Enhancing Customer Experience

There is a growing trend for enterprises to pay increasing attention to the experience of customers as they interact with the company.  The concept of “Customer Experience Management” (CEM) is supplanting that of “Customer Relationship Management” (CRM).  While both concepts are ostensibly focused on customer interactions, CRM measures tend to concentrate on viewing these interactions from the company’s perspective.  CEM seeks to understand these interactions from the customer’s point-of-view. 

In most interactions, there are two key dimensions that define the experience for the customer.  Was my purpose of the interaction fulfilled?  And, how did I feel about the way interaction transpired?  Enterprises strive a) to meet the customer’s purpose and b) to have the customer pleased with the experience. 

CEM encompasses interactions of all types – walking into a retail location, accessing a website, calling a contact center, even watching advertisements.  For customer interactions with a contact center, the key issue is the nature and effectiveness of the communications. 

In contact center environments, improving the customer experience often means providing the agent with access to information to enable “first contact resolution” of a customer query.  If the agent doesn’t know the answer, the customer’s objective hasn’t been fulfilled.  And if the agent puts the caller on an extended “hold” and scrambles to find the answer, the customer’s perception of the experience will likely be diminished.

Unified communications concepts provide an array of tools and capabilities to enhance communications between a company and its customers, especially in the contact center.  And these tools can be very effective in facilitating the goals of excellent customer experience.  An obvious example is the use of instant messaging.  There are at least five ways that IM and presence capabilities can be helpful:

• The most common is to enable the agent to seek help from a supervisor or expert within the contact center.
• Increasingly, companies are implementing ways that an agent can reach outside the center and use presence to identify an available subject matter expert to help. The agent might IM with the expert to get information, or conference in the expert to participate in the call.
• The company can enable customers to IM directly with a contact center agent from a website.
• The company can establish a secure web-based portal for specific customers that will support IM communications with the contact center. 
• In cases of high-value customers, enterprises could provide presence information for that customer’s key contacts – sales, logistics, accounting, tech support, and other departments outside the contact center.  This approach provides direct links for customers, and could significantly enhance perceptions of their interactions with the enterprise.

All these techniques help customers achieve their goal in an interaction, and do it in a way that enhances the experience.  In addition, since the goal of CEM is to understand that experience from the customer’s point-of-view, enterprises also need to design and implement surveys and other ways to measure the customers’ perceptions. 

Forward-thinking vendors are developing capabilities to help promote more effective interactions using unified communications and other techniques. Aspect, for example, has improved their Aspect Unified IP and PerformanceEdge products both to enhance and to measure the customer experience.  

They recently announced a number of new IM capabilities, some leveraging their partnership with Microsoft and the integration with Office Communications Server and the Microsoft Office Communicator.  Within the contact center, agents can IM to supervisors or specialists for assistance with a customer question.  In other cases, agents can identify the availability (through presence) of experts throughout the enterprise to solve specific customer issues, helping to improve first call resolution and enhance customer satisfaction.  Finally, customers of the enterprise can add IM addresses of enterprise contacts to their own IM “buddy lists”, to facilitate direct communications, or to check the status of agent queues. 

Measurement is important, too.  Customers can forecast and report on agent and knowledge worker availability compared to projected contact center volumes. Aspect’s workforce management tools can be used to schedule both agents and also experts outside the contact center. Companies can track forecast vs. actual performance, monitor agents and knowledge workers in real-time and compare to plan, and provide reports of schedule activity and adherence for individuals and groups.  Finally, through their partnership with Tellme, Aspect’s On-Demand Voice Portal opens up the opportunity to proactively contact customers as well as being able to conduct post-call customer surveys.

As the global economy recovers and businesses position themselves for future growth, many enterprises will turn to the concepts of customer experience management to guide their strategies and investment decisions.  Aspect and other vendors are developing unified communications capabilities and other product enhancements to support these important initiatives.  The result will be new ways to link companies with their customers.