identifying and
eliminating the root cause of their issues.
This framework helps support organizations
better understand customer challenges by
gathering insights from product usage patterns
and issues that customers face while using the
product. In order to analyze real-time business
scenarios, the product engineering team listens in
on support calls and analyzes the use cases under
which the problem is reproducible. This is a huge
step toward replicating customer behavior.
The insights gathered are evaluated in detail
to identify common issues. Once the product
engineering team detects the root cause, it can
devise approaches to create concrete solutions
(see Figure 1). The immediate focus, however, is
to reduce specific customer pain points, either by
providing a self-help solution or empowering care
agents with the right solution. If the solution is
successful, it will be built into the product, subse-
quently eliminating the problem at its source. This
paves the way for a more rewarding customer
experience.
During the resolution process, communications
and technology companies decode the fields of
information from the following:
• Voice of the customer inputs collated from a
multitude of channels, such as online commu-
nities, social channels and feedback provided
to the care team.
• Beta feedback or early input on how product
functionality is aligned with the defined scope.
• In-product feedback surveys.
• Voice of the customer on multiple social
networking channels.
• Top-call driver/call volume analysis.
• Fix resolution approach.
• Scenarios leading to business-blocking issues.
User Insights-Driven Product Engineering
Figure 1
cognizant 20-20 insights

4. 4cognizant 20-20 insights
To enable this, our Care Transformation Frame-
work offers three tracks:
• Track 1: “Do it for me” (empower the care
agent): In this scenario, the customer reaches
out to the care agent to resolve an issue.
• Track 2: “Do it myself” (empower the
customer): This mode provides customers with
a host of relevant solutions to their immediate
problem. One of the primary outcomes of this
mode is to reduce the contact volume, thus
reducing product support costs.
• Track 3: Care is built in (empower the product):
In this context, the customer would not feel the
need to contact the care team, as support is
built-in; the product just works.
We deliver multiple tools to empower care agents
that efficiently identify, replicate and simulate
customer-reported problems.
The multiple ways in which agents are empowered
include:
• Creation of a knowledge base (KB) repository
to help provide fact-based customer service.
The repository is essentially a collection of
historical call data, top agent responses, agent
recommendations, etc.
• Building a first-line response agent capable
of providing efficient and accurate responses
to user problems through:
>> Virtual agents.
>> Robots.
>> Artificial intelligence (contextually aware re-
sponses based on analytical data).
>> KB-based quick responses.
In this era of contextually-aware virtual assistants,
intelligent personal assistants and smart
advisors, it is not surprising that self-service is
also undergoing a sea change. The main objective
is to provide an intuitive and proactive diagnosis,
guidance and suggestions platform that delivers
automated alerts and helps users avoid problems
before they occur.
Post-diagnosis, the platform also provides self-
healing. The proactive alerts could be related to
maintenance or business and, when presented
to the user at the right time, could help them
run their business efficiently. This approach is
primarily used to reduce the number of calls to
care agents.
This is the ideal state. To succeed here, it’s
important to thoroughly understand customer
usage patterns and analyze customer feedback
about the product across multiple channels. The
insights are provided as inputs to the product engi-
neering team, which in turn conducts proactive
diagnosis and repairs issues at the source.
Track
1 Do It for Me
Do It for Myself
Care Is Built-in
Track
2 Do It Myself
Care Is Built-in
Track
3 Care Is Built-in

5. 5cognizant 20-20 insights
Care Transformation Framework:
Core Building Blocks
In addition to analyzing business workflows, cate-
gorizing issues and identifying recurring patterns
that lead a customer to reach out to the customer
care team, our Care Transformation Framework
enables users to ideate on top-call drivers and
then create a solution spectrum to reduce or
eliminate challenges that consumers typically
encounter and that result in support contact.
Proactive Diagnosis and Repair Framework
This framework gathers fields of information,
called user insights, diagnoses the problem and
offers fixes by rolling out a suite of diagnostic
tools to capture and eliminate the most common
causes for recurring issues.
Proactive Notifications and Support Framework
Timely, business-critical notifications and alerts
about payables, receipts, reminders, etc. can help
with preemptive resolution of customer issues,
thereby reducing the load on the support team.
These can either be one-way messages that offer
customer updates or two-way messages that
require them to respond.
Proactive Alerts and Notifications Platform
This framework monitors the product’s vital
parameters that impact non-functional require-
ments (NFR). The goal is to provide end users
with a centralized view of business and non-busi-
ness alerts. In addition, it organizes notifications
by due date, criticality and type, and establishes
a pattern that makes it easy for the user to take
action.
Potential monitoring conditions are built on a
set of predictive rules that are automatically
generated by a rules-based learning algorithm.
• A proactive engine gathers information from
the vital parameters, scrubs the data and
creates messages and notifications.
• An alerts engine then pushes these notifica-
tions to users.
• Together, these engines enable the notifica-
tion platform to deliver maintenance alerts,
warnings and suggestions that help maintain
and improve business efficiency.
These alerts also ensure data safety, remind users
to submit invoices to get paid on time, and pay
bills within the window period and avoid penalties.
Figure 2
Proactive
diagnosis
and repair
framework
Proactive
notifications and
support framework
Proactive alerts and
notifications platform
Care Transformation
Framework
Proactive alerts and
notifications platform
Core Building Blocks of the Care Transformation Framework

6. 6cognizant 20-20 insights
Quick Take
L3 Product Support for Banking Products
Hosted on a SaaS Platform
We worked with a banking software organization
whose software-as-a-service-based (SaaS) data
aggregation platform supports seven products
for 21,000 banks across 14 countries, including 115
million accounts serving 18 million customers. The
Level 3 support team was tasked with supporting
a total average inflow of 12,000 incidents per
month, with a turn-around time (TAT) of 24 hours.
We needed to help the company verify that all
required information about a reported incident
was available, and that an auto-response of known
issues (pulled from the knowledge repository)
was made available to the customer.
The non-functional requirement (NFR) was that
the auto-response should reach end users within
two hours of logging the incident. The number of
incidents reopened needed to be less than 5%
for incidents sent back by the robot integrator,
a software bot that filters out duplicate or
redundant messages, validates the incidents for
existence/replication and calls out known issues.
The Care Transformation Framework in Action
Figure 3
Simulation queue
Ticket assignment
Splunk Monitoring System
Pull
Push
Aggregation Platform
CCAPI
CRM System
SOAP API
REST API
Thread 1
FI
Ticket Workflow Application
Thread N
Issue validator
Auto-executor
Result comparator
Ticket data validator
Known issue resolution
Recent fix validator
Issue simulator
Log analyzer
Ticket de-dupe
Process
Rules configuration,
templates,
knowledge
base & simulation
results
Mule
ESB
Simulation engine
Robo-
Integrator
Robot Integrator: A Logical View
The robot integrator offers the following
capabilities:
• Pulls customer-reported incidents from the
CRM system.
• Pushes updates on incident details, once
resolved.
• Processes verification of the rules for defect
incidents and known errors, and checks for
issue persistence.
The system operates using Mule ESB, which
functions as a gateway for accessing systems
outside the ticket workflow application.
Outcome
By using our framework, 72% of trouble tickets
were resolved through the robot agent, and as
a result, only 28% incidents were pushed to the
Level 3 support agent (see Figure 4).

7. Proactive Engine
Info
collector
Message
generator
XML filesMaintenance
alerts
Core IU
components
Data files and
system info
Main event loop
Product Modules Proactive Agent
Proactive
data
collecting
and alert
process
7cognizant 20-20 insights
Product L1 support
2% —
reopened
Holding queue
Robo-integrator
98% —
First-time
incidents
30% —
Send
back
Escalation queue
Assign to engineer
28% —
Valid
issues
40% —
Repeated
issues ■ Apply de-dupe logic to
identify issues already
worked upon.
■ Establish parent-child
relation.
■ 7% — Required fields
missing
■ 14% — Known issues
■ 9% — Recently fixed/
temporary issues
■ Valid issues assigned to
engineer
■ Simulation results
attached with tickets
for quick analysis
Customer connect
Issue logged in
CRM tool
Figure 4
Robot Integration Framework
Helping a Small Software Company with
Accounting Functionality, Bookkeeping and
Business Management
For a financial and tax preparation product to
function as desired, it needs to help customers
save time and grow their business. When the
software does not provide complete control of
pending payables/receivables, overdue invoices,
pending bills, etc., it results in the user calling
customer service, which in turn increases product
support costs.
We helped a financial and tax preparation software
company that serves the small business and
consumer tax segment by creating a diagnostic
framework within the product, as well as a suite
of diagnostic tools to capture and eliminate the
most common causes for recurring issues. Our
framework consists of repair, recovery and early
warning modules integrated within the product
ecosystem, as well as external tools that run inde-
pendently to monitor and fix issues around the
product’s vital parameters (business/application
critical).
We verified this design by providing a “do it for
me” care agent tool, which provided greater
visibility into various customer scenarios. The
incidents were resolved based on the order of
priority and the impact on business usage.
The next step was to centralize these distributed
alerts and provide a global view to customers.
Through a centralized alert engine, a mechanism
was built to deliver notifications and alerts
triggered by proactively monitoring the product’s
vital parameters. Through a focus on product
quality and usability engineering, an enhanced
customer experience was achieved (see Figure 5).
Outcome
Our client saved $2.8 million in product support
costs (equivalent to resolving 170,000 calls). This
resulted in satisfied customers who are now able
to run their small businesses through an appro-
priate notification ecosystem.
Figure 5
Centralized Alert Engine

8. cognizant 20-20 insights 8
Looking Forward
To provide more timely and cost-effective
product support, technology organizations
need an automated platform that is powered by
user data gathered through software metering.
The quintessential product will monitor usage
patterns and provide predictive analytics and
reports to product support teams. The platform
will collaboratively use in-house systems such as
a diagnostic framework, proactive notification
framework, social analytics and device analytics
data derived from the Internet of Things.
Predictive analytics will form the backbone of
the platform. The power of predictive intelligence
will facilitate preemptive and strategic decision-
making, with minimal room for incorrect assump-
tions. Product support will take a giant leap from
proactive support to predictive analytics-based
support.
Note: Code Halo is a trademark of Cognizant
Technology Solutions.
All company names, trade names, trademarks,
trade dress, designs/logos, copyrights, images and
products referenced in this white paper are the
property of their respective owners. No company
referenced in this white paper sponsored this
white paper or the contents thereof.
Footnotes
1 “Poor Customer Service Costs Companies $83 Billion Annually,” MediaPost, Feb. 18, 2010,
http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/122502/.
2 “Consumer Reports Survey: Two in Three Consumers Have Walked Out of a Store Because of
Poor Customer Service,” Consumer Reports, June 7, 2011, http://pressroom.consumerreports.org/
pressroom/2011/06/consumer-reports-survey-two-in-three-consumers-have-walked-out-of-a-store-
because-of-poor-customer-service.html.
3 Brad Tuttle, “Customer Service Hell,” Time, June 7, 2011,
http://business.time.com/2011/06/07/customer-service-hell/.
4 Ibid.
5 For more on Code Halos and innovation, read “Code Rules: A Playbook for Managing at the Crossroads,”
Cognizant Technology Solutions, June 2013, http://www.cognizant.com/Futureofwork/Documents/
code-rules.pdf, and the book Code Halos: How the Digital Lives of People, Things, and Organizations are
Changing the Rules of Business, by Malcolm Frank, Paul Roehrig and Ben Pring, published by John Wiley
& Sons, April 2014, http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-1118862074.html.
6 Ibid.

9. About Cognizant
Cognizant (NASDAQ: CTSH) is a leading provider of information technology, consulting, and business
process outsourcing services, dedicated to helping the world’s leading companies build stronger busi-
nesses. Headquartered in Teaneck, New Jersey (U.S.), Cognizant combines a passion for client satisfac-
tion, technology innovation, deep industry and business process expertise, and a global, collaborative
workforce that embodies the future of work. With over 100 development and delivery centers worldwide
and approximately 217,700 employees as of March 31, 2015, Cognizant is a member of the NASDAQ-100,
the S&P 500, the Forbes Global 2000, and the Fortune 500 and is ranked among the top performing and
fastest growing companies in the world. Visit us online at www.cognizant.com or follow us on Twitter: Cognizant.
World Headquarters
500 Frank W. Burr Blvd.
Teaneck, NJ 07666 USA
Phone: +1 201 801 0233
Fax: +1 201 801 0243
Toll Free: +1 888 937 3277
Email: inquiry@cognizant.com
European Headquarters
1 Kingdom Street
Paddington Central
London W2 6BD
Phone: +44 (0) 20 7297 7600
Fax: +44 (0) 20 7121 0102
Email: infouk@cognizant.com
India Operations Headquarters
#5/535, Old Mahabalipuram Road
Okkiyam Pettai, Thoraipakkam
Chennai, 600 096 India
Phone: +91 (0) 44 4209 6000
Fax: +91 (0) 44 4209 6060
Email: inquiryindia@cognizant.com
­­© Copyright 2015, Cognizant. All rights reserved. No part of this document may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted in any form or by any
means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the express written permission from Cognizant. The information contained herein is
subject to change without notice. All other trademarks mentioned herein are the property of their respective owners.
About the Author
Ashish Kalvakota is a Senior Engineering Manager within Cognizant’s ComTech Business Unit, where
he is responsible for key product engineering engagements. Ashish has over 19 years of product engi-
neering experience, delivering products and solutions to world-leading organizations in North America,
Europe and Asia Pacific to clients in the financial services, media and entertainment, gaming, and digital
home spaces. He holds a master’s degree in computer science from the National Institute of Technology,
Warangal, India. Ashish can be reached at Ashish.Kalvakota@cognizant.com.
Codex 1419
About Cognizant’s ComTech Practice
Cognizant has a well-established ComTech Practice with 10,000-plus talented professionals providing
end-to-end information technology services for industry-leading companies across the communica-
tions and technology industries. Cognizant provides solutions and services to communication service
providers, MVPD and broadband providers, high-technology companies, independent software vendors
and online companies. Cognizant’s depth of industry consulting expertise, technology skills, innovative
research labs, technology alliances and partnerships create a compelling value proposition for our
clients globally. With a global presence in 17 countries and engaged with over 100 customers it has
proven capabilities in enabling new services and revenue growth, from strategy to development and
from deployment to support. We have strong, long-term, strategic relationships with 7 of top 10 Global
Communications Service Providers and Independent Software Vendors. Cognizant also actively partici-
pates in industry forums and alliances such as the TeleManagement Forum (TMF) and QuEST Forum.