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Summary
Customer experience management is a set of business processes that taken together address the totality of an organization’s interactions with each of its customers; its purpose is to produce the greatest possible customer satisfaction while also achieving corporate goals. To achieve these twin objectives, companies must accomplish four key functions: deliver customer interactions to the most qualified available people to handle them; provide agents with support that helps them handle interactions efficiently and effectively; reach out proactively to customers with information and offers; and provide each employee with customer-focused performance information that helps them treat customers in ways that serve the business goals of the company. Cincom’s CEM products support all these functions, and the vendor makes them affordable for different sizes of companies through a choice of on-premises licensing or software as a service.

Assessment
Ventana Research’s benchmark research on the maturity of contact centers showed that companies are still seeking to achieve many of the original objectives of customer relationship management (CRM) systems: loyal customers who spend more and are less expensive to support; a complete, single view of all business with customers; support for multiple channels of communication; and, above all, more satisfied customers. The fundamental problem is that most CRM products focus on internal company processes. Customer experience management, on the other hand, is directly concerned with the outcomes of interactions with customers.

Cincom’s Synchrony Inbound Contact Center includes a universal routing engine that can be configured to deliver calls to the people best equipped to handle them, regardless of whether they are based in a formal contact center or another business unit or location. Having made that choice, as a call is delivered, the system displays information about the customer on the employee’s desktop to prepare for the interaction. The desktop also works with other communication channels, such as e-mail, fax and chat, so customers can interact through their channel of choice. The Outbound Contact Center module also supports agents wherever they are based and includes popular forms of outbound dialing functionality, which allow agents to reach out proactively to customers. This module might be used, for example, for ad-hoc interactions during a call or to implement a marketing campaign. The product includes features to support automated fulfillment, which can reduce agents’ workloads and verify that customers receive what they ordered.

At the heart of Synchrony is what Cincom calls a unified desktop. Its basic function is to bring all applications into a single desktop, which it does through a combination of tabs (or icons) and hot links on the agent’s screen that automatically link to other applications or information. These features save agents from having to sign on separately to multiple applications and from manually navigating through menus or across applications. By hiding these interfaces, smart tabs and resource links allow agents to concentrate more on their jobs. And this desktop is smart in the sense that it can automatically display tabs that match the agent’s role, the type of interaction and/or the customer’s profile.

The cornerstone of CEM is a complete, “360 degree” view of the customer that includes information about all business done with that customer, a full history of interactions and other related information. Synchrony includes reporting and analytics capabilities that can be configured to meet the needs of different types of users. It can extract data from systems other than Synchrony, thereby enriching the view with more information, and is accessible through a Web browser.

Market Impact
Customer experience management is emerging as a conscious concept and discipline as companies realize that CRM systems have not delivered more loyal customers and more revenue. Cincom is one of the first vendors to enter this market and, as noted above, offers functionality that supports all four key requirements for managing the customer experience. It is available as either an on-premises installation or on demand over the Internet, giving companies a choice that suits their strategy and budget. As companies become more aware of the focus of CEM and its superiority to traditional CRM, we believe Cincom will be well-positioned in this space.

Recommendation
Ventana Research is an advocate of CEM. In ever more competitive markets, it is difficult for companies to attract customers, keep them happy and persuade them to do more business, while keeping their costs reasonable. Customers’ experiences during interactions have a major influence on whether they stay loyal and purchase more products and services. Recent consumer research shows that nearly half of customers have stopped doing business with a company because of one bad call. Companies that want to prevent this must focus on the customer experience, and as they do so, we recommend they consider Cincom’s products.

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