Today, Customer Experience Management (CEM) involves listening to the Voice of the Customer through listening posts, analyzing customer feedback to create a basis for acting on better business decisions and measuring the impact of those decisions to drive greater operational performance and customer loyalty.
Through this process, a company can strategically organize itself to manage a customer's experience with its product or company, and tap into cost savings and revenue drivers that can deliver profitability in all aspects of business operations.
CEM goes far beyond simple customer satisfaction measurements, as such measurements alone are the equivalent of looking in the rear view mirror – you know what happened before but you have no idea what lies ahead. By comparison, CEM helps you track changes in a customer's life cycle and react appropriately and profitably. In fact, companies that distinguish themselves through excellence in customer experience consistently appear in top industry rankings, maintain competitive advantage, and most importantly, build their bottom line.
"Businesses that ignore this and don't look beyond internally focused customer relationship management systems (CRM) to externally focused customer experience solutions (CX) will not survive," Andrew Hull, director of Product Marketing at RightNow, told CRM Search recently.
To harness the power of big data and the increasing ways that customers want to communicate with companies, Avaya (News - Alert) has introduced analytics and customer interaction solutions. Avaya Customer Experience Management (CEM) solutions offer tools for analyzing data, applications for expanding multichannel customer interactions in the call center, and deployment options for virtualized environments.
"Companies today are struggling to keep pace with serving customers the way they need to be served to increase their lifetime value. Customers want convenience, but on the business side, delivering on convenience can be incredibly complex," said Mark de la Vega, vice president and general manager of the Contact Center Business Unit at Avaya.
Currently, Avaya’s Customer Experience Management solutions include Aura Call Center Elite Multichannel, Customer Experience Virtualized Environment, Automated Chat, Speech Analytics, Answer Desk and Contact Flow Analytics.
Aura Call Center Elite Multichannel layers multichannel capabilities, including Web chat, social media, text messaging and e-mail onto Avaya's call center software. The Customer Experience Virtualized Environment provides organizations with Avaya contact center applications, such as skills-based routing, multichannel interactions, reporting and self-service capabilities optimized for VMware environments.
Additionally, Automated Chat integrates with live chat support for an intelligent response engine.
Moreover, Answer Desk allows non-chat agents to tap the automation engine to get answers for their non-chat customer contacts. Also, Speech Analytics integrates the actual voice of the customer into performance management practices. Lastly, Contact Flow Analytics enables organizations to identify call flow issues through visualization tools like flow graphs, dashboards and tabular reports.
"Avaya's customer experience management analytics tools, coupled with our multichannel interaction solutions, replaces guesswork with certainty to support strategic decisions that enable a more personal, streamlined experience that is integrated across channels throughout the customer's journey," continued de la Vega.
One of the biggest strengths of the new applications is the speed with which they can now be deployed, according to Cory Glover, senior marketing manager at Avaya. "Companies are able to spin up multichannel apps and get them deployed in hours instead of the days or weeks that it used to take.”
Edited by Braden Becker