Enterprise Communications Featured Article

Customer experience management (CEM) is an integral part of any company’s business plan. While investing in a host of enterprise-level communications solutions will help foster exchanges between companies and their customers, use of CEM can greatly improve the success of a business and its customer service. However, the rising pressure to adopt CEM and meet increasingly high customer service expectations is leaving many companies struggling to keep pace. Even worse, some seem to be flat-out failing to deliver on CEM, despite trying.

This is one of the latest findings from a recently released study by Avaya, a global provider of business collaboration and communications solutions. According to the report, businesses acknowledge the importance of CEM yet cannot seem to effectively adopt and use the technology. In an age when the customer experience is what can set a company apart from the rest in a saturated market, this is highly problematic.

Although 95 percent of business managers surveyed stated that CEM will be important to their organization this year, only 59 percent actually have a comprehensive CEM plan in place. And even among that latter 59 percent, fewer still are able to truly capitalize on the profit boosting powers of CEM, finding that they can only deliver on a handful of elements needed for a personalized, automatic, real-time customer experience. Shockingly, 81 percent of organizations have seen their CEM initiatives fail in the last three years.

Why is this? Most companies know, at this stage, that there is a solid correlation between a strong CEM program and overall increased profits. Eighty-one percent of those surveyed who have seen a significant increase in profits also report having a CEM program in place. So what is keeping companies from effectively adopting CEM? Improving the availability of multichannel communications seems to be a big factor. Of the companies polled without a CEM program at all, 31 percent blame a lack of appropriate technology in place. Avaya (News - Alert) found that 43 percent of managing directors, CEOs and owners think the top reason for CEM failure is project misalignment with customer preferences, pointing to communication barriers within organizations themselves.

Avaya’s survey found that China is leading the pack in terms of CEM, with 84 percent of Chinese businesses having a CEM solution. China is followed by the U.S. at 73 percent, India at 72 percent and Brazil at 63 percent. Companies worldwide are addressing the need for CEM plans and bolstering their communications to ensure those plans succeed. As such, companies struggling to meet CEM demands must take a hard look at their communications investments or risk fading into obscurity in their market.

Perhaps one of the greatest mistakes companies make is in failing to look at all of their enterprise communications options. A strong multichannel backbone to a company can give CEM programs the foundation they need to truly succeed in customer service, and improve internal communications within a business at the same time.