by Richard Snow |
3/7/2008 | Article ID: M08-09 | Article Type: VentanaMonitor
Summary
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. ResponseTekCEM is a software product that supports customer experience management by gathering feedback from customers about their interactions at every touch point and then providing information that enables company representatives to take corrective action. Because it does this in real time, companies can address customers’ issues as they interact with them. ResponseTekCEM is available as an on-demand service, which reduces costs and setup and maintenance tasks.
Assessment
Ventana Research’s benchmark research on contact centers shows that overall they are very immature in performance management. We found two fundamental reasons for these low levels of maturity: an inability of companies to produce a business-oriented view of how the contact center is performing and a lack of processes and technology to measure customer satisfaction accurately. We found the most common way of assessing customer satisfaction is simply to ask call center agents how happy they perceive the caller to have been by clicking on one of five smiley faces. But most agents are understandably reluctant to declare that they left customers unhappy, and even setting this bias aside, their answers will be very subjective.
A more reliable way is to ask the customer, which ResponseTekCEM facilitates. Its Involve component allows companies to create questionnaires for surveys that agents or processes can initiate at any touch point with a customer, regardless of the channel of communication. It also supports surveys on a variety of media, further suiting circumstances and preferences particular to each customer. Users define the information they want to collect at each touch point, and ResponseTekCEM helps automate the task of creating appropriate questionnaires. The information that the Involve module collects is then made available to the other two components of the product.
The Integrate component makes the data available to back-office functions and processes, so “the voice of the customer” can inform operational decisions. It produces reports that can be tailored to individual requirements, depending on the person’s role, and delivered to users as required to help them identify issues and decide how to address them. As well, it can deliver alerts in real time if certain rules are breached. For example, if a survey is received that has a customer satisfaction score below a defined threshold, it can alert the receiving party to take immediate action. This mechanism ensures that customer issues aren’t allowed to fester and possibly escalate to the point at which the customer stops doing business with the company.
The Improve function offers a longer-term view. It collects survey results over time, allowing companies to identify trends and patterns of customer issues. These analyses may support changing practices or policies. For example, analyses might show that customers become highly dissatisfied because of the time they have to wait in a queue to speak with an agent; managers could use this information to assess whether they need to deploy more agents. Or they might show more fundamental issues, such as customers becoming highly dissatisfied with the quality of the company’s products, and point to areas where the company should change its manufacturing and quality control processes.
Market Impact
ResponseTek is one of only a few vendors of customer feedback software; others include CustomerSat, NICE Systems and Witness Actionable Solutions (part of Verint). Each of these products supports the ability to generate customer surveys and analyze the results to learn the truth about customer satisfaction, and more broadly what customers think of the company and its products or services. To be effective requires using this information to go further. Ventana Research asserts that performance management is a cyclic process that includes measurement, analysis and change or action, because while it may be true that you can’t change what you can’t measure, it is just as true that it is not worth taking measures that aren’t used. ResponseTekCEM supports companies as they try to improve the customer experience and in parallel address areas that are causing undesirable customer behavior and dissatisfaction. However, it may be a challenge to get potential customers to adopt this approach because both companies and individuals often are reluctant to accept they are doing something wrong and need to change.
Recommendation
Customer behavior is paramount to long-term business success or failure, and a key component of producing positive behavior is to make the customer’s experience at every touch point as rewarding as possible. Ventana Research recommends a three-step approach to achieving this goal: understand the impact of each interaction on a customer’s behavior and mood, optimize the outcomes, and align the organization behind making changes that will improve results. We advise companies that want to focus fully on the customer and improve the customer experience to consider ResponseTekCEM’s ability to support such initiatives.
Related Research Notes:
Customer Experience Management Can Refocus Contact Centers
Better customer relationships improve business performance (December 20, 2007)
Customer Experience Management Technology
Newer approaches can help companies satisfy customers better (December 20, 2007)
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