Preface
In a world of virtually frictionless supply and demand conditions where businesses have less control over pricing, and where your customers are most likely to obtain products at a price they desire, where is your competitive edge? When customers are in charge of defining your channel and the price they want to pay, it's clear your business is going through a fundamental and irreversible change. In this new era of growing customer power, companies must rethink their business models. As your business implements a CRM strategy and restructures to be more customer-centric, and your once efficient production system bows down to customers' expanding demands, another competitive asset disappears. More and more companies are realizing that traditional competitive advantages are evaporating as new technologies, and the Internet in particular, empower your customers to take to the driver's seat. As such, a new set of challenges is emerging: How do you develop lasting loyalty in light of customers’ evolving tastes and preferences? What does your brand stand for and what supports brand position? In a world of rapidly changing preferences, where the customer, increasingly, dictates the rules, and information is instantly available, how do you create lasting loyalty toward your brand?
Finding answers to these questions is emerging as the top priority for every business today. If your company’s pricing, promotion, product, and placement models have not yet been challenged – they soon will be. Now what?
The Last Competitive Asset
In this new competitive environment, the brand is the only asset companies have left. It is the last area of competitive edge for which you exert considerable control. But brand is no longer about tangible assets like product differentiation or specialized distribution channels. Those differences are disappearing at a rapid rate. New parameters and factors are starting to affect customer loyalty to your business and your brand: quality of customer support, on-time delivery, shipping prices and options, product representation, privacy policies, and more. “Classic” differentiators, once so critical, no longer dictate business success or failure. Bizrate.com’s 1999 Q2 online customer survey rated “Quality of customer support” as the parameter most affecting customer loyalty. Selection and price were rated lowest in terms of affect on customer loyalty. Furthermore, a March 2000 Report from Jupiter Communications revealed:
Today, brand equals customer loyalty. The strength of the brand, to a large extent, is determined by the number of loyal customers and the durability of that loyalty. The more loyal the customers and the longer lasting their loyalty, the stronger the brand. The stronger the brand, the greater your differentiation is. The stronger the differentiation, the stronger your business!
What is customer loyalty? How do you build it? Customer loyalty is a collection of all the positive emotions your customers have developed toward your brand and business. Those emotions are developed primarily via interactions the customer has with the business over the course of weeks and months. There is no way to bypass this process, and there is no way to acquire loyalty overnight with large sums of money. Loyalty is an outgrowth of natural human behavior. Corporations must build and sustain this loyalty one customer at a time-one interaction at a time.
The demise of traditional competitive assets gave rise to the Interaction Center, and highlighted its increasing strategic significance for every organization. The Interaction Center moved from the periphery of the business to the epicenter of every corporation. Today the Interaction Center’s the heartbeat of your business and customer interactions and the manner in which businesses deal with them is the lifeblood of the organization, that which will sustain and grow the enterprise.
Once you understand that each customer interaction determines the strength of your brand, recognition that your Interaction Center (or contact center) is the key to your customers’ loyalty will follow naturally. Every interaction with customers – over the phone, via the internet, however – is a basis for building lasting customer loyalty. Needless to say these interactions can also be the basis for destroying customer relationships and loyalty. It all depends on the quality of the customer interaction and the consistency of that quality over time.
Building and maintaining your customers’ loyalty is “mission critical.” Anytime the customer contacts your business, their loyalty is enhanced or reduced-rare, indeed, is the neutral customer experience. If you do not use every customer interaction, in all their many forms, to build loyalty, then you risk losing it. Because chances are one of your competitors is building loyalty, very possibly with one of your customers.
The Business Paradoxes
Have you ever noticed the contradiction of power vs. proximity to customers? In most organizations, the closer you are to the customer the less power you have to influence their experience. The agents staffing the Interaction Centers are facing customers every day, yet their power to resolve problems is minimal, often limited to a set of rigid rules. On the other hand, top management, those who hold the power to change and influence the customer experience, are the farthest from the customers. They tend to be hidden away behind piles of statistical analysis and important meetings, missing out on the experience of actually listening to the customer.
Executives often claim they simply do not have enough time to listen to customers. In this new era of customer loyalty as the last competitive asset, this excuse is not only invalid, it’s dangerous. Executives cannot make informed decisions unless they are plugged into their customers' viewpoints and opinions.
As a result of the power vs. proximity contradiction, the agents’ primary function in the Interaction Center often seems to be to take irate customers’ poisoned arrows and cover for top management. It might appear that agents “manage” crises, but in reality they have very little effect on changing the way the business operates and in avoiding the next crisis before it occurs.
It’s said that in the real estate business, there are three overriding considerations: Location, Location, and Location. Businesses dedicated to building customer loyalty must also observe three L’s: Listen, Listen, and Listen.
The Power to Listen requires, first, a commitment, and then an ability to hear with open ears and a willingness to adopt listening to customers as a business process and a overall state of mind.
There’s a high degree of likelihood that before any particular trend affecting your business comes up in a meeting, a courageous (or irate!) customer will have mentioned it first in your Interaction Center. Similarly, before any activity becomes statistically significant enough to hit the weekly report, it will already have come up in your Interaction Center. Before a certain problem blossoms into a worldwide crisis, chances are it will hit your Interaction Center first. Listening, hence knowing, what is going on there is the power to prepare and even avoid the next crisis. What is the value of the next great idea or avoiding the next big crisis? Only you can put a price tag on those advantages.
Moreover, in an era where the competition is just a mouse-click away, your customers’ perceptions and personal preferences are beginning to play an increasingly important role, just as the web-front's appearance has become as important as the personal greeting in a brick-and-mortar store. If you do not treat your customers right, if you do not actively manage the interactions with them, you are leaving the formation of loyalty wide open. And what do you think your competition is doing?
There is tremendous value in listening not only to specific content but also to the way in which it is presented. A customers’ tone of voice can often speak louder than words. No report or pie chart can deliver this kind of information. Remember, your customers aren’t developing their loyalty and brand preference purely on statistics and rational analysis, so why would you develop your understanding of them based on statistical analysis alone? The emotional, subjective factors woven through all your customer interactions are just as crucial to building and maintaining loyalty as those stacks of brilliant reports.
Listening cannot be looked upon as a necessary evil that senior management must do once a month. You must create and exploit every opportunity to listen. While waiting in the airport, why not connect to your Interaction Center and listen in. On the way home from work, dial in and listen. Listening should become a habit, not an unwelcome interference.
Every executive in a position to make decisions in the organization must be listening on a regular basis in order to make informed decisions.
The basic Interaction Center model serves an organization’s need to centralize and manage mass interactions with customers in an effective, coherent and consistent manner. In doing so, this strategy effectively places the business’s most valuable asset, its customers, in the hands of one of the lowest ranking, lowest paid functions in the business, its agents. Therefore, the agents’ proficiency and effectiveness become the most crucial elements affecting business performance and success. They also represent a potential weak link in the business value chain.
A poorly motivated or trained agent may be talking to your most valuable customer right now. This agent may not only be missing out on an opportunity to increase that customers’ loyalty to your business and brand, the agent might well have a negative effect on that specific customers’ loyalty to your business. But managing customer interactions is not about reducing potential negatives, it’s all about exploiting opportunities.
It is the organization’s responsibility to make sure its agents are empowered with the right tools, techniques, and practices, in addition to incentives and rewards, to make every interaction they handle perfect – you can afford nothing less!
A customer contacting the Interaction Center views the agent as the business. If it’s a service or support call, the customer would usually like to talk to someone senior, but must “settle” for the agent who’s available. To create customer satisfaction and build loyalty you need to empower each agent to act as the CEO in the eyes of the customer. You must give the customer that one-to-one interaction he would like, but has learned not to expect. Because your agents are the key to creating lasting customer loyalty, create a perception in customers’ minds that every agent is a CEO. Always remember that your agents are the primary interface to your customers.The success of each customer experience in the Interaction Center experience is solely dependent on the human touch provided by the agent. If agents are “wearing” the wrong attitude, customers will get the wrong impression. Make sure they are empowered and treated well so they’re able to provide the best impression.
Interaction Center agents are often under-appreciated. They have to endure a great deal of cynicism and powerlessness in their job. I wonder how long most of us could work under these conditions? I’ll never forget how I once contacted a Interaction Center to voice my aggravation. I compared the company I had called to the better service available at the competition. The agent replied that she understood my complaints and that she would probably have gone to the competition herself!
In the name of customer focus, companies are spending ever-increasing amounts of money and resources to solicit customer viewpoints. From simple customer surveys in hotel rooms and at restaurants to expensive regional and ethnic-based focus groups, corporations are trying to get a grip on the customers’ perspectives. Aggressive organizations are even offering valuable prizes just to ensure they hear from those customers whose opinions they need and value.
The paradox, of course, is that simultaneous with companies spending all this money and time, right in their very own Interaction Centers, customers are actively calling and providing their ideas, viewpoints, and suggestions – everyday! Yet this information is largely ignored.
The wealth of knowledge organizations seek is already available. To capture it requires a change in focus and attitude, and some investment in the right analytical tools. If only a portion of the resources applied to customer surveys actually found its way to the analysis of information gathered in the Interaction Centers, companies would become richer in both ideas and money not spent chasing what they already have.
Technology is the Key
Most companies are focusing their technology investment in the customer Interaction Center around the core business functions of the center. PBX and ACD ensure the discussion with the customer is initiated. CTI allows smart communication and distribution of calls to the best-qualified agents. Adding CRM enables centers to maximize their revenue per customer. None of these technologies, however, is geared toward actually listening to the customer beyond registering a complaint or closing a sale. None of these tools serve to empower management by providing direct information from the customers. None of them focus on the quality of the interaction, instead, they focus primarily on the existence and effectiveness of that interaction, on closing the deal or the service ticket, not on closing the next deal or preventing the next ticket.
Furthermore, research has shown that the number one area that interaction centers will focus their spending on in 2000 is technologies that improve the level of customer service. The number expenditure is an investment in increasing loyalty.
Different from your investment in tools and software, Customer Experience Management (CEM) focuses directly on the essential area of customer loyalty. It is the natural next step to existing technologies and it transports the Interaction Center from the periphery to the center of your business, by making it a powerful system to create sustainable customer loyalty as well as provide decision tools for senior management.
This evolving category complements existing technologies such as ACD, CTI and CRM; thereby, completing the existing cycle of customer interactions. Utilizing CEM, companies can learn from their experiences, continuously improve their business processes, and create ever-improving customer experiences.
In this new era of increasing dependency of the brand on customer loyalty, capturing the quality of customer interactions and improving them on a regular basis are imperative for the future survival of every company. Customer Experience Management has become the foundation for the company’s performance.
The ability to capture any interaction with the organization and link those interactions directly to a specific customer is the starting point. The next step requires adding the ability to monitor and evaluate the quality of the service provided by the agents. This evaluation process can be customized to the specific needs of your business and industry. The evaluation must not be made in the context of the agents’ performance but in the context of agents’ future skills and knowledge training.
Additionally, customer interactions must be shared with the true decision-makers of the enterprise as they occur, and well before they become lost in a pile of statistics. One of the keys to building last customer loyalty is providing a timely and appropriate response to what the customer has indicated is important to them. Achieving this involves a combination of providing decision-makers access to daily customer interactions as well as empowering agents to deliver those interactions.
For example: imagine a scenario where a customer complains to an agent at a software company about a bug in the latest version. Done right, this interaction is either caught by the product marketing manager himself, or delivered to him by the agent. The product marketing manager then sends an e-mail directly to the customer acknowledging the problem and stating a proposed resolution. customer experience management
Furthermore this entire communications loop could be resolved in New York, before start of business in San Diego. You now have an organization dedicated to finding ways to acknowledge and respond quickly – not simply monitor and fade away.
The endless CEM cycle allows you to turn the data captured into knowledge that can create better agents to deal with customers, more informed executives to lead the business, more timely responses that lead to customer loyalty and, ultimately, a more successful business. Learning from experience and being able to apply those lessons to improve the business quickly is what differentiates the best corporations from the rest. CEM is providing the tools to learn more from your customer experiences and apply the knowledge quickly to build a better business. This is not a one-time fix, but rather an on-going, never-ending process of improving the business and making it more customer-focused and competitive.
The Technology Behind CEM
Multimedia interaction recording and monitoring. Recording and monitoring engines for Voice, e-mail, web collaboration, VoIP, Chat and other data and events. Technologies such as Voice over IP and other emerging web technologies are part of expanding interaction channels. Including them is key to capturing the complete experience.
360-degree customer experience A view that combines voice, screen, VoIP, IVR and Web-based customers surveys and CRM data to provide a complete view of the interaction as the customer viewed it. The customers’ view is the critical piece needed to complete the picture of the results and quality of the interaction.
CRM Console – Integration with CRM systems utilizing the CRM system as a console that enables a full view and analysis of the customer interaction. In addition, using the CRM and its data to trigger recording and analysis of the data captured.
Executive Connect – The ability for every executive to connect to the Interaction Center and listen to customer interactions at their center anytime and from anywhere.
Data Mining – Utilizing advanced data mart and data mining tools to extract business and customer intelligence from multiple sources to provide answers to questions and to reveal patterns previously undiscovered.
HYPERLINK mail to:Agent@Home – Addressing the needs on an emerging class of home-based agents is key to supporting the evolution of Interaction Centers. This evolution allows the centers to recruit highly motivated agents while providing attractive employment benefits.
In addition, CEM technology must address the environment in which it operates. It has to provide flexibility of integration with leading ACD and CTI elements. Reliability through redundancy options is another critical component to ensure that there is no interruption to the customer experience. This is a field in which NICE possesses both tremendous experience (government intelligence background) as well as a patent in applicable revolutionary technology.
The Foundation Technology Solutions
NICE provides a solution foundation framework for Customer Relationship Management enabling and enhancing through CEM. The foundation is built on top of:
These solutions are scalable, fully integrated and work on top of the same platforms. This allows customer to grow the system, as the system helps them grow their business. It also enables a smaller Interaction Center to use the same cutting edge solution the “big guys” use, and grow the system with time. Furthermore, this concept gives the customer the combination of a sound and well-rounded product and the advantage of a perfect fit to one’s unique and specific needs.
Flexibility through Full Integration The solutions are fully integrated to the interaction center environment:
Professional Services – ready to provide customization for your unique customers and business Cutting-edge, Reliable Recording Technology
New Directions on Top of the Foundation Framework
With the introduction of CEM, NICE is now taking the foundation technology mentioned above to the next level to provide real value to customers in terms of gaining and maintaining their brand name and customers’ loyalty. This is achieved by adding and integrating the following elements on top of the foundation technology:
CRM Console
The CRM system as an interaction console – NICE recognizes the role CRM applications play on the Interaction Center’s desktops. For that reason, NICE provides a complete solution integrating the NICE CEM capabilities with those CRM applications so they seamlessly become an integral part of the agents’ workflow. Agents will no longer have to look thorough the CRM system to find a customers’ interaction history and then turn to another application to retrieve and recreate that interaction.
Integration of ROD with the CRM vendors – In line with the above-mentioned approach, on-demand recording will also be initiated by the agent through the CRM application in order to capture the complete customer experience.
As mentioned in the section dealing with the foundation technology, an existing capability the system also provides is the capability to integrate with CRM and other external sources to drive selective recording and QM based on business information.
Multimedia recording and quality measurement
The foundation technology is enhanced to support multimedia recording and QM of these interactions. These include email, chat, collaborative browsing sessions and, VoIP. The solution will initially support Lucent’s Internet solutions, the Genesys Internet Suite, Cisco’s Customer Interaction Suite, eGain, Kana and other eCRM solutions.
We combine these solution with NICE’s platform independent H.323, MGCP and SSP (Cisco’s Skinny Station Protocol) VoIP recording and monitoring solution (based on award wining patent-pending VoIP recording technology) and the NiceLog and NiceUniverse systems to provide complete coverage for all multimedia recording. The tight integration of these platforms allows users to not only recreate the interaction but to review both the content of the interaction as well as the conduct of the agent while handling this interaction – a distinction our focus groups have found invaluable.
360 Degree Customer Experience Measurement
This is a new concept that NICE is introducing to the market, a concept designed to provide a complete, 360-degree view of the interaction between the business and its customers. It combines current solutions’ ability to evaluate the customer interaction from the businesses (agents, supervisions and QA team members) perspective, with two leading technologies providing the customers view on the experience. These are:
CustomerSat.com Web-based Customer Surveys – online surveys polling on-line and phone customers via the Internet to solicit input regarding their view of the interaction and customer experience.
NICE CenterPoint Solution’s IVR Customer Surveys – Voice-based post call surveys to obtain customers’ input regarding the quality of the interaction and the customer experience. By integrating this information with the complete recording of the customer experience provided by the foundation technology and enhancing it with multimedia recording & QM (discussed above) and the CRM Console, the system provides a complete 360-degree view of the customer interaction, both from the business and the customer perspective. This enables the business to properly evaluate and analyze the customer experience and then drive change to continuously improve agents’ performance and overall business processes.
Reporting and Data Mining
The integration and enhancement of the CenterPoint Solutions’ datamining technologies as Next generation Reporting and Data mining tools takes the CEM concept one step further by turning the wealth of information available in the Interaction Centers’ data systems into real business wisdom. By integrating recordings, CRM and CTI information, Call Statistics, and QM results this tool will provide the knowledge to improve businesses processes, performance, and efficiency; thus, reducing costs while increasing customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Post Processing
Executive Connect Giving every decision-maker the ability and facility to connect to the Interaction Center and listen in to calls anytime from anywhere. An IVR type product providing the capability to call in from a remote location and monitor randomly selected calls in the Interaction Center to provide a first-hand, unvarnished look at the customers and their needs.
So what’s the next step, where is CEM going? Interaction@Anywhere! As businesses become more global and depend more on outsourcers, and as CRM revolutionizes business structures and processes to become more customer-centric, interactions are happening everywhere!
True, the center for B2B and B2C interactions is still the Interaction Center, but there are many other areas of activity as well. It would seem to be enough to mention self-service web-sites, sales and filed service forces, chat rooms, bulletin boards, outsourcers and specialized front offices (such as trading rooms) to start with. But the wave of mobile commerce and 3G cellular services is expected to take this even further. Interactions are starting to occur anywhere and everywhere ñ and where there are customer interactions, there is place for CEM.
We envision a world where everywhere your products or services are discussed, you apply a CEM approach. In chat rooms, at channel partners, on sales force cell phones. Anywhere an interaction is created, there is the potential for building support toward a stronger brand.
Conclusion
Customer Experience Management is about capturing and analyzing your customers’ experiences, one customer at a time and as a universe of customers. It provides you with the power to listen in real-time, or anytime, to customer voices and opinions. Captured through incoming e-mails, web chat or phone calls, you can get a complete picture of customer feelings and emotions. This knowledge combined with your customers’ complaints and suggestions constitute a secret weapon to bring your company to a new level of competitive prowess.
As powerful as this technology sounds, only a fraction of Interaction Centers today are equipped with CEM. Most centers are touting their ability to handle business, but very few understand the full scope of handling their customers. Customer Experience Management is about allowing you to continuously build better customer experiences, lasting loyalty and ultimately a stronger brand, today and in the future. With CEM, you have the promise of tomorrow: Clear differention through a stronger brand and loyal customers leading to a better business with better results.
In today’s world, the last secret weapon is your ability to influence customers’ hearts and minds to favor your brand. The rest of your competitive assets are easily copied through new technologies, such as the Internet. Building lasting customer loyalty will provide you with a true, sustainable competitive edge. Listen to your customers, preferably with your ears wide open. Do so frequently. By empowering your business with Customer Experience Management tools, you empower your agents. When you start seeing the world through your customers’ eyes, you will be amazed at what you discover. |