Companies should no longer be content with selling products to customers but instead weave a whole new experience for them at all the touch points
By Jasmine Desai
Customer interactions have become like a complex code that needs proper decoding in order to serve them better. As consumers use multiple touch-points to access information, exchange reviews and buy products and services, organizations are clearly finding it difficult to integrate systems and leverage social technologies to optimize the quality of customer interactions. In a world driven by ever changing market and customer priorities, acquisition, retention, loyalty and satisfaction are keywords for your customer management strategy. Each time your customer transacts with your brand, they are engaging in an experience.
According to Sudhir Narang, Managing Director-India, BT, “Customer Experience Management (CEM) is one of the most critical elements of any business running across the world. While it allows companies to widen its customer outreach, adding depth to its engagement with one of its most important stakeholders, it also helps them differentiate in the competitive landscape and opens up avenues of superior growth in the market.”
The need of the hour is to address the new realities of CEM and ride the wave of future growth, in order to establish market leadership. Presently, the journey that CEM is headed towards is of avoiding bad customer experiences in the first place.
And to achieve this, technologies like social media and mobility are emerging as preferred platforms and tools to deliver end-to-end services in today’s dynamic business environment. It is important to blend disruptive technologies like big data, analytics and social media to create a holistic view of customer priorities. These tools are helping companies monitor consumer perceptions and trends to enhance the overall customer experience. Adopting these technologies will help businesses address their challenges and will establish better CEM practices as an important discipline for their overall growth and success.
Challenges in CEM
Technology plays several key roles during the customer journey. It facilitates “any time, any media” interactions such as voice, self-service, Web chats, and more. Social media and mobile innovations also bring new opportunities to better serve customers in their preferred environment. At the same time, technology can be a cause of concern for those who do not deploy it effectively. Handling increasingly complex types of calls and customer expectations with quality, requires hiring, training and retaining highly skilled agents, as well as leveraging technology and the depth and breadth of solutions, which takes additional investment. And all these need to be balanced with cost-effective service delivery that clients expect from their BPO/BPM partners.
Wrong technology choices, such as using multiple stand-alone platforms to store customer details, product information, history of past interactions, current and past orders, shipping, and billing can result in poor customer service and in turn, reduce the overall lifetime value of the customer. Bad experiences will of course be amplified using social media.
According to Johnson Varkey, Director – Contact Center Sales – India & SAARC, Avaya, “Technology can play a critical role in delivering a differentiated customer experience. However, just 8% of organizations surveyed by Forrester have implemented multichannel customer service technologies. At the same time, the majority of respondents recognize the benefits that technology can offer, such as improved agent productivity, improved quality of service, and the delivery of consistent service across all channels.”
Therefore, in order to offer an excellent customer experience and maximize the lifetime value of a customer, it is vital to have an integrated multichannel approach. Also, standing out from all the noise and fluff around engaging with customers is the most critical challenge.
Explains Ramesh Loganathan, Vice President and Managing Director, Progress Software, “Getting creative to offer something very interesting that captivates the customer and thus create that positively pleasant experience for the customer, is a key part of CEM. The tools are all available, we just have to get creative in how these are leveraged to engage with the customer.”
Customers today tend to handle simpler transactions through self-service, resulting in an increase in the volume of complex customer service calls. Customers also expect their concerns to be resolved on the first call. Furthermore, their loyalty to a product or service nowadays is also impacted by how well companies are able to personalize or provide a truly differentiated, highly-satisfying customer service experience for them. Says Sanjit Bal, Director for Business Development, Convergys India, “For us in the customer management business, two trends we see impacting customer service are call complexity and changing/evolving customer expectations. With a lot at stake, an outdated, one-size-fits-all service becomes a low customer service standard.”
It’s the front-line contact center department that bears a hefty burden. This is the place where customer service or sales agents directly interact with customers. Without the ability to know who they are or how best to connect with customers on an individual basis, or have the right tools to address the complex nature of customer issues, contact center teams are not set up to do the best job possible. More likely than not, customers will end up getting impersonal, inconsistent, and perhaps inaccurate responses to their complex problems and thus, end up as unsatisfied customers.
According to Raj Mruthyunjayappa, Managing Director, APAC & EMEA, Talisma Corporation Pvt. Ltd., “Successful companies differentiate from the competition through their customer experience. However, many companies still have not come to terms with the pace of change in digital customer transparency, nor have they laid out strategies that will serve them in the coming years. These companies are highly vulnerable to those competitors that have their customer experience strategy in place.”
CEM and the big data angle
Big data is a crucial element for innovation, competitive advantage and productivity and especially marketers, are adopting big data technologies to make sense of what is otherwise an overwhelming amount of information.
As per Sanjit Bal, Director for Business Developmnent, Convergys India, “Our contact center operations become a rich source of insight into customers as well as ourselves as a service provider. But often, such information is siloed across different systems, some of which the contact center has no control over. As a result, customer service agents have no single view of the customer and no rich insights to pull from big data. The key is putting Customer Intelligence to better use.”
Advanced BPM process mining, allows a better understanding of the customer behavior from internal data, social networks, and other external sources to enhance experiences, extend targeted offers that grow relationships and boost customer lifetime value. Usage of behavioral analysis tools combined with “next best action” and “next best offer” can transform the process’s competitive weapon, thereby helping companies gauge and optimize as to how customers experience the situations and the choices that confront them.
According to Mruthyunjayappa of Talisma, “CRM has always involved data, but most of it is structured data, such as contact information, latest contacts, products bought, etc. With big data techniques, it is possible to process, store and analyse massive amounts of unstructured data — not supplied by the customer, and can be used to gain additional insights. Using big data technologies, CRM can finally become a true revenue driver.”
However, organizations must keep in mind that it is not just about data collection but also about how to use that data to understand customers better, and to derive purchase cycles. Institutions must invest in data analysis and treat it with the same enthusiasm as data collection.
Solutions that combine real-time decisioning and analytics can build on that integrated customer information and to provide guidance on how to help the customer. For example, in the contact center context, these systems can identify incoming calls, assess customer history and value, route them to the most appropriate agent, and create a tailored recommendation to serve that customer in terms of what to say and do, what information to gather, and so forth in real time. Analytical tools can even provide predictive guidance about whether a customer is likely to defect or respond to an up-sell or cross-sell offer.
According to Sanchit Vir Gogia, Chief Analyst & Founder, Greyhound Research, “CIOs are very keen to utilize analytics to better serve customers and improve the customer experience. Asian Paints is one example of a company which is using web-based analytics to target customer references. Through this, the company is better able to tap into the customer behavior during multiple stages of the website experience and look out for the stage at which the customer usually opts out.”
There are contrasting views as well when it comes to big data. Mentions Ramesh Loganathan, Vice President and Managing Director, Progress Software, “Big data is hyped majorly. I don’t believe any of the challenges or opportunities are new. The only thing new is some of the data sources hitherto not easily available, are now available given the widespread use of cloud solutions in enterprise applications.”
BPM and CEM equation
BPM was always an integral part of CEM. But as things stand today, BPM has become more tightly interwoven with CEM and is considered as one of the pillars of CEM. According to Loganathan, “BPM has been a mainstay in most enterprises already. And most of BPM use was when it comes to human workflow, be it internal within the enterprise or the extended customer. With mobile apps and enterprises seriously trying to leverage the same to connect with the customers, BPM can be leveraged to offer self-service business interactions with the enterprise more easily.”
Customer-centricity should be in the DNA of any organization who is in the customer management business. We all know intuitively that today’s customers are continually connected, inherently better informed, and armed with the power to make a difference in a brand’s reputation based on their experiences with the company.
The mobility angle to CEM
Mobility, coupled with wireless connectivity and social media, is proving to be a game changer in Customer Experience Management (CEM). Mentions Bal of Convergys India, “Mobility is increasingly empowering consumers and for service providers, that means more interaction channels to touch the customer. Companies are proactively making smart use of mobile technologies to initiate touch points with customers rather than other way around.”
For example, there is the trend of location based services, wherein service providers leverage the mobile location to provide service offerings to their customers. Additionally, mobility has expanded the customer market to non-English speaking emerging markets, which increases the demand for non-English services.
According to Loganathan of Progress Software, “Unlike normal apps that are more transactional in nature, mobile apps are more user centric rather than transaction centric. They connect the user’s present context, location et al with the business opportunity which that user may want to perform. It enables a richer experience and interaction breadth for the user, even as the user is performing a normal business transaction.”
For example, mobile apps may be get lookups based on users’ current location, location juxtapose don map, or get reference information like say weather in a city relating to the transaction being performed on. Over the past few years, the industry has seen an onslaught of technology improvements and innovation in the mobility space and this has enabled greater connectivity, and even new types of delivery, such as mobile commerce.
