by Richard Snow |
3/7/2008 | Article ID: V08-11 | Article Type: VentanaView
Summary
During 2007 Ventana Research identified a significant shift in the contact center and customer relationship management markets. The essence of these changes is that companies are beginning to utilize more employees from various parts of the organization to handle interactions with customers; this is the so-called “virtualization” of call centers. At the same time, companies are continuing to increase the number of channels of communication they offer to interface with customers, the most notable of which are Web-based self-service and chat. In this context, the challenge for companies in the next two to three years will be to build a customer service organization that crosses departments and channels to produce the desired business benefits.
Accordingly, in 2008 Ventana Research will focus more on the broader issues of managing customers and consider the contact center as one of several business units responsible for handling interactions and building more positive relationships with customers. Customer performance management seeks to optimize the effectiveness of all the business activities and processes that impact the customer by aligning people, processes, information and systems. Its purpose is to achieve business goals and positive outcomes that result from having better satisfied, more loyal customers. In particular we will look at how some of the key issues previously confined to the call center, such as agent workforce management, quality monitoring and interaction-handling performance management, can be applied to the wider employee base now interacting with customers.
View
The Customer Performance Management Practice has selected research topics based on two key criteria: They must be focused on the customer and how organizations can enhance company performance by acquiring, retaining and supporting customers, and information technology must play a key role in supporting the people and processes associated with achieving these goals and outcomes. We will focus on four topics, described below, during 2008.
Customer Experience Management
Customer relationship management (CRM) has been around for a long time in technology terms. It was meant to focus companies’ efforts on managing customer relationships rather than on internal issues of the business units. But over time, users found that CRM products were better at supporting the marketing, sales and customer support processes than at satisfying customers. As Ventana Research sees it, the element missing from CRM is the customer’s experience.
That experience is the customer’s aggregate perception of all interactions with a company and the degree of satisfaction that results from the outcomes. It includes how the customer behaves and feels during and after interactions with the company’s representatives. Those interactions may include phone calls, visits to the organization’s Web site, answers to letters and even face-to-face meetings. Customer experience management (CEM) 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. Our research in 2008 will examine how companies can change their interaction-handling processes to improve the customer’s experience and thereby improve their own business performance.
Customer Interaction-Handling Performance Management
Companies finally are realizing that centralized call-handling does not make the process more efficient and reduce costs. They are noticing as well that customer satisfaction ratings have failed to improve because, for example, agents cannot resolve issues at the first contact, are not empowered to make decisions or, in an outsourced center, cannot communicate well in the customer’s language.
In response, as cheaper Internet protocol (IP) networks have become available, many companies have decided to support simpler interactions through Web-based services, thereby freeing call agents to deal with more complex interactions while routing some of those complex interactions to knowledge workers in other business units, home-based agents and mobile workers such as field service engineers and the sales force. This diversification of channels and personnel is creating new issues: managing the schedules of a workforce in which some handle interactions only on a part-time basis; training and coaching an extended workforce; monitoring how well they handle interactions; and assessing the overall performance of interaction-handling. Our research in 2008 will examine the role of information technology in each of these areas as organizations struggle to improve the effectiveness of handling these critical interactions.
Customer-Focused BI and Analytics
Companies have longed for a single, “360-degree” view of their customer, and they learned that CRM applications alone cannot deliver it. A single view must account for all the organization’s data about customers, which resides in many sources and tools spread across the enterprise. Even the smallest centers employ widely different technologies, such as an automatic call distributor (ACD), computer/telephony integration (CTI) software, interactive voice response (IVR) systems and e-mail servers. Most of these are based on proprietary hardware and software that are difficult to access and extract data from. The problem is further compounded as new channels of communication generate more forms of data, many of which are unstructured, particularly text and e-mail messages, scanned documents, instant messaging scripts, blogs and Web scripts and voice (recorded calls). Our research in 2008 will examine how companies can deploy emerging applications that utilize all forms of customer data and apply analytics to perhaps at last achieve the 360-degree customer view.
Customer Information
Research we carried out in 2007 found that companies have customer data dispersed over several types of systems and often over several instances of the same type of system. This has led to issues about the quality and consistency of the data and about the company’s ability to produce a reliable source of customer information that everyone across the enterprise can use. Our research in 2008 will examine these issues in more depth, in particular how companies are putting in place data governance groups and processes to improve the quality of customer data, and the technologies and services available to access and enrich the data, synchronize it across the corporate systems architecture and produce a single, reliable source of customer information that everyone can access and use in the form best suited to individual operational requirements. These technologies encompass data integration, data quality, data discovery and master data management.
Assessment
Ventana Research asserts that the best way for companies to retain customers and achieve optimal business results is to improve the customer experience at each and every point of interaction. The contact center remains an important factor in achieving these objectives, but companies need to recognize that keeping customers satisfied and achieving the desired outcomes is an enterprise issue. Even though many have achieved significant efficiency gains in handling customer interactions, as markets become more competitive and customers spend less, they will need to focus on making interactions more effective and in doing so, on increasing customer satisfaction and encouraging future behavior that benefits them. By leveraging analytics and information management technologies, organizations will be able to support the mission of creating highly satisfied customers.
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