Samsung Electronics Named Overall Winner in IDC's Best in Future of Customer Experience North America Awards

International Data Corporation (IDC) today announced winners in the inaugural Future Enterprise Best in Future of Customer Experience North America Awards. Samsung Electronics America Customer Care was named the overall winner, followed closely by Unum and Samson Inc. as runners-up. Recognized for effectively transforming the way customer-related initiatives are done, these organizations clearly demonstrated a keen understanding of the evolving nature of the relationship between customers and brands and the role of technology to support this evolution. Winners will be recognized at a virtual event this fall.

Winning Project Highlights

Overall Winner: Samsung Electronics America Customer Care

Project name: Samsung Connected Care

Project summary: Samsung Connected Care delivers the first fully digitalized prescriptive customer service journey in the home appliance industry. Unified customer data, which includes product and service information, delivers an elevated contextual experience. Customers can curate their own service journey (i.e., self-service or escalation to a technician) powered by a range of smart IoT-based maintenance and repair solutions for Samsung appliances. Samsung has also taken steps toward a more complete transformation vision by extending experience elements across the mid- and back-office functions, evidenced by significant improvements in first-time repair rates and NPS.

Runner Up: Unum

Project name: Unum: Benefits and Contact Center Journey

Project summary: Unum modernized the customer experience by digitally processing First Notice of Loss (FNOL) through text and other asynchronous channels, instead of traditional voice phone calls. This digital-first strategy reduced claim processing times from days to hours, with 50% of customers completing the process within 5 minutes. Claims processing is a critical customer journey in insurance and amongst incumbents, only a few providers offer this level of sophistication in a simple, self-service experience. By partnering with Ushur, Unum uses conversational AI, knowledge work automation, smart analytics, and omnichannel technologies to deliver guided, contextual, digital customer experiences that are secure and engender trust. In parallel, Unum has augmented the employee experience with workflow automation to increase efficiency for email processing, member enrollment, and customer engagement.

Runner Up: Samson Inc.

Project name: Samson ICARIA 2.0: The Digital Solution for Mooring Line Management

Project summary: Samson is the leading producer of high-performance synthetic ropes. Samson's customers have ropes that need to be inspected regularly and have their usage tracked. Samson innovated by using customer data and insights to offer prescriptive guidance for inspections to improve customer safety while meeting regulatory compliance. Samson partnered with Unvired to build a Hybrid App for iOS, Android, Windows 10, and the web, through the purposeful application of technologies such as NFC and AR to improve accuracy. By productizing leading practices and compliance requirements, the integrations with Salesforce enable analysis and automatic report generation. As a result, customer benefits include safety, compliance, cost savings, deeper insights about rope usage and retirement, and enhanced customer service.

Pillars of the Future of Customer Experience practice include:

• Customer Experiences - Customers want human conversations, clear journeys across multiple channels, and contextual experiences that lead to satisfaction.
• Data and the Prism of Technology - Data is critical to customer engagement. It provides insight about the brand, the customer, and the interaction, while providing the context for delivering relevant experiences and solutions. And, while data is at the heart of a digital experience, technology is what enables the analysis and delivery.
• Business Outcomes - Business outcomes are mapped to the technologies and the customer expectations to demonstrate that there is a flexible alignment between the customer journey and business outcomes.

"The winner and runners-up from our inaugural Future Enterprise Best in Future of Customer Experience North America Award represent the most compelling use cases, across North America, of Customer Experience transformation through the use of innovative technology," said Sudhir Rajagopal, research director, Future of Customer Experience, IDC. "These initiatives demonstrate that it is possible for enterprises to deliver empathetic customer outcomes while also achieving business value. We congratulate the teams at Samsung, Unum, and Samson for their dedication to improving and enhancing their customer experience and delivering empathy at scale as showcased through each of their Future Enterprise initiatives."

About the Future Enterprise Awards

The world is moving from digital transformation (DX) (as we know it) to Digital-First. DX started with transformation from analog to digital. With contextualization, digital-first becomes the next evolution in DX. Digital is a permanent, yet dynamic fixture in this world. Digital-first applies to any entity searching for a digital-based capability or enhancement that could improve our lives and desired outcomes. As we anchor ourselves in a digital-first world, one thing is clear. Organizations, private or public, large or small, will need to leverage technologies in an accelerated fashion to thrive. And the ones that can close the new digital gap through the greatest business value impact will become market leaders of tomorrow. These leaders are the Future Enterprises. To learn more about the Future Enterprise Awards, please visit idcdxawards.com.

For any questions regarding the North American Future Enterprise Awards please contact Heather Ball at [email protected].

About IDC

International Data Corporation (IDC) is the premier global provider of market intelligence, advisory services, and events for the information technology, telecommunications, and consumer technology markets. With more than 1,300 analysts worldwide, IDC offers global, regional, and local expertise on technology, IT benchmarking and sourcing, and industry opportunities and trends in over 110 countries. IDC's analysis and insight helps IT professionals, business executives, and the investment community to make fact-based technology decisions and to achieve their key business objectives. Founded in 1964, IDC is a wholly owned subsidiary of International Data Group (IDG), the world's leading tech media, data, and marketing services company. To learn more about IDC, please visit www.idc.com. Follow IDC on Twitter at @IDC and LinkedIn. Subscribe to the IDC Blog for industry news and insights.