By: Brynn Palmer principal solutions marketing at Verint Witness Actionable Solutions

Organizations need the right processes, metrics, and enabling technologies to ensure an engaging and profitable customer experience.

Do you remember how customer service was delivered in the pre-Internet days? Back then, your local grocer knew what advertisement brought you into the store and the items you purchased regularly, and was able to answer questions or concerns right there on the spot. Then things started to scale. The local grocer became a national, or even global, corporation. Customer management became fragmented and was delegated to various siloed departments across the business–from marketing to sales to the contact center. While this scenario continues to play out, there is one aspect that hasn’t changed: customer expectations. As consumers, we all want rapid, high-value and priority service at a competitive cost.

Customer service has definitely changed. Enter social media. Customers who are no longer tolerant of poor service can take their grievances to public sites like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. More and more, the customer experience is becoming a topic of discussion in the boardroom. And what we’re now seeing is an organizational shift from simply adding more frontline resources to fundamentally changing service operations structures, and supporting technologies and business processes—all to gain a more holistic, 360-degree approach to customer care.

Organizations are starting to place an emphasis, across the executive team, on improving customer service and support. Often their products, services, and price are no longer the differentiators they once were–which has driven many to renew their investments and efforts around building customer intimacy, enhancing service delivery, and advancing their brands.

Building the infrastructures to truly sustain these goals is critical, but it doesn’t stop there. The right processes and workflows need to be in place. The right metrics that will align customer support with the broader business are necessary. And, the right enabling technologies are needed to automate, streamline, and deliver analytical insights and reporting on what’s happening across the operation. For some businesses, this raises more questions than answers—they often are unsure where to begin. Below are five key considerations, starting points, and best practices for getting on the right road to developing a comprehensive view of the customer experience in 2011.

Create a customer experience owner. Having a customer service advocate at the executive level is a great place to start. Consider dedicating a new position that sits adjacent to the executive level—reporting directly to the CEO and interacting with senior leadership. “Owning” the holistic customer experience, this dedicated role can act more like an internal consultant and ambassador, building the “big picture” by regularly collaborating with business units and departments across the organization. Having a champion in this area ensures a leader and her team wake up every day focused on this vital topic.

Revisit (and possibly invest in) supporting customer service processes and technologies. What some organizations have faced is the lack of a unified infrastructure and supporting business processes and technologies to provide a single view of the “customer truth.” The result: manual data gathering and analysis, often of only a small portion of the customer experience intelligence that’s available, coupled with a limited amount of time and resources to focus and act on the findings. Today, such technologies as workforce optimization, customer interaction analytics—composed of speech, text, data, and customer feedback surveys—and desktop and process analytics can tell organizations an amazing amount of information about the issues, frustrations, trends, and opportunities in their customer service operations—some of which they might know to look for, along with some they’d otherwise not know about.

Such solutions enable organizations to capture, analyze, and immediately sift through and aggregate customer experience intelligence to provide valuable, timely, and actionable insight to management, as well as to frontline employees. Suddenly, the customer is “in the room.”

With an effective enterprise customer experience model in place, business leaders can equip themselves with the tools and insight they need to make changes in their products, services, marketing offers, and the processes that support their internal teams. They can identify gaps in staff training, find out what customers share about competitors in the market, and more.

Put feedback from your customers into action. Gone are the days of wondering what customers think about your business, your products, and your services. They’re happy to tell you—all you need to do is ask. Over the past several years, much progress has been made in the area of customer feedback and data collection. Whether you’re calling your wireless operator’s customer service line, or buying the latest HDTV at a local retail store, you’re typically asked to fill out a survey.

The good news is today’s businesses can now go beyond simply asking if a customer was satisfied with the service provided. They can be asked context-sensitive questions that are specific to the reason they contacted the business in the first place. The days of “canned, one-size-fits all” surveys are gone. With this insight, organizations can make changes to their internal training so front-line staff are better equipped; they can be alerted to broken business processes leading to customer frustration; they can make swift changes to special offers that aren’t resonating in the market; and they can take feedback on product defects in order to proactively reach other customers and make necessary changes and adjustments.

A tip: If you take the time to ask for input, be prepared to do something with it. Put the “voice of your customers” to work for you. In the end, as customers we want assurance that our feedback is being applied and taken seriously. We want to know that companies care about our input and are prepared to do something with and about it.

Embrace social media. Diverse groups of customer segments–Baby Boomers, Gen X, Gen Y, and more–are driving the uptake of multichannel communications, and even how these interactions are handled and responded to by companies. More and more consumers are moving toward the Internet and leveraging social media and self-service to communicate their basic wants, needs, and expectations from businesses.

With social media comes a more widespread, global customer voice—a voice that can be pro-business (for those positive customer experiences) and critical (where customer frustrations play themselves out via such channels as review sites, YouTube, blogs, and others). As such, companies should be proactive and take steps to understand how customers use these channels, be able to monitor and analyze them, know when and what reactive actions to take as appropriate, and truly embrace social media as formal customer service and branding channels. Best practices also would support the need for organizations to designate internal resources with responsibility for administering Twitter, Facebook, and others as information sources for their customers and a way to provide regular relevant news, updates, and tips.

Get back to building customer relationships. Happy customers can be your biggest brand ambassadors. And we’ve all heard the numbers around it being far more expensive to acquire a new customer than to retain an existing one. Both of these factors hit home with businesses, especially given the economy in which we all operate. As a best practice, in 2011, work to recapture some “shop around the corner” mind-set with personalized experiences. By capturing and analyzing the voice of your customers you have an essential focus group on demand—an “outside in” voice that every business needs but few put into action. Putting customer expressed feedback into motion reinforces the fact that you’re listening to their wants and needs, and that you appreciate and value them.

As ever, interactions between companies and their customers become more than just initial transactions or sales, but rather opportunities to build lasting relationships. The customer service representatives on the frontline are generally trained to be operationally focused; however, as an industry we need to start thinking more in terms of relationship building. That requires a shift in how businesses interact with customers, how we train, and how we go to market.

In the end, the desire of the average consumer to have a relationship-based customer experience has never gone way. The good news is we now have the ability to immediately gather data on customer transactions (including our customers’ views) and to service and understand a new generation of customers using both traditional and new-age communications channels. All we need to build relationships, loyalty, and gold-star customer experiences is there for us. Success will go to those businesses that recognize the difference and seize the opportunity.

Source: www.1to1media.com