For years, organizations have struggled to balance customer satisfaction with the requirement to increase revenue and minimize the cost of customer service.
Managing these conflicting goals is difficult, but is complicated even further by the many different enterprise functions and supporting processes involved in serving customers. These include the traditional customer touch points — the contact center and branch offices — as well as back-office operations.
Not surprisingly, each of these areas within the organization has its own systems, processes, and procedures for managing workflow and assessing effectiveness. These pose a variety of challenges:
• Although management applications and workforce management, IVR, ACD, and CRM systems provide a staggering amount of statistical data about what is happening in the organization, they do not explain why — and unit-level managers may lack the time, tools, and expertise necessary to perform meaningful data analysis.
• Applications often cannot share information readily, and data may remain hidden or inaccessible. Moreover, since the applications typically are purchased, implemented, and administered independently, they usually require duplicate effort and expense to install and maintain, thereby reducing their return on investment.
• Different functional areas within the organization often lack standardized processes for sharing and correlating data with other areas. This problem becomes magnified as data and reports are disseminated to successively higher levels in the organization. Reporting periods and units of measurement may vary from one business unit to another. Each unit, branch, or contact center may report on a different set of metrics altogether, making it difficult for data to be rolled up into meaningful reports. This prevents organizations from receiving a holistic view of performance, making data analysis for enterprise decision making nearly impossible.
• Many — if not most — organizations have developed their customer service processes to fit around their internal systems and procedures, such as accounting, order fulfillment, and delivery. These systems and processes are convenient for the organization, but not necessarily for the customer. Unless organizations have a means of collecting, analyzing, sharing, and acting on statistically valid customer feedback, they run the risk of alienating customers without even realizing that a problem exists somewhere within their service delivery chain.
Collectively, these challenges pose a formidable barrier to strategic decision making and superior customer service. In fact, they tend to foster fragmented customer service. In a survey of 176 North American firms with revenues of $500 million or more, Forrester Research presented respondents with a list of potential issues. Seventy-three percent of firms selected “getting alignment across organizations” as a significant obstacle for improving the customer experience they deliver. Organizations need a way to capture, analyze, share, act on, and learn from actionable intelligence™ — customer and workforce performance data—to deliver a unified, quality customer experience.
Leveraging Actionable Intelligence
Escalating costs, competition, and customer expectations have translated into huge pressures in every industry. In recent research conducted by Gartner, businesses identified the following as their top five priorities.
1. Improve business processes
2. Control enterprise-wide operating costs
3. Attract, retain, and grow customer relationships
4. Improve the effectiveness of the enterprise workforce
5. Grow revenue
Recognizing the need to deliver a superior customer experience, some organizations are implementing customer-centric management strategies, through which customers’ wants and needs — rather than organizational convenience — drive business processes. These strategies require process re-engineering, but the net result — particularly when paired with appropriate technology — is a customer-focused, highly competitive enterprise that is able to sustain its competitive advantage over time.
Other organizations have turned to technology to help them improve efficiency, manage performance, and reduce the cost of customer service. In particular, contact centers — often the front line of customer service delivery — have benefited from a range of technological improvements, including recording and quality monitoring systems, as well as automated forecasting, scheduling, and adherence tracking provided by workforce management applications. More recently, speech and data analytics have enabled
root-cause analysis, allowing centers to transform customer data — structured and unstructured — into actionable intelligence.
While such technology undeniably provides greater efficiency and effectiveness in managing customer service,the degree of its success hinges upon the nature of the deployment. Often, these applications support specific functions, perpetuating the siloed environment and forcing each part of the customer service value chain to act independently.
Some organizations have taken the next step to improve their customer service operations by implementing workforce optimization (WFO), a solution that combines quality monitoring, workforce management, performance management, and eLearning to drive better performance. WFO breaks down the barriers among siloed applications, allowing contact centers to capture, analyze, share, and act on cross-functional information concerning workforce performance, customer interactions, and customer service processes.
The growing use of IP telephony has expanded WFO’s reach from the contact center into remote, branch, and back-office operations. When enterprise WFO is brought together with speech and data analytics, the result is a powerful, end-to-end software solution that helps organizations uncover trends, determine why certain employee and customer behavior is occurring, and respond appropriately — across all departments — to achieve continuous performance improvement. This combined solution is known as customer service analytics.
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