I have written many times about the emergence and importance of customer experience management (CEM) to business today. CEM is fundamentally about making every interaction as positive as possible, both for the customer and the business. From my perspective this means that companies have to support their contact center agents with more customer information and a smarter desktop, and they have to make self-service more personalized and more intuitive to use. The big question is how do companies understand how they are doing and what needs to be done to improve. This brings into play what I think is another key element of CEM; customer feedback management and the information companies can derive by analysing the content of surveys their customers complete.

The products from a  company called ResponseTek allows companies to design, build and deliver customer surveys. Its technology allows companies to quickly develop surveys which customers can choose to complete, or which companies can initiate at regular intervals in the customer lifecycle e.g. after every call to the contact center, or for one-off situations. The surveys can be delivered through multiple communication channels to best match customer preferences. Completed surveys can then be collected and analysed, including where necessary using a built-in text analytics tool. The product includes pre-definable, rules-based actions so for example should a survey be received that has a particularly bad score for an agent then the agent’s supervisory can be alerted immediately to take action. This plays a critical role in the need for improving agent performance which I have pointed as a key investment for organizations as customer feedback management across channel is essential. Then taking the information for surveys and feedback management can be used to establish a knowledge management foundation for determining future actions.

Previous versions of the product included some reporting and analysis tools but these have been significantly improved in the latest version. As well as reports, dashboards and scorecards, the results can be “sliced and diced” in almost any dimensions that companies want to set up. These could be to reflect corporate organisation, different customer groups, different interaction types, different agent groups etc. This enables companies to see however different parts of the organization are working, how different processes are working, and how different customers are re-acting to different interactions.  With this information to-hand, companies can pinpoint where they need to take action.

My CEM research also shows that improving customer satisfaction is still the most important driver for companies. Once again the challenge is to really understand customer satisfaction levels and surveys are certainly one-way that companies can make their scores far more consistent and objective. ResponseTek allows companies to do this and by combining satisfaction scores, survey results and other customer-related information, it places companies in a position to take the necessary actions to influence the customer experience.

Let me know your thoughts or come and collaborate with me on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

Regards,

Richard Snow - VP & Research Director