On the customer experience side, a new revelation has surfaced. Onboarding is to financial services what out-of-box is to companies like Apple computer. Apple sweats the details around the experience of getting, opening, and engaging with their devices. Financial service companies do little in that way, but that is changing with a renewed desire to improve the customer experience. That is where onboarding comes in. Onboarding is the out-of-box experience for financial service product. It is the processes and experience new customers have as they activate and utilize a new product.

Forrester just published a document that outlines our strategic thinking about how best to approach new customer onboarding from an organization, metrics, strategy, and execution perspective. I would also encourage you to take a look at work that Harland Clarke, JD Power, and other firms have done with justifying onboarding from a customer experience and dollars and cents perspective.

VIEW FORRESTER’S ONBOARDING REPORT.

Brad

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EPIC Connections’ Bill Pieper has seen every cycle, trend and transformation in the contact center industry. His observations, below, will help you optimize your customer relationship- building strategy in this pivotal year, 2012…

Online, interactive marketing is driving job creation; that bodes well for contact center operators, but only if they can adapt at the same rate as the web;

For the first six months of 2011, the online advertising industry increased it revenues by 23%, to $15 billion (according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau).

This represents a big change from the somber years of 2009 and 2010. Many corporations are realizing that no matter what they sell, they are a media company as well. As a result, companies are looking for talent: “I need a CMO, an e-commerce executive, a social media expert and a content developer.” Interactive media is providing fulfilling jobs in a growth business that is just beginning to hit its stride. One association executive estimates that the number of marketing employees is way up from the 1.2 million people that it was in 2009.

All this bodes well for the contact center industry, but only if it can adjust and adapt at the same rate. As the end user becomes further empowered through interactivity, contact centers must strive to embed themselves in the middle of the action.

Kate Leggett’s Blog

Forrester.com

Customers dream about personalized, contextual, proactive customer service experiences — where companies deliver an experience tailored to their persona, their past purchase history, and their past customer service history. They want each interaction to add value and build upon prior ones so that they don’t have to repeat themselves and restart the discovery process. They want to be able to choose the communication channel and device they use to interact with a service center. They want to start an interaction on one channel or device and move it seamlessly to another. Check out RightNow’s vision video that brings these points to life.

Most customer service organizations are still struggling with the basics — the hygiene factors in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs — in meeting their customers’ expectations. There are benchmarking tools that you can use to figure out how well your organization is doing and to get actionable recommendations on how to do better. But, as you focus on the tactical improvements that you need to make this year, it’s important to keep tabs on the optimal experience that customers would like you to deliver to help shape your long-term direction for customer service. Here’s my abbreviated personal list:

EPIC Connections’ Bill Pieper has seen every cycle, trend and transformation in the contact center industry. His observations, below, will help you optimize your customer relationship- building strategy in this pivotal year, 2012…

After choosing a contact center partner and going through the implementation and training process together, most clients sit back and let the contact center team move into a routine of customer interaction and periodic, regular reporting. The focus is cost containment and operational consistency. Continue reading →

Brad Strothkamp’s Blog

Forrester.com

The drive for revenue and the desire to improve the customer experience are converging within financial services, with one of the results being a renewed interest in new customer onboarding. On the revenue side, the importance of onboarding is clearer. A new customer who leaves after opening a new account is an expensive proposition. For something like deposit accounts, that attrition rate is somewhere between 25% to 30% of new customers, and when you add up the cost to acquire the account, the cost to open the account, and the potential loss of ongoing revenue, the impact can be huge to a financial services firm.

…continues Wednesday
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EPIC Connections’ Bill Pieper has seen every cycle, trend and transformation in the contact center industry. His observations, below, will help you optimize your customer relationship- building strategy in this pivotal year, 2012…

The contact center industry has long been preoccupied with operations and technology. But in 2012, contact center executives must collaborate proactively with their clients’ marketing managers to rethink how the ‘new’ end user wants to interact with the brand. Continue reading →

Watch Out…Customer Experience Innovations Can Come From Where You Least Expect Them

Posted by Megan Burns | Forrester.com

Contributor: Brian Cantor | Customermanagementiq.com

Here is something that will shock you:  today’s customer service departments adhere to behind-the-scenes  philosophies, strategies and practices they do not excitably disclose to the average consumer.  Mind-blowing, right? Continue reading →

Contributor: Brian Cantor | Customermanagementiq.com

Even in an age of significant customer management focus, many of those facing pressure to expand their customer experience management initiatives still find themselves dwelling on two key concerns: Continue reading →

And why you should want to join the best-in-class

Contributor: Brian Cantor | Customermanagementiq.com

We know that these best-in-class organizations are far deeper into their customer experience management life cycles, but what benefit does that reality bring to their overall businesses?

Significant benefit, it turns out. Continue reading →