I've always thought it would be gratifying if
customer-facing companies had the customer commitment equivalent to the
loyalty of Manchester United fans to their English soccer club. United is
oft called the best-supported sports team in the world, home games played in
front of typically 67,000 fans while millions of others follow the games via
TV, radio or the Web. (Of course, both serviced customers and the club's
fans would do well to eliminate their hellions and hooligans.) Yes, that
kind of loyalty to customer-facing companies would be satisfactory.
Companies need customer loyalty. 'And then end life when I end loyalty,'
Lysander says to Hermia in A Midsummer Night's Dream. The lives of
service-offering companies end when those companies have lost their
customers' loyalty.
In the same vein, Amae Software (www.amaesoftware.com)
offers its entirely Web-based CI Suite to improve customer satisfaction, as
well as to improve employee productivity (the latter affecting the former,
of course).
Amae seeks to give customers an active voice in
business processes, replacing a host of incommodious survey methods, manual
processes and point solutions, by employing four application modules within
the enterprise application: customer feedback, service quality management,
enterprise performance management and customer research. With this modular
architecture, the suite can provide flexibility to add application
functionality as required and to deploy application functionality in
increments, doing so without the necessity of changing existing business
processes.
The suite allows for collection of intelligent feedback using the
survey-builder, by which customized questions of any type are created and
deployed via telephone, Web and e-mail without the need for programming
skills. This can be done so immediately.
The customer feedback module analyzes and reports feedback and perspectives
from contact channels as well as customer and transaction types immediately
following customer interactions. The real-time and anytime formats include
trend analysis, with the data presented in color-coordinated, online
interactive graphs and tables.
The second module, the service quality management module (SQM), converts
customer feedback and performance metrics into real-time organizational
improvement drivers, generating alerts regarding more important customer
interactions or agent, team or location performance. The SQM module
automates customer retention programs, or manages activity that is customer
feedback- or service performance-driven.
The third module, enterprise performance management (EPM), is good news for
companies as entities but bad news for employee truants. Goals and service
quality can be set at all levels within the organization using the EPM
module. It can identify performance areas of slight and prioritize the areas
that require improvement ' based on customer perspective and the
organization's objectives. In other words, the customers are speaking to the
company, telling those in charge what needs to change regarding service.
It's similar to students giving the teacher criticism or gold and silver
stars in specific areas, the principal or dean then being updated of their
accomplishments or faults immediately after the critiques are shared by the
students. (And teachers generally do not want to lose their potentiality for
tenure, let alone find themselves seeking a teaching position at another
school.)
The fourth and final module of the Amae CI Suite, the customer research
module, manages the collection and analysis of customer feedback across all
channels, comparing feedback by type: customer, transaction or channel. The
information can be summarized as cross-tab analysis, rapidly driving
business decisions because the collected information is revealed as
actionable.
The suite, licensed or hosted, seamlessly integrates with existing
enterprise applications. The system will link directly with existing
telephony for a single user-interface that both measures customer feedback
and reports it to relevant groups throughout an organization, linking
telephony technology and enterprise networks. The built-in IVR can be easily
programmed (questions/surveys created and structured, etc.) from anywhere,
sound files and all, directly from a Web browser by someone with
admministrative authorization. The application's database structure operates
on a standard Windows platform and can optionally be deployed on any
standard ODBC database.
A 360-degree view of the business allows those in charge the opportunity to
improve that which needs to be improved upon because these decision makers
have the ability to actually know what underachievement is taking place and
where. In business, performance is the reality ' not words, explanations or
promises. Performance and nonperformance can be measured. Service quality
and goals-based productivity are both emphatically egregious ' so salient '
to the customer and to the company. Com-panies should want (because they
need) their customers faithful, to think as Adam in Shakespeare's As You
Like It: I will follow thee/To the last gasp, with truth and loyalty. (The
Bard sure loved his allegiance.)
It is so basic, but without the customer, the company has only a commodity
without an audience, like a European football club without fans; without, it
is obsolete. Amae allows companies to, like team United, score their goals.
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