Want Next Generation Customer Experiences for Your Customers? Turn the Channel
by Mike Sheridan on May 15th, 2012
It’s no secret that the speed businesses and customers communicate in today’s hyper-accessible information age has brought noticeable challenges to the contact center and many companies are still grappling with how to adjust. Part of the problem lies in the lack of true departmental integration companies currently have to overcome to create a free-flowing customer information exchange. Companies must update and break down the silos in their operations, and more than ever, examine the state of their current company-customer relationships in order to stay competitive.
Reinventing company-customer relationships 
As communication channels expand to include the latest digital mediums, customers are raising their expectations of businesses and calling for more direct, intelligent interaction and easier, customized communication. There is a growing consumer demand for companies to establish a deeper knowledge about their habits and histories in order to better engage them at an individual level at specific points of interaction. Not only does this require companies to record preferences, habits, complaints and problems across multiple platforms, it also necessitates the consolidation and contextualization of that data into a comprehensive and usable customer profile.
Establish next-generation customer contact
Let’s get historical for a second. First generation call centers were a one-to-one model. A customer called and they got an agent. Through evolution, the contact center created an opportunity for a one-to-several solution where customers could be transferred to other agents in other parts of the enterprise. And now most recently, contact centers have added email and chat, maybe even SMS. But in order to achieve true next generation experiences, organizations need to evolve to create a one-to-all model that can reach the entire enterprise.
By connecting the customer and the company in multiple ways and more importantly the ways the customers want to connect and removing internal barriers and silos between the enterprise and the contact center, unified communications becomes a central pillar of the next-generation organization. By unifying multiple channels into a singular platform while maintaining and optimizing access to a database full of knowledge, businesses can incorporate things like social networking or self-service applications within and not ‘next to’ a customer-centric communications model.
As a result, the contact center, and the enterprise as a whole, experiences greater efficiency and real-time agility. This model streamlines the processing of unstructured data (e.g. social) that is acquired from interactions within the contact center. The large volumes of data are sorted and structured into business intelligence, providing the organization with critical knowledge in real time. The information will then be readily available to service customers beyond the contact center and throughout the entire organization.
What the Rise of Mobile Payment Technology Means for the Contact Center
by Tim Dreyer on May 3rd, 2012
Some recent research will send a chill down the collective spine of all the companies whose contact centers are struggling to meet the expectations of today’s mobile consumers.
Pew issued a survey report, “The Future of Money in a Mobile Age,” that studied emerging trends in mobile payment technology. The prevalence of smart phones and mobile commerce offerings such as Google Wallet are enabling consumers to dispense with their cash and credit cards and make purchases with their phones. Anyone who’s been to Starbucks lately will recognize that mobile payments aren’t part of some wild-eyed science fiction. So mass adoption is more a matter of when, not if.
To that end, Pew’s survey asked respondents whether they agreed with the following statement: “By 2020, most people will have embraced and fully adopted the use of smart-device swiping for purchases they make, nearly eliminating the need for cash or credit cards.” Nearly two-thirds believe that’s a realistic time frame.
While there are a number of factors that must be addressed—competing platforms, security, the role of banks and credit card companies, to name a few—don’t assume that these will slow progress significantly. One only needs to look to Kenya, where 18 million consumers use M-PESA, a mobile banking platform that went live in 2007, to make payments equal to 20 percent of the country’s GDP via text message.
So what should the contact center be doing in 2012 to prepare for the coming mobile storm? A few things jump to mind:
- Implement a robust platform that can evolve to accommodate changing technology
- Develop a multichannel customer experience strategy that emphasizes mobile
- Empower service agents with the tools and capabilities to resolve issues efficiently
With the accelerating pace of technology advances over the past couple of years—remember that the iPad was introduced in January 2010—eight years from now is a relative eternity. Companies that embrace this challenge and make moves now will be in a position to thrive in 2020; those that bury their heads in the sand are going to be in for a rude awakening.
Enhancing Workforce Mobility Through the Consumerization of IT
by Jamie Ryan on May 1st, 2012
Within the last year, businesses have undergone a major transformation as the consumerization of IT makes its way into the enterprise and bring-your-own-device (BYOD) policies become more prevalent. As today’s workforce increasingly requests the capability to use the same technologies on the job as in their everyday lives, IT departments have been forced to adapt to workers’ preferences and implement policies to support the use of personal devices within the enterprise. According to a 2011 Citrix survey, more than 67 percent of senior executives and IT managers reported that they don’t have policies, procedures or IT systems in place to manage the use of personal devices for business purposes.
Image courtesy of Maas360 www.maas360.com
This consumerization of IT is also further enabling an increasingly mobile workforce. In order to strategically embrace this trend, CIOs must understand how these changes have and will continue to impact the enterprise. Rather than work to block these technologies, CIO’s must find ways to leverage them while maximizing employee efficiency and helping to streamline business processes.
The question is what do organizations gain from allowing employee devices with the walls of enterprise IT? One of the biggest challenges now is keeping a balance between consumerization and the security needs of legacy systems. Since our employees are also consumers, when we understand them we’ll better understand our customers. So while IT needs to adapt in order to keep up with IT consumerization, they also need adopt a “manage the middle” attitude in order to bridge the gap between the consumer and the corporation. It’s a challenge granted but doing so will allow employees to leverage enterprise technologies without sacrificing security while using the tools and techniques that best engage customers.
What’s on Your Social Channel?
by Tim Dreyer on April 30th, 2012
Photo courtesy of Likeable Media www.likeable.com
The abundance of social media platforms has empowered users to provide feedback in new many ways. Because of this, we’re seeing a widening of the gap in a company’s ability to provide a satisfactory customer experience. Turning on social as a part of a customer service component can unleash a flood of information that organizations are simply not prepared to handle much less process.
However, companies can harness this social media feedback through the use of new monitoring platforms that better connect the consumer to the business. But having an infrastructure that brings multichannel visibility to the enterprise is essential to make sure the customers send out a Tweet or post a comment are promptly and seamlessly directed to the right person. Companies can no longer just react, they need to act on — and in many cases anticipate – issues at the speed their customers have them in order to turn socially-aired issued into opportunities.
Earlier this week, InformationWeek came out with an article on 5 Tips for Handling Complaints on Social Media. The first tip they offered was to use listening tools to monitor but more importantly, better manage the huge amount of information you can create trying to get a hold of how and what people are saying about you in the socialsphere. So while it’s an important step, it’s essential that the data collected is not just usable but contextual and referencable as well. Full integration into the CRM is key to making social a channel addition to existing customer service strategy.
You can read up here on how you can extend your contact center to include social.
Is Your Company Meeting the Needs of Digital Natives?
by Chris O'Brien on April 25th, 2012
It’s no surprise that the mobile devices individuals use have a profound effect on how they consume information. Could these habits also have an impact on how they prefer to interact with customer service agents?
Recently, Time Inc., Innerscope Research, and M&RR conducted a study that monitored participants at various times of the day to determine how consumers from different generations engage with various media platforms. The report, “A biometric day in the life,” separated the sample into two types of users: Digital Natives are individuals who grew up around mobile devices and social media, while Digital Immigrants adopted these devices and channels as adults.
According to the report, Digital Immigrants are intuitively linear—that is, they want content to have a beginning, middle, and end. By contrast, because Digital Natives frequently switch between platforms, they tend to assemble the pieces of the story themselves. The study also found that Digital Natives switch between media platforms (magazines, tablets, smartphones, television) a whopping 27 times per hour. As a result, their emotional engagement with content was lower than that of Immigrants.
So what does this mean for the contact center? If you think of Digital Natives as the embodiment of the next-generation consumer, then companies need to become more agile, responsive, and multichannel. Indeed, more than half of Digital Natives would rather send a text than talk to someone; only 28 percent of Digital Immigrants felt the same.
Digital Natives are also more likely to embrace new modes of service such as social media and chat. With the rising adoption of smartphones and other mobile devices, the behavior of Digital Natives will soon become the standard for all consumers.
As we’ve discussed on this blog, rapid technological advances are transforming the consumer landscape—and by extension the customer contact dynamic—faster than companies can keep up. Now is the time for the enterprise to implement a platform that enables multichannel engagement and can evolve to meet emerging consumer needs.
Please Don’t Tell a Customer You “Can’t” Help
by Chris O'Brien on April 19th, 2012
Customer service is becoming a deciding factor in the customer satisfaction game. As someone who both works in the customer experience industry and is – like everyone reading this – also a consumer, this offers something of a unique perspective. I could recount a dozen best practices that would pretty much guarantee a satisfying experience, and I recognize good service when I see it. But what I’ve also discovered is that a company can guarantee that I will never do business with again just by relying on one little word: “can’t.”
Here’s an example. The other day, after spending hours online researching the perfect birthday gift for my husband (in case he’s reading, let’s just say it’s a “watch,”) comparing models, features, prices, packages, and styles, I decided to try and save a
few bucks by ordering the item from a company that promised free shipping. Several online reviews had mentioned this company’s questionable customer service, but I shrugged those off.
“I won’t need to worry about service for this,” I figured. What could go wrong? This was a quick transaction on an in-stock item. It should arrive within a few days without any complications.
Right.
Later that day, an email notified me that my item had been backordered and would now ship at the end of next month – about six weeks late, not even close to being on time for a birthday present.
Not only that, they had already charged my credit card!
I picked up the phone to call customer service and cancel the order. After being asked to repeat my order number and explain my request to two different agents, I finally reached the individual who promised to help me.
What I got from him wasn’t exactly “help.”
“I’m sorry,” he explained, “but the label has already been printed. I can try and cancel it. But worst case, the item will be shipped to you and you’ll need to pay the return shipping.”
I was a little bit dumbfounded. “I ordered this less than 24 hours ago based on the information that it was in stock,” I said. “If it’s not in stock, then it’s your error. Please just cancel the order and return my money.”
Again, I was given an apologetic line about the order already being in the system. “At this point,” he said, “there’s really nothing I can do.”
Wow. Really? Nothing he or anyone within his organization could do to salvage a customer relationship, keep my impression of their brand from being dragged through the mud, and ensure that I would invest future money with his company? There was not a supervisor he could speak with, a phone call he could make, a process that could be interrupted for the sake of continued customer loyalty?
Apparently not. He ended the call by promising to “try.” He let me know to watch for a cancellation email – one that I have to assume might or might not come.
Ten years ago, would I have felt as a customer that I had the “right” to flawless service? Maybe not. Expectations have changed. I fully anticipated that the agent I reached would resolve my problem immediately and to my complete satisfaction, at any cost. If a process stood in the way, I fully expected it to be worked around.
This is the reality of today’s consumer-driven environment. Organizations that continue to underestimate their expectations will be making a grave tactical error.
Chief Customer Officer: Enhancing Customer Experience
by Tim Dreyer on April 18th, 2012
Image courtesy of Curtis N. Bingham, CCO Council
Meeting the expectations of today’s consumer requires traditionally siloed functions such as sales, marketing, and the contact center work together more effectively. To support this business objective, an increasing number of companies are creating the position of chief customer officer (CCO) to break down these silos and ensure that the consumer is a top priority for the entire enterprise.
As Inc. Magazine notes in “Make room for the chief customer officer,” the scope of the CCO varies from company to company. Some organizations have made the position part of the executive management team, while at others the CCO is the head of a department, such as sales, but has the additional responsibility of promoting customer issues across the company. The degree of authority of departments and budgets also differs greatly among companies.
Similarly, last year Forrester conducted a survey of 155 CCOs to get a better idea of their responsibilities and impact. The survey found that the development of the CCO role is still in its infancy. Indeed, 82 percent of the sample has been in their positions less than two years, indicating that companies have recently recognized the need for an increased emphasis on customer experience but might still be grappling with how the CCO can have the greatest impact.
We have been vocal advocates for an enterprise-wide approach to customer experience, so it’s heartening to see companies embracing it. A critical element of this strategy is to ensure all of the departments that will collaborate on customer experience—sales, marketing, customer contact, IT, and public relations—have a unified communications platform to facilitate information sharing and decision making.
It’s both technological and cultural shift but one that best addresses the way consumers want to engage with the companies they do business with. What are the biggest silos in your organization that you’d like to take a hammer to?
Going Mobile to Serve the Next-Generation Consumer
by Tim Dreyer on April 17th, 2012
In the current business climate, trying to stay one step ahead of rising customer expectations is a formidable challenge. The rapid consumer adoption of mobile technologies underscores the task companies are facing. Gartner forecasts sales of tablets will exceed 100 million in 2012. Similarly, 472 million smartphones were sold in 2011, and Gartner predicts that market will grow by 39 percent this year.
These sales figures highlight the need for companies to integrate a mobility component into their customer experience strategy. But as consumers get unprecedented speed and access to information, how should companies adapt their approach?
Against this backdrop, many businesses have refocused their efforts on customer experience. A new survey shows that customer engagement is a top priority for retailers in 2012, and mobile figures prominently in their plans.
On this blog, we’ve talked a lot about how customer experience leaders deliver a robust offering across channels so that customers can engage in the channel of their choice. There’s a compelling reason for this approach. The more consistent you can make the experience across channels, the stronger the bond with customers, which translates into revenue growth.
Mazda is the latest example of a company extending its reach to consumers through mobile applications. In Canada, the company rolled out Mazda Connect, a multilingual application available on iTunes. It offers customers the ability to locate dealers, access interactive service manuals, view maintenance videos, and connect instantly to social media platforms. Thanks in part to Mazda Connect, the company’s Canadian sales in December were among the best in its history, and sales have continued to increase with growth of more than 34 percent over last year in March.
Mazda’s efforts represent the next wave of customer engagement: customized tools that provide mobile customers with targeted information. However, when undertaking these kinds of initiatives, companies must consider the entire customer engagement ecosystem. By the time customers turn to the contact center, they’ve likely exhausted self-service offerings, customer forums, and other information channels.
The advent of mobile means this progression can take place in an increasingly compressed time frame—sometimes just a matter of minutes. Effective solutions need to not only understand the customer mind-set but also how all of these elements fit together.
To develop Connect, Mazda tapped Aspect. Our decades of experience in the contact center helped to create an app that strengthened the company’s relationship with its customers. By focusing on the user experience, the Aspect Digital team helped to establish digital communities that serve as an approved information source.
Mazda Connect was successful because it embraced three important characteristics:
- An immersive, interactive brand experience for Mazda’s end users.
- A comprehensive understanding of the uniqueness of individual users
- The means to sustain deeper engagement with customers
We want to congratulate Mazda on its success and look forward to working with them going forward.
New Data Bolster Business Case for Better Customer Service
by Chris O'Brien on April 2nd, 2012
If you doubt the growing importance of delivering excellent customer experience, three pieces of recent research drive home the benefits for companies that have been able to succeed in this area.
First, IBM conducted interviews with more than 1,700 chief marketing officers (CMOs) across 19 industries in 64 countries. Its report, From Stretched to Strengthened, found that participants cited delivering value to the customer as their top priority. CMOs acknowledged that this value consisted of not just products and services but also how the organization acts and responds. In addition, study participants recognized that the customer has now seized control of the company-customer relationship.
Second, the Temkin Group issued a report, The ROI of Customer Experience, that attempts to quantify the impact of customer service on a company’s bottom line. (Aspect’s Mike Sheridan tackled this topic last year.) Its analysis of 10,000 U.S. and 3,000 U.K. consumers found that U.S. companies with more than $1 billion in sales can increase their revenues by $384 million over three years by making incremental gains in the quality of service they deliver to customers.
Last, Forrester released its 2012 Customer Experience Index, which used responses from more than 7,600 U.S. consumers to gauge the performance of 160 top brands on customer engagement. The results: just 4 of the companies, or 3 percent of the sample, received an excellent rating. The rest were categorized as underperforming along key measures of customer experience.
So what can we conclude from these studies? A few things:
- Organizations are shifting their priorities to address the changing company-customer dynamic.
- There’s a growing recognition among executives of the value of customer experience.
- The majority of companies are falling well short—which translates to lost revenue in the hundreds of millions of dollars for the average large company.
With companies focused on delivering a distinctive customer experience, understanding that there’s a direct relationship between customer satisfaction and revenues, why are so many businesses still failing? A couple of factors are responsible:
1. Delivering excellent customer service is difficult, and getting increasingly so.
We’ve discussed how consumer expectations have risen precipitously as a result of mobility and instant access to information. Customers want their issues to be resolved the first time and aren’t up for waiting on hold to accomplish it.
2. The functionality of most contact centers hasn’t kept pace with technological advances in the consumer arena.
The proliferation of communications channels has overwhelmed contact centers, and emergence of social media as a primary information source means that negative interactions increasingly result in a public airing of grievances. (It’s no longer reserved just for Festivus.)
These reports underscore the necessity for companies to take urgent action to empower their contact center agents with the tools and resources to engage more efficiently and productively with customers. The impact of such investments will be reflected not just in performance but also on the bottom line.
What is your company doing to improve its contact center operations?
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!
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.