Are You Really Engaging Your Customers?
by Kelly Burke on March 22nd, 2012
Just came back from the Gartner Customer 360 Summit and there are definitely a lot of great things happening within our industry that are going to help us deliver exceptional customer experiences! There were several key trends discussed that will shape business decisions and investments in the coming year. Self-Service and Customer Experience were cited as two of the top baseline trends. The customer is truly poised to have it their way… Self-service via mobile devices and the web that can easily transition to seamless live agent assisted experiences incorporating a wide range of interaction channels (voice, web, chat, video) are hot trends where the contact center is positioned to become even more pivotal. The contact center is becoming the customer engagement hub. 
You’re probably wondering why we still need contact centers if consumers are demanding more self-service options. Even while many interactions can be predictably automated or guided, there are just as many that are complicated and will have variable solutions depending on a customer’s specific situation. These are the interactions that will continue to be driven to the contact center. But the game has definitely changed. The same craving for social interaction that is driving the surge in social communities is shaping expectations for the next generation of consumers. Speaking of games… these consumers love games (if you have kids you know all about this), they love problem solving, and this is one of the sources of the energy and sense of ownership that will be instrumental in transforming the customer service experience.
We need to take a holistic view of every touch point where the customer engages our business and determine their intent for that interaction. We need to anticipate that customers will engage us at different points in our process and with different channels within the organization and be aware of that unique context to present intuitive processes (both self-service and agent assisted) to help them reach their destination. Using analytics to understand what’s really going on with the customer experience today is critical, but companies will also need to start using new forms of customer context information such as location, presence, intent, and social network relevance to determine customer value. Companies will be expected to be transparent in showing consumers how these evaluations affect the service they receive as well.
All of the speakers and participants at the conference acknowledged that these trends are simultaneously exciting and challenging and the next question, of course, is how will we get there? One of the first steps companies can take is to start adopting a customer-oriented culture by building a team focused on understanding and improving the customer experience. This team will need to undertake an honest analysis of customer interaction processes across all parts of the enterprise and start to build a new model for engaging the customer on their terms. It’s just as critical to think about the metrics you will use to measure success. Traditional measures such as contact volumes or cost per contact are relatively easy to measure but often don’t expose successes or issues until well after the events are past. To get in front of your processes and be more responsive you will need to measure new types of metrics such as net promoter scores, lifetime value, and customer sentiment. Traditional KPIs such as agent churn, escalations, and self-service success rates will provide important and measurable trends, as well. Investing in a unified communications solution that allows you to strengthen customer-company interactions while increasing customer satisfaction, improving contact center performance and reducing costs will be the springboard for gaining deeper customer insight and engagement.
Remember context is critical when you start to define your next generation customer contact experience. Mobile devices are already transforming consumer expectations for rich, yet simple user experience (use of location, social monitoring, and video are increasing). Your customer is social and that’s where we will find them in the future… in the community. Companies that harness the energy and collective expertise of social communities along with customer support are expected to reap the rewards in reduced costs and increased customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Stay tuned for more updates on these exciting developments and successes from within our own Aspect Community!
A UC Reality Check with Nemertes Research
by Kelly Burke on January 12th, 2012
Despite the promise of unified communications, many companies still struggle with challenges such as creating an effective business case, measuring results, choosing the right partner (or partners), and developing an effective organization.
Join me on January 26, together with Irwin Lazar of Nemertes Research, for A Unified Communications Reality Check webinar.
Using real-world cases studies and benchmark data gathered from hundreds of end-user organizations, this hour-long webinar will answer many of the questions that may be preventing an organization from moving forward with a more efficient, cost-saving UC solution.
We’ll explore:
- What solutions companies are currently deploying and why.
- How to build a business case and measure success.
- How to develop organizational, vendor, partner, and technology road-maps.
- What role Microsoft® should play in an enterprise UC strategy.
- How to integrate enterprise UC strategies with application platforms.
- The proper role of “the cloud” in your technology infrastructure.
Join our live presentation on Thursday, January 26th at 1 pm ET by pre-registering now. Or, upon completion of the event, we’ll offer a recording you can view online.
We’re looking forward to a great discussion during A Unified Communications Reality Check that promises to provide valuable insight that will help your business advance its UC strategy and realize greater business efficiency.
Checking in from the Next Generation of Customer Contact Road Show in Chicago
by Kelly Burke on August 30th, 2011
We had really great turnout and a beautiful day in downtown Chicago to meet and share ideas about the latest Consumer 2.0 expectations and how contact centers can develop an action plan to meet those challenges. Many of the participants indicated that their organization was actively reviewing unified communications (UC) solutions, so they were very interested in learning more about how UC can engage the enterprise and deliver a better experience for their customers.
Mike Andrews, regional vice president for the Midwest, shared insights on how building customer loyalty is becoming more important than ever because of consumers’ easy access to product information and research.
Microsoft’s Kevin Lopez discussed the latest release of Microsoft’s voice platform, Lync 2010, with capabilities like instant messaging, presence, conferencing, and enterprise voice. Aspect’s team offered very positive feedback on how adoption of Lync across Aspect’s global organization has dramatically improved the way we work. Instant access to screen sharing, collaboration, and messaging with anyone in the company has produced tangible productivity gains.
In addition, the entire Aspect contact center for our customers utilizes Lync 2010 for voice services along with expert search and collaboration. The business case for UC adoption is incredibly compelling when you look at the increased efficiencies that collaboration offers across the enterprise and the tremendous savings that capabilities like conferencing offer over traditional external conferencing services.
Next Aspect’s Tamara Craig and John Wray walked us through some very interesting success stories from Aurora Bank and Bayer that highlighted how Aspect’s contact center solutions support blended environments with remote agents, along with quality management, text-to-speech, and multi-site data-directed routing. Both of these clients had stringent requirements for security, compliance, and distributed deployment that highlight the importance of a unified, scalable architecture to meet mission-critical communication needs.
I finished up the session with a deeper look at the key characteristics of a next-generation customer contact solution, emphasizing the importance of giving customers a choice in how they contact your business and creating a consistent experience to help build customer loyalty. We also talked about how social communications is a huge opportunity to capture the voice of your customers and really “listen” to feedback on their terms.
With all this information flowing into the contact center, it’s more important than ever to aggregate and analyze customer interactions across all channels to gain insight and support strategic decision making. Also, automated proactive contact is getting a lot of attention and is considered to be a critical element of any consumer-centric strategy, since this demonstrates that you understand your customers and can anticipate their needs in a way that supports personalization and improves the overall customer service experience.
This post barely scratches the surface of all the exciting ideas we shared with the road show participants. There are several more dates lined up over the next couple of months, so be sure to sign up for this event when it’s in your neighborhood (maybe I will see you there!). Check the event website for upcoming locations in your area.
Improving the way companies communicate internally and externally with their customers is an important objective for all organizations. This blog is focused on levaraging the collective knowledge withing Aspect.