|
Building Customer Relationships One Interaction at a Time
Overview
Companies and their customers continue to have very different perspectives.
Companies want to establish meaningful long-term relationships with their customers while consumers want every interaction to be efficient and valuable.
Successful customer-oriented companies know that customer relationships can only be built one interaction at a time. Thus they are re-aligning objectives around the customer interaction and realizing that they�re only as good as their last interaction.
Consumers don�t necessarily want a relationship with a company or service provider. Instead they expect their needs to be understood and met during every interaction. Organizations that can achieve this � with each and every interaction � will be rewarded by a customer�s loyalty. Unfortunately, even one poor interaction can ruin the customer �relationship,� even those that have existed for years.
It is time to change the course of customer interactions.
This article will discuss:
1. The important of interactions
2. The challenge behind delivering an �optimum� interaction every time
3. The need for real-time management of interactions
4. How to achieve optimum interaction results by leveraging, not replacing, existing customer investments
It�s the Interaction That Matters
In just ten short years, the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) industry has been created, defined, and redefined. It�s been viewed from a functional perspective � sales, service, marketing; a technological perspective � operational, collaborative, analytical; and a targeted perspective � 360 degree view, customer experience, customer centric.
What�s common to all of the above views is that they describe an organizational perspective of CRM, and not a customer perspective. Since CRM has been recognized as a significant part of corporate strategy, customers have changed radically.
Today, there are dozens of product choices available at the click of a mouse as well as the proliferation of mobile devices and PDAs. Consumers are empowered in ways they simply weren�t before. The concepts of �instant gratification� and �personalization� are no longer the exception; they are the rule. If a consumer can�t get what they need or want immediately, it�s pretty simple to find other alternatives.
�Both CRM [Customer Relationship Management] and CEM [Customer Experience
Management] are subject to a fatal flaw. Both strategies assume that customers can
and are willing to be managed. While there are exceptions to this rule, in general,
customers do not want to be managed. Customers want to do business when they
want, where they want, how they want and the way they want.� (I)
The Challenge behind Delivering an �Optimum (News - Alert)� Interaction
By definition, customer interactions are both complex and unpredictable. Furthermore, an �optimum� interaction means different things to different people, particularly customers.
The Complexity of Interactions: Organizations maintain massive amounts of information about customers stored in databases and analytic warehouses. The challenge is in synthesizing and bringing this information � or the necessary components of it � to the forefront during interactions with customers. Furthermore, customers interact with companies across multiple channels, creating a complicated web of information needs. And last but not least, these interactions are often handled by customer-facing employees, adding yet more layers.
Too frequently, companies rely upon customer-facing employees to be the point of integration. With hiring and employee turnover challenges as well as training on hundreds of customer systems, it just simply isn�t feasible. It is this final element, the human involvement, which brings us to the next component of customer interactions: their inherent unpredictability.
Research from the Gartner (News - Alert) Group shows that �59% of multichannel customers will stop doing business after a single bad experience.� (II)
The Unpredictability of Interactions: No matter how well organizations prepare themselves to manage customer interactions, the circumstances surrounding interactions are always changing. Here are a few possible scenarios:
1) A customer might call with multiple needs in mind, shifting the course of the interaction itself.
2) Your organizational objectives can change from hour to hour: a promotional offer might be relevant one morning, but a supply chain glitch might render it useless that same afternoon.
3) External situations cause interactions to shift as well. Witness any insurance company call center in the hours following a hail storm, or an institutional investor website during a drop in the stock market.
The point is regardless of preparedness, and channel, the interactions exist between customers and companies are instigated or managed by people, or both. Therefore, they are inherently unpredictable.
The Optimum Interaction: The optimum interaction has different objectives to the customer and the organization. From the customer�s standpoint, it might be the shortest interaction possible that fulfils the initial need.
From the organizational perspective, the optimum interaction for the customer service executive might be getting the right call to the right employee, on a topic they can support. For those tasked with revenue objectives, they would prefer that the end result involving a new service was accepted.
These scenarios can appear to be at odds with one another, but they are all accurate descriptions of �optimum.� They can be valid during the course of any single interaction, as people interact, and circumstances shift.
Making It Real-Time
Many organizations have developed the tools, knowledge, and processes to manage individual customer interactions. Where they have been limited is in synthesizing the right combination of components, and harnessing it in real time to be used during the interaction.
Significant investment and progress has been made in solving many of the individual challenges described herein: managing efficient customer interactions, enabling cross-sell opportunities, training agents and deploying usable self-service websites. Where the struggle still exists is when more than a single objective needs to be met, during the moment of interaction with a customer. Most companies know that they need to break down organizational silos if they aim to be a customer-centric organization, but too frequently, the decision about which objective to support is left to chance during the interaction. One objective gets traded off for another, time and time again.
While some interactions can be very straightforward, preparing your customer-facing
employees and the supporting customer technologies to deliver value in every complex and unpredictable interaction has, to date, required either cost-prohibitive technology integration or levels of hiring and training that simply aren�t viable.
Bringing Targeted Customer Capabilities Together in the Moment of Interaction
Customer management systems were simply not designed to manage multiple objectives at once, especially in real time. Most CRM applications were largely developed to manage individual functions or interaction types: customer service, marketing automation, field service, order management. The unfortunate reality this created is threefold:
1) The most pertinent information these systems can provide about customers is
delivered in batch form, after the interactions have occurred.
2) Data and information gleaned from these systems is organized for specific end-users in the corporation, not for customer benefit.
3) Managing more than one type of interaction has required companies to spend significant amounts of time and money to integrate these applications themselves.
Companies have already invested millions in these customer systems, and those investments cannot and should not be abandoned. Companies shouldn�t have to change anything about these systems, but rather, find a way to selectively pull the data necessary from each of them, wherever they may reside, into the moment of the customer interaction.
Inspiring Every Interaction
Companies can achieve the efficient and optimum result during every customer interaction, by continuously adapting and responding in real time to both changing business circumstances and the unpredictability of the customer interaction.
Fortune 500 customers have achieved results such as:
� Increased sales through service interactions by 25%
� Boosted lead generation by as much as 31%
� Cut down average handling time (AHT) by 9%
� Shortened training time by as much as 15%
Technology today can intelligently pull and analyze data from both the interaction itself and from all available data sources - without requiring actual integration - and combines that with an interaction rules engine that can be easily and rapidly modified by business users.
With the addition of personalized callouts for the customer-facing employees, every customer interaction can be interpreted from start to finish, continuously taking actions and advising decisions as needed, within the existing environment.
Organizations can:
1. Manage changes to business objectives that arise from the interaction itself.
2. Simultaneously attain both the business and operational objectives of every
customer interaction.
3. Capture new ROI from existing investments by focusing the capabilities of all
customer systems on the moment of interaction.
The result is that the organization can handle any combination of circumstances, in any zone of customer interaction, based upon the objectives that are most important at that point in time.
Conclusion
Successful customer-oriented companies have figured out that customer relationships can only be built one interaction at a time, and are re-aligning objectives around just that: the customer interaction.
By changing the course of the interaction, you could personally direct the outcome of every single customer interaction, start to finish. You could drive towards revenue goals, and manage efficiency objectives, or to switch back and forth between those needs instantly, based upon which customer is calling or how high your call queue is.
Customer-facing employees would understand those changing objectives and are empowered and inspired to respond accordingly.
Plus, this activity could all be directed from your own desk. And possibly the greatest reward for your organization is having customers complete every interaction feeling satisfied.
eglue (News - Alert) Business technologies � Inspire every interaction�
eglue is a global software company who provides unique real-time customer interaction
solutions for mass market companies. For more information about eglue or its suite of
business applications, eglue Interact�, visit www.e-glue.com or call 201-217-0022.
© eglue Business Technologies. All rights reserved. 9/2007
I. �The Battle Between CRM and CEM�, by Donna Fluss, DMG Consulting LLC, August 2006
II. �Improving the Customer Experience: Expectations, Delivery and Feedback�, Ed Thompson, Gartner
Group, March 2007
[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]
|
INDUSTRIES
Activate Email 
INDUSTRIES
Find Solutions for Enterprises, SMBs & Service Providers at the INTERNET TELEPHONY Conference and EXPO West, September 1-3, 2009. Los Angeles, CA.
