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Summary
In the last decade companies focused largely on reducing costs, especially in their contact centers. But now the pace of business has accelerated and, spurred by the Internet, it has gone global and competition has become fiercer, forcing companies to concentrate more than ever on winning new customers and retaining those they have. Because it is so easy to go elsewhere, customers have become less tolerant of bad service, so much so that one bad experience with a call center or on the Web often is enough to drive them to the competition. It is therefore vital that companies manage each experience to ensure that customers go away happy and return to them the next time they want to make a purchase.

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Customers are the most important asset of a company. However, the sheer pace of business, volume of customers and cost constraints today mean that businesses can no longer provide personalized service. In the current commercial environment, contact centers and the Internet have become the primary – and sometimes the only – interface between businesses and their customers. Due to cost pressures, many companies front their contact centers with interactive voice response (IVR) technology that pushes the customer even farther away from human contact. With the rise of the Internet, many companies have encouraged – some would say forced – customers into Web-based self-service, where they are almost invisible to the company. Customer experience management (CEM) seeks to restore some of the principles of personal service, while acknowledging that physical distance and sales volume are limiting factors.

It should be obvious from the name that CEM is about putting the customer first. To do this requires setting aside the issues created by having different business units – marketing, sales, field service, the contact center, the Web site or finance – deal with different aspects of customer relations. It requires rethinking how things are done and centering processes on customers rather than internal departmental matters. At the same time, organizations need to recognize that customers perceive these various interactions as part of one interconnected process of getting their issues resolved. So companies must identify where and how processes touch the customer and what effects each interaction is likely to have on downstream processes and the interests of the customer in each of those. It’s necessary to consider, for example, how a marketing campaign might engender calls to the contact center, how customers visiting the Web site might end up calling the contact center or how many customers will drop out of the IVR system. Changing processes should start with asking “why”: Why did the customer call, why did the customer visit the Web site, why didn’t the customer complete the Web-based transaction, why did the customer hang up on the IVR? To do this requires that data from multiple sources and in multiple forms (structured, unstructured and event-based) be integrated and then analyzed to show which processes need improving.

CEM doesn’t stop with asking why some interactions aren’t successful. It should examine each interaction, asking questions such as whether the contact center agent was able to personalize the conversation and resolve the issue in a timely and satisfactory manner during the first interaction, or whether the Web site was easy enough to use that the customer completed the transaction the first time. When a company finds the answers to be negative, it can start to change the outcomes by providing to agents and the operators of the Web site the same information that it uses to assess and change processes. That information can help agents by prompting them proactively through the different stages of the customer interaction, such as personalizing the greeting depending on the customer’s history and other circumstances or up-selling appropriate products at appropriate points. Likewise, the same information can personalize a visit to the Web site by, for example, recognizing that a customer has made multiple previous visits and popping a message to see if an interactive instant messaging session might help resolve the issue more quickly. Once companies have made these two channels consistent and personalized them, they can look at other, less often used channels and perhaps move on to proactive, personalized outbound interactions.

Assessment
A recent benchmark research report by Ventana Research noted that people in 91 percent of companies assert that they are largely keeping their customers satisfied. This finding contrasts with consumer surveys that report that customer satisfaction levels have actually fallen during the last year. This clash of opinions strongly suggests that most companies are merely paying lip service to the stated objective of increasing customer satisfaction. We believe that at the core of this issue is not hypocrisy but rather misunderstanding of the real customer experience. Since most interactions occur on the phone or over the Web, and each interaction is handled as a one-time event, it is difficult for companies to create a complete picture of each customer and how they really feel about the way they are treated. The practice of customer experience management is about recognizing these issues and facing them directly, developing systems that can produce a complete view of the customer and then using this information to make interactions consistent and personal no matter which channel handles the interaction.

Related Research Notes
True Measures of Customer Satisfaction
CustomerSat’s technology helps assess and monitor customer satisfaction

Contact Centers Struggle for Customers’ Trust
U.K. Customer Contact Association forum reveals pressure to change

Improving the Self-Service Customer Experience
Tealeaf delivers insight into customers’ use of the Web