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Customer Engagement Day Reveals New Issues and Opportunity

May 1, 2012 in Business Analytics, Business Collaboration, Business Intelligence (BI), Business Mobility, Cloud Computing, Customer Performance Management (CPM), Financial Performance Management (FPM), Governance, Risk & Compliance (GRC), Information Applications (IA), Information Management (IM), IT Performance Management (ITPM), Operational Performance Management (OPM), Sales Performance Management (SPM), Social Media, Supply Chain Performance Management (SCPM), Sustainability, Workforce Performance Management (WPM) | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | by | Leave a comment

I recently attended the second in the series of customer engagement days organized by the Directors Club (GB & NI). The format of the event was the same as the first day that I wrote about and included three keynote presentations and three roundtable sessions where attendees discussed how organizations should engage with customers. As for the first event I chaired the roundtable on perfecting multichannel customer engagement in the contact center and gave a keynote on how social media is impacting the contact center.

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

New Customer and Contact Center Technology at Call Centre Expo

October 15, 2011 in Business Mobility, Cloud Computing, Customer Performance Management (CPM), Operational Performance Management (OPM), Social Media, Workforce Performance Management (WPM) | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | by | 1 comment

I have spent the last two days at the U.K.’s largest contact center trade show, which this year moved to London Olympia from the NEC in Birmingham. While the overall number of visitors seemed to be down, some exhibitors told me there were more high-level attendees with serious intent to purchase.

At the show I detected three major themes: support for managing multichannel (including social media) customer interactions, “the contact center in the cloud” and analytics. Regarding the first, Ventana Research’s benchmark research into the use of technology in contact centers shows that companies must support multiple channels through which customers can interact with them or risk that certain segments of customers won’t do business with them. A colleague recently summed it up nicely: A multichannel customer service strategy is not an “or” strategy but an “and” strategy; that is, no one channel, even social media, will replace any other channel, and therefore you need them all. Supporting this viewpoint were a number of vendors whose integrated products support multiple channels; these includeAltitude Software, cTalk Ltd, Enghouse interactive, Genesys, mplsystems,NobleSystems and ShoreTel. 

One of the challenges in handling multiple forms of customer interactions is that it adds to the complexity of the desktop agents use. This is already complex because of the number and variety of applications agents need to access to resolve interactions. The combination of multiple interaction types and multiple applications is increasing the need for a “smart” agent desktop. Altitude and mplsystems include that as a component of their products, while others have specialist products, such as sword-ciboodle and (although the company won’t thank me for describing it this way) Salesforce.com.

As for the contact center in the cloud, Salesforce would claim it provides this, and as I noted it does provide a key part in the smart desktop that brings together all customer information so agents can handle customer interactions more efficiently. But Salesforce doesn’t provide a technology platform to manage inbound interactions and route them to the most appropriate person to handle them. This capability is provided in the cloud by some of the multichannel management vendors whose systems can be based on-premises or on a hosted (in the cloud) basis. Three vendors at the show that specialize in this are Interactive Intelligence, NewVoiceMedia and SAP – the last might surprise people as it is better known as an ERP and CRM provider.

Interactive Intelligence’s CIC provides a technology platform and interaction management, plus other applications to support multichannel customer interaction management in the cloud. NewVoiceMedia’s main product,ContactWorld, also provides interaction management in the cloud and can route interactions to the most qualified person regardless of location. It also launched its Trust site which takes performance monitoring to a new level. Whereas most cloud vendors provide availability and reliability statistics, NewVoiceMedia automates tasks agents carry out, runs these tasks every five minutes, measures the results and publishes the outcomes, thereby allowing managers to see the level of performance their agents receive from the product. This monitoring also allows NewVoiceMedia to spot issues before users see any impact and take corrective action. Possibly the most surprising vendor in this space is SAP, with its BCM products, which include a cloud-based service that supports management of multiple communication channels. All three of these vendors support the growing trend to distribute interaction-handling to dispersed “agents” who can be in different physical centers, home-based, mobile, working in other business units or even working for a third-party outsourcing company.

The other major theme running through the show and in presentations was analytics. Ventana Research advocates wider adoption of analytics in the contact center and elsewhere, so it was interesting to see a variety of analytic products. Most of the vendors have some form of analytics built in to their systems, but a number of specialist vendors offer particular types of analytics: Attensity was featuring its customer-focused analytics; Aurix was featuring its speech analytics; CallCopy was featuring its process and speech analytics products which work with its other products to support improved agent performance; Enkata was featuring a range of products that support operational and agent-focused performance analysis; and Nexidia was featuring its customer-focused analytics that can analyze interactions from multiple channels. I didn’t hear as much as I expected about social media analytics, so it may be that vendors are still evaluating how social media is impacting business.

I describe the adoption of analytics as moving beyond the early-adopter stage and approaching the mainstream. I believe the main issue holding back adoption, which was highlighted in our benchmark research into the use of analytics, is that companies have difficulty interpreting the outputs from analytics and thus getting real business benefits. Our research shows that business units such as Finance are supported by business analysts who essentially interpret the results and show management the impact of different decisions and activities. In the contact center, such responsibility sits with the operational team so they need more support before they can realize the full benefits of speech, text and social media analytics.

Overall the show confirmed that there is an impressive variety of technology available to support companies in their efforts to improve the way they interact with customers. Two absences I noted this year were Cisco andVerint. More technology, applications and analytics are becoming available in the cloud, making it easier and more affordable to try. I have only been able to touch on a few vendors in this piece, so I urge you to take more time to find out what is available and let us know what issues you come across by collaborating with me.

Regards

Richard Snow – VP & Research Director

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