Technologies for Improving Customer Experience
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Thu, Sep 11, 2008
On Monday, at the Gartner CRM Summit, Jim Davies gave the presentation The Role of Technology in Improving the Customer Experience. He began with a compelling point: billions have been invested in CRM systems, yet customer satisfaction has not improved. How to explain this discrepancy? Most CRM systems have been implemented from an operational point of view, not from the view of customer experience. In fact, many technologies have made the customer experience worse! Annoying IVR (Interactive Voice Response) systems, hard-to-use web sites, poor call routing, call centers with powerless customer service agents all save their companies money, but at a cost to the customer.
Clearly, technology needs to be used to improve the customer experience, not just to achieve operational efficiency. How to reconcile these two competing goals? Jim proposed a compelling analytical framework for prioritizing which technologies to adopt. He presented a series of charts graphing investments on the dimensions of Productivity (how much does this technology improve customer service productivity?) and Impact (how big of an impact does this have on a customer's experience?).
Each technology is then plotted with a colored circle indicating ease of achieving ROI: green for easier, yellow for moderate, red for challenging.
The composition of the actual charts will vary for your industry and organization.
Key to improving the customer experience is the need to better collect feedback and better analyze opinions. Jim outlined the following technologies to help:
Collect Feedback
EFM (Enterprise Feedback Management)
Survey tools
Event analytics
BPM (Business Process Management)
QA monitoring
Analyze Opinions
Customer value analytics
Data mining
Segmentations
Sales/CSS/Marketing
Jim made another key point: balance customer surveys with detailed analysis to determine what customers really want, in order to invest in the appropriate improvements. Jim gave the example of BT Retail, which was trying to determine the lack of correlation between satisfaction scores and intermittent failure to meet SLA (Service Level Agreement) response times. For certain periods, BT field-service representatives were not showing up at customer locations within the committed time window. Yet for those transactions, satisfaction was no lower than for transactions that were within the time window. Meanwhile, BT was expending significant resources to try to improve the responsiveness. From further research, BT determined that the SLA lapses were occurring during periods of difficult local weather; customers were happy that a BT representative showed up at all, given the conditions, and therefore did not penalize the company for the delay. As a result, BT shifted its efforts to better communications and settings of expectations, by calling affected customers in advance to let them know that the weather would result in a delay.
Jim's final recommendations for improving customer experience:
- Create technology matrices to prioritize which technologies your organization should invest in to improve the customer experience
- Look for appropriate opportunities to embrace existing technologies
- Focus on improving important attributes
- And finally: "Build an EFM system and explore more innovative feedback mechanisms."