16.04.2008 Efficient Customer Management and Positive Customer Experience |
Efficient Customer Management and Positive Customer Experience through Process-Driven Customer Interaction
By Danny Singer
For decades, companies around the globe have been seeking for ways to personalise and streamline interaction with their customers at the same time. This has lead to two major trends in the industry: Off-Shoring and Business Performance Improvement programmes including (semi) automation.
The Off-Shoring approach tends to leave only large corporate projects with a positive net effect after deducting the exploding project management costs - due to increased quality issues and customer complaints.
As a result, Business Performance Improvement regarding Customer Management has gained more speed again. However, with a wealth of technologies at hand, many leaders of customer facing environments are still curing symptoms rather than tackling the challenge by the roots. What do I mean?
The decision of a customer whether to do business with a company again in the future depends roughly on two factors: 1) on his experience along his “buying and after-sales journey” with this company and 2) on what the competition can deliver at the same time.
The latter can only be tackled through Benchmarking and a short cycle of learning from competitors including rolling out proven successful approaches. The former, however, is entirely in our own hands. We can make a difference when creating a customer journey through and with our organisation that leaves her/him with a truly positive experience - so far the theory. Yet the big question is: how can we actually deliver this?
If I want to reach a goal, I need to do some planning and define the steps I want to take to achieve the goal. To create a positive customer experience is not any different. The key here is to create a route for the client through our organisation – for each and every of her/his needs, the so –called “contact reasons”. Then we need to define which action we take to tackle the customer’s needs – and which communication channel (phone, email, letter etc.) we or (s)he will use for this action.
What’s important is that we can plan our own actions for whatever channel we want – but we must leave it up to the customer which channel (s)he want to use. This, in turn, requires a multi-channel environment which allows us to switch seamlessly between different channels throughout our customer interactions. Now, I could talk about a lot of theory here, but let me just give you an example:
Let’s say you are an insurer and you want a better Customer Experience with your organisation which leads to a higher renewal rate, lower complaint rates (and complaint management costs) and higher cross-selling probabilities. Let’s assume your core business is motor insurance.
Now, as we said before, what is fully in your own hands is to deliver a positive customer experience. First, you will define all contact reasons. Claims will be certainly one of them. If customers have a positive experience with your claims handling process and the respective results, you have done your part to retain her/him. So, what are our next steps?
First we need to outline the customer journey. Which means, starting with the customer’s (inbound) or our (outbound) reason to contact each other. In here, many organisations make the first big mistake: they define what is done (the action) but now the channel via which the action is taken and – surprisingly – often not exactly enough who (department, position) takes the action.
We all know that actions without clear stakeholder and person in charge will not be taken. Further we know that actions for which the communication channel range is not defined can cause severe technical and organisational issues resulting in poor service and loss of customers. If the customer approaches us or contacts us back, we should offer as many channels as possible and wait for him/her to decide which one (s)he takes. When the enquiry comes in, we need to have it in our integrated pipeline where we can see every interaction with that particular client - calls, emails, letters, no matter what.
A first claim can come directly from the location of an accident – the customer speaking from his Mobile. Then you require the customer to write a report about the accident and send it via email. Now you need to have every record about all of these interactions in one place. This is called multi-channel Customer Management. And what if we contact the customer?
Now we are talking about outbound campaigns, not only for sales purposes, but also “contact” backs of every kind. In this case we might use a Predictive Dialler to cut down on our Average Handling Time. Now, what if the call did not reach its target? What happens next? Far too many organisations still run awfully complicated manual procedures to contact such companies again.
The results may be double and triple contacting the same person, customer record doubles - or many customers not being contacted again, because they have been approached once and now they “disappear” from the queue. The nitty-gritty work of importing, exporting and re-importing records of customer who need to be contacted again, or via another channel, or another person (if contacting companies) can be a real pain. In our example this could be contacting back customers who made a claim, to get more information or for other reasons. How can we streamline such operations in order to allow customers to contact us once and we organise the rest and deliver to full customer satisfaction?
The key is we have to integrate both our process maps for interaction between humans (client-agent) and between the channels both sides use – including follow up actions for both human and machine. In our example this would mean e.g. to define precisely
• Who will receive the motor insurance claim
• Via which channels (open them all, and define a contact flow for each of them!)
• How the tail effect continues throughout the organisation
• What kind of follow up action is necessary in which case via which channel
• And which results we aim to provide to our customer for which contact reason
The bad news is that this can be a complex task. And industry standards, legal and government regulations will certainly not make it any easier.
The good news is that today technology is available to integrate all these activities into one big workflow map consisting of many sub-flows for all communication channels, and for both inbound and outbound communication with your customers.
The key here is to integrate the work flow of your employees with the supporting flow of the used technology. In other words: instead of first defining manually e.g. on Visio what your agents are doing to resolve clients’ issues and then defining the desktop screens which allow then to do this – you plan and roll-out everything in one shot. How does this work?
Instead of calling your customers over and over again, often different agents repeating the same message to the customer, not getting back to her/him in time and other annoying service mistakes – you plan the customer journey ahead. For instance, if your customer wants to make a claim and gets lost in your queue, and hangs up – maybe you want him/her to leave a call back message which automatically goes into your “call recycling” loop. Then the call back will be delivered automatically at the requested date and time to the agent with the right skills who is free at that time. And now figure this would be integrated with outbound campaigns at the same time.
Wouldn’t this be a relief?
Going one step further, you can also use technology to support your agents with advice for each step of their interaction. Some people call this scripting, but actually it is much more. Don’t think of monologues read by an agent to a customer from a static script. Rather imagine a dynamic script which refers to information that a particular customer has given your agent at an earlier step of the same conversation or during some earlier contact.
To stick with our example: if your customer calls to make a claim, you could have your technology calculate whether the claims will have an impact on the insurance premiums. Or, which breakdown service can help depending on the location of an accident. There are many options to support your agent during his conversation with his customer.
Now, let’s summarise this:
You can increase the efficiency of your Customer Management and also the number of positive Customer Experiences through Process-Driven Customer Interaction. Instead of leaving every action up to your agent, you design a process map for both human interaction and the technology supporting every step of it.
For every contact reason you define a roadmap of actions and advice that will be served to your agent’s desktop at the right time of the customer interaction. Rather than forcing your agents to read out static scripts, you provide dynamic advice based on facts that the client has previously given. You can do this for all communication channels – phone, email, fax, letter or web. Follow up actions will be served at the date and time you had planned to the agent with the skills you had planned before.
No customer contact is lost, predictive dialling lists integrated with your inbound activities. You have mapped if, when and how those customers who could not be reached this time will be contacted a second or third time. You do much the same with calls, emails etc. with certain results. For example, you can “reward” customers who had the patience to leave a message after a long wait in your queue.
This is intelligent Business Process Management using Multi-Channel Strategies and an Integrated Agent Desktop. It includes goal-setting, targeted Business Process (Re)-Engineering and Controlling of outcomes. It contains intelligent branching which allows automating further steps depending on customer’s given information.
Further, it contains dynamic scripting supporting your agents with the specific information needed for that particular customer at that particular time. Finally, it contains a Predictive Dialler that “knows” at which step in the conversation your agents currently is and when he will be “through” – to deliver the next contact at that point. Is that some strange Techno-Vision again?
Certainly it is not. You can do this today. And you should – for loyal clients. |
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