Posted by Vovici Blog on Fri, Jun 07, 2013
By Anne Patton, Sr. Director, Corporate Communications, Verint® Systems
*This is reposted from http://www.verint.com/verint-blog/index
This morning at Driving Innovation 2013, Verint welcomed guest keynote speaker, industry analyst and author Harley Manning.
As VP and research director at Forrester, Manning took center stage and spoke to the topic of the book he co-authored with colleague Kerry Bodine, “Outside In: The Power of Putting Customers at the Center of Your Business.”
So why focus on Customer Experience (CX), and why now, he asked?
The new reality is that customers have more choices than ever before, courtesy of our global economy. They have options galore, information (and with it, information overload), and a multitude of devices that enable access to almost anything, anywhere, anytime. By most counts, this is a good thing. But until organizations get their arms around their part in mastering the equation, it continues to be a source of uncertainty for some, and even angst for others.
Says Manning, “What we concluded was that companies that want to survive and thrive in today’s reality will adopt a perspective that reflects today’s reality—a reality where the balance of power has shifted to their customers. It’s a perspective that we call ‘Outside In,’ which was also the genesis of our new book about customer experience.”
At the start, there’s the customer journey, he explained. Customer experiences he says are how customers perceive their interactions with a company. That seems obvious enough. One way to think about it is through the lens of the “customer experience pyramid.” This is a model in which the “base” equates to meeting customer needs. The next step up centers on “ease”—how easy is a company to do business with? And at the top is the “enjoyment factor,” where the best experiences are pleasurable and can lead to loyalty, the ultimate nirvana.
Manning likes to share the Forrester “Customer Experience Index” as a backdrop to illustrate the direct correlation between customer experiences and loyalty. Consider these three questions: What is a customer’s willingness to make future purchases from a company? What is his/her likelihood to recommend it to a friend? And what is his/her propensity to switch to a competitor? These actions speak far louder than words and are critical indicators.
The good news is there are technologies today—such as Voice of the Customer Analytics—that can help organizations analyze and act on these very indicators.
At Forrester, Manning and colleagues study the most important things that companies do to create superior customer experiences. Taking it a step further, he highlighted the “6 Principles of CX”—Strategy, Customer Understanding, Design, Measurement, Governance and Culture. And during the keynote, as well as throughout his book, he pointed to the power of examples, sprinkling the “what to dos” and “how tos” behind the initiatives of organizations taking a bottoms up approach to the customer experience.
As for next steps, Manning’s “know before you go” takeaway pointed to additional insights and resources available at http://forr.com/cxmaturity
Follow Harley Manning at @hmanning and blogs.forrester.com/harley_manning.
Posted by Vovici Blog on Fri, Jun 07, 2013
By Candace Flynn, Senior Public Relations Manager, Verint® Systems
*This is reposted from http://www.verint.com/verint-blog/index
It’s important to keep in mind how critical it is to think like your customer. “Customers don't think in channels,” Verint SVP of global marketing Ryan Hollenbeck said when he spoke with Ginger Conlon of Direct Marketing News at Verint’s Driving Innovation user conference, talking trends during a break between sessions.
“It's one customer, one company. That's where we're going.” Yes, companies need to optimize individual channels, Hollenbeck said; but businesses also need to optimize customer experience across channels. For most companies today this is more of a vision than a reality, he noted.
Read more of Ginger’s blog to hear what other Verint leaders had to say about listening to customers.
Posted by Vovici Blog on Fri, Jun 07, 2013
By Siobhan Miller, Solutions Marketing Director, Speech Analytics, Verint® Systems
*This is reposted from http://www.verint.com/verint-blog/
Many organizations don’t realize it, but they have a potential gold mine of customer feedback at their fingertips. The sheer volume of data and the manual processes required to extract it has prevented them from uncovering this useful information. But the recent advent of speech analytics technologies has changed that. There is now a way to glean valuable intelligence from thousands, even millions, of customer calls, more quickly and easily than ever before.
In fact, many of today’s most successful and innovative organizations have started using speech analytics in their contact centers and are also expanding these initiatives to create value across departments. They are capitalizing on the vast repository of unsolicited and unfiltered customer feedback found in recorded calls. The migration of this tool from the contact center throughout the enterprise is reflected in the growing speech technology market. Analysts such as DMG Consulting have predicted growth rates of 25% in 2013, and 20% in 2014 in this market.
Speech analytics can uncover issues that affect many departments across the enterprise, including sales, marketing, operations, compliance and support, as well as customers, partners and employees. Here are four prime examples of how today’s progressive organizations are using speech analytics to optimize business processes, improve the customer experience and add value.
Account Management
Leveraging the voice of their customers not only streamlined processes and reduced costs, but they also drove revenues. A national payment processing company used speech analytics to tap into the calls of customers who had closed their accounts in order to build a customer profile that was “likely to defect.”
The analytics team then leveraged the tool to search incoming calls and flag existing customers who fit this profile. After cross-correlating the list of retention risks with CRM data, the team established a process to proactively contact the most high-value and “at risk” customers, saving more than 600 accounts worth $1.7 million. Notably, within seven weeks of launching this solution, the company had already achieved a return on its speech analytics technology investment.
Sales
For many enterprises, cross-selling or up-selling to customers is as important as retaining them. One leading financial institution analyzed the conversations taking place in its contact center to understand why a “service to sales” initiative wasn’t meeting targets. By using speech analytics to help mine and analyze trends across the customer interactions, it was quickly identified that certain terms and phrases in a particular script correlated with much lower conversion rates.
When using the phrase “may we have another moment of your time?” to transition from the service segment of the call to the sales pitch, conversion rates dropped from 15.1 to 6.3 percent. Simply by changing this transition phrase, some agents managed to more than double the average conversion rate. Leveraging speech analytics helped uncover the components in the sales initiative that weren’t working to fine-tune the program.
Partner Management
Many calls into the contact center are driven by processes or issues that it does not control: billing problems, missing orders and broken products. They can be even more difficult to resolve when the source is outside the enterprise. One travel company discovered that many of its contact center calls were driven by a third-party’s billing department, so the two companies worked together to improve billing practices and reduce call volume.
Marketing and Advertising
The marketing department can also benefit from the customer recordings within the contact center. Buried within customer calls is information on brand perception, messages that work, issues that can blow up into social media nightmares, and insight that marketing can leverage for future campaigns. In essence, it’s an on-demand focus group. In addition to these proactive uses for speech analytics, the marketing department can also leverage it to rework messaging when needed.
One large organization fixed an issue in an ad campaign based upon information gathered in the contact center, which indicated that customers were frustrated and confused by a particular television ad. By analyzing the calls, it was determined that the voice-over describing the offer did not match the screen text. The voice-over indicated the offer had no restrictions, while the graphics indicated it was limited to certain types of customers. Once the issue was addressed, conversion rates increased and customer frustration was alleviated.
Today, speech analytics technology has made it easier than ever to surface issues that can drive change – not only in the contact center but across the organization. There are many innovative ways in which speech analytics can be used across the enterprise to optimize the business and improve the customer experience. Consider the variety of ways your organization can utilize speech analytics in order to create value, such as reducing costs in the contact center, creating back-office efficiencies, or better understanding the customer experience.
Your customers will be glad you did.
Posted by Vovici Blog on Wed, May 22, 2013
*This is reposted from http://www.verint.com/verint-blog/index
Verint continues to expand on analytics capabilities that allow customers to build stronger multichannel relationships, gain deeper insight into the customer experience and improve operational efficiencies. With our Voice of the Customer Analytics™ portfolio, organizations can capture VoC feedback 24/7 from anywhere in the world by easily deploying mobile surveys offline or online via the web, email, IVR—and now SMS. That means they can now gain feedback at the point of customer experiences and/or transactions—such as a store purchase or bank visit.
Looking to our latest Enterprise Feedback Management™ offering, organizations will find enhancements that continue to simplify survey design—helping reduce time and increase productivity—while maintaining a powerful and flexible feature set. These capabilities also are helping global companies centralize customer interaction data into a single view and break down information silos. Interactive dashboards take the advances a step further, providing a central view into customer data, allowing decision makers to instantly access and share real-time insight.
Interested in learning more? Click here.
Posted by Nancy Porte on Tue, May 14, 2013
By Nancy Porte, VP of Customer Experience, Verint® Systems
*This is reposted from http://www.verint.com/verint-blog/
The Customer Experience Professionals Association (CXPA) annual Member Insight Exchange kicks off today in San Diego, California at the Hotel del Coronado. Our keynote speaker this afternoon is Jeanne Bliss, president of the consulting firm CustomerBliss, a company that helps organizations create an actionable path for profitability and business growth through earning customer and employee raves. Her best-selling books are Chief Customer Officer and I Love You More than My Dog: Five Decisions that Drive Extreme Loyalty in Good times and Bad. As co-founder of the CXPA, Jeanne was pleased to speak to her members.
Beloved companies enable people to decide and act from a corner of their brain that is congruent with doing the right thing. Five decisions set companies apart and reveal who they are and what they value. Beloved companies earn the right to their customers’ story. And beloved companies have prosperity—prosperity of spirit.
Companies that embrace the five decisions enjoy solid business performance advantages. Recruiting costs are less, because they are hiring—and keeping—the best employees. Advertising costs less, because their customers promote their products and services. And, their business grows as a result of a clear, customer-focused message.
Decision 1: Beloved Companies Decide to Believe
“We trust our customers. We trust those who serve them.”
Do you believe that customers are an asset or a cost center?
Zane’s Cycles made the decision to not ask for collateral for test drives. As a result they show their trust in customers. (And, they lose very few bicycles as a result.)
1. Revamp how you hire–start with core values.
2. Create a “kill a stupid rule” movement.
3. Let customers key their feedback directly on your home page.
Believing is about embedding the notion in your company about building an asset–the customer–and talking about them as human beings.
Decision 2: Beloved Companies Decide with Clarity of Purpose
“Our iron-clad integrity and clarity guide the direction of our decisions.”
This is about moving your employees past doing tasks and toward creating a customer experience. Know the emotions your customers want to feel. Improve their lives and create a memory to that desired emotion.
IKEA decides to design the price tag first. They learn how the customer will use the furniture first and design the chair or sofa from there. People remember the first and last experience. Are you designing your experience around how customers are greeted, and what do you offer them as they leave?
Decision 3: Beloved Companies Decide to Be Real
“We have a spirited soul, humanity in our touch, and personality that’s all ours.”
Beloved companies take customers seriously—but they don’t take themselves too seriously. Being transparent with customers takes courage. USAA decided that new hires should eat like soldiers so they understand their customers better—as a result, they are more real when solving their issues. The resulting empathy created amazing growth for USAA.
Being real means thinking about people, not accounts. Show your values as you make decisions.
- Start all new hire orientation with walking in customers’ shoes.
- Get rid of jargon in how you talk to and about customers.
- Be a customer. Require everyone to do this once per quarter.
Decision 4: Beloved Companies Decide to Be There
“We must earn the right to our continued relationship with customers.”
Do you know your customers? Zara decided to invest in product speed, not advertising. They knew their customers were fashionistas on a limited budget. So, they turn over inventory quickly and their customers purchase when they see it. In fact, customers go into the stores 17 times a year!
- Start with customer priorities to drive operational investment.
- Connect team structure and rewards to customer prosperity.
- Fix how you hand off customers when service providers change.
Beloved companies do the hard work in getting to know their customers and earning the right to repeat business. That starts with being there when customers need them, on the customers’ terms.
Decision 5: Beloved Companies Decide to Say Sorry
“We act with humility when things go wrong. We will make it right.”
How you apologize to a customer and how you handle an adverse situation is the true litmus test of your organization. Southwest Airlines decided to proactively apologize to customers. They review issues with flights each day and proactively send letters and compensation to inconvenienced customers. As a result, net positive revenue increased. Takeaways for the rest of us:
- Establish your own version of the daily overview meeting.
- Establish five very human responses to mistakes.
- Re-entrench core values—act from them in service failures.
Decide to believe. Have clarity of purpose. Be real. Be there. Say you are sorry. The decision is yours!
Posted by Dave Capuano on Mon, May 13, 2013
By Dave Capuano, Vice President, Marketing, Verint® Systems
*This is reposted from http://www.verint.com/verint-blog/
These days the Big Data buzz is growing louder, rapidly becoming a topic that organizations need to address. The volume of customer data has become so large—and is growing at such a fast rate—that “business as usual” can’t keep up anymore.
It’s easier than ever for customers to express their feelings about service experiences, products and more to the social stratosphere. As a result, organizations are no longer covered if they only record transactional information. Now, customer sentiment also needs to be tracked, analyzed and understood through all channels or modes of communication. Moreover, while trying to manage all that, companies also have to adhere to customer information-related data protection and privacy laws. In a word, compliance—and it’s here to stay.
Today’s highly competitive marketplace—combined with customers who have multiple ways to communicate 24/7—has created the need to tame the data beast. Collecting and analyzing vast amounts of customer data quickly can be challenging. Word to the wise: much of this data can be unclear, ambiguous or just plain irrelevant. As if that’s not enough, the intelligence gleaned from this data then needs to be applied wisely across the enterprise so that everyone accesses and leverages the same information effectively.
That’s a lot to absorb, so are you ready for some good news? When accessed and leveraged correctly, the intelligence from all this data can be timely, valuable and solve complex problems quickly. Companies that successfully navigate this maze have a competitive advantage over those that don’t.
Targeted VoC Analytics solutions can enter databases and information warehouses to find answers to questions or challenges without requiring any significant system overhauls. In fact, industry analyst firm Frost & Sullivan points out that Verint’s Voice of the Customer Analytics™ is designed to obtain customer sentiment and VoC from unstructured and structured data. It also performs predictive analytics in real time during customer interactions, as well as to customer files prior to customer contact.
Want to know more? Read Frost & Sullivan’s white paper Obtaining “Big Results” from Big Data.
Posted by Vovici Blog on Thu, May 09, 2013
By Oren Stern, Vice President, Voice of the Customer Analytics, Verint® Systems
*This is reposted from http://www.verint.com/verint-blog/
These days everyone wants your opinion—or at least they all seem to be asking for it in some way, shape or form.
Nearly all companies have come to realize the importance of measuring customer experience and satisfaction. Various means of collecting customer feedback, especially in the business-to-consumer and retail industries, seem to be overflowing. With all of these requests for feedback, one question keeps bothering me—how do these feedback requests influence the customer experience itself?
A great deal has been said about feedback fatigue. You know how it works: you get too many requests for feedback. You don't really see the value in providing it. You start (or continue) ignoring the requests. Much research has been done on how to optimize the amount of feedback requests one gets, as well as how to maximize the perceived value in providing feedback. (Hint: You actually do something about the feedback and close the loop!)
However, let me hypothesize and suggest that the ubiquity of feedback and the emergence of social media have made feedback not only a desired mechanism for understanding customer satisfaction, but also an integral part of the experience itself.
Case in point—I took my car in for service the other day. The service experience was stellar as it has always been. The waiting room was great, Wi-Fi worked perfectly, my car came back sparkling after being hand washed, and I drove off into the sunset (well, actually, back to the office).
As I expected, what followed shortly thereafter was a courteous email requesting my feedback. As I do Voice of the Customer Analytics for a living, I try and read these emails, and sometimes I actually respond! I expected the first part of the email, which was all about how a great customer experience is important to the dealership and the car company. However, the second part of the email took me by surprise.
I thought it would be about how the dealership values my opinion and wants to improve. Instead, it was all about how the service person’s professional standing with the company depended on my feedback, as well as the dealership’s professional standing with the car company. It was suggested that if I intended to answer anything but "it was a stellar experience,” that I should call them first to clarify.
This actually got me a bit mad! Here was the service department "warning" me I shouldn't say anything wrong or negative about them, suggesting they didn’t care about my feedback or want it in order to improve.
Feedback is no longer an isolated event that happens with a select few companies you interact with. It is everywhere. Moreover, social media has taught us we all have an opinion, and we can choose to scream it from the rooftops. We go online and discuss our last meal in a restaurant, rank the hotel we recently stayed in, review the concert we just went to, and so on.
We are conditioned to provide feedback these days. When we take our car in for service, we expect we’ll be asked about it. However, if the feedback request is done the wrong way—as in too frequently, with poor wording, insincerely or without closing the loop—this becomes part of the experience itself.
In my case, it even turned a positive experience into a less satisfying one, with a lasting impression.
This is where we need to get smarter about asking for feedback. We need to recognize and understand that eliciting feedback has become an integral part of the overall customer experience. Sometimes, it’s the last impression we give. Designing a positive and stellar customer experience is critical to separating your organization from the pack; yet, in its research, Forrester suggests that customer experience design is still a foreign concept.
According to recent studies, only 35 percent of companies follow a formal process for designing customer experiences. So while we expand our listening posts and start capturing multichannel feedback, we should keep in mind that feedback is part of the experience and thus should be taken into consideration.
A lot of new up-and-coming social, mobile and online providers have started to take this into consideration. There are more and more applications and websites where "your feedback" is not just a hidden button behind three layers of navigation, but an integral part of obtaining the service. This is still infrequent, but requesting feedback as part of the experience is where we’re headed.
Recognize this today and get smarter about asking for feedback. Your organization will be rewarded with customer loyalty and more repeat business.
Posted by Vovici Blog on Mon, Apr 22, 2013
By Siobhan Miller, Solutions Marketing Director, Speech Analytics, Verint® Systems
*This is reposted from http://www.verint.com/verint-blog/
A U.S. television program called “The Voice” challenges musicians to perform onstage while judges listen with their backs turned, forced to identify the next great singer purely on the quality of the voice they hear. Based on the judges’ reactions, the appearance of many of the contestants isn’t much of a surprise. But every once in a while, there is genuine shock—one contestant was greeted with a “whoa, you’re a guy?!”
The conceit of the show is—of course—that we have preconceived notions of what a successful singer looks like. At times that can overtake what a great singer sounds like—indeed, the actual voice can get overlooked.
I was thinking about this recently in terms of customer experience initiatives, especially when they involve speech analytics. When we think about speech analytics, we often think in terms of how we can use the solution to solve problems we know about—long handle times, high call volume, customer satisfaction issues, product or process issues, etc. We build categories to bucket calls that pertain to these issues, so we can easily track and access them and continue to make progress against our KPIs. Categories such as “complaint,” “repeat calls,” “self-service failures,” “compliments” or “product quality” track what’s important to us and identify root cause.
However, whether we know it or not, we’re filtering what our customers are telling us. We’re taking this amazing, unsolicited feedback and focusing it according to what we want to hear, or what we already know. However, in the process, we can lose sight of an invaluable benefit of speech analytics: using unsolicited customer feedback to tell us the things about our business that we don’t already know. What are we overlooking in our quest to maximize our ROI and make progress against KPIs?
Speech analytics solutions maximize their value when you take the time to just listen—without filters and without bias. Use speech analytics to surface words and phrases that have seen the biggest increase or decrease in use across time and find out what’s spiking. Find out what customers are saying without predetermined or fixed labels.
Can you still track issues that are important to you? Sure. I mean, even on “The Voice,” the contestants eventually have to perform in front of people who can see them. But having that initial pass of just listening—without bias? That’s invaluable!
Posted by Vovici Blog on Mon, Apr 15, 2013
*This is reposted from http://www.verint.com/verint-blog/index
In the last year, much has been written about Big Data Analytics. More recently, and rightly so, many have pointed out the contact center and other customer experience-delivering departments as the entry point of big data analytics into the enterprise. Big Data manifests itself as Voice of the Customer Analytics (VoCA) in these departments—these solutions analyze treasure troves of big unstructured data collected in the form of recorded phone calls, emails, web chats, free-form survey remarks and social media posts.
VoCA enables enterprises to “listen” to solicited and unsolicited customer feedback across different channels and modes of communication. This feedback is analyzed to identify trends, root causes and, most importantly, deliver actionable intelligence that the rest of the enterprise can use to improve performance.
VoCA (a la Big Data) is new, and understandably so, has a lot of excitement surrounding it. However, there is a tendency to view it as the end-all for enterprises to deliver a superior customer experience. While VoCA is excellent at delivering actionable intelligence, it alone cannot help operationalize the intelligence across the enterprise. In addition to listening and analyzing, intelligent enterprises have to strive for and achieve operational excellence. This is where traditional Workforce Optimization (WFO) solutions and processes still have an active and important role.
VoCA and traditional WFO are different yet must work together. VoCA excels in analyzing humongous amounts of unstructured data and proactively delivering valuable insight and actionable intelligence. The recipients of this intelligence are usually a relatively small group of ‘analyst’ type users. If the insights and intelligence are not acted upon in a timely and systematic way at all levels across the enterprise, then the customer experience will not improve.
Delivering a superior customer experience requires enterprises to percolate that intelligence across the entire population of agents, employees, supervisors and managers. It requires the buy-in, involvement and collaboration of many people and instilling a culture of continuous improvement.
A few examples: The intelligence unearthed by VoCA should be used to change quality evaluations from random samples to more relevant interactions to the business. The intelligence gained has to be applied to train and coach employees at all levels to change behaviors and elevate their performance to desired levels.
Acting on the intelligence in a timely manner requires having the right number of people with the right skills at the right time. The people who do the work are usually geographically dispersed across various departments or groups (contact center, back office, branch), have different skill sets and availabilities and must be scheduled and holistically managed. Their work arrives in different forms and types with other varying characteristics. This work must be tracked and meet specific service level goals.
The processes that people follow when working also tend to vary—managers need visibility into them to understand how work is being done and to address variances. Delivering a superior customer experience requires effectively managing the work, people and processes. Leveraging the intelligence and proactively applying it to improve performance—quality, productivity, behavior and lower costs—is where the value lies. Traditional WFO solutions enable this.
Therefore, delivering a superior and consistent customer experience requires a unified combination of Voice of the Customer Analytics (a la Big Data) and WFO solutions, working in tandem. A common framework that delivers interoperability between the two enables enterprises to practice and achieve the nirvana of Customer Inspired Excellence.
Learn more about Verint’s customer-centric Workforce Optimization and Voice of the Customer Analytics software.
Posted by Nancy Porte on Mon, Apr 01, 2013
By Nancy Porte, VP of Customer Experience, Verint® Systems
*This is reposted from http://www.verint.com/verint-blog/
This week I had the pleasure of hosting a webinar presented by Harley Manning, Vice President and Research Director, Forrester Research. Harley leads Forrester’s team of analysts who cover topics ranging from strategy and design to metrics. He is also the co-author of Forrester’s latest book, Outside In: The Power of Putting Customers at the Center of Your Business.
The presentation provided guidance for organizations interested in building a great customer experience. At Verint, we believe that a great customer experience can be a differentiator in the marketplace and propel amazing business success. However, we also know that it can be difficult to know where to start!
Harley began by asking the obvious question – Why Customer Experience? Why now? The answer is actually quite clear. We live in a new reality where customers have almost limitless choices. They can choose from many vendors for almost any product and can easily access them through mobile devices. So, when multiple companies sell the same product, the consumer understandably often chooses the company that is easiest to do business with.
Customer experience is defined as how customers perceive their interactions with your company. Forrester has determined that in order to provide great customer experience and, ultimately, inspire customer loyalty, the interactions must have three dimensions. First, they must meet the needs of the customer. If the customer contacts customer support for a technical problem, the first requirement is that the technical issue needs to be resolved. Secondly, the interaction should be easy. For example, customers do not want to explain their needs every time they are transferred to a new company contact. Finally, the interaction should be enjoyable. At the end of any interaction there is an emotional component. Successful interactions typically end with a positive feeling that translates into the customer wanting to do business again.
Why does this matter so much? Customer experience correlates to loyalty! Watermark Consulting performed a study of companies that were declared leaders and laggards in customer experience. They followed these companies for a five-year period (2008-2012) and found that customer experience leaders averaged over 22 percent increase in stock price, where the laggards lost over 46 percent in the same time period. So, not only do customers reward companies who offer great experiences, but so does the stock market!
Harley offered some great advice to companies wondering how to get on the path to customer experience improvement. He talked about how the customer experience ecosystem—the complex set of interdependent relationships among your company’s employees, partners and customers—needs to be understood. One way to understand the complexities is to map your current customer ecosystem.
Mapping a customer system can look simple. However, many levels need to be considered. At the top of the map can be the customer-facing process and who is involved in each step of the interaction. Then a “line of visibility” is drawn to indicate the back office or behind-the-scenes activities that impact the people and processes that interact with the customers. These include items such as CRM systems, scheduling systems and corporate policies. By examining the factors that influence the interactions between the customer and employees and partners, the root cause can be found—helping to ensure the team designs the true solution to the issue causing customer dissatisfaction.
Harley closed the webinar by encouraging viewers to put in a very visible place in their office, “I need my customers more than they need me!” This will help create the right frame of mind when building a customer experience program.
Enjoy the journey!