Gartner’s Seven Initiatives to Improve Customer Experience

According to a recent worldwide survey by Gartner Executive Programmes (EXP), Targeting, attracting, and retaining new customers remains a top priority for chief information officers (CIOs) in 2008.

To this cause, Gartner outlines seven types of organizational initiatives to boost customer loyalty and satisfaction:

1. Act on feedback, deploy changes and communicate actions to employees and customers - View every customer interaction as an opportunity to deliver brand values.  Standardize on one business feedback management tool across the organization, for all communication channels.
2. Design processes from the outside in - Most process redesign focuses on improving operational efficiencies rather than to improve the customer experience. Yet with every customer interaction, there is at least one "moment of truth" that can disproportionately positively or negatively affect the customer experience.  "Organizations must fix one problem at a time and shouldn’t try to fix all broken processes simultaneously. The best organizations just focus on the worst two or three," says Ed Thompson, research vice-president at Gartner.
3. Act as one organization to ensure consistency – Since customers often interact with many individuals throughout your company, it’s important to ensure that information captured in one interaction is not forgotten in the next channel.
4. Be open - Organizations that want to improve the customer experience often become more open. This could mean offering more channels or extending hours but it can mean much more.  For example, establishing an online community can be one of the most powerful and influential tools for marketing.  Gartner recommends that open organization should follow three tenets:
   • be transparent and clear
   • be open-minded
   • be inclusive
5. Personalize products and experiences - Some personalization options are simple, such as a web site that enables customers to monogram products, while others are more complex, such as tailoring and personal pricing.  However, companies need to consider additional complexity and costs when considering personalization.  Makes sure you evaluate these costs against the sales benefits and longer-term customer experience.
6. Alter attitudes and employee behavior - Employees’ actions are often the most powerful improvements in a customer’s experience. Executive mystery-shopper programs and hands-on manager involvement during peak-demand periods help to educate company leaders about what the average customer and employee are experiencing.  Gartner outlines three primary ways to alter employee behavior:
   • recruit the right types of employees
   • ensure standards such as policies, procedures and governance structures
   • create training programs and incentives that can modify employee behavior patterns
7. Design the complete customer experience - Many organizations have no plan or design for the customer experience.  The experience is experience is unplanned and accidental in its execution -- it “just happens”.  Companies with a focus on selling experiences, such as in the entertainment, education and travel industries, focus on designing experiences ... the brand is an expression of a product or company’s reputation built up over many years. Today, brands increasingly are used as part of marketing communications to create a high-level expectation or promise of a particular quality or customer experience.

By Randy Saunders, Perfect CEM

How to Be a Customer Experience Standout

It’s no coincidence that a number of the companies delivering an unmatched customer experience are among the newest. Relative newcomers such as Amazon and Prudential’s youth-leaning Egg brand in Britain have been able to start from ground zero with modern technology and no institutional legacies. These companies know very clearly who they are and who they are trying to serve, and clearly communicate that both to the marketplace and to their own employees.

“Building that brand platform means articulating a promise to customers that makes very evident what they can expect from you, and why they should come to you,” says customer experience expert Shaun Smith of Shaun Smith + co (www.shaunsmithco.com.) But building a customer experience around safe objectives or simply doing business the way it has always been done is unlikely to score points and create lasting value. Aggressive goals and unique offerings will differentiate you and create memorable experiences. Amazon nearly went bust trying to source one million titles – but Amazon wanted to be the place where you could get any book. It was a proposition that could be communicated to the marketplace, and it became a successful one.

In the contact center, that means doing more than simply meeting last year’s service levels or attaining an industry average. It means creating a distinctive experience the customer cannot duplicate anywhere else. “If your processes adopt a cookie-cutter approach and people are forced to adhere to a system, it takes away any of the personality and personalization there could be,” Smith says. That is where so many companies shortchange the customer experience by tying it to conventional wisdom “best practices,” which place too much emphasis on sameness and assumes customers want to be treated the same no matter where they may take their business. In fact, Smith believes that “in the absence of a clearly articulated strategy, copying other companies’ best practices is bad practice.”

Rather than focusing energy on devising rigid processes and procedures, Smith advocates spending the lion’s share of research time on determining who your best customers are and identifying ways to create a captivating experience for them. “That’s not what most companies do – most organizations have a very loose understanding of their customers and what they’re after, but they have very tight control over the processes,” he says. “The very best brands – the ones who have the most enthusiastic customers – are very tight about who their customers are, what they value, and most importantly, what the brand promises. They can then afford to be looser about procedures, giving employees more freedom to deliver that promise in the best way for that particular customer. If you make it so cookie-cutter that you reduce it to a mechanistic experience for customer and employee both, it leads to turnover – you create the problem you were trying to avoid.”

Customers take notice when they receive an experience that is clearly not delivered by the book. Smith cites a service interaction between smoothie-maker Innocent Drinks and a customer whose discarded bottle fermented in a trash can and exploded all over his office cubicle. Any responsible company could have simply sent him a free coupon. A curmudgeonly company could have simply cited that its drinks are meant to be kept cold and that fermentation is an obvious side effect. Innocent not only responded with a case of free drinks, but sent the customer a personalized message chastising his “very badly behaved smoothie for re-decorating his office,” putting a smile on a regrettable situation and creating a memorable customer experience. This raises another important issue and that is tone of voice. The best brands have a tone of voice that they use to communicate to customers in a way that is also differentiated. Google has one; so do Apple, The Geek Squad, and Southwest – and they are all different. Unless the call center reflects that tone of voice, you might just as well outsource it and trust the experience to luck.

Performance metrics can be used to determine which agents are best delivering your brand message. Coordinated desktop applications also make it possible for agents to take the best possible action to resolve each customer encounter, in a way that can be tracked and executed on by the rest of the organization. Put simply, there’s no point in having aggressive agents willing to do anything to get the job done if they cannot clearly record the results of a call or ensure that it is acted upon through immediate communication with all responsible parties throughout the entire organization.

Note that creating a sublime customer experience expressly does not mean that you must execute on each and every dimension at a higher service or satisfaction rating than your competitors. “If Southwest Airlines were to do a customer service survey, they might find that to improve Southwest, they should offer food and advance seating, and transfer baggage. But if they did all of that, they would go out of business or at the very least cease to create a great customer experience for their most profitable customers!” Smith says. “For Southwest customers, what’s of value to them are the speed, frequency, and low cost of service.” It is a powerful reminder that satisfaction ratings and customer experience are not necessarily directly correlated. A superior experience need not score a perfect 10 in all avenues of performance if those attributes are of lower importance to the target customers – but you had better be scoring 10 on those that are. The proper technology helps to identify and consistently measure the key customer-centric metrics.

This article is an excerpt from the white paper “Customer Experience Happens in the Contact Center, With Insights From Shaun Smith." Go to www.cincom.com/shaunsmith to download the complete white paper or to view a webcast titled "See, Feel, Think, Do - Creating Breakthrough Ideas to Deliver the Perfect Customer Experience," in which Shaun Smith presents a lively discussion on how to build great customer experiences.

Creating A Virtual Contact Center

"Enabling agents as diverse as your customer base to respond seamlessly"

You may have experienced the following crisis situation or one similar to it.

The crisis: In the middle of your most important campaign of the year, you’re hit with the largest snowstorm in a decade. Not only are the roads impassible for most of your staff, you have lost power in your building several times today. And to your customers this simply means your contact center is unreachable. What do you do?

You can substitute your own critical program and trouble spot as you please for this scenario — as long as it requires immediate contact center service. When you’re faced with a situation like this, what happens if these communication channels are interrupted?

The rescue: An increasing number of enterprises are using Software as a Service (SaaS) to create “virtual” or “hosted” contact centers. For the uninitiated, Software as a Service is a way of using subscription-based software to allow contact center agents to be located away from a traditional service center. Through SaaS, agents may be in multiple time zones, using multiple communicational lines. They may even speak multiple languages when responding to customers.

For enterprises that utilize SaaS, the virtual contact center allows agents to work from home, accessing a common set of tools, appearing joined and available via “regular” support channels. Having this capability pays big dividends — here’s how:

• High-value transactions receive high, skill-based priority. When a high-value customer needs support, every transfer counts. By linking agents in the virtual call center based on skills, rather than location or pool-priority, the customer may receive an improved level of support. These agents can be part of the larger contact-center pool or an escalated group of experts.
• Home-based agents may be more productive. Agents who work from home often have more education and are more loyal than those in brick-and-mortar contact centers. They don’t have commuting problems to deal with and may be more flexible regarding extended or off-hour responses.
• Virtual contact centers can be easier to reach in a disaster. Because of their decentralized nature, when disaster strikes, many virtual contact centers remain open and operational. They are more reachable because the agents are not in a single location. During disasters, the contact centers can also share critical information with employees calling to find out about facilities, coworkers, even loved ones.

Good for the your company and your customer

According to industry research from IDC, the number of U.S. at-home agents will triple by 2010. This way of working is growing in popularity for many good reasons. The first is cost. For the company implementing a virtual contact center, or adding agents to an existing operation, the cost per agent can be much lower because no additional facilities are required — The company does not have to provision or maintain more power, air conditioning, furniture, communications equipment or computers for every new agent. Adding agents in an existing virtual center doesn’t require additional IT infrastructure or labor.

From the customers’ perspective, they can’t tell that the center is virtual. Customers use the same 800 number or series of numbers. They don’t know if agents are side by side or all over the country. Customers are still routed with an automatic call distribution (ACD) queue and skills-based routing to put the right agent on the right call.

The beauty of the virtual or hosted service is that the “back end” is transparent to the customer. And for the agent they only need a web browser and Internet access to participate in the virtual center.

Creating a virtual contact center

The virtual call center model allows a company to rely on a contact center service provider to set up an account, which is quite simple. Cost is often based on the number of agents and services provided. The provider maintains the infrastructure and contact center software as part of the service to your company.

Contact center software updates, patches and bug fixes are also handled by the service provider, making the contact center even easier to create and maintain. By using different hosted services, you can boost your company’s existing contact center performance and capabilities with minimal disruption and investment. And as your company and support needs expand, it’s easy to expand your virtual contact center, using the hosted services and virtual agents.

Managing your virtual team

Companies concerned about allowing agents to work from home have excellent management capabilities with the virtual or hosted center. Since on-site supervision is no longer a part of the management perspective, other tools are needed to monitor and manage virtual contact center activity. Call monitoring software reports number of calls per agent, length of call, even software access times. These reporting tools are often accessible from a contact center manager’s desk, which may also be off-site.

Flexibility and expandability are significant advantages with the hosted model. When your company expands or becomes geographically diverse, the contact center can grow or move to support it, without additional infrastructure. Adding another shift or time-zone to your company’s operation is also easier to support with virtual agents who are already awake and accustomed to working in the new time-zone. Similarly, when you move into new regions requiring multilingual support, you can depend on agents native to the region — who already speak the required languages fluently.

Customer support on a limited budget

For small companies, or those with limited budgets, adding virtual agents enables them to provide a high level of support without devoting the infrastructure investment and facility cost of an on-site contact center. Companies often start with a small, centralized installation, allowing agents to work from home as they become comfortable with the hosted applications. This method allows a centralized presence initially or migrating to a virtual center, or a combination of the two. Often the addition of a second or third shift marks the migration to a virtual center, allowing the additional business to be supported by virtual agents at significant cost savings.

Your company may also benefit from regional hub-zone telecommuting incentives, by eliminating commuters and pollution from the area.

Virtual solutions — concrete benefits

Companies that create a virtual contact center experience a plethora of benefits. When you begin to add virtual agents to your business, you improve productivity and facilitate better customer responses through:

• Minimal capital start-up costs
• Low infrastructure and information technology costs
• Flexible and easily expandable workforce
• Readily available multishift and multilanguage support
• Lower agent turnover — loyal virtual agents working from home
• Smaller resource utilization footprints — lower cost per agent
• Reduced outages due to emergencies or disasters

The keys to success include finding a provider you can work with that offers the mix of services, reporting tools and supportability you want. Start with your existing program and add virtual extensions. As you expand, you’ll have the experience and relationships in place to better support your customer base as it changes. By making your move into a virtual contact center with the support of a knowledgeable vendor, you’ll ensure success for you and your customers.

By Randy Saunders at Cincom Systems