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In a world where businesses have less control over pricing, where your
customers can obtain products often at a price they desire, where is your
competitive edge? When customers are in charge of defining your channel
and your pricing, it's clear your business is experiencing a fundamental
change. Companies are increasingly realizing that new technologies, the
Internet in particular, are empowering customers while wiping away
traditional competitive advantages. Amidst all this change, new challenges
emerge:
- What does your brand stand for and how do you support brand
position?
- How do you develop lasting loyalty in light of customers' evolving
tastes and preferences?
- When customers can dictate the rules and information is instantly
available, how do you create lasting loyalty toward your brand?
If your company's pricing, promotion, product, and placement models
have not yet been challenged, they soon will be. Now what?
The Last Competitive Asset
In this new competitive environment, the brand is the only asset companies
have left. It is the last area of competitive edge for which you exert
considerable control. But brand is no longer about tangible assets like
product differentiation or specialized distribution channels -- these are
disappearing as we speak. New factors are affecting customer loyalty to
your business and your brand: quality of customer support, on-time
delivery, shipping prices and options, product representation, privacy
policies, and many more. "Classic" differentiators, once so
critical, no longer dictate business success or failure. Bizrate.com's
1999 Q2 online customer survey rated "Quality of customer
support" as the factor most affecting customer loyalty. Selection and
price were rated lowest in their effect on customer loyalty.
The demise of traditional competitive assets has given rise to today's
interaction (contact) center, and highlighted its strategic significance.
The interaction center has moved from the periphery to the epicenter of
every organization. Today the interaction center is the heartbeat of your
business and the manner in which you deal with customer interactions is
the lifeblood of your organization.
The Right Technology Is The Key
Most companies are targeting their technology investment in the interaction
center's core business functions. PBXs (public branch exchanges)
and ACDs (automatic call distributors) ensure initiation of the discussion
with the customer. Computer telephony and routing technologies allow smart
communication and distribution of calls to the best-qualified agents.
Adding CRM (customer relationship management) enables centers to maximize
their revenue per customer. But none of these technologies are dedicated
to actually listening to the customer beyond registering a complaint or
closing a sale. They do not focus on closing the next deal or preventing
the next ticket.
However, customer experience management (CEM) focuses directly on the critical
area of customer loyalty -- a key part of your company's brand and
competitive edge. CEM builds on existing technologies and
transports the interaction center to the center of your business by making
it a powerful system that creates sustainable customer loyalty and
provides essential decision tools for senior management.
Customer experience management is a constant 24x7 process involving:
- Capturing customer experiences;
- Evaluating the interactions on an ongoing basis;
- Analyzing to provide a picture of the overall quality of the
customer experience and the details within it; and
- Improving your business processes by responding to the results of
the analysis.
Additionally, customer interactions must be shared with the true
decision-makers of the enterprise -- not just agents -- as they occur, and well before they
become lost in a pile of statistics. Achieving this involves a combination
of providing decision-makers access to daily customer interactions as well
as empowering agents to deliver those interactions.
The never-ending CEM cycle allows you to turn the data captured into
knowledge that can create better agents to deal with customers, more
informed executives to lead the business, more timely responses that lead
to customer loyalty and, ultimately, a more successful business.
The Business Paradoxes: Getting To Know Your Customer
Business Paradox 1: The power to change vs. the power to understand.
Have you ever noticed the contradiction between power and proximity to
customers? Oftentimes, the closer you are to the customer the less power
you have to influence their experience. Agents staffing the interaction centers
face hundreds of customers every day, yet their power to resolve problems
is minimal. Top management, on the other hand, those who hold the power to
change and influence the customer experience, are the farthest from the
customers. They tend to be hidden away behind piles of statistical
analysis, engaged in meetings, and thoroughly missing out on
actually listening to customers. In this new era of customer loyalty as
the last competitive asset, executives cannot hope to make informed
decisions unless they are plugged into their customers' viewpoints and
opinions.
You must create and exploit every opportunity to listen to what and how
your customers are communicating. Every executive in a position to make
decisions in the organization must be listening on a regular basis in
order to make informed decisions.
Business Paradox 2: But who is speaking to your customer?
The basic interaction center model serves the need to centralize and
manage mass interactions with customers in an effective and consistent
manner. In creating this marvelous system, you effectively place the
business's most valuable asset -- its customers -- in the hands of those with
the least power to influence change: its agents. Agent empowerment,
proficiency, and effectiveness are critical in affecting business
performance and success.
Your agents are the primary interface to your customers. The success of
each customer experience in the interaction center experience is solely
dependent on the human touch provided by the agent. If agents are
"wearing" the wrong attitude, customers inevitably will get the
wrong impression.
It is the organization's responsibility to make sure agents are treated
well. They must feel empowered with the right tools, techniques, and
practices -- in addition to incentives and rewards -- to make every
interaction they handle perfect. You can afford nothing less!
Business Paradox 3: It's right under your nose!
To achieve the position of "customer focus," companies are
spending ever-increasing amounts of money and resources to solicit
customer viewpoints. From simple customer surveys in hotel rooms and at
restaurants to expensive regional and ethnic-based focus groups, there is
no shortage of corporations trying to get a grip on their customer's
perspectives.
The paradox, of course, is that while companies are spending all this
money and time, their customers are simultaneously calling and providing
(for free!) their ideas, viewpoints, and suggestions, everyday. Yet this
information is largely ignored.
The wealth of information and knowledge organizations seek is already
available. But to capture it requires a change in focus and attitude. It
also requires investment in the right analytical tools and solutions.
CEM Strategy In Action
CEM takes interaction center technology to the next level and eliminates
the "business paradoxes" by providing the
tools and capabilities to capture, analyze, evaluate, and improve, but
also to respond. The following tools and concepts embody CEM's bottom line
value proposition of listening and responding to enhance brand and
maximize customer loyalty:
Record, Monitor, And Apply Quality Measurement Regardless Of Media
Increasingly, the interaction center must record and monitor engines
for voice, e-mail, Web collaboration, VoIP, chat and other data and
events. Technologies such as voice over IP and other emerging Web
technologies are part of expanding interaction channels. Including them is
key to capturing the complete experience.
Capture A 360-Degree View Of The Customer Experience
360-degree customer experience is a view that combines voice, screen,
VoIP, IVR, and Web-based customers surveys and CRM data to provide a
complete view of the interaction between the business and the customer.
The customer's view is the critical piece often missing, but sorely
needed, to complete the picture of the results and the quality of the
interaction.
Ensure CEM/CRM Integration
Utilizing the CRM system as a console is a concept that integrates CEM
capabilities with CRM Systems which enables a full view
and analysis of the customer interaction. In addition, using CRM and its
data to trigger recording and analysis of the data captured. In this way,
agents will no longer have to look thorough the CRM system to find a
customer's interaction history and then turn to another application to
retrieve and recreate that interaction.
Give Your Executives Access To The Data
Connecting executives means enabling every executive to connect to the interaction center
and listen to customer interactions at their center anytime and from
anywhere. An IVR type product providing the capability to call in from a
remote location and monitor randomly selected calls in the interaction center
to provide a first-hand, unvarnished look at the customers and their
needs.
Data Mining
Data mining utilizes advanced tools to extract business and customer
intelligence from multiple sources to provide answers to questions and to
reveal patterns previously undiscovered. Next-generation reporting and
data mining tools take the CEM concept one step further by turning the
wealth of information available in the interaction centers' data systems
into real business wisdom. By integrating recordings, CRM and call data
information, call statistics, and quality measurement results advanced
data mining tools will provide the knowledge to improve businesses
processes, performance, and efficiency; achieving reduced costs while
increasing customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Conclusion
Customer experience management is about capturing and analyzing your
customers' experiences, one customer at a time and as a universe of
customers. It provides you with the power to listen in real-time, or
anytime, to customer voices and opinions. Captured through incoming
e-mails, Web chat, or phone calls, you can get a complete picture of
customer feelings and emotions. This knowledge combined with your
customers' complaints and suggestions constitute a secret weapon to bring
your company to a new level of competitive prowess. When you start seeing
the world through your customer's eyes, you will be amazed at what you
discover. In today's world, this last secret weapon is your ability to
influence customer's hearts and minds to favor your brand. The rest of
your competitive assets are easily matched or neutralized. Building
lasting customer loyalty will provide you with a true, sustainable
competitive edge.
Lior Arussy is the senior vice president of global marketing for the
CEM division of NICE Systems. NICE
Systems' CEM Division serves over 3,000 customers at 8,000 sites in 67
countries. NICE's CEM solutions are based on a business platform for
customer experience management, which enables customer interaction centers
to capture, evaluate, analyze and improve the customer experience in a
wide range of communications including voice, voice over Internet protocol
(VoIP), e-mail and Web interactions. These solutions enable the enterprise
to build lasting customer loyalty and brand recognition by providing tools
to listen and respond to customer needs. NICE CEM solutions bring the true
decision-makers of an organization closer to customers and empower agents
to become key assets in the business value chain. |
