Unified Customer Experience Management: The Next Battleground
Part-I
CEOs across the industries have just begun focusing on the critical role that customer experience plays in keeping their companies competitive and profitable. There has been a tremendous pressure on the companies to move beyond CRM (an operations/marketing centric, transactional, inside-out approach) to Customer Experience Management (CEM), which is a customer centric, holistic, outside-in approach to drive customer advocacy. The purpose of CEM is to provide pleasant experience to all the customers every time across all channels of contact. In the last 5 years, a new role called ‘Chief Experience Officer (CXO)’ has been created in hundreds of organizations. While CRM tools are highly leveraged by CMOs, CEM tools are heavily leveraged by CXOs. Better CEM is a strategic differentiator since it can not be copied by the competitors. Hence, the CXO ensures that the board room pays enough attention to the CEM programs.
A Google search for the term ‘Chief Experience Officer’ will reveal the growing importance of CXOs across the industries.
Analyst Views
The following comments by the leading analyst and consulting companies further underscore the growing importance managing customer interactions.
“………………as momentum behind customer experience builds, companies will soon be fighting to prove the superiority of the experience they provide. Companies must look “beyond the browser” and invest in the quality of improving cross-channel interactions, something 78 percent of respondents claim is a higher priority” - “Obstacles To Customer Experience Success”, a Forrester Report
“Most firms today struggle to measure the quality of their customer experience. To establish a framework for measuring customer experience quality, firms should identify key customers, the most important moments of truth in the customer experience continuum, the criteria customers use to evaluate those critical interactions, and metrics — both subjective and objective — that capture how well the organization met customer expectations in each area” - The Customer Experience Quality Framework” , a Forrester Report
- 81 percent of organizations agree that the customer experience impacts loyalty and advocacy; 73 percent concur that it impacts satisfaction and spend.
- Less than one third of organizations use analytics to understand what is happening in customer interactions; most rely on subjective, irregular, and delayed feedback from agents and customers.
- Less than two thirds have documented processes to govern the customer experiences they deliver; and less than a third has processes for handling multi-channel interactions. “Measuring and Managing Customer Experience” Survey Results by Vedanta Research
Impediments to Superior Customer Experience Management
There are several challenges in ensuring a well differentiated and consistently superior customer experience all the time.
Some of these challenges are:
A. Ignorance, Assumptions & Complacency
These three are the most important impediments. The management believes that they are providing superior customer experience. As per a study by Bain & Co, 80% of the companies believe that they provide superior customer experience whereas only 8% of their customers agree to that! This 80/8 customer service delivery gap is still common among several large B2C companies.
Moreover, many companies assume that Quality Monitoring (QM) is the ultimate step in monitoring customer satisfaction. In fact, QM indicates only how well the customer was handled rather than if the customer was really satisfied or not. QM as well as speech analytics techniques can show only less than 50% of the true customer experience story.
B. Operational complexity
It is a big operational challenge to manage a multi-channel, multi-site, multi-time zone, multi-lingual, multi-business and multi-partner customer service delivery operations. Ensuring consistency in customer experience in such environments is a daunting task.
Lack of appropriate systems, processes and standards can further complicate the service delivery.
C. Technological Complexity
Customer service delivery is technology intensive. It requires more complex and expensive IT infrastructure and systems. Typical IT systems required are: ACD, IVR, Dialer, Quality Monitoring system, CTI server, SMS server, Workforce Management system, CRM, Website, MIS / BI and other support systems. These systems generate huge amount of raw customer interactions data every hour. In fact, the same copy of raw data is generated by many of these systems which make the data volume growth exponential. Almost all of this data is trapped in disparate systems which makes it very difficult for managers to discover how the customers are treated in the Contact Center, IVR, Website, and Back-office channels.
The MIS data that is presented to the managers is very superficial and tell only a fraction of the truth. The managers have no access to deeper actionable intelligence to manage and improve customer experience holistically across all the customer touch points.
D. Inadequate Budget
Customer service delivery requires substantial budgets as the cost of technology infrastructure and people resources is very high. Often managers are left with managing conflicting goals like improving CSAT and reducing the cost of operations. Many times, a perfect balance between these two goals is practically not possible to achieve.
In Part-II, several techniques that are available to tackle various customer experiences related strategic issues will be discussed.
The author is the CTO & Co-Founder of Metrica Systems ( www.metricasystems.com ).
