- Case study
Breathing new life into customer experience at Thermo Fisher Scientific
How award-winning customer service transformation boosted experiences, increased revenue, and improved productivity
Who we worked with
With revenues of nearly $45 billion, Thermo Fisher Scientific is one of the world's leading suppliers of scientific instruments and services
What Thermo Fisher Scientific needed
To overcome the challenges from:
- Disparate order management systems and processes from years of mergers and acquisitions
- Missed or delayed shipments impacting the customer experience, revenues, and cash flow
- Limited end-to-end visibility of orders and too many touchpoints across the order life cycle
How we helped
- Mapped customer service processes and built a business case for digital transformation
- Automated order management processes and exception management, and enabled end-to-end order visibility with process orchestration and artificial intelligence (AI)
- Delivered data-driven insights into customer experience by analyzing customer interactions
What the company got
- 10-20% increase in customer experience
- 0.5-1% revenue boost from improved sales and customer experiences
- 30% end-user productivity rise
- End-users feel better equipped to do their jobs
Challenge
Transforming customer experience through automation and digitization
Since Thermo Electron and Fisher Scientific announced they would merge in 2006, the laboratory equipment and scientific instrument supplier has made almost 40 acquisitions in multiple sectors. It hasn't shied away from investing, spending more than $66 billion on companies in life sciences tech and genomics.
But this rapid growth left Thermo Fisher Scientific with a problem: Within its customer services function, the company had 178 unique workflows and more than 17 fragmented and highly manual processes and disparate data sources and systems.
Minimal automation meant low productivity. Customer-care representatives had to deal with nine different systems across nine different screens. It took a long time to check on the status of orders. Sometimes it took ten minutes to answer a simple call about an order's status. And they needed ongoing and complex training in the different systems they encountered.
Too many touchpoints, too little visibility
Thermo Fisher Scientific manages more than 10 million transactions and customer interactions every year from entry, sales, and customer services. Previously these interactions arrived via phone, fax, and email from businesses and consumers, while some even had to be read and keyed into a system. Customer-care representatives had too many points of contact with different customers and struggled to connect with them and meet orders. Shipments were delayed or missed and customers were kept waiting.
In addition, the company had to reimagine how it measured, monitored, and improved its customers' experiences. When it emailed customers asking for feedback, only 10% responded. Unsurprisingly, it lost revenue and long lead times meant managing cash flow was difficult. Thermo Fisher Scientific knew it risked customers turning to its competitors.
So, the company launched Project Northstar.
This customer engagement initiative would automate and digitize manual processes and create a unified system, making it simple to connect with customers. Thermo Fisher Scientific needed a better order-conversion rate to improve repeat business, boost revenue, and increase cash flow. But reducing cost to stem the churn was also essential. To achieve this, customer-care representatives needed sight across all orders, end-to-end.
Solution
Review, then revolutionize
Map the current system through analytics
We needed to step into customers' shoes to experience how they buy Thermo Fisher Scientific products and services. Our first step was to create a blueprint that mapped all customer service processes and defined a detailed taxonomy that identified gaps and pain points.
Using our diagnostic tools, analytics, automation, and transformation methodologies – including ProcIndex, the Intelligent Automation Index, and Celonis' process-mining tools – we assessed the customer service value chain, made recommendations, and built the business case. That's how we created a transformation roadmap, setting out the process-improvement priorities using digital tools to bring in a refined automated ordering system.
Harmonize data
But first, consolidation was key. We created a centralized data lake that brought data together from multiple ERPs, CRMs, and legacy systems from years of M&A growth into a single layer. This data lake underpinned the entire project.
We created a 'single pane of glass' that shows the entire lifecycle of an order with integrated track and trace. Workflow technology called Cora Orchestration – deployed on web service Amazon EC2 – replaces the multiple screens employees had previously used to track orders. Now employees can use a smart search platform on a single dashboard to pull information from the data lake, be it customer orders, product availability and pricing, customer-specific quotes, or invoices.
Our order management system, Cora OrderAssist, is now in place. Built on cloud-computing platform Amazon Web Services (AWS), it uses Amazon EC2, Amazon SageMaker, AWS Lambda, and Amazon Redshift to create a scalable solution that allows ThermoFisher to focus on business outcomes, rather than IT infrastructure.
By using document-automation technology from Esker, Cora OrderAssist automates processes and extracts and validates order information. Customer care representatives now have fewer orders to key in manually. And if there are exceptions or order changes at any point, machine learning and dynamic workflow manage them automatically.
Monitor, measure, and improve customer experience
Thermo Fisher Scientific needed to understand every experience customers had throughout the value chain. Genpact implemented its customer experience, sales experience, complexity, and risk framework (CSCR™), and built a digital platform that enables the company to measure customer interactions. With KPIs at each touchpoint, Thermo Fisher Scientific can quickly determine the next-best action.
For case management, we used machine learning to read emails and analyze sentiment, which helps to auto-assign customers' emails to teams based on their content. Now complaints go to the right team and repeat orders go to the right team—all automatically.
Impact
We built the roadmap, executed the plan, and delivered on the project's goals
In just one year, our collaboration with Thermo Fisher Scientific on project NorthStar has transformed customer service:
- Average call hold times have decreased 27% since the end of 2021
- Cash flow has accelerated by between $200-300 million due to faster order processing
- Customer experience through the entire find-buy-use-renew lifecycle has improved by 10-20% and can now be fully measured
- Revenue has increased by 0.5-1% through improved sales and customer experience
- By providing greater visibility into orders through a 'single pane of glass', first-call resolution for complex customer queries has improved by twice the average and new hires reach work productivity goals within two weeks, rather than two months
“Genpact's understanding of our business and its skills with digital technologies have enabled us to solve some of our complex problems and simplify how our customer-care teams interact with our customers," says John Stevens, vice president of IT at Thermo Fisher Scientific. “That helped us to really understand how to solve some of these very complex problems and simplify the way that our customer care teams interact with our customers."
What's next
Based on the success of Project NorthStar, Cora OrderAssist has been deployed to Thermo Fisher Scientific's Sales and Service Operations of the Materials and Structural Analysis Division, covering end-to-end operations. The company is going through the learning process for order entry automation and is planning to embed more digital processes within the organization to maximize standardization. This includes continuing to develop the CSCR™ framework.
“We've achieved NorthStar's goals by transforming order management and giving customers an experience that strengthens our relationships and deepens loyalty," Stevens adds. “I'm looking forward to bringing our success and partnership with Genpact to the wider Thermo Fisher business."
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