Companies today are facing a struggle to balance critical, often conflicting business objectives: maximize customer satisfaction and increase revenue, while minimizing the cost of delivering an outstanding customer experience.
Managing this balance at the highest level is difficult enough, yet it is complicated further by the fact that it takes many different functions and supporting processes (for example, back office claims processing, order fulfillment, etc) within the enterprise to service the customer. Through the contact center, marketing, customer experience owners/managers, branch stores, and back offices, organizations are striving to optimize the performance of their people, processes and technologies to increase service effectiveness and efficiency, and to help build customer loyalty and an improved customer experience.
That customer experience now goes far beyond the realm of traditional service channels and has expanded into the back office, social media and even into service channels the enterprise doesn’t manage or control, such as social community destinations. In fact, some multi-channel customer interactions that happen today didn’t even exist as little as five years ago (no social media, twitter, etc.), which has made understanding what customers are saying and their sentiment more challenging than ever.
To speed up and improve the customer experience, companies must break down organizational silos. Customers are expecting immediate responses or at least faster customer service, having been influenced by instant gratification from the leading Web and social companies.
Increasingly, companies are adopting a customer-centric management strategy through which customer wants and needs drive a company’s business processes. Workforce optimization and voice of the customer analytics technologies, including software for speech analysis, text analytics and enterprise feedback management, workforce management, quality monitoring/recording, e-learning/coaching, and performance management are often implemented to deliver on the promise of organizational performance improvement and compliance, as well as an improved customer experience. However, these technologies traditionally support specific functions, creating a siloed environment that forces each part of the customer service value chain to act independently. This is especially true in the banking environment, in which each functional area of service delivery (branch stores, contact center, marketing/customer experience, Web, etc.) is making independent decisions to drive performance, rather than the result of a holistic business strategy.
Further complicating matters, the customer experience value chain is ever-widening across the enterprise and the underlying processes to service customers are unproductive, ineffective, or in some cases, non-existent. Companies seek to streamline these customer experience processes however possible.
The solution is a customer-centric workforce optimization offering that breaks down the barriers between siloed functions across the customer service value chain so organizations can capture, analyze and act on cross-functional information concerning workforce performance, customer interactions and customer experience processes. An end-to-end offering helps companies uncover trends and discover why certain employee and customer behavior is occurring, while also deploying the right solutions to manage to excellence and achieve continuous performance improvement.
Ryan Hollenbeck is SVP of Global Marketing at Verint Systems.