Solving the Customer Experience Crisis

For every industry and in every country, new factors have challenged initiatives to acquire new customers and keep existing ones.

Today, companies that succeed must satisfy customers across mobile devices, contact centers, email, websites, printed pieces and whatever additional touchpoints their customers require. Companies must reach global customers in their own languages while maintaining a consistent, recognizable corporate image. They must accelerate product delivery and promotional campaigns, both to please customers and to beat competitors.

For some organizations these challenges culminate in the "perfect storm" of a customer experience crisis. To reap the rewards of competitive advantage and increased revenue opportunities, companies must provide a satisfying customer experience.

"Customer experience" is defined as the collection of all interactions a customer has with a company, its products and its partners, across all customer touchpoints, all geographies and throughout all stages of the customer lifecycle, from initial customer attraction through fulfillment to retention.

While many enterprise processes have been automated—such as ERP, supply chain, HR and CRM—most companies have not automated the processes that provide the customer experience. These processes typically occur across multiple divisions and are distributed over many geographies. Procedures vary by location. Consistent quality and branding standards are rare. People in different locations and departments share information only on an ad hoc basis, leading to isolated, redundant efforts that produce mismatched results and confused customers. Because more and more customers and nearly all promotional campaigns now interact across multiple touchpoints, the likelihood of providing a poor customer experience has only been increased.

Another obstacle to optimizing the customer experience is the difficulty of performing interactions that span a combination of many applications and technologies. It is common for a large organization to support dozens of authoring and creation tools to create material in different media types stored in hundreds of content repositories to be presented to customers in dozens of environments in several languages. The pieces are scattered across the enterprise, and because they depend on manual involvement they cannot scale to support new markets, new channels or rapid company growth.

As a result, a growing number of companies are experiencing the following detrimental effects related to customer experience:

1. Diluted brands and messages: As executives travel throughout the world, they can see their brand and messages distorted differently in every country. Inconsistency is also evident when brands and messages are altered for the requirements of different channels, such as retail stories, contact centers, mobile devices, websites, print brochures, podcasts, broadcast media, etc.

2. Inability to implement prompt changes: Companies report delays of four months or more to roll out brand changes, new products or new campaigns to customers worldwide. This time lag postpones product launches and gives competitors an open invitation to steal customers.

3. Customer dissatisfaction due to poor quality information and inconsistencies across touchpoints: Inaccurate, out-of-date, or incomplete information prevents customers from understanding companies and products, and can drive customers away.

4. Customer process inefficiencies: Disconnected and wasteful customer experience processes can add substantial costs to each customer interaction, damaging the bottom line. These widespread problems lead directly to bottom-line consequences, and historically have been difficult to solve.

Solution: Customer Experience Management
Many companies across a variety of industries are mobilizing customer experience initiatives. For example, Forrester Research reports that 94% of financial service organizations surveyed consider it very important or critical to improve customer experience.

Any attempt to resolve enterprisewide problems with a piecemeal solution will not work. For example, companies can focus on optimizing one particular type of customer interaction, or on one customer touchpoint, and realize some positive gains in improving the customer experience. However, the greatest results are generated by considering all aspects of the customer experience together.

This strategy of optimizing the customer experience by delivering persuasive content consistently across all touchpoints is called customer experience management.

Successful customer experience management cannot be accomplished without making business processes work together. Winning customer experience solutions bring together a blend of applications, insightful expertise and a comprehensive partner ecosystem that includes the leading vendors and integrators in the customer experience field.

Customer experience management solutions need to include:

• Workflow that automates processes for creating and managing customer information by handing documents, information and tasks from one participant to the right person or application to take the right action.
• Collaborative document management that facilitates team-based collaboration on document-intensive processes, thereby enabling organizations to improve organizational decision-making, mitigate risk and streamline execution.
• Digital asset management to manage the thousands of digital assets used to promote products and brands, so extended marketing teams can easily catalog, transform and distribute photographs, logos, audio, video, datasheets, advertisements, presentations and documents.
• Image capture that captures paper documents and the images needed by customer experience processes and to comply with regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley.
• Content intelligence that organizes the unstructured information that drives the customer experience, including office documents, email and Web content, enabling personalization, cross-selling and upselling.
• Content distribution to dispense all types of content (Web content, code, documents, data, media, etc.) to any application in any physical location, enabling secure customer experiences that are consistent across channels.
• Web content management to create, manage and deliver websites and applications, enabling organizations to improve communication, respond to changing market demands, support new business initiatives and contain costs.
• Records management that manages paper, email and electronic records—even in other systems—from a single application, enabling organizations to control records consistently and effectively across offices, media types and systems, thereby decreasing the cost of managing records and reducing risks from inconsistent records policies.