Posted by William Band |

Forrester.com

I’ve just finished up several months of research digging into the best practices of how leading organizations aspire to implement outside-in, customer-focused, cross-functional processes that transform the organization and set it on the path toward continuous improvement. At the core of this trend is a desire by these organizations, especially in services industries, to domesticate their “untamed” or “invisible” processes that touch customers.

In talking with nearly 30 organizations, consulting companies, and solution vendors, I found that instead of deploying slow-to-change packaged applications or building difficult-to-change custom solutions, leading organizations are embracing business process methodologies — supported by process-centric IT platforms. They are striving to drive rapid process change, increased business engagement in IT projects, and achieve dramatic improvements in worker productivity.

…continues Wednesday

Contact EPIC Connections for a no obligation consultation

Follow Us On Social Media

Article Source

Why Customer Experience? Why Now?

For decades, companies have been promising to delight customers, while simultaneously disappointing them in nearly every channel. That tactic won’t cut it anymore. Why not? We’ve entered a new era that Forrester calls the age of the customer — a time when focus on the customer matters more than any other strategic imperative. In the age of the customer, companies find that:

• Commoditization has stripped away existing sources of differentiation. Competitive barriers of the past like manufacturing strength, distribution power, and information mastery can’t save you today — one by one, each of these corporate investments has been commoditized.
• Traditional industry boundaries have dissolved. Companies in every industry find themselves competing with new types of competitors — automakers with services like Zipcar, newspapers with Google News, travel agents with Expedia, and the entire retail industry with eBay.
• Customers have more power than ever. With online reviews, social networks, and mobile web access, it’s easy for your customers to know more about your products, services, competitors, and pricing than you — and to share their opinions of your company with their friends.

Those are the global business trends. But what specific business benefits can companies expect to gain from customer experience investments? Every firm in every industry can leverage great customer experiences to:

• Bolster brand equity. Referencing customer service conversations, Tony Hsieh, Zappos.com’s chief executive officer, wrote in Delivering Happiness, “Our belief is that the telephone is one of the best branding devices out there.” Even with conservative estimates, it’s easy to make the case that the call center has influence on par with, if not greater than, that of mass advertising campaigns. And the call center is just one of many customer touchpoints where the experience influences the customer’s impression of a brand.
• Garner customer loyalty. Years of Forrester data confirm the strong relationship between the quality of a firm’s customer experience and loyalty measures like willingness to consider the company for another purchase, likelihood to switch providers, and likelihood to recommend. We’ve also found a solid connection between customer experience ratings and Net Promoter Score in multiple industries.
• Boost revenue. Even small shifts in customer loyalty can translate into billions of dollars of incremental revenue each year for firms in some industries. One example: B2B company CDW drove $230 million in incremental revenue in just one year by following up on sales leads identified through customer loyalty surveys.
• Drive down costs. Through its voice of the customer program, Fidelity Investments recently identified a problem with account authentication in its interactive voice response system. It recruited a few associates to discuss the issue, identified its root cause, and quickly launched a solution. Its estimated annual cost savings from this one fix: $4 million. Other companies count their savings in terms of higher employee retention.

The big takeaway? Companies need to start treating customer experience as a business discipline — not a bumper sticker.

If you need to make the case for customer experience at your company, you should:

Download a free (yup, free!) copy of our report, “Why Customer Experience? Why Now?”

Contact EPIC Connections for a no obligation consultation

Follow Us On Social Media

Article Source

The big takeaway? Companies need to start treating customer experience as a business discipline — not a bumper sticker.

If you need to make the case for customer experience at your company, you should:

Download a free (yup, free!) copy of our report, “Why Customer Experience? Why Now?”

Contact EPIC Connections for a no obligation consultation

Follow Us On Social Media

Article Source

Which way is your marketplace moving?

Bill Pieper has been an impact player in the teleservices industry for over 30 years, helping America’s top brands serve and engage the customer cost-efficiently.  His predictions below provide a clear path forward in the midst of change.

1.  Marketers Invest in a Moving Target

Budgets are inching up, but decision makers want to serve the right prospect at a lower cost per interaction. Smartphones and mobile messaging are changing the game as is the proliferation of self reported data.

36% of all adults now own Smartphones, so it’s understandable that marketing directors are obsessed with mobile messaging through SMS/text, chat and email. That ‘kinetic’ trend may drive down customer service costs if they become a substitute for call center agent interaction. If your product /service is complex, however, mobile messaging will likely drive an additional call to an agent, adding incremental costs.

Either way, a mobile messaging strategy is a mandate.

2.  Global Outsourcing Gets a Second Look

After 10 years of offshoring their customer support systems, many companies are rethinking the arrangement. Why? The ‘true cost’ of working with them in different time zones may exceed the hourly savings that attracted them in the first place.

Complicating factors include: inability to attract quality agents, travel costs to visit with the contact center, differences in business process and the number of calls that have to be rerouted/escalated back to a domestic agent/supervisor.

Frosting on the cake: if a contact center is within a day’s drive (instead of on the other side of the planet), companies can squeeze greater productivity out of the marketers charged with overseeing their contact center partners. All this adds up to a more precise and realistic ‘true cost’ for CFOs looking for incremental financial improvements.

3.  The Inside Scoop

In 2012, everyone wants their brand to be as sharp as possible relative to their competition. Instead of using focus groups or structured surveys, it may be better to listen closely to the conversations your call center agents are having with your customer.  If you have a discerning ear, you’ll hear plaudits or disparaging remarks that have great value to the branding or sales team. Customers may emphasize them or simply mutter them as an aside as a conversation winds down. You’ll likely hear the inside scoop on the competition’s latest promotions. You’ll also learn whether certain competitors’ features live up to expectations. This type of market intelligence can provide a powerful extra edge at a low cost, so weave it into your communications budget.

4.  Key themes

Outsourcing will continue to grow, but there will be greater pressure to match the client requirements with the outsourcer’s true competencies.

You can trust EPIC Connections to make that match accurately and time efficiently….at no charge!

Those are the global business trends. But what specific business benefits can companies expect to gain from customer experience investments? Every firm in every industry can leverage great customer experiences to:

• Bolster brand equity. Referencing customer service conversations, Tony Hsieh, Zappos.com’s chief executive officer, wrote in Delivering Happiness, “Our belief is that the telephone is one of the best branding devices out there.” Even with conservative estimates, it’s easy to make the case that the call center has influence on par with, if not greater than, that of mass advertising campaigns. And the call center is just one of many customer touchpoints where the experience influences the customer’s impression of a brand.
• Garner customer loyalty. Years of Forrester data confirm the strong relationship between the quality of a firm’s customer experience and loyalty measures like willingness to consider the company for another purchase, likelihood to switch providers, and likelihood to recommend. We’ve also found a solid connection between customer experience ratings and Net Promoter Score in multiple industries.
• Boost revenue. Even small shifts in customer loyalty can translate into billions of dollars of incremental revenue each year for firms in some industries. One example: B2B company CDW drove $230 million in incremental revenue in just one year by following up on sales leads identified through customer loyalty surveys.
• Drive down costs. Through its voice of the customer program, Fidelity Investments recently identified a problem with account authentication in its interactive voice response system. It recruited a few associates to discuss the issue, identified its root cause, and quickly launched a solution. Its estimated annual cost savings from this one fix: $4 million. Other companies count their savings in terms of higher employee retention.

…continues Friday

Contact EPIC Connections for a no obligation consultation

Follow Us On Social Media

Article Source

Posted by John Miller

CustomerThink.com

Our front-line customer service agents are the heart and soul of our customer service operations.  After all, the customer service agents are the ones who actually interact with our customers, day in and day out.  Our customer service agents are the ambassadors and stewards of our brand.  They are the ones who create that all-important interface with our customers.  Our customer service agents are the ones who … Continue reading →

Contributor: Brian Cantor

Customer Management iQ

Your organization’s customer service standpoint is, in many ways, determined by its belief in the imminence of social media’s rise as a customer service tool.

But while the more progressive organizations might be shifting their focus away from the traditional call center in order to support the escalation of social–and the more conservative organizations might be slowly easing their toes into the social water—a new study reveals that a happy medium is presently the best approach. Continue reading →

Posted by Kate Leggett

Forrester.com

With 2012 still bright and full of hope for most of us, what are the key trends that customer service professionals need to pay attention to as you plan for success this year? Here are the top trends that I am tracking. My full report will be published in January. Continue reading →

Posted by William Band

Forrester.com

I’ve just finished up several months of research digging into the best practices of how leading organizations aspire to implement outside-in, customer-focused, cross-functional processes that transform the organization and set it on the path toward continuous improvement. At the core of this trend is a desire by these organizations, especially in services industries, to domesticate their “untamed” or “invisible” processes that touch customers.

In talking with nearly 30 organizations, consulting companies, and solution vendors, I found that instead of deploying slow-to-change packaged applications or building difficult-to-change custom solutions, leading organizations are embracing business process methodologies — supported by process-centric IT platforms. They are striving to drive rapid process change, increased business engagement in IT projects, and achieve dramatic improvements in worker productivity.

In my new report, I define more than 30 best practices that organizations can use to support their transition to process-centric customer CRM. Here are few of them:

• Understand the degree of cross-process and cross-system coordination required. Workers using CRM technology sometimes have to access four or five different interface screens to carry out a single business process transaction. Workflow tools within CRM products rarely support cross-system activity well.
• Don’t think of CRM, BPMS, and DCM as disparate systems. Look at your solution holistically rather than as individual tools. CRM excels at managing customer data, whereas business process management suite (BPMS) solutions combine the disciplines for managing business processes with the enabling technology to facilitate their design and delivery. Dynamic case management (DCM) business applications allow organizations to handle both routine and unpredictable cases. The complete solution may require combining the elements of each type.
• Articulate a compelling vision from the customer’s perspective. Anchor the vision for process improvement in the organization’s value proposition and the customer experience. Try to work backward from the outcomes that different categories of customers might expect and use these insights to define at target operating model (TOM). A TOM is a representation of how an organization operates across process, organization, and technology domains to deliver customer value.
• Take an iterative and Agile approach to process improvement. Agile project management and software development refers a group of development methodologies that are based on principles of iterative development, where requirements evolve through collaboration between a self-organizing cross-functional team. All too often, businesspeople have become accustomed to an IT-led “waterfall” project approach: All functionality is specified up front and usually delivered many months — or even years — down the line. As a result, businesspeople attempt to imagine every nuance of the desired functionality in “to-be” work sessions as they try to pack everything into an initial release. BPM thinking takes the exact opposite approach: New versions of the process are rolled out frequently and quickly.
• Senior management needs to lead with a clear vision and concrete plan. The organization’s senior leadership must remain intimately involved with any major change initiative, whether it’s a functional change, an enterprise change from an acquisition, or a desire to re-engineer the business processes that touch customers.

Contact EPIC Connections for a no obligation consultation

Follow Us On Social Media

Article Source

Why Customer Experience? Why Now?

For decades, companies have been promising to delight customers, while simultaneously disappointing them in nearly every channel. That tactic won’t cut it anymore. Why not? We’ve entered a new era that Forrester calls the age of the customer — a time when focus on the customer matters more than any other strategic imperative. In the age of the customer, companies find that:

• Commoditization has stripped away existing sources of differentiation. Competitive barriers of the past like manufacturing strength, distribution power, and information mastery can’t save you today — one by one, each of these corporate investments has been commoditized.
• Traditional industry boundaries have dissolved. Companies in every industry find themselves competing with new types of competitors — automakers with services like Zipcar, newspapers with Google News, travel agents with Expedia, and the entire retail industry with eBay.
• Customers have more power than ever. With online reviews, social networks, and mobile web access, it’s easy for your customers to know more about your products, services, competitors, and pricing than you — and to share their opinions of your company with their friends.

…continues Wednesday

Contact EPIC Connections for a no obligation consultation

Follow Us On Social Media

Article Source