Transcom is a large provider of outsourced customer service. It emphasizes improving the customer experience and increasing revenue per customer. Transcom operates globally and has more than 24,000 employees. Its core business model is centered on the telephone as the primary means of communication, and its revenues have come largely through the amounts of time its service representatives spent on the phone with customers. However, although its customers are still turning to outsourcers to save money, Transcom is finding they now place more emphasis on customer loyalty, generating additional revenue from their customers, and the customer experience. This is causing a change in reward models for Transcom, which increasingly depends on the levels of revenue generated by its agents, not just the time they spend on the phone.

Operations have changed as well. Companies are asking Transcom to support additional channels of communication, including social media. To meet customer expectations in this area requires tighter integration among all channels of interaction because customers want a consistent experience regardless of channel. Another consequence of these changes is that companies seek more customer-related information, which requires the outsourcer to use more advanced analytics tools when producing reports and analysis for its clients.

These lessons learned by Transcom are applicable as well to in-company contact centers and customer interaction-handling operations. Each of them reflects our research into customer relationship maturity, which shows that the most mature companies now support multimedia customer interactions, including social media, are increasingly adopting speech, text, process, predictive and social media analytics, and focus on customer retention and the customer experience. None of this is easy in terms of people, processes, information or technology. For companies unwilling or unable to address these issues, turning to an outsourcing provider that has adapted to the changes is one option to consider.

How well are you managing customer interactions? Please share your experience and collaborate with me on Transcom.

Regards,

Richard Snow – VP & Research Director

If you extrapolate this thinking into the domain of customer service, or more widely into the way organizations manage customer interactions, you might conclude that companies would be smart to support one channel of communication, do it right, and tell customers “this is the way it is,” in much the way online retailers and some banks support only Web-based interactions.

However, that approach flies in the face of my recent benchmark research into customer relationship maturity, which found that on average, in response to growing customer demand, organizations support four or five channels of communications, and many support eight or more, including telephone, email, fax, postal mail, text messaging, the Web, instant messaging, online collaboration, video and social media. This complicates the task of simplifying interaction and forces organizations to make some tough decisions.

As our CRM maturity research shows, and as was confirmed at a recent customer engagement day, two fundamental issues prevent many organizations from taking a consistent approach to handling multimedia customer interactions. First, to support multiple communications channels, the majority of organizations have implemented stand-alone, proprietary systems. Integrating these to provide a seamless, common user experience is complicated, time-consuming and costly. Second, few companies have a single source of customer data and information to enable decisions and actions at every touch point, preventing customers from having consistent experiences.

The solution to both of these issues is to upgrade the organization’s IT architecture or to look for smarter, less invasive options. Three approaches come to mind:

1. Implement one of the fully integrated multimedia communications management systems. Several of these are available as cloud-based systems, which afford companies the opportunity to take this step at reduced costs and in a more timely manner.
2. Implement a smart agent desktop system. These can hide complex systems behind a user interface that reflects only what the agent requires to meet customer expectations. They can extract data from systems based on predefined rules, and they include rules-driven processes that allow users to focus on customers.
3. Implement one of the new forms of self-service that are coming to market. These include software agents for virtual conversations, visual IVR and mobile applications that allow customers to serve themselves from their smartphones or tablets. Since all of these are software-based, they can be programmed to follow defined processes for handling different interaction types, and to use the most up-to-date data. To avoid making some of the mistakes that organizations have made companies should put themselves in their customers’ shoes and ensure that these new self-service applications are programmed to meet customer expectations instead of forcing them to use annoying and prolonged procedures.

The idea of making it simple for customers to engage with a business is reflected in one of the latest metrics being used by organizations – customer effort scores. This metric seeks to determine how easy customers find it to interact with an organization. If they can be used to drive improvement, customer effort scores may help businesses provide easier ways to engage, which should lead to more satisfied customers and better business results.

Do you make it easy for your customers to engage with you? If so, tell us more and collaborate with me on next steps.

Regards

Richard Snow – VP & Research Director

An increasing number of companies have developed applications so their customers can transact business with them. But customer service is more than that; it requires a series of capabilities that allow users to execute various self-service tasks such as looking up the balance of their account, searching for product information or tracking the status of an order. Interactive Intelligence has developed what it terms a “software platform” that allows organizations to build functionality within a shell that performs different tasks in response to user input. The shell takes care of interfacing with the device’s operating systems and capabilities such as presentation, allowing user organizations to focus on developing task-related functions that it then renders on the user’s particular device. The first release of Interaction Mobilizer will require developers to learn to code applications, but Interactive Intelligence says it is working on “drag and drop” capabilities to make it easier to develop applications. Built-in capabilities already allow developers to take advantage of common mobile device features such as touch screens, selecting data by spinning a dial and accessing location information.

In the past, most contact centers deployed self-service applications to save money by deflecting calls from live agents. My research into customer experience management shows this hasn’t been very successful, as large numbers of users resort to the option to speak with an agent. If mobile applications are to avoid this rejection, they will have to deliver the information customers are looking for quickly and in ways easy to use, and will have to support prompt transfer to an agent if the need arises. Interaction Mobilizer provides a framework that should allow organizations to focus on task-related functionality that meets these customer requirements. Such applications for smartphones and tablets could have huge potential; customers might at last be able to take more control over solving their own issues without speaking to a live agent. Done right, that would be good for both customers and companies they buy from.

Have you considered mobile self-service? If so tell us more and collaborate with me on this topic.

Regards

Richard Snow – VP & Research Director

In contrast to the first event, here I found less adoption of multimedia customer engagement, with more of the attendees saying that they are experimenting with different channels of engagement but haven’t settled on new strategies. A particular issue was raised by several organizations from the insurance industry, whose multichannel plans are hampered by a legal requirement to conduct many customer interactions in written form. They spoke of being “snowed under” with paper and as a consequence trying to determine how often they can use non-paper channels.

Another big issue nearly all the organizations face is the large number of systems they already have to manage, the number of new systems they would need to manage multiple channels of communication and the challenge of integrating all these to produce a consistent experience across channels and a single view of customer channel usage. As I discovered in my research into the adoption of a contact center in the cloud, many organizations are finding the answer to these problems lies in the adoption of preintegrated channel management systems from vendors such as Genesys, inContact, Interactive Intelligence and Noble Systems, and cross-channel analytics from vendors such as NICE Systems and Verint.

As I tweeted at the time, the discussions raised what for me was a familiar idea, that “companies need more joined-up thinking.” As my research into customer relationship maturity shows, organizations still store information in silos, which minimize sharing of processes, information or systems. This separation makes is difficult to take steps that would deliver consistent, appropriate experiences across all touch points. One of the participants in my roundtable said the organization had some success using customer journey maps to help plan customer engagement touch points within a channel but hadn’t thought to use them to map a customer’s journey across different channels. I believe that journey mapping could help organizations identify and thus remove some of the less sensible steps they make customers go through and help them see engagements from the customer’s point of view.

As at the previous event, even before I gave my presentation on social media, the topic of using social media came up in all three roundtable sessions. In this case more organizations are experimenting with social media rather than building it into their overall customer service strategy. That said, almost all agreed that they need to make social media a two-way channel of communication with customers and not just a place where customers raise issues or make complaints that are not addressed. These views are in line with my research, which shows that the use of social medial by organizations is growing but has yet to be adopted as a mainstream channel for customer service; indeed many of the attendees agreed that responsibility for social media remains with Marketing and thus is used mainly to carry out low-cost marketing campaigns.

Perhaps the most pleasing part of the day was the chairman’s roundup of key points coming out of the roundtable discussions. As the different chairpersons summed up their discussions, I often heard the sentiment that the “customer should come first,” whether in developing a multimedia customer service strategy, mobile applications to support customers or Web-based self-service, or generally becoming a “social enterprise.”

All-in-all, the day raised more questions than answers, but everyone appreciated the opportunity to join the debate. Won’t you please come and collaborate with me.

Regards

Richard Snow – VP & Research Director

My research into the maturity of customer relationship leads to me to three conclusions in which the need for innovation is apparent:

• Companies now have to provide multiple communication channels through which their customer can interact.
• Many business units within an organization handle inbound customer interactions.
• From the customer’s perspective, one of the keys to a good experience is consistency, in the way interactions are handled and in the information provided at every touch point.

Meeting these three objectives requires synchronization of processes, information and actions across business units and communication channels, and to achieve that companies need support from integrated technologies. In short, companies have to innovate in the ways they handle customer interactions if they are going to differentiate themselves from the competition and provide excellent customer experiences that produce strong business results.

Interactive Intelligence attempts to supply systems to help in this effort. Its first product was a software-based PBX, which was innovative compared to the preparatory-based systems available at the time. Over time ININ has expanded its product portfolio to include an integrated suite for contact center operations, unified, multimedia communications, business process automation underpinned by intelligent task-routing, and tools to support integration with popular CRM systems and social media. It has also enhanced its reporting and analysis capabilities, including real-time word-spotting.

It has other new developments and enhancements, including integration with Microsoft’s unified communications platform Lync. ININ has a strategic partnership with Microsoft to develop tight integration between their products and mutually market the resulting offering. Although Microsoft claims to have sold a large number of Lync licences, as far as I can tell it is only a few innovative companies are using it and so far very few have integrated it into their contact centers; time will tell how big this market becomes.

ININ was also one of the first vendors in its market to take cloud computing seriously, and it now offers a variety of products, especially communications, deployable on-premises, in the cloud or in a hybrid architecture that I have already assessed. My research into adoption of a contact center in the cloud shows that this is a wise move. Organizations still have concerns (such as security and performance, which in my view are largely unfounded) about moving to the cloud, and ININ’s ability to offer this choice can address some of them. That said, the research shows that nearly half of companies believe that moving to the cloud can help improve the ways they interact with customers, so I expect more organizations to go down this route.

ININ CEO Don Brown closed this event with a speech promising even more new developments, which will take the company further toward offering products that support truly innovative customer experiences, across all touch points, including mobile devices. I will be watching out for these, so to keep up with developments, please collaborate with me on my analysis and research agenda.

Regards

Richard Snow – VP & Research Director