THE CONTACT CENTER S CONTRIBUTION TO CEM LEVERAGE DATA TO BREAK DOWN THE BARRIERS TO CUSTOMER-CENTRIC CHANGE.

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1 feature / june 2014 THE CONTACT CENTER S CONTRIBUTION TO CEM LEVERAGE DATA TO BREAK DOWN THE BARRIERS TO CUSTOMER-CENTRIC CHANGE. By Susan Hash, Contact Center Pipeline Pipeline Articles

2 Susan Hash Contact Center Pipeline We have entered the age of the customer. Organizations are shifting their focus away from conventional marketing and customer acquisition strategies. Instead, they re emphasizing customer experience and retention as the path to business success. It s what contact center leaders have been saying for decades, but perhaps not with the right measures and the type of data that s available today to make a compelling case. While there are plenty of inspiring stories in the press and across social media of wow moments for customers, these examples are mostly taking place in organizations that are on the leading edge of the customer experience movement. For the majority, the ability to drive customer focus across the organization is yet in the early stages with companies still trying to figure out what it encompasses and who should lead it. To date, it has been primarily the large-scale organizations that have supported the transformation from product-centric to customer-centric with a position at the executive table. According to Forrester Research s Chief Customer Officer Snapshot, 2014, almost half (47%) of chief customer officers (CCOs) work at firms with $1 billion or more in annual revenue, which means that 6% of the S&P 500 now have a CCO in place. However, while 86% of the CCOs that Forrester examined hold a seat on the executive management team, the report points out that the role is still largely experimental : The majority (85%) of CCOs are the first to hold this position within the company; More than one-third of CCOs are new to the job in the past year; and Only 12% have held previous customer experience positions. Forrester forecasts a bumpy road ahead for these newly minted customer experience executives who must prepare for both increased attention and operational responsibilities as they strive to establish their position and drive change across the organization. Not surprisingly, there are many overlaps and similarities between the customer experience and contact center worlds, says Jim Rembach, senior vice president for Customer Relationship Metrics ( and principal for Beyond Morale ( Customer experience professionals and contact center leaders share the same areas of need and want, including defining customer measurement and metrics, building a customer-focused culture, and driving executive and employee engagement. Those commonalities position the contact center to be a critical contributor to the CCO s role and ability to break down the silos that hamper a consistent, end-to-end customer experience. Helping the CCO to succeed at this task will ensure that the center has a C-suite champion whose views and goals are aligned with center s something that many contact center leaders have struggled to obtain in the past. Practical Pointer: Is CCO a role that you aspire to? You can take the first steps by developing a more holistic view of the customer experience across the touchpoints in your organization, as well as expanding your knowledge of the customer experience discipline. A good source of information about the specific job tasks and the skills you will need to master is the Customer Experience Professionals Association s (CXPA) six core competencies required to earn a Certified Customer Experience Professional designation ( Leverage Data to Help Drive Customer-Centric Change In many organizations, the contact center is a largely untapped fount of information. The contact center has a wealth of information about every other piece of the business reaching deep into the supply chain, competitors, marketplace and the opportunities, says Rembach. Business-savvy contact center leaders can leverage that information to help influence the organization s transition to a more customer-centric environment. How? By knowing what information to capture and how to package it into a story that will help other key touchpoints, such as marketing, sales and fulfillment, to be successful. 2

3 The best way to knock down silos is with an olive branch, not a wrecking ball, Rembach says. There is a massive opportunity in contact centers to influence the organization by using data to build bridges. Jim Rembach is Senior Vice President for Customer Relationship Metrics Cynthia Grimm is Vice President of Client Development for CX Act Step Outside the Center for a Better View How do you identify the insights that will be useful to other critical customer touchpoints? This can present a huge challenge when organizational silos create barriers to knowledge transfer, collaboration and alignment with the customer experience vision. Too many companies get wrapped up in managing each silo. They conduct transaction surveys, relationship surveys, and track operational metrics for each touchpoint, says Cynthia Grimm, vice president of Client Development for CX Act ( formerly TARP Worldwide. They end up drowning in data, but they don t have any information. She advises contact center leaders to take a step back and map the customer journey, what you are measuring and how it all fits together. Customer journey mapping is a valuable exercise that allows you to outline the customer s experience through their eyes from initial engagement with your company (e.g., a marketing campaign or promotion) through the buying process, using the product or service, to renewal,repurchase or making the decision to leave. Viewing the experience through the customer s eyes is the key. There is a very clear distinction in perceptions between what the company thinks and what the customer thinks, Rembach says. He adds that, in journey mapping, it is critical to ensure that you are not describing the engineered perspective, that is, how your company designed the experience to flow, but not how it actually happens for the customer. How can you ensure that you re capturing the appropriate viewpoint? By forming a crossfunctional team to provide a variety of viewpoints and validating their input with your customers. It s a three-step process, says Leslie Pagel, vice president of Customer Experience for Walker Information ( a consulting firm specializing in customer intelligence. The first step involves gathering a crossfunctional group of employees to participate in a journey-mapping exercise, which is designed to see their business through the eyes of the customers, she explains. Through this facilitated process, employees will map out the customer journey, including aspects such as, what is the customer trying to accomplish, what are they doing to meet their needs, strengths and weaknesses, and the customer moments of truth or the defining moments. The second step is to validate these moments of truth with customer input. Customers will participate in one-on-one or group discussions to share their thoughts, interactions, expectations and moments of truth. Many companies won t stop here, she adds. They will continue to listen to customer needs by implementing a formal voice of the customer program designed to capture customer input from the entire customer base. With this input, they will use analytics to identify the defining moments, or the aspects of the relationship that have the greatest impact on the customer experience. Define the Moments of Truth That Impact Customer Satisfaction Once you begin to form a more holistic view of the customer s journey, you can define the interactions that truly impact the customer experience which are the ones you want to measure. Grimm recommends focusing on the key drivers of overall satisfaction. Consider: What are the points of pain? What are the make-or-break issues in the customer journey? A customer can have lots of questions, issues and transactions, but there may be only a few that really make a difference in whether they will buy from you again or recommend you, she says. At the end of the day, that has to be your final measure what issue, transaction or touchpoint has the greatest impact on the customer s willingness to buy again and their willingness to recommend you. That becomes the defining moment. 3

4 While companies will have different terminology, the key touchpoints to measure will often cover the following six aspects of the journey, says Pagel: Learning creating awareness so that the company is included in the consideration set. Purchase process giving the company the best possible chances for being selected. Onboarding (or installation, delivery, etc.) optimizing the customer s first experience in using the products and/or services. Using the ongoing use of the product or service. Paying making it easy for customers to pay for what they purchased. Maintaining ongoing support and services. Leslie Pagel is Vice President of Customer Experience for Walker Information. David Howard is Director of Marketing at Bright Pattern. David Howard, director of Marketing at Bright Pattern, suggests focusing on those touchpoints where key information is transferred, he says. For example, how many times did the customer have to provide his or her account or policy number? Was information captured or transferred correctly the first time? Did the customer get different answers depending on who they spoke to which is a common problem when dealing with large organizations. Look Beyond Customer Surveys How do you measure a customer experience that spans multiple touchpoints? Keep in mind that customer surveys are not the only way to measure customer experience. Operational metrics can be leading indicators as long as they are tied to your key satisfaction levers, says Grimm. The most important thing is to find the metric that best predicts your customer repurchase and loyalty, and stick with it. Stay consistent, and don t worry about what the metric of the day is. Pagel agrees that companies often rely solely on customer survey feedback as the customer experience metric. While customer sentiment and perceptions are extremely important, companies must also incorporate customer behaviors into the mix, she says. She points to the following three behavioral components that must be considered: Product usage, or the way in which the customer uses the products. Product usage metrics include things like product penetration (breadth and depth) and the change over time. Involvement, which represents the ways customers interact with the brand has the customer served as a reference; do they attend user groups; do they follow the brand on social media, etc. Finally, and often the most challenging area, companies should seek to understand how the customer engages with the competition. Do they single-source or multisource? What is the share of wallet? The way a customer behaves and their feelings toward the brand reflect their experiences, Pagel adds. Susan Hash is the Editor of Contact Center Pipeline. susan@contactcenterpipeline.com (206)

5 CUSTOMER- CENTRIC FOCUS STARTS IN THE CENTER AT Solix Inc., a BPO provider of customer care and communications solutions, contact center leaders have defined several key drivers that impact customer satisfaction within the phone channel. We asked Vice President of Commercial Programs Thomas Clarke to share his insights on how his operation creates and measures an outstanding customer experience. WE TRY TO EMPHASIZE TO OUR STAFF that the customer is calling for a specific reason, typically with a fairly finite amount of time in which to conduct their business, and they want to complete it in one call. The overriding considerations for us are respect for the customer s time, helping them to accomplish their goal with the call, and doing so with knowledge, courtesy and respect. How does that experience translate into metrics? The first element in delivering an excellent service experience is answering the phone quickly. For us, service level is answering 90% within 20 seconds, or 80% within 30 seconds, depending on the program. The second consideration that we keep in mind is that customers do not want to have to call us back to resolve their issue or answer their questions, or have us call them back. They want to get it done right then. We find that first-call resolution is a major driver of customer satisfaction. Third, we try to ensure that we deal with our customers with courtesy and respect, and also demonstrate our knowledge to customers so that they can resolve their issues in the first call. We need to be subject-matter experts so that when customers call, they can get their questions answered. While the mechanics of the call are tracked by the WFO platform, agent knowledge is monitored through live and remote observations. Customer surveys provide feedback on how well the agent performed. The best way to gauge the overall experience is with the question, Would you recommend us to your friends and colleagues? That is a differentiator. If you ask, Would you buy from us again, it is a lower standard because sometimes, as consumers, we continue to do business with companies that we re not entirely happy with so that question doesn t always deliver the significant feedback that we want. Would you recommend says that you re satisfied, you d buy again, and you found the experience to be of value so that you would invoke our name to your friends and colleagues. The best way to gauge the overall experience is with the question, Would you recommend us to your friends and colleagues? TOM CLARKE 5

6 INTEGRATING MULTICHANNEL DATA FOR A HOLISTIC VIEW One of the most significant challenges that companies face today is integrating the data from different channels into a holistic view of the customer experience especially if there are multiple survey and feedback tools being used. Data is trapped within components of the contact center infrastructure typically point solutions, like IVR and ACD and cannot be integrated or viewed holistically, says Bright Pattern s David Howard. In 1988, Phil S. Ensor coined the phrase functional silo syndrome to identify a common organizational problem where information is trapped within departmental, or functional, groups. We have adapted this concept and use the phrase data silo syndrome. State-of-the-art contact center technology unifies what were historically point solutions, each with their own data silo, on a common platform, and provides a holistic or unified view of that data from the platform. Further, the data can be exported by API to third-party big-data systems for further integration and analysis, and modern contact acenter solutions can also integrate data from won t-go-away legacy point solutions, to bring that old technology into the modern fold. But, he adds, there are organizational and technology barriers to be aware of. Specifically: Each communication channel may require a separate evaluation, contract negotiation, and budget project. Integration of one or more survey systems with existing systems can be costly and take months. Once the integration is complete, you still may not be able to easily get the sort of reporting insight that you need to empower smart changes. Islands of information make it hard to analyze data and agree on priorities. About Contact Center Pipeline Contact Center Pipeline is a monthly instructional journal focused on driving business success through effective contact center direction and decisions. Each issue contains informative articles, case studies, best practices, research and coverage of trends that impact the customer experience. Our writers and contributors are well-known industry experts with a unique understanding of how to optimize resources and maximize the value the organization provides to its customers. To learn more, visit: Online Resource This issue is available online at: ContactCenterPipeline.com Pipeline Publishing Group, Inc. PO Box 3467, Annapolis, MD (443) info@contactcenterpipeline.com 6