Customer Experience Optimization
The "customer experience" is the sum of all the interactions that a customer has with your company. It defines your company in terms of how easy or difficult it is to do business with, the quality of its products and services, and whether or not it cares about its customers. Ultimately, the customer experience determines how long customers will continue to do business with your company and whether they will refer others.
If a company provides a great product but spotty service, customers will only stick with it as long as the product clearly out-performs competitors, or if the switching cost is very high. But when products are similar or switching cost is low, customer service becomes the great determinant of whether customers stay with a company. This is why every well-run company today has a "customer experience management" (CEM) program.
Loyalty Matters
We all strive to satisfy our customers—or even to exceed expectations. However, the greatest financial benefit comes not from "satisfaction" but rather from loyalty-the tendency of a customer to be a repeat buyer or to remain a customer over time. Satisfaction is simply a milestone along the way to the loyalty that we all want from our customers. Loyalty is earned long-term, not only with product performance but with the service and care that a customer receives in his or her interactions with the supplier.
Research by the Customer Contact Council (CCC) shows that both customer satisfaction and customer loyalty can be improved through better interactions with customer service representatives (CSRs).
According to the CCC research, companies can improve customer satisfaction by improving the so-called "soft" skills of their CSRs. These include things like confidence, concern, listening ability, sensitivity to the customer's mood and follow-through.
On the other hand, the research shows that reducing customer effort has the greatest effect on customer loyalty. Factors that reduce customer effort include:
- Reducing transfers to other CSRs;
- Making sure the customer doesn't have to repeat information; and
- Resolving the customer's issue on the first contact.
With so much riding on interactions with our CSRs and other customer-facing professionals, focusing on the tools and preparation that we use to equip these individuals can pay enormous dividends.
Challenges for CSRs
Most organizations assume that because they have deployed a customer relationship management (CRM) platform, they have properly equipped their CSRs and other customer-facing professionals to provide an outstanding customer experience. But Vivisimo's own research, conducted with contact center managers and executives, shows that customer-facing professionals typically have to access six to 10 different applications and data sources in the course of a day to do their job. This adversely affects performance in both the "soft" and "hard" skills areas and therefore negatively affects customer satisfaction and loyalty.
In the area of "soft skills"—listening, showing concern and empathy for the customer's problem and sensitivity to the customer's mood—the need to pull information from multiple locations is a distraction to even the most skilled CSR. And with information scattered among multiple different systems, the CSR may never realize without being told that, for example, the customer has called multiple times in the past about the same problem.
"Hard skills" also suffer from having to work separately with so many different underlying systems. This will inevitably take longer and involve more trial-and-error which increases effort on the part of the customer and negatively affects loyalty.
Customer Experience Optimization
Is there an alternative to this chaotic and inefficient way of working? After all, just about everyone needs a CRM system, as well as support ticketing, order tracking, email and knowledge management tools. The answer lies in a search-based application that combines powerful information optimization capabilities with social media and Web 2.0 collaboration.
Consider capabilities of an enterprise search platform such as: secure access to multiple data repositories, powerful search and navigation, and the fusion of structured and unstructured data together in a contextually relevant way.
Next, add some of the key features of social media: the concept of "following" people, organizations and other entities, an activity feed that consolidates all of the customers and topics you are following and shows changes in real time, as well as a place to record updates and comments of interest to other team members following the same topics.
With these elements properly integrated in a single application, CSRs, as well as their counterparts in sales and account management, can instantly gain visibility into all of interactions a customer has had with your organization, see all of the products they have purchased and know the status of all of their projects and orders. At the same time, any information that is needed to advise a customer or resolve an issue can be presented in context with all of the account information so that the CSR doesn't need to search for information in multiple applications.
By optimizing your contact center leveraging elements of both enterprise search and social media in a single application, you can give the customer-facing professionals in your organization the visibility and access they need to focus on the customer's issues and to deliver the kind of exceptional customer experience that ensures long-term loyalty.
Vivisimo's Customer Experience Optimization solution connects customer-facing professionals with all of the information they need to deliver an outstanding customer experience. Visit www.vivisimo.com.