It’s the new consumer mindset. Offering a wider variety of products at lower prices than your competitors doesn’t matter as much as it used to. These days, providing a great customer experience has emerged as the Holy Grail of what matters most to consumers. Blame it on the age of accelerated information flows. Whereas traditional sources of differentiation like price cuts and product varieties were once steadfast, they now erode rapidly — leaving customer service as the last sustainable source of achieving and maintaining a competitive advantage.
This challenges customer-facing departments to step up their game. For decades, customer centers have focused on providing acceptable levels of service by emphasizing efficiency and operational metrics. The approach no longer suffices. The leap from good service to great service requires a different journey, first for your enterprise and contact center, and subsequently for your customers.
In defining how we know we’ve arrived at the desired destination, we all know a great customer experience when we go through it. For organizations and their contact centers, up-leveling customer service to great and consistently delivering such an experience requires a shift in focus. It requires placing the customer’s subjective preferences and perceptions front and center. Today’s customers appreciate experiences that make taking care of business easy, and enjoyable. They expect their experience to be consistent across all channels, and to be personalized.
Omnichannel therefore becomes imperative to the collective journey your organization and customers take. We provide guideposts to this new customer experience journey by answering several key questions, two of which follow here.
Q: How can companies deliver great customer experiences?
Richard Snow: Companies must engage with customers in three ways: through assisted service, self-service, and connected service. Assisted service includes channels where customers engage with a person. Self-service includes channels where customers engage with technology, such as IVR or the corporate website. And connected service begins with customers trying to resolve their issues in a self-service channel such as a mobile app. If they’re unable to complete the interaction using self-service, they are seamlessly transferred to assisted service, such as an agent in a contact center.
My research shows that companies support, on average, 7.5 channels of engagement. Providing a great experience requires consistency across all channels. The research also shows that the highest percentages of interactions are still handled by a contact center agent or someone working in a business unit or branch office. The outcome of such interactions thus depends on the skills of the person and the information they can access. Along with getting the technology right, it’s vital that anyone engaging with customers gets appropriate training and one-on-one coaching. It also is vital that everyone uses the same information to provide responses. Achieving this consistency requires producing a complete view of customers and their interactions, and sharing it across the enterprise.
The key for self-service is ensuring that technology works the way the customer wants, not to meet an internal objective. For example, IVR menus should reflect what customers want to do. Menus should not be designed just to reduce operational costs. For connected service, the key is a seamless transfer so customers don’t have to repeat any steps they’ve already completed in self-service, such as providing their name, account number, or security information. Overall, success relies on providing choices that match customers’ expectations.
Karina Howell: In an omnichannel environment, managing all customer interactions through a universal routing engine helps meet rising expectations for an improved experience across all touch points. In addition to receiving service across various channels, customers expect to transfer fluidly from self-service to assisted service, and expect agents to have instant access to the context of other interactions.
At the same time, companies must continually prepare for the impact of new technology innovations — mobile devices, social media, big data, and cloud computing. These technologies are converging to place increased influence in the hands of the consumer. Customers now have powerful computing power in their pocket, and expect to resolve service issues via smartphone applications. In turn, the results of these interactions, positive or negative, can be broadcast over social media channels. In effect, these technologies are raising customer expectations significantly.
The good news is, these technologies also provide a new set of tools for companies to differentiate themselves through great customer experiences. By implementing a cloud model, you can deploy an integrated suite of advanced customer service applications in a very short timeframe while paying only for those applications that add business value in your environment. Social media provides powerful tools for understanding your customers’ perceptions of your brand. By monitoring and reacting to customer conversations about your brand, you’re able to shift perceptions in a positive direction. And by leveraging unstructured data from within and outside the contact center, you can receive the feedback necessary to guide process improvements.
Q: What are the keys to delivering exceptional customer service and experiences across every touch point?
Snow: The first key is to understand the customer’s reaction during and after each engagement. You therefore need a voice of the customer (VOC) program that, through surveys or by using analytics tools, shows the outcomes of interactions plus the customer’s sentiments. A second key is to understand the channels that different customers use to carry out various types of interaction, and if and when customers use multiple channels to achieve the wanted outcome. My research shows that innovative companies use analytics tools that can capture which channels customers use, for what purpose, and the outcomes. These companies then produce customer journey maps that show which journeys result in the best experiences for the customer. By combining these two kinds of information, companies can put in place process improvement programs, training and coaching to improve employees’ knowledge and skills, and technologies to support both efforts.
Two of the biggest barriers to great customer experiences are technology that isn’t easy to use, and an inconsistent customer experience across channels. Companies in our research cited three main challenges to achieving the fabled omnichannel experience: difficulty integrating business systems, difficulty integrating channels of communication, and lack of collaboration among business units. To deliver great experiences, companies must address all three of these in a coordinated manner. Increasingly, companies are planning to do this by adopting applications in the cloud (63 percent) as well as communication management systems in the cloud (44 percent). Typically, cloud systems are better integrated than on-premises systems, have better integration with other systems, are easy to use by customers and employees, and can be deployed solely in the cloud or in a hybrid environment.
Additionally, my research shows that customer engagement is no longer the responsibility just of marketing, sales, customer service and the contact center. Every business unit (except IT) now engages with customers. To provide consistent customer experiences, companies must at a minimum consider using business process management systems that span business processes and new collaboration tools that make it easier for employees to share information and jointly decide actions.
Delivering exceptional experiences begins by understanding the customer experience through a comprehensive VOC program to better connect processes, interaction channels, business applications and analytics, and to enable better collaboration between everyone involved in customer-facing activities.
Howell: The first thing you must do is decide that elevating the customer experience is a top priority. Then, align the employee culture, design business processes and deliver interactions around this goal. Such a commitment from senior organizational leaders is foundational to this process. You can then put the initiative into action by cultivating engaged employees, and by empowering these employees with the tools and recourses necessary to deliver great experiences.
As Richard points to, we also recommend mapping the customer journey. For instance, an insurer can map the steps a policyholder takes in filing a claim. Or a hotel can map the journey from making a reservation to checking out. Beyond a specific process, a map can also be cradle to grave, ranging from when a customer first hears about your company to describing their experience. The more customer touch points you have to complete a process, the more complex the map is — and the more necessary.
Next, look closely at the touch points that support the customer through their journey. Products, retail locations, Web sites, phone calls between customers and agents, and even comments posted by customers on social media. A customer journey map helps a company understand how effective particular interactions are (are calls and emails handled to the customer’s satisfaction?), while gauging how these interactions fit within an entire process. More so, the company sees where refinements must be made, say to the document process flow, or to the collaboration process between contact center agents and knowledge workers in other areas of the enterprise. 
This article is adapted from the white paper, The Customer Experience: the Journey from Good to Great, by Richard Snow of Ventana Research and Karina Howell of Interactive Intelligence, Inc. Download the full paper at www.inin.com/resources.