Latest Updates: customer experience management RSS

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  Vikas 04:29:06 am on May 20, 2010 | 0 | # |
  Tags: CRM, Customer Experience, customer experience management, customer service, Service Experience Management

  Questions for all customer Service Managers to think about:

  What if your every agent, could be your best agent?

  What if your agents didn’t need to ALT_TAB through 15 applications on the desktop?

  What if your agents didn’t have to “copy and paste” between applications?

  What if any agent could handle any call?

  What if your agents did no need to search for answers?

  What if quality and compliance was a natural part of agents work and not an afterthought?

  What if your agents could follow the right process, just as you had envisioned it?

  What if you could translate your ideas, adapt to change, in a short period of time?

  What if you could measure and achieve your Cost, Satisfaction and Revenue goals?

  What if you didn’t have to spend months and months on agent training?

  After every answer, ask:

  Why Not?
   

• Vikas 04:06:53 am on March 4, 2010 | 0 | # |
  Tags: customer experience management, customer service, Customer Support, Knowledge Management, service experience, Service Experience Management, voice navigation system

  Call Center Agents Need a Voice Navigation System!

  Today’s voice navigation systems help you get to where you need to be and let you focus your attention on what’s important: driving.

  Think back to life in the old days, before GPS. You’re lost with a map open on your lap, looking for the right street to turn into and driving more slowly than rest of the traffic. Angry are drivers honking loudly behind you!

  This can’t be too different than how call center agents feel about their current tools and technology. Their typical desktop applications open up to reveal an ALT-TAB nightmare — 20 tabs with 10 tabs under each of those tabs. It’s not uncommon for an agent to have 15 of these applications open at once. Their desktop search function, if it works, returns a long list of possible solutions. Their knowledge solutions, if available, come in the form of long documents. And, they’re expected to figure how to navigate all this while trying to help a customer on the phone. Pretty grim environment to work in, eh?!

  Now imagine the equivalent of a voice navigation system for call center agents. A  system that presents the agents with an intuitive and interactive experience to lead them to the right resolutions quickly. By delivering the ideal blend of process, screens, and contextual knowledge, a service experience management system can act just like voice navigation system, letting agents focus on what’s important: the customer.
   
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  Mark Angel 02:04:09 am on November 24, 2009 | 1 | # |
  Tags: customer experience management, customer satisfaction, customer service, enterprise feedback management, Knowledge Management, Service Experience Management, service-oriented architecture, SOA, strategy

  Top 5 Problems with Service Today

  We’ve all been the victims of bad service. We have to repeat ourselves to agents; we get different answers depending on whether we use email or we call a service rep; or worse, we don’t even receive a response. We have a tendency to blame the agents.

  But it’s not their fault. They want to do a good job. They just don’t have the tools they need to meet customers’ expectations of personalized, consistent, accurate and fast service. They don’t have the tools because their technology isn’t working.

  Thus, I trace bad service to 5 root causes:

  – IT organizations have not solved the integration problem. Agents need dozens or often hundreds of un-integrated tools and applications to perform their jobs. Agents must toggle through many applications in the span of a service call, resulting in long hold times.

  – IT organizations have not solved the change problem. Agent tools are typically hardwired together. When procedures change in a company, IT organizations cannot quickly respond to the changes in order to give the agents the new tools that they need.

  – Knowledge management vendors have not solved the knowledge problem. Corporate knowledge exists on an island; it does not fit into the context in which agents are searching for content. This means that agents need to wade through many solutions in order to find the one that is right for a particular customer.

  – Case management vendors have not solved the business process management problem. Today, business or call center leaders can’t drive agents through clear processes. This means that they put the responsibility of following the right resolution processes in the hands of agents, which are not all equally competent.

  – Organizations have not solved the agent training and turnover problem. Businesses know how they want service delivered, but they can’t have their best, most highly trained agents handle every interaction.

  How do we start solving these problems? We start with technology. We implement service-oriented architectures (SOAs) to begin integrating systems in a flexible way so that information is no longer siloed. This means that when processes change, IT systems can be rewired easily, without a tremendous amount of overhead. We ensure knowledge is it’s shared and applied appropriately. We present in a way that makes sense to agents, and we use it to inform our decisions about what’s working and what’s not working in our service processes. We provide agents with stepped procedures for each and every service interaction that allows them to provide the consistent service that we desire. If we are able to achieve these goals, and provide agents with the tools they need to succeed, then we’re solved our final dilemma. Because every agent becomes as good as our best, most highly trained agent.

   
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  Vikas 09:51:54 am on November 10, 2009 | 0 | # |
  Tags: customer experience management, customer relationship management, customer service, evidence-based service, social crm, Vikas Nehru

  Hype or Hyper-Measurement?

  Recently, Seth Godin posted on how we are moving into an era of “hyper-measurement.” As he explains, a journalist being fired because his or her web content isn’t drawing a lot of traffic is not going to be a newsroom novelty for much longer. In a world where, more and more, success can be measured in quantifiable metrics, why wouldn’t a publisher base business decisions on newly available evidence? It just makes sense.

  The customer service industry is no different. As my fellow blogger, Kate Leggett, points out, to truly maximize the value of their contact centers, customer service mangers must take an experimental approach towards service processes.

  For every end-to-end service process they design and deploy, managers must define a testing period during which they play around with different aspects of it and measure results against business objectives. These metrics can then be used to determine the relative effectiveness of the process – what worked and what didn’t – and update the service process, or eliminate it entirely. To ensuring ongoing optimization, no process should ever be viewed as final. Rather, managers must consider each and every service process as a prototype and resign themselves to always retesting and tweaking them.

  Delivering “evidence-based service” in this manner will help consumer-facing companies break bad habits, discover new tricks and cope with the constant shifts going on in their marketplace.

  For instance, a business introduces a new tool that captures and analyzes customer interactions in various community forums – essentially, pooling the collective input of the crowd at given time. The customer service manager applies that insight in real time to change, reprioritize and improve information presented to a customer on the self-help portion of a website or educate agents on a shift in incoming questions (depending on the level of service the company provides). Over time, they begin to see patterns in terms of what information is just chatter and what type of information is important to meeting their business objectives and their customers’ brand expectations. And, the way they use the tool – and incorporate the customer voice – becomes a highly sophisticated and beneficial to their service processes.

  The “hyper-measurement” trend, as Mr. Godin puts it, shouldn’t be ignored. It should be embraced. It offers a way for service departments, as well as publishers, to be more precise and pragmatic with their decision-making – to remain in control and one step ahead of the customer.<

   
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  Kate Leggett 07:23:55 pm on September 28, 2009 | 4 | # |
  Tags: Collaboration, customer experience management, customer relationship management, customer service

  Evidence Based Service – The How is harder than the Why

  Service organizations would perform better if leaders applied the best evidence. I’ve dedicated several posts to this subject. It’s a great concept and it’s another thing to do it.

  Some experimentation is easy – for example like what Yahoo! does on its homepage where they typically run over 20 experiments at a time, changing things like colors, placement of ads and location of text or buttons. Outcomes of these experiments can have a huge effect – like moving the search box from the side to center of the home page generated enough click-throughs to bring in about $20M more revenue a year.

  But this requires a mind-set shift–instead of debating which screen design or content works better, you gotta try it, and analyze the results to see what works.

  #1–Treat your service offering as an unfinished prototype. Baseline your performance. Then try to vary something and measure how you do – trying something half baked quickly with the data at hand is often much better than just waiting until you have all the data you need as the urgency to react may have passed.

  #2-Don’t get blindsided by corporate mantra, and organizational half-truths. Many service organizations are managed based on industry best practices, and historical precedence. Base your decisions on just data. Understand what works for you and your customers and do a root cause analysis to understand why changes you have made work or don’t.

  #3-Look at yourself using your customer’s eyes. Do a mystery shopping exercise on your site, and document your strengths and weaknesses. Look at your competitors and see what they do. Do it in a systematic, scientific way, not based on emotion.

  You can apply evidence based service at a micro or macro level-to a simple installation and tuning of a product–for example a new ERMS system. And, you can apply it to optimize a particular service offering, or transform your complete service offering to the next level of operational maturity

   

• Kate Leggett 04:24:19 pm on August 24, 2009 | 1 | # |
  Tags: CRM, Customer Experience, customer experience management, customer service

  Service = Brand, Part 2

  Customer service. We know that it is not one size fits all – it is the art of aligning your service with your brand. It’s the consistency of experience that a customer feels every time they interact with you. And what is brand? It’s what you stand for, it is how you differentiate yourself. Bruce Temkin from Forrester blogs a lot about this.

  We seem to agree that not all companies need to provide exceptional customer service – just good enough service that is in-line with their brand. Think back to the IKEA and Apple examples in my last blog.

  But what about industries where there is little differentiation between products and services? Like banks or telecom providers? Is there any true difference between the banking products and services at Wells Fargo, Citibank, or Bank of America, just to name a few? They also offer an undifferentiated customer service experience that makes it hard to for you, as a customer, to individualize them.

  One deviator in the banking space is ING Direct. They are a non-traditional, internet bank where all business is done via web self service, ATM or email. They have no branches, and you cannot visit a live agent. Even without this traditional personal touch, they know who their customers are, what they want, and deliver what they need. Everything about the banking experience is slick, comprehensive and targeted to a good customer service experience. However, they only target the tech savvy customer with relatively straightforward banking needs – they are known to fire “high maintenance customers” who do not fit into their service mold.

  ING Direct, in a sector of undifferentiated products and services, differentiates themselves by their exceptional service experience. This experience is aligned with the bank’s business model. And this service differentiation becomes their brand. Once again, service = brand.

   
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  Allen Bonde 04:24:36 am on July 25, 2009 | 1 | # |
  Tags: customer experience management, Knowledge Management

  Is it still all about the experience?

  
  About a year and a half ago I wrote a column for CIO.com looking at the state of CRM and customer service and proposing that three priorities were emerging: delivering a differentiated customer experience, better leveraging content assets so reps and customers have answers at their fingertips, and tapping into collaboration and social networks. As I discussed a couple posts ago, our recent survey of customer service leaders shows that content (and KM) and social CRM are in fact two of the areas that are attracting additional investment this year despite lower spending overall on customer service. So the last two have definitely been predictions I can live with (remember, I was an analyst at one point…)! But what about customer experience management? The third of the “mega” trends I started to see back at the end of 2007.

  
  Well…it just so happens that in the same survey, we also asked respondents about their organization’s position on customer experience management. The results are shown below.

  

  What is interesting in this data is that not only are more organizations focusing on how to deliver a differentiated customer experience via some “flavor” of CEM (or SEM, if you use KANA’s lingo), but more than a quarter are currently deploying or have finished deploying a CEM program. Another 30% have a CEM strategy and presumably are ready to go once funding is in place.

  
  What about your organization? With pundits such as Forrester recommending companies keep customer experience top of mind in the current economic climate and some evidence that companies with improving customer service scores can actually boost their share price (see discussion and table in BusinessWeek), are you looking at experience management as an area of investment for the remainder of 2009 and beyond?

   

• Allen Bonde 04:55:25 pm on April 16, 2009 | 0 | # |
  Tags: customer experience management, Knowledge Management, Self-Service

  Hello again!

  It’s been exactly one year since I kicked off the eVergance blog with the goal of sharing our thoughts on the state of customer service and support, looking at emerging best practices and technologies, and – hopefully – creating a community of interest which would be greater than the sum of its parts. After 8500 views, 80 posts and several hundred comments to this point, I think we have exceeded my expectations for our little exercise, and shown that there is a place for “evolved thinking” in the Blogosphere!

  I want to thank Esteban for his contributions, insights and wit in nurturing our blog over the past year, and while I don’t know if I can meet the standard (and expectations!) he has set, we have some great contributors and our team is looking forward to our second year of blogging and developing some additional themes as eVergance and KANA go down the exciting and uncharted path of Service Experence Management.

  At the same time, I’d like to re-oriented our focus a bit to get back to basics, if you will. Just as the three-martini lunch has gone out of style in today’s business climate, I think we have to remember why we are here and re-focus on some of the core questions around effective service delivery, such as:

  • what are the remaining efficiency killers in the call center? (we think KM is one solution, and it’s great to see Michael Maoz’s recent post with a similar theme)
  • how do we deliver service on our customer’s terms – while still maintaining control and visibility?
  • how do we find the right mix of channels, and leverage all our investments in systems and content to this point?

  I know there are a lot more questions we have and will tackle. I hope you will continue to check in, offer your suggestions and feedback, and pass on a good word if you like what you see. Look for additional bloggers joining the fun as we ramp up our plans for the remainder of 2009, and we’ll try to provide more frequent, punchier and more news-related posts as well.

  Thanks for reading!
  Allen Bonde, eVergance CMO

   
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  Esteban Kolsky 07:00:40 am on April 13, 2009 | 5 | # |
  Tags: CRM, Customer, Customer Experience, customer experience management, customer first, customer loyalty, customer service, experience management, loyalty, Voice of the Customer

  Customer First? or Customer Only?

  Been reading a lot lately, trying to get caught up after spending so much time in the trenches doing some real work.  Almost everywhere I turn I read about “Customer First”.  Putting the customer first, or ahead of everything else you do.  Why, there is even an entity in the UK that is called Customer First to ensure UK organizations remain true to their customers.  Closer to home, Continental Airlines has been talking about the great results of their Customer First initiative, as well as Northwest Airlines (which merged with Delta recently, another Customer First organization) and even an organization as distinct as the City of San Antonio has gotten on board.

  With all these people you’d think that customer first is all it takes to succeed – but I would like to bring up a more interesting point: it is not about putting the customer first, it is about making the customer the ONLY reason for your existence.  Putting the customer first means that there are other things to distract you from your commitment to your customer.  Making the customer the only thing means that their needs will supersede all others.  It may seem a trivial difference, and hair-splitting semantically speaking, but think about it for a second…

  Do you want to commit all your resources to making your customers happy – or just the ones you can spare?

   

• Esteban Kolsky 03:22:06 pm on April 7, 2009 | 0 | # |
  Tags: CEM, CRM, customer experience management, customer service, experience management, Self-Service, Technology of Business

  How is that “new” customer service going?

  Some time ago I wrote about this “new” customer service brought on by the economic downturn.  I said back then that these moves were not based on core, sound principles and thus they would not last long.  It takes three weeks for people, and between six and eight weeks for corporations, to make a habit stick (think new years resolutions and the time when they affirmed or broken – or rather, how your gym seems to be more empty in Februay than it was in January).  We are a little bit past that time now — how is that new customer service working?

  My perspective? I started seeing some complains come across twitter for customer service problems that had gone away and are now coming back, and I began to hear again from our customers about overloading their systems, how they can reduce the costs of supporting clients with longer handle times, and whether it is a good idea to have those automated and electronic systems put back into action.  In other words, we are going back to normal.  Just as Will Smith said in “I, Robot” when they learned that the robots that were supposed to serve are actually trying to take over the world — “Somehow I told you so just doesn’t say it”.

  Remember, to make changes stick you need to change the core – not just the surface… What are you seeing out there? Am I wrong?

   

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