by Richard Snow |
3/7/2008 | Article ID: M08-08 | Article Type: VentanaMonitor
Summary
Customer experience management (CEM) is a set of processes for handling customer interactions. Unlike customer relationship management (CRM), which is concerned more with internal marketing, sales and support processes as they relate to customers, CEM aims to influence what happens at every point of contact with customers; its purpose is to produce outcomes that satisfy customers so they become loyal and spend more. Toward this end, Graham Technology has launched Ciboodle, a platform on which customers can develop their own interaction-handling processes. Companies can modify the formats of these processes to serve various channels of communication so that they handle customers consistently regardless of channel they use.
Assessment
CRM systems have had little impact on the experiences customers receive during contact with a company, except to make more information available to the person or system handling the interaction. Benchmark research by Ventana Research shows that the highest volume of interactions still take the form of telephone calls to an agent, and so the CRM system is just one of many systems agents have to access to resolve customers’ issues. Because these systems weren’t designed to follow the process of handling an interaction, agents typically have to navigate across multiple screens – sometimes in multiple systems – to access and input data they need. Developers of CEM technology recognize that interaction-handling process are unique to each company and that some can be very complex (such as responding to a product inquiry and following it through to an online sale). An additional challenge is that many such interactions happen in real time, for example, while the customer is on the phone, taking part in a chat session or at the Web site.
Graham Technology provides services and software that help customers develop processes and technology to support interaction-handling. Its Ciboodle process platform enables users to construct process flows for different types of interaction. These process flows can be tailored to devices that support different communication channels, and the common origin helps make processes consistent across touch points.
Although Ventana Research’s benchmark findings shows that for most companies telephone calls to the contact center represent about 80 percent of all interactions, we realize this is changing as channels such as chat and text messaging become more popular. Ciboodle workspace provides a single desktop environment that displays different interaction-handling processes according to the type of incoming call. The agent therefore has at hand information and links that will help deal with that type of interaction, including links to other applications that have to be accessed to resolve the customer’s issue. The workspace also contains a notepad so agents need not write notes by hand and links to frequently asked questions that contain common information.
Embedded within Ciboodle is a rules-based engine that can access customer data and push relevant information proactively to the agent. It allows agents to personalize their responses based on up-to-date customer profiles and transaction information. A workflow engine delivers cases to the agent most qualified to deal with a particular issue. The combination of the two should allow agents to respond more efficiently and effectively to customer calls.
Market Impact
Customer experience management offers an alternative to CRM for managing customer relationships. It goes to the heart of managing the customer experience and is predicated on the expectation that satisfying experiences will create loyal customers who spend more with the company. CEM is essentially a process issue in the sense that companies need to improve how they handle interactions. While there are business process development and management tools on the market, Ciboodle is one of only a few products that focus solely on interaction-handling processes. Other vendors such as Cincom and Jacada focus more on creating a smart desktop that improves the efficiency and effectiveness of the agent’s system. We believe that this difference will give Graham Technology an opportunity to gain market share as CEM becomes more widely recognized.
Recommendation
Ventana Research is an advocate of CEM. In ever more competitive markets, it is going to become more difficult for companies to attract customers, keep them happy and persuade them to do more business, while keeping their costs reasonable. The heart of CEM is to improve interaction-handling processes. Companies need these processes to be efficient so as not to waste the time of customers or employees, to be effective so they produce the desired customer behavior and generate the right outcomes, and above all to be consistent so customers get the same information and have the same experience at every touch point. We recommend that companies begin their initiatives to improve the customer experience by starting with these processes, and as they do so they should consider Graham Technology’s products.
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