Ventana Research - Customer Service Comes to the Fore

Current Users		New Users

Management:

Business Research:

IT Research:

Operations Research:

Best Practices:

Vendors:

Vendors by Name

Customer Service Comes to the Fore
Genesys reinforces support for entire customer service chain

by Richard Snow | 6/19/2007 | Article ID: QT07-25 | Article Type: QuickTake


			Related Topics:
			Business Research: Contact Center, Customer Performance Imperative Research: Performance Improvement, Profitability Management Vendor Research: Aspect, CallTower, Five9, Genesys Telecommunications Lab, IBM, Jacada, Microsoft, NICE Systems, Noetica, Nortel, Oracle, Syntellect, Verint, Witness Systems, VPI, ClickFox

			Printer friendly version Email this article Send feedback to editor

Take
Since the earliest days of customer relationship management (CRM) technology, analysts, consultants and vendors have tried to persuade companies to put their customers first. In a Web-enabled world, where the customer is one click away from defecting to the competition, the message finally seems to be getting through, but the results from different surveys show inconsistency in progress in satisfying customers. In recent research by Ventana Research, for instance, survey participants from 91 percent of companies said they are keeping their customers at least somewhat satisfied. On the other hand, when contact center software vendor Genesys surveyed the consumer market, 61 percent of respondents said customer service has indeed improved, but 40 percent said they have defected to a company’s competitor because of bad experiences with its contact center. And in another contradictory report, the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) found more drops in customer satisfaction than gains.

The Ventana Research study offers one explanation for these discrepancies. We found that more companies are involving more employees, from more business units, to handle customer interactions. This broadening of response raises a number of important issues, such as how to provide a single source of customer data so that all employees work from the same information; how to route interactions to the most appropriate person; how to ease access to customer information; how to make the customer experience consistent across all channels of communication; and how to track the way customers interact with the company. At a recent conference in London, Genesys restated its commitment to support the entire customer service chain, saying it will enhance its own products and partner with companies offering products that supplement its capabilities. The products on display at the conference show that technology exists that can help close the gap between customers’ perceptions and business reality. Companies have no choice but to get serious and start to measure real levels of customer satisfaction and to adopt new processes and technology to deliver what customers expect.