October 2000

BY LIOR ARUSSY, NICE SYSTEMS

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.