Last week, I had the pleasure of speaking with Alejandro Villacís, who leads Customer Experience and Insights at FCP Euro, a leading online marketplace specializing in aftermarket and OEM parts for European vehicles like BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Volkswagen, Audi, and Porsche. With over a decade of experience managing operational customer experience teams, Alejandro provided valuable insights on how support teams can drive business growth and improve the overall customer experience. Here's what we discussed:
Can you tell us about your approach to customer support and insights at FCP Euro?
"At FCP Euro, we're handling about 40,000 customer interactions a month. My role oversees the full end-to-end customer experience, which is different from my past roles where I was much more focused on the contact center.
In the past few months, I've been focusing on the operational side of the team. There's a lot of opportunity from a staffing perspective, ensuring we have enough people in the right places to meet customer demand across different channels. I've been concentrating on operations, forecasting, and staffing.
However, I see a big opportunity on the insights side. The rest of the organization is clamoring for feedback from customer interactions. We're talking to tens of thousands of customers a month, which is a goldmine of information.
I've started to look at how we've structured our tags on tickets and our disposition reasons. There are some categories that are fairly broad where I would want a more nuanced understanding of why people are contacting us. Ideally, we can understand what an inquiry is about in an automated fashion, and have the ability to break it down into more granular reasons."
How do you use support data to drive decisions in other parts of the business?
"One area that's particularly interesting to our catalog team is the feedback we're getting about specific products, product categories, and product brands. We work with hundreds of vendors, and we get into conversations in the contact center about specific brands and products within those brands.
We want to be able to pull that data out and feed it back to our catalog team. For example, we might say, 'Hey, there's this feedback we're getting about this product, whether it's about the quality, the fitment, or whatever it may be.' We want to be able to summarize this information for them without having to manually add tags for each product or brand.
Another interesting aspect of our business is that, unlike most places I've worked in the past where the majority of contacts were post-purchase, at FCP Euro, about 40-50% of our contacts are pre-purchase. This is due to the complexity of choosing the right part for your vehicle, which is often VIN-specific.
We have an extremely high contact rate. At Harry's, one of my previous companies, our contact-per-order rate was around 10-12%. Here at FCP Euro, we're in the 35% to 40% range. This is because we're focused on the European car market, and many of our customers are DIYers who need guidance on choosing the right parts for their vehicles."
How do you measure the ROI of customer support initiatives?
"We've structured our team to include technical support experts. If someone requires technical assistance, they can speak to a specialist. For example, if you have a Volvo, we have a Volvo specialist who can walk you through the job you want to do, verify your VIN, confirm the part numbers you need, and in some cases even suggest additional components that should be changed.
These conversations are really interesting and valuable, but they can also be time-consuming and difficult to QA and analyze because they're often 15-25 minute conversations.
I'm working with our data team to capture attribution data. For example, if a customer spoke to an agent today and converted within a few days, we want to be able to tie that back to the agent and the contact center. This is more about shifting the perception of the contact center from being just a cost center to driving revenue,improving conversion, and generating loyalty.
My focus is on thinking about the contact center differently because so many of our conversations are pre-purchase, and there's a ton of value we're actually deriving from those conversations."
What's your vision for the future of customer support at FCP Euro?
"This is going to be probably a year to 18-month transformation, but I want to make sure that we're leveraging technology wherever we can. Everything I've done in the past has been largely dependent on training agents to do a certain type of tagging, constantly changing what those tags are depending on the needs of the business and our cross-functional partners.
So much of the work of synthesizing qualitative insights has been manual in nature. If we can find the right partner that can help us synthesize all this information and present it formatted in the right way for different stakeholders across the business, that would be awesome.
I want to shift the perception of the contact center being just a call center to the contact center driving revenue and conversion. But it would also inform a potential program on rewarding the agents for sales and conversion. The first thing is my focus, though, which is thinking about the contact center differently, because so many of the conversations that we're having are pre-purchase, and there's a ton of value that we could derive from those conversations."
Key Takeaways:
1. Leverage technology for insights: Use AI and machine learning tools to automatically categorize and analyze customer interactions, reducing the need for manual tagging.
2. Focus on pre-purchase interactions: Recognize the value of pre-purchase conversations, especially in complex industries like auto parts.
3. Shift perception of the contact center: Position the contact center as a revenue driver, not just a cost center.
4. Connect support data to business outcomes: Work on attributing sales and conversions back to support interactions to demonstrate value.
As Alejandro put it, "I want to shift the perception of the contact center being just a call center to the contact center driving revenue and conversion." By leveraging advanced support systems and viewing customer interactions as opportunities for growth, companies can unlock valuable insights, improve customer experience, and drive business growth.
