Customer experience management is, rightly, seen by many organizations as a strategic issue. In the digital domain, organizations have a rich set of tools and techniques to effectively monitor, analyze, and improve the digital experience that their customers enjoy. On the other hand, the state of the art in digital experience management continues to evolve and innovate, but our ability to effectively monitor, analyze, and improve the offline, or “analog,” experience of our customers is beginning to lag sharply behind.
Organizations that place importance on the customer experience, whether that is because they care about the customer or are obliged by regulation to monitor and measure it, need to invest in tools and processes that enable them to effectively manage every point of contact.
Digital and Analog Customer Experience
Over the past few years the number of technologies and techniques that help organizations to more effectively manage the digital interactions they have with customers has exploded. Organizations can track, trace, and monitor their digital channels using sophisticated analytics platforms; actively support customers through co-browsing and real-time chat; and market test planned enhancements using techniques such as A/B testing. But when it comes to the non-digital channels that still play a hugely important role in driving customer satisfaction, the state of the art lags significantly behind.
Organizations that operate call centers can choose from a wide array of sophisticated call management solutions. These solutions are principally designed with throughput and compliance in mind rather than offering an active way of measuring and improving the quality of the caller experience. Of course, call centers are only one point of voice interaction. Sales organizations depend on mobile phones as their primary voice communication channel, and few organizations are effectively monitoring and managing mobile communications today.
Customer Experience: Call Management
In order to really understand the way in which their customers engage with them, organizations need to apply the same level of care and attention to every interaction, not just those that take place over digital channels. Regulated industries have deployed call monitoring and recording platforms, but these platforms are still used primarily to ensure compliance instead of as a way to better understand what the customer needs and wants and then to improve the way in which service is delivered.
As markets become increasingly competitive, and customers become increasingly sensitive to the quality of the experience they have with service providers, it becomes more and more important for organizations to deploy tools and techniques that enable them to understand and improve the customer’s entire experience.
Organizations should begin by introducing call management solutions that span both the call center and the mobile employee. Next, they need to apply the same passion for analytics and continuous improvement to these channels that they apply to the online experience. Finally, the smartest organizations will use analytics to combine the data they gather from every channel with a view to understanding and then transforming the relationship they have with their customers.
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Gary Barnett is chief analyst, software at Ovum. Read all Ovum blogs here.
