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Summary
Ventana Research defines customer experience management as the people, processes, information and technology involved in ensuring that customers’ experiences at every touch point engender the desired customer behavior and business outcome. Understanding customers’ current experiences and taking action to improve them are the keys to retaining customers and increasing sales. Our benchmark research shows that the most popular techniques for gaining this understanding are listening to recorded calls and using surveys. We urge companies that have not explored these techniques to do so and to evaluate how they can improve their customers’ experiences and in doing so profit more from them.

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Our benchmark research on customer experience management (sponsored by Ciboodle, Cincom and Verint and media sponsors ICCM and Mycustomer.com) shows that the large majority of companies (82 percent) solicit feedback from customers in one way or another. The two most preferred methods (each cited by 41 percent) are listening to calls as part of the quality-monitoring process and sending customers surveys by e-mail.

Surveys have an advantage over quality monitoring in that the customer answers them, rather than a third party making a subjective assessment based on listening to recorded calls. Both approaches have issues concerned with the size of their samples because until recently companies have been able to assess only a small volume of calls, and historically response rates to surveys have been quite low. But new products allow companies to automate the assessment of more calls by using speech analytics techniques, which if set up correctly can also make the assessment more objective. Other new products and new channels of communication can increase the number of completed surveys. The key here is to use the channel each customer prefers and to ensure that anyone completing a survey receives a response, even if it is only an acknowledgement of completing the survey. As companies introduce new channels of communication, our research shows that sending surveys by e-mail is still the number-one choice, followed by outbound calls and directing people to a Web-based survey.

The benchmark results show that the two types of interaction most important to companies are calls to the call center (55 percent) and customers using Web-based self-service (40 percent). Both of these activities happen in real time, and consumer research shows that if companies don’t meet a customer’s expectations there is a high probability that the customer will not only fail to complete his or her intended action but is likely to defect to a competitor. It is important therefore that companies ascertain the quality of the customer’s experience as quickly as possible after each interaction is completed. In this respect, our results show positive news in that almost one-fourth (23 percent) do send out surveys immediately after completion of the interaction, but this is offset by the fact that 55 percent of companies send out surveys monthly or less frequently. We urge companies to look at their processes and technology and adopt the best practices exhibited by more mature companies, such as sending surveys as soon as the interaction is over. 

Assessment
Improving customer experience management depends on knowing what customers feel during and after an interaction. Our research shows that a current best practice for the majority of companies is to use personalized surveys delivered by each customer’s channel of choice immediately after an interaction. Several vendors support such a process in products that allow companies to build standard surveys and customize them to meet specific circumstances (such as different call types) and customers. Furthermore, more advanced vendors have extended their products to analyze the returns from surveys and recommend actions that companies should take, for example, to give certain agents coaching and training in how to handle particular call types better.

A few of the most mature companies use automated analysis of recorded calls. New compression techniques and less costly storage technology enable companies to record all calls, and some vendors have released products that use speech analytics to automate analysis of calls and classify levels of customer satisfaction based on pre-configured rules. These techniques can be combined. In this slow economy, in which customer retention takes precedence over new customer acquisition, we strongly recommend companies evaluate both options so they can improve their customers’ experiences and thus generate more business from their existing customer base.