Retailers, get ready for the magic of CRM

“International giants entering India in a big way was an impending trend only waiting to happen.  If you haven’t prepared for the tussle yet, this is your chance. Indian retailers are set to impress customers and increase their bottom-line with the aid of the right CRM”

It’s ironic that while the retail sector in India is estimated at US$350 billion, organised retail is estimated barely at US$8 billion. The upside is the expected growth rate. By 2010, organised retail is expected to grow up to US$22 billion, an estimated 40 percent compounded annual growth of return over the next few years.

Numerous international retail giants from Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States are entering the Indian market with enormous hope and investments. Retailers in India so far only prefer to increase the number of outlets within a city or to other regions as a part of their expansion drive. But they will now need to fight the burgeoning retail space with many new shopping centres and growing new markets like the kids’ retail revolution in apparel. To manage the tremendous volume of transactions and to beat international competition, Indian retailers have an immediate need for Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools.

CRM will happen. It’s simply a question of how long it will take and in how many ways retailers will benefit. Customer Relationship Management is important, especially for your repeat customers and for them to feel camaraderie with the retailer. A good CRM will provide the right framework to retailers so that they can personalize merchandise purchases, services and responses across all communication channels for the customer’s satisfaction and for increased sales.

Low cost, high value

But before retailers embark on any CRM software, they need to ensure it comes at optimal cost, with minimal risk, high value, and a higher return on investment (ROI). It should install quickly, interface readily with existing systems, be easy to learn and to use, and deliver uncompromising performance.

Driven by changing lifestyles, strong income growth and favourable demographic patterns, the Indian retail market is growing at compounded annual rate of five percent and expected revenues of US$320 billion in 2007, according to a report by AT Kearney and the Confederation of Indian Industry. And big international and domestic retailers have realized this growth.

To sustain competition from the giants, Indian retailers must differentiate or brand their business. Customers expect retailers to do this is by personalizing products and services. And this is where a rightly implemented CRM comes into play.

Growing Communication Channels

India has more than 129 million mobile communication subscribers and the number is expected to go up to 300 million in 2008. This is a strong marketing channel retailers cannot afford to miss. “Truly loyal customers can’t imagine doing business with anyone else. They are your best means of advertising because they’ve become advocates for your company. They bore their friends with stories of how great you are,” write Shaun Smith and Joe Wheeler, authors of Managing the Customer Experience.

To implement the right CRM, retailers need to analyze customer preferences and trends, and then merge analysis with inbound and outbound calling via CRM technology so that customers can communicate with the retail chain by fax, phone, web, SMS and the like. The CRM framework links and integrates these channels to individualize the customer’s experience and ensure satisfaction.

Similarly, competition must be kept under a check. If a retailer offers volume discounts, its competitors must likewise offer comparable value to the customers. If a retailer has tools to reach more customers with personalized purchase offers, or to process orders faster, or with fewer errors, or more efficiently, other vendors must adapt or gradually surrender market share.

But unfortunately, only 30 percent of companies worldwide have actually implemented a commercial CRM software package. And most of these are only a year old. Of this minority, 54 percent have implemented just one part of CRM. With so much room for improvement in meeting customer demands, CRM can only help.

Contact centres form an integral part of CRM because they directly impact how customers feel about the retailer’s products, services and business. With an efficient system at the contact centre, retailers can help customers buy what they want and need. For instance, retailers are yet to utilize the opportunity of selling daily needs to a population that is using the latest technology to purchase almost everything.

If you are looking at moving to customer-centric marketing, this means that all customer functions are subject to CRM’s analytical processes. This helps retailers understand both how the customer base is presently segmented and, for the future, according to what retailing values. Other analyses identify new services, evaluate their ROI, shift focus from less to more profitable customers, etc. The outcome from CRM analytics is better service, improved planning and profitability, and more appropriate pricing.

Customer Analysis

CRM analysis can help retailers make a smooth shift to a customer-focused enterprise by allowing processes like differentiating customers into segments, discovering precise needs of customers and redesigning compensation and rewards to effect behavioural changes. This process establishes the context that stimulates the customer to shop and buy. Hardcore marketers make their own analytical understandings with the help of a CRM to evaluate what their customers need.

Improved Sales

Better services imply the customer’s improved ability to make purchases. They will make informed decisions and be happy with their purchase. Such efficient shopping will only mean a patronizing customer. For the retailers, this means higher transaction rate, increased revenues, and a wider profit margin.

Smart retailers are looking up new and critical CRM tools like the unified agent desktop that allows customer service agents to respond faster and with greater accuracy and consistency every time a customer picks up the phone, accesses e-mails or chats. The unified agent desktop brings the customer into focus at the desktop and turns the agent’s screen into a hub that can access all enterprise applications and databases necessary to respond rapidly to the customer.

The result is increased quality and decreased operating costs, leading to one of the most handsome ROIs in the industry. It also eliminates data redundancy like repeating customers with the same requests or relying on agents to recall the correct systems to enter a new customer record or service request.

Questions to ask about any CRM Framework:

• Does it allow the supervisor or manager to access and process analytical data online? Preferably through a web portal?
• Does it use just one screen to manage all customer channels – e-mail, voice, chat, fax, web self service – so that agents stay productive and don’t get lost in the transaction?
• Does it offer a universal view of your retail CRM data on a single screen – contact information, history of recent activity, knowledge base, workflow interaction, resource management?
• Does it make efficient use of your and the customer’s time by minimizing clicks so that managers and agents don’t have to toggle to other screens or other applications while the customer waits impatiently?

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Attention : Is Your Call Center Ready for a Disaster?

Hosted contact center solutions help to insulate small to medium-sized businesses from disruptions – and offer additional benefits as well.

Hurricanes, tornados, earthquakes, storms, power outages, terrorist threats … you never know when or how your business might be disrupted. But you do know that you must have a business continuity plan because customers don’t stop calling and e-mailing when you have an outage. In fact, volumes may increase. Your agents need to be available to customers. One negative experience with your company and you could lose that customer forever. Add the average number of customer contacts you have in a given time period and it is easy to see how quickly the damage to your business can multiply with any outage.

Large companies with established national or global operations typically have the resources to create redundant systems to overcome a local or even regional outage. If there is an outage or problem at one location, contacts are simply routed to the other open sites. However, small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) typically don’t have the resources to build comprehensive disaster recovery plans and are left with few options other than rebuilding the system as quickly as possible.

Hosted contact centers to the rescue

Hosted contact center solutions provide SMBs with a cost-effective and reliable solution that minimizes business risks during an emergency by enabling agents to work from virtually anywhere. The latest hosted solutions require only a web browser, phone and internet access to provide the same complete contact center functionality as if the agents were actually on-site. Because all software and hardware are housed off-premise in a secure hosting facility, the “contact center” can continue to operate without disruption.

In fact, a hosted contact center can provide even greater flexibility and security than redundant physical contact centers. For instance, even if a company with multiple contact centers were able to re-route incoming contacts to one of their other centers, the remaining locations may not be able to handle the increased volumes or have the proper training to adequately handle the re-directed calls. A hosted solution enables you to automatically route communications to available agents wherever they might be. And if employees did have to be evacuated, re-establishing operations is quick and inexpensive, since agents only need a web browser, a phone, and access to the internet. This makes nearly any home or hotel a potential temporary outpost. The end result is the business continuity that your bottom line and customers require.

A virtual contact center for real-world events – and a global economy

Because the hosted solution places the hub of the contact center outside of the organization, it makes the virtual contact center a reality. By strategically locating agents in geographically diverse locations, you can dramatically reduce the impact any single event could have on the business. Far greater than even multiple contact centers, this can make the business nearly immune to local outages or disasters.

Fine Art By Hyatt is one company that can testify to the advantages of a hosted solution in an emergency. When Fine Art By Hyatt made their original decision to go with a hosted solution from Cincom Systems, Inc., a lot of factors other than emergency preparedness entered into the equation. However, when Hurricane Wilma stormed ashore less than 20 miles from the company headquarters in Naples, Florida, this ability moved to center stage. Larry Block, president of Fine Art By Hyatt, says “our agents in the Midwest and western states were able to cover the phones while we were covering our heads to protect from Wilma. We never missed a beat as far as taking customer orders was concerned!”

Under non-emergency conditions, a hosted solution can provide unmatched scheduling flexibility for agents and managers. It enables the business to employ the best agents available worldwide – creating a virtual contact center for businesses of any size.

The flexibility of hosted solutions also offers advantages during call spikes. Because no special hardware or software is required, you can quickly engage non-contact-center personnel to take customer calls. In essence, your entire organization can become a pool of backup agents for unforeseen load conditions.

The importance of multi-channel capability

A key component in the success of hosted solutions when addressing business continuity planning is the ability to integrate multiple channels. For example, if your customers’ phones are out of service due to an outage, they will try to utilize other channels of communication, such as e-mail, until they reach you. During Hurricane Katrina and the 9/11 attack, this situation became reality as millions of telephone lines and cell phones were inoperable; yet e-mails could be sent from many locations. The ability to substitute contact channels proved vital in this situation.

Also, if your business involves utilities, certain government agencies, and other organizations, call volumes are likely to increase during emergencies. The ability to direct customers to alternative communication channels that are operational or to agents located outside the affected area could be critical. Today's hosted solutions make all of this possible.

Hosted contact centers on the rise

The business continuity and global business advantages of today's hosted contact center solutions haven't gone unnoticed by businesses. According to Datamonitor, hosted contact centers will be the fastest-growing sector of the market, and by 2008, will account for 38 percent of the global market. Additionally, DMG Consulting reports that by 2007, 20 percent to 30 percent of all new contact center seats will be hosted. By providing an economical and viable alternative to the on-premise contact center, a hosted solution enables SMBs to establish business continuity capabilities and global customer service that was previously not feasible. The end result is a leveling of the playing field for SMBs and minimized exposure in the event of a disaster.

Key business continuity advantages of hosted contact center solutions

Some of the key benefits of the best hosted contact center solutions in a business continuity plan include:

• Agents anywhere – Agents and other knowledge workers can log in remotely and receive phone, e-mail, chat, and fax interactions.
• Minimal capital outlay with no hardware or software investments - Typically a simple monthly per-seat licensing.
• Inherent security with off-premise hosting that places your contact center infrastructure in a secure, redundant location.
• Eliminates the expense and time-consuming process of buying, installing, and maintaining a backup site.
• Quick, simple, and inexpensive relocation with only a web browser, a phone, and access to the internet required.
• Enables non-contact-center personnel to take customer calls as backup agents to accommodate unforeseen load conditions.

By Randy Saunders

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What to Look for When Selecting a Hosted Contact Center Solution

According to Datamonitor, by 2008, the global market for managed and hosted contact center services will have more than doubled, reaching a value of more than $5 billion. So the odds are good that if you haven’t already implemented a hosted solution in your contact center, that you will soon.

But once you make the decision to implement a hosted solution, finding the right service provider is critical. What should you look for? Here are five areas to investigate:

1. Experience and capabilities

The vendor’s ability to provide a complete solution is as important as its ability to execute the solution.

• A service provider offering a hosted solution should deliver a full, robust suite designed for the hosting environment. It should include advanced analytics that track and measure all elements of the contact center at both an operational and business level, interaction channels with universal queue, and an agent desktop that provides a universal view of the customer.

• Companies can gain insight into the capabilities and support the company provides by checking customer and partner references.

• Most importantly, companies must understand the hosting infrastructure.

2. Functionality and security

As the demand for hosted solutions rises, traditional vendors have begun to retrofit their premise solutions to offer them as a service. The buyer should be cautious of these solutions, as they may not have the same benefits as a solution that was built to be both hosted and on-premise. Understanding the functionality of a hosted solution is key to understanding the vendor’s ability to customize, integrate, and provide security for your existing resources.

• A multi-tenant architecture can improve the operation of a hosted solution. It is an inexpensive and comprehensive method of providing a shared architecture down to the last table. With a multi-tenant architecture, multiple clients with distinct needs, tools, processes, customizations, and workflow can all reside in the same infrastructure – each with its own completely separate, completely unique set of processes.

• A Net-Native Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) solution can eliminate the need for client/server applications on user desktops. Additionally, it utilizes the internet as a global delivery system for maximum uptime and flexibility while ensuring full security.

• Integration should use a common platform based on open standards. This easy-to-program, goes-anywhere framework can summarize data from any system (transactions, interactions) and transmit it to agents using a single, web-based interface.

• Secure data transmission is also very important. Solutions should provide best-of-breed hardware, redundant firewalls, restrictive internet protocols, good authentication, and secure virtual private network (VPN) lines between the client and the service provider. With the multi-tenant architecture, core tenants of the security framework for hosting keep everything separate.

3. Scalability and flexibility

Having a hosted solution that can grow with your business is critical to long-range success and a long-term partnership with the service provider.

• The solution needs to be flexible and customizable to your business. The ability to configure and adjust communication channels, workflows, processes, knowledge and application access, desktop presentation, and configurations are all critical.

• A hosted solution should also offer a variety of deployment and financing options. Purchase a license and let the service provider manage the logistics and infrastructure for you, or start with a hosted version and confirm that it works for your business before investing in a licensed version. Or stay with the hosted model indefinitely.

4. Processing speed and availability

As hosted solutions physically reside outside the user’s network, companies should ensure that the service provider is able to meet processing-speed and availability requirements.

• The service provider should have a commitment to meet service-level agreements and the solution architecture and infrastructure to do so.

• To ensure redundancy, the service provider should have multiple data carriers.

• The internet service provider must provide adequate bandwidth, as well as meet latency and reliability requirements.

5. Feedback and measurement

Business intelligence functionality provides the insight necessary for managers to make informed business decisions. Thus, analytical functionality has transitioned from being a luxury to being a necessity for decision-makers in the enterprise.

• The hosted solution should provide real-time or near-real-time reporting that provides managers with immediate access to logical and intuitive reports based on the company’s operations.

• Flexibility in the controls of data manipulation is also important. Not only should the vendor offer standard reports, but it should also give managers the capability of creating custom reports that meet specific needs. Companies should look for online analytical processing (OLAP) capabilities that allow business users to flexibly manipulate or “slice and dice” operational data, using familiar business terms, in order to provide analytical insight.

If you fully investigate these five areas, you should succeed in implementing a solid software solution for your unique customer service needs.

This article is an excerpt from the white paper “The Hosted Model: Simplifying Contact Center and Agent Desktop Solutions." To download the complete white paper, go to www.cincom.com/hostedmodel

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Gartner’s Seven Initiatives to Improve Customer Experience

According to a recent worldwide survey by Gartner Executive Programmes (EXP), Targeting, attracting, and retaining new customers remains a top priority for chief information officers (CIOs) in 2008.

To this cause, Gartner outlines seven types of organizational initiatives to boost customer loyalty and satisfaction:

1. Act on feedback, deploy changes and communicate actions to employees and customers - View every customer interaction as an opportunity to deliver brand values.  Standardize on one business feedback management tool across the organization, for all communication channels.
2. Design processes from the outside in - Most process redesign focuses on improving operational efficiencies rather than to improve the customer experience. Yet with every customer interaction, there is at least one "moment of truth" that can disproportionately positively or negatively affect the customer experience.  "Organizations must fix one problem at a time and shouldn’t try to fix all broken processes simultaneously. The best organizations just focus on the worst two or three," says Ed Thompson, research vice-president at Gartner.
3. Act as one organization to ensure consistency – Since customers often interact with many individuals throughout your company, it’s important to ensure that information captured in one interaction is not forgotten in the next channel.
4. Be open - Organizations that want to improve the customer experience often become more open. This could mean offering more channels or extending hours but it can mean much more.  For example, establishing an online community can be one of the most powerful and influential tools for marketing.  Gartner recommends that open organization should follow three tenets:
   • be transparent and clear
   • be open-minded
   • be inclusive
5. Personalize products and experiences - Some personalization options are simple, such as a web site that enables customers to monogram products, while others are more complex, such as tailoring and personal pricing.  However, companies need to consider additional complexity and costs when considering personalization.  Makes sure you evaluate these costs against the sales benefits and longer-term customer experience.
6. Alter attitudes and employee behavior - Employees’ actions are often the most powerful improvements in a customer’s experience. Executive mystery-shopper programs and hands-on manager involvement during peak-demand periods help to educate company leaders about what the average customer and employee are experiencing.  Gartner outlines three primary ways to alter employee behavior:
   • recruit the right types of employees
   • ensure standards such as policies, procedures and governance structures
   • create training programs and incentives that can modify employee behavior patterns
7. Design the complete customer experience - Many organizations have no plan or design for the customer experience.  The experience is experience is unplanned and accidental in its execution -- it “just happens”.  Companies with a focus on selling experiences, such as in the entertainment, education and travel industries, focus on designing experiences ... the brand is an expression of a product or company’s reputation built up over many years. Today, brands increasingly are used as part of marketing communications to create a high-level expectation or promise of a particular quality or customer experience.

By Randy Saunders, Perfect CEM

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Improving Customer Satisfaction through Documents

In the face of growing competitive and economic pressures, organizations of all kinds are paying much more attention to satisfying their customers. Whether for-profit or nonprofit, any organization must fulfill customer expectations in order to be successful. Customer satisfaction is vital to the ongoing viability of any organization and ultimately provides measure of system management performance.

Customer satisfaction is vital to the ongoing viability of any organization and ultimately provides measure of system management performance.

For most commercial organizations, customer satisfaction represents the degree to which a product or service meets their customer's expectations. The factors driving satisfaction among car buyers, for example, are tangible and clear. Price, features and quality top the list. Even among service organizations, where “products” may be more emotional or psychological, conditions that spur customer satisfaction are still self-evident. Hotel day-spa operators, for example, strive to provide professional service, in a pleasant manner, to create "customer delight."

For some organizations, stimulating customer satisfaction is not as straightforward. Some organizations do not provide a commercial product, per se, and the service provided is less corporeal than that of most service organizations, the factors that influence the satisfaction of customers are much less distinct. How can managers improve the satisfaction of their customers? What “products and services” influence customer satisfaction? Where can management find opportunity to better meet the expectations of customers and other stakeholders?

One area of opportunity may be found in customer documents. Customer correspondence in the form of letters and statements, applications and notifications, beneficiary forms and prospectus booklets all combine to represent the face of any organization. Indeed, for most customers, documents compose much, if not all, of the product they receive and are the only tangible evidence of the service provided. As a result, documents have great scope and importance due to their direct influence on customer satisfaction. By improving the accuracy and quality of key customer documents, managers are likely to make significant improvements to the performance of their system overall, and take strides to ensure the continued satisfaction of their customers.

For most customers, documents are the product: the only tangible evidence of the service provided.

This paper will focus on customer satisfaction and the important role that customer-facing documents play in the overall satisfaction of customers. According to some surveys, organizations within all industries and sizes are all striving to improve their document systems. The key to success, however, may lie in the ability of managers to ensure that infrastructure improvements, specifically those that impact document communications, ultimately bolster customer satisfaction.

Documents drive Satisfaction

While electronic communications are growing, printed documents remain the primary means by which organizations communicate with their customers. Surveys indicate that nearly 90% of all communications between an organization and its customers are in the form of printed documents – general correspondence, applications and registrations, and beneficiary forms. As a result, printed documents represent the most important, if not the only, touch points available between organizations and their customers. Indeed, for most organizations, documents are the product; the only tangible evidence of the services provided. Despite the pivotal role documents play in customer service, most organizations still struggle with the process of creating and revising customer documents with most projects taking days, if not weeks, to complete. This, combined with the prevailing concerns over data accuracy, integration and control, and the manual rework and assembly of documents, suggests that now may be an opportune time for managers to initiate document system upgrades to enable a more accurate and agile document workflow.

While improving document systems and processes seems to be a “no-brainer” given the impact on customer satisfaction, many organizations struggle to find the sponsorship needed for document system-specific improvements. Even with the growing desire to bolster customer service, document systems are often overlooked in the large strategic planning associated with information system upgrades and enhancements. In addition, many organizations feel that transferring document communications management and production from IT to business users is an important initiative; the underlying sentiment perhaps being that business areas will be more fruitful in advocating for document system specific enhancements.

The Investment Implications of Customer Documents

Let’s face it, information technology investments are expensive. Projects, especially those surrounding core applications, routinely reach multi-million dollar proportions. Whatever the price tag, however 100% of the investment made to upgrade ultimately gets manifested into a document. Customer documents like statements, letters, applications and notifications literally represent the final “product” of any organization. Despite their importance in customer care, however, customer documents are often an afterthought during information system infrastructure planning; the implications of these vital touch points overshadowed by the scope of the bigger technology initiative. But regardless of the extent of state-of-the-art systems put into play, if infrastructure enhancements do not account for the implications of customer documents any technology investments made will not be fully realized.

Examining this example of a customer purchasing a new car will illustrate the implication of customer documents. The new vehicle is the result of considerable investment by the car manufacturer and comes fully equipped with a host of modern performance features. Soon after the purchase, however, the key breaks in the ignition and leaves the new owner stranded. A tow truck is called, because the key to the ignition is the only interface available to the customer who, despite the state-of-the-art features under the hood, quickly becomes dissatisfied with the quality of his purchase. Inferior car keys eroded customer satisfaction. Investments made by the car manufacturer missed this important customer interface.

Just like keys to a car, documents represent the only interface customers have with organizations. The danger for organizations is to invest heavily into infrastructure enhancements and overlook the documents that are ultimately output from the system. If this important customer interface is broken, customers perceive that their “product” is broken.

Poor documents can lead to dissatisfaction. This dissatisfaction in turn reflects poorly on the performance of the organization in the eyes of management and more importantly, customers. With competitive options available at the click of a mouse, customers can quickly “voice” their dissatisfaction with their experience.

Organizations must not become complacent when it comes to customer satisfaction. Consider the state of the phone industry prior to deregulation. With few exceptions, large telecom companies were not focused on customer satisfaction. Telecom customers had few options and competition was literally non-existent. Since deregulation, a war is being waged over customer satisfaction in the telecom industry. Organizations may want to consider the high cost of landing new customers versus the high profitability of a loyal customer base and reflect upon current information technology infrastructure strategy.

A Strategic Approach

Customer satisfaction is vital to the ongoing viability of any organization and ultimately provides measure of performance. Customer documents represent very important touch points that greatly influence the satisfaction, or dissatisfaction, of customers. Indeed, for many organizations documents are the product: the only tangible output of the relationship with their customers. As such, customer documents should be regarded with the same strategic focus and priority given to other important information infrastructure enhancements.

By adopting a more strategic approach to customer documents organizations will find fruitful opportunity to improve customer satisfaction.

By adopting a more strategic approach to customer documents organizations will find fruitful opportunity to improve customer satisfaction. While evaluating the technological and administrative aspects of core application enhancements consider the ultimate product of those systems: customer documents.

• How will system upgrades interact with and improve customer documents?
• Will enhancements enable greater accuracy and control of customer documents?
• What opportunities exist to bolster relationships with customers and ensure their ongoing satisfaction through documents?

Advances in document and information technology, along with the prevalent goal among organizations to improve customer documents, suggest that now may be an opportune time for system managers to move forward with document system improvements. A variety of automation and management solutions are available for a fraction of the expense spent on enterprise application upgrades. The key for “document strategy” advocates, however, will be to successfully include document system enhancements in the overall scope of infrastructure improvement plans. Information system managers must foster the sponsorship needed to include document systems as a line item in RFP efforts and embrace customer documents in the process of system enhancement. This endorsement can be found by delving more closely in to the relationship between customer documents and customer satisfaction. Oorganizations are in position to ensure that their customer documents ultimately do their part to improve and maintain customer satisfaction.

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How to Be a Customer Experience Standout

It’s no coincidence that a number of the companies delivering an unmatched customer experience are among the newest. Relative newcomers such as Amazon and Prudential’s youth-leaning Egg brand in Britain have been able to start from ground zero with modern technology and no institutional legacies. These companies know very clearly who they are and who they are trying to serve, and clearly communicate that both to the marketplace and to their own employees.

“Building that brand platform means articulating a promise to customers that makes very evident what they can expect from you, and why they should come to you,” says customer experience expert Shaun Smith of Shaun Smith + co (www.shaunsmithco.com.) But building a customer experience around safe objectives or simply doing business the way it has always been done is unlikely to score points and create lasting value. Aggressive goals and unique offerings will differentiate you and create memorable experiences. Amazon nearly went bust trying to source one million titles – but Amazon wanted to be the place where you could get any book. It was a proposition that could be communicated to the marketplace, and it became a successful one.

In the contact center, that means doing more than simply meeting last year’s service levels or attaining an industry average. It means creating a distinctive experience the customer cannot duplicate anywhere else. “If your processes adopt a cookie-cutter approach and people are forced to adhere to a system, it takes away any of the personality and personalization there could be,” Smith says. That is where so many companies shortchange the customer experience by tying it to conventional wisdom “best practices,” which place too much emphasis on sameness and assumes customers want to be treated the same no matter where they may take their business. In fact, Smith believes that “in the absence of a clearly articulated strategy, copying other companies’ best practices is bad practice.”

Rather than focusing energy on devising rigid processes and procedures, Smith advocates spending the lion’s share of research time on determining who your best customers are and identifying ways to create a captivating experience for them. “That’s not what most companies do – most organizations have a very loose understanding of their customers and what they’re after, but they have very tight control over the processes,” he says. “The very best brands – the ones who have the most enthusiastic customers – are very tight about who their customers are, what they value, and most importantly, what the brand promises. They can then afford to be looser about procedures, giving employees more freedom to deliver that promise in the best way for that particular customer. If you make it so cookie-cutter that you reduce it to a mechanistic experience for customer and employee both, it leads to turnover – you create the problem you were trying to avoid.”

Customers take notice when they receive an experience that is clearly not delivered by the book. Smith cites a service interaction between smoothie-maker Innocent Drinks and a customer whose discarded bottle fermented in a trash can and exploded all over his office cubicle. Any responsible company could have simply sent him a free coupon. A curmudgeonly company could have simply cited that its drinks are meant to be kept cold and that fermentation is an obvious side effect. Innocent not only responded with a case of free drinks, but sent the customer a personalized message chastising his “very badly behaved smoothie for re-decorating his office,” putting a smile on a regrettable situation and creating a memorable customer experience. This raises another important issue and that is tone of voice. The best brands have a tone of voice that they use to communicate to customers in a way that is also differentiated. Google has one; so do Apple, The Geek Squad, and Southwest – and they are all different. Unless the call center reflects that tone of voice, you might just as well outsource it and trust the experience to luck.

Performance metrics can be used to determine which agents are best delivering your brand message. Coordinated desktop applications also make it possible for agents to take the best possible action to resolve each customer encounter, in a way that can be tracked and executed on by the rest of the organization. Put simply, there’s no point in having aggressive agents willing to do anything to get the job done if they cannot clearly record the results of a call or ensure that it is acted upon through immediate communication with all responsible parties throughout the entire organization.

Note that creating a sublime customer experience expressly does not mean that you must execute on each and every dimension at a higher service or satisfaction rating than your competitors. “If Southwest Airlines were to do a customer service survey, they might find that to improve Southwest, they should offer food and advance seating, and transfer baggage. But if they did all of that, they would go out of business or at the very least cease to create a great customer experience for their most profitable customers!” Smith says. “For Southwest customers, what’s of value to them are the speed, frequency, and low cost of service.” It is a powerful reminder that satisfaction ratings and customer experience are not necessarily directly correlated. A superior experience need not score a perfect 10 in all avenues of performance if those attributes are of lower importance to the target customers – but you had better be scoring 10 on those that are. The proper technology helps to identify and consistently measure the key customer-centric metrics.

This article is an excerpt from the white paper “Customer Experience Happens in the Contact Center, With Insights From Shaun Smith." Go to www.cincom.com/shaunsmith to download the complete white paper or to view a webcast titled "See, Feel, Think, Do - Creating Breakthrough Ideas to Deliver the Perfect Customer Experience," in which Shaun Smith presents a lively discussion on how to build great customer experiences.

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Successful Customer Experience Really Does Happen in the Contact Center

Customer experience, and by extension the ongoing business relationship with any customer, lives and dies at the point of contact. All the glossy advertising in the world cannot compensate for a consistently weak experience. “Surveys find that only 26 percent of a purchase decision is influenced by advertising. By far the factors more frequently cited are personal experience and referrals,” says customer experience expert Shaun Smith of Shaun Smith + co, former Head of Customer Service, Sales, and Marketing Training for British Airways and more recently, VP of Customer Experience for the Forum Corporation.

Ideally, advertising serves to establish a promise and an expectation for a unique and appealing customer experience, which is then confirmed and reinforced every single time the customer touches the organization. That puts the contact center on the hook, yet uniquely placed, to sustain the customer experience regardless of changes elsewhere in the organization.

The best customer experiences are delivered by companies that have so deeply embedded their brand message and customer priorities in their DNA that each and every agent can present the best the company has to offer. They create self-sustaining customer communities that are so focused on their interaction with each other that they m

ay even forgive the occasional mishap, and see it as an opportunity to actively engage with the company and make improvements because they believe their patronage is truly valued.

No Barriers – Customer Experience Permeates

Achieving that goal requires a customer-service commitment that completely denies the existence of barriers. The customer experience will surely break down if the different communities that make up an organization do not understand the role they must play to build and maintain it. This means paying more than lip service to the concept of customer centricity – it requires aligning the internal organizations that provide the “care and feeding” of customers to achieve the same goal – building and maintaining the environment that provides the right service to the right customers and creates value for those customers they cannot get anywhere else. “Really strong brands have marketing, customer service, and human resources all working as one around a common agenda, which is the customer experience,” Smith says.

Marketing’s contribution is the articulation and refinement of the brand promise, using advertising and outreach to communicate the virtues of doing business with your company and setting it apart from competitors and pretenders. The customer service organization must be prepared, on a monthly, daily, weekly, and hourly basis, to deliver on that promise to customers, with the right training, systems, and most importantly, management support to make the right decisions by each and every caller.

Human Resource’s role in this process cannot be overlooked. Look at the global market for customer-service personnel as an opportunity, rather than a negative. HR should focus on bringing people into the organization that will be a natural fit for the customer experience, who can believe in the company’s brand mission, and who will use every tool and opportunity at their disposal to preserve that experience whenever possible.

Technology can help. A unified desktop that provides a 360-degree of the customer enables every person with the entire organization to share the same common view of all customer experiences. Marketing, Human Resources, Finance, the Executive Suite, and so on, can all share a common view and extract exactly the insight to help the organization support and deliver the promises made or requests extended.

Summary

The contact center’s role in a customer experience management strategy cannot be underestimated. Consumers perceive that a company’s ability to respond to a problem or request has a higher influence on an excellent experience than any other attribute, as shown in Figure 1. That puts the contact center ever-more front and center in creating that experience – consistently, intentionally, but in a manner that is differentiated and adds value.

Your customer experience can never be better than the people you place on the end of every telephone call, e-mail, or web chat, and the quality of the technology they rely on. Only they have the unique opportunity to strengthen your relationships every time a customer reaches out, and that can only happen if they are given the tools and trust to make every contact the right contact. “It is about having people who like people, who have personalities, and are willing to engage with customers and get beyond the form-filling,” Smith says. “You need a working environment where people are naturally curious and interested in doing business with your customers – not where they are driven by management to pick up the phone within three rings every time.”

This article is an excerpt from the white paper “Customer Experience Happens in the Contact Center, With Insights From Shaun Smith." Go to www.cincom.com/shaunsmith to download the complete white paper or to view a webcast titled "See, Feel, Think, Do - Creating Breakthrough Ideas to Deliver the Perfect Customer Experience," in which Shaun Smith presents a lively discussion on how to build great customer experiences.

Technorati Tags: Customer Experince,CRM,Contact Centre

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Shaun Smith's Top Ten Tips for Deploying CEM

This week Shaun Smith posted an article on CustomerThink titled, “Top Ten Tips for Deploying CEM .”

As Shaun points out, execution is the often the hardest part of creating a branded customer experience.  That’s because you must mobilize employees at all levels and align competing agendas, functions and executives.

Drawing on his experience with leading brands across the globe, Shaun has observed a number of mistakes that are all too common in so many failed initiatives.  In this article, Shaun outlines ways to avoid these pitfalls when implementing your own customer experience initiative.  Here are his “Top Ten Tips” for success:

1. Successful deployment requires the active and continuing involvement of leadership
2. Ensuring cross-functional ownership is vital
3. Focus on your most strategically important customers
4. Find out what these customers truly value
5. Design CEM before installing CRM systems
6. Use customer experience to retain customers rather than attempting to lock-in them in through so called loyalty cards
7. Deploy customer experience before allowing your agency to communicate the proposition
8. Provide ‘branded’ training to ensure that employees all understand the brand story
9. Measure the customer experience and align performance KPI’s with it
10. Sustain deployment through measuring customer experience rather than customer satisfaction

Shaun expands on each of these points with his own insights and examples of successful organizations that follow these tips.  So if you want to join these winners, make sure you read and follow Shaun’s advice in “Top Ten Tips for Deploying CEM."

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Retailers, get ready for the magic of CRM

International giants entering India in a big way was an impending trend only waiting to happen. If you haven’t prepared for the tussle yet, this is your chance. Indian retailers are set to impress customers and increase their bottom-line with the aid of the right CRM

By Shiraz Datta

It’s ironic that while the retail sector in India is estimated at US$350 billion, organised retail is estimated barely at US$8 billion. The upside is the expected growth rate. By 2010, organised retail is expected to grow up to US$22 billion, an estimated 40 percent compounded annual growth of return over the next few years.

Numerous international retail giants from Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States are entering the Indian market with enormous hope and investments. Retailers in India so far only prefer to increase the number of outlets within a city or to other regions as a part of their expansion drive. But they will now need to fight the burgeoning retail space with many new shopping centres and growing new markets like the kids’ retail revolution in apparel. To manage the tremendous volume of transactions and to beat international competition, Indian retailers have an immediate need for Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools.

CRM will happen. It’s simply a question of how long it will take and in how many ways retailers will benefit. Customer Relationship Management is important, especially for your repeat customers and for them to feel camaraderie with the retailer. A good CRM will provide the right framework to retailers so that they can personalize merchandise purchases, services and responses across all communication channels for the customer’s satisfaction and for increased sales.

Low cost, high value

But before retailers embark on any CRM software, they need to ensure it comes at optimal cost, with minimal risk, high value, and a higher return on investment (ROI). It should install quickly, interface readily with existing systems, be easy to learn and to use, and deliver uncompromising performance.

Driven by changing lifestyles, strong income growth and favourable demographic patterns, the Indian retail market is growing at compounded annual rate of five percent and expected revenues of US$320 billion in 2007, according to a report by AT Kearney and the Confederation of Indian Industry. And big international and domestic retailers have realized this growth.

To sustain competition from the giants, Indian retailers must differentiate or brand their business. Customers expect retailers to do this is by personalizing products and services. And this is where a rightly implemented CRM comes into play.

Growing Communication Channels

India has more than 129 million mobile communication subscribers and the number is expected to go up to 300 million in 2008. This is a strong marketing channel retailers cannot afford to miss. “Truly loyal customers can’t imagine doing business with anyone else. They are your best means of advertising because they’ve become advocates for your company. They bore their friends with stories of how great you are,” write Shaun Smith and Joe Wheeler, authors of Managing the Customer Experience.

To implement the right CRM, retailers need to analyze customer preferences and trends, and then merge analysis with inbound and outbound calling via CRM technology so that customers can communicate with the retail chain by fax, phone, web, SMS and the like. The CRM framework links and integrates these channels to individualize the customer’s experience and ensure satisfaction.

Similarly, competition must be kept under a check. If a retailer offers volume discounts, its competitors must likewise offer comparable value to the customers. If a retailer has tools to reach more customers with personalized purchase offers, or to process orders faster, or with fewer errors, or more efficiently, other vendors must adapt or gradually surrender market share.

But unfortunately, only 30 percent of companies worldwide have actually implemented a commercial CRM software package. And most of these are only a year old. Of this minority, 54 percent have implemented just one part of CRM. With so much room for improvement in meeting customer demands, CRM can only help.

Contact centres form an integral part of CRM because they directly impact how customers feel about the retailer’s products, services and business. With an efficient system at the contact centre, retailers can help customers buy what they want and need. For instance, retailers are yet to utilize the opportunity of selling daily needs to a population that is using the latest technology to purchase almost everything.

If you are looking at moving to customer-centric marketing, this means that all customer functions are subject to CRM’s analytical processes. This helps retailers understand both how the customer base is presently segmented and, for the future, according to what retailing values. Other analyses identify new services, evaluate their ROI, shift focus from less to more profitable customers, etc. The outcome from CRM analytics is better service, improved planning and profitability, and more appropriate pricing.

Customer Analysis

CRM analysis can help retailers make a smooth shift to a customer-focused enterprise by allowing processes like differentiating customers into segments, discovering precise needs of customers and redesigning compensation and rewards to effect behavioural changes. This process establishes the context that stimulates the customer to shop and buy. Hardcore marketers make their own analytical understandings with the help of a CRM to evaluate what their customers need.

Improved Sales

Better services imply the customer’s improved ability to make purchases. They will make informed decisions and be happy with their purchase. Such efficient shopping will only mean a patronizing customer. For the retailers, this means higher transaction rate, increased revenues, and a wider profit margin.

Smart retailers are looking up new and critical CRM tools like the unified agent desktop that allows customer service agents to respond faster and with greater accuracy and consistency every time a customer picks up the phone, accesses e-mails or chats. The unified agent desktop brings the customer into focus at the desktop and turns the agent’s screen into a hub that can access all enterprise applications and databases necessary to respond rapidly to the customer.

The result is increased quality and decreased operating costs, leading to one of the most handsome ROIs in the industry. It also eliminates data redundancy like repeating customers with the same requests or relying on agents to recall the correct systems to enter a new customer record or service request.

Questions to ask about any CRM Framework:

• Does it allow the supervisor or manager to access and process analytical data online? Preferably through a web portal?
• Does it use just one screen to manage all customer channels – e-mail, voice, chat, fax, web self service – so that agents stay productive and don’t get lost in the transaction?
• Does it offer a universal view of your retail CRM data on a single screen – contact information, history of recent activity, knowledge base, workflow interaction, resource management?
• Does it make efficient use of your and the customer’s time by minimizing clicks so that managers and agents don’t have to toggle to other screens or other applications while the customer waits impatiently?

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The Role of Customer Experience in a Down Market

Have we come to the realization that the US economy is at best rocky and possibly on a tough sled downward?

The storm is over our heads, the stock market is falling fast, the government is trying to bail us out (by sort of giving us our money back) so we will spend our way out of a recession. They are doing the things they can do to stem the tide. But we cannot wait for them to bail us from the storm.

When the enconomy goes down, most companies cut back on marketing, reduce staff and sit on their money to ride out the storm. In the last downturn, this strategy of "wait it out" left a lot of companies swept away in the storm ditch.

Losing Customers Now is a Bad Strategy

Accenture reported last month that globally, 53 percent of consumers have bailed on a brand due to a negative customer experience. This blog has a lot of these kinds of stories.

In a bad economy, the worst thing we can do is sit out the storm. We should have learned from 2002 that the companies that do best are the ones with a strategy to compete more aggressively.

Whatever you do, do not go into hibernation. You might end up in the ditches like a lot of companies did in the last economic downturn. Get on the Internet and read up on the stories that were published in the last economic trough and absorb the good lessons and the bad lessons. Watch which companies weathered the storm and came out stronger and which went into the storm ditch.

So what should we do now?

4 Ways to Compete for customers!

If 53 percent of customers are leaving us when we need them most, then it is reeeaaaaaally time to look at our customer experience strategies. Let's do innovative things that will re-position us as delivering the best, most perfect customer experience we can possibly deliver.

1. We all know by now that employees are the pathway to that customer experience. So this customer experience strategy must be carried out by the people now on your team. Reinforce your strategy, train the team, get everyone facing in the same direction -- on the customer experience.
2. Sharpen ... really sharpen your marketing, sales and customer service actions. This is not the time to spend extravagently (most of us are not like the government and cannot give our money back to customers). Nor should we have to. Instead, innovate a highly valued and differentiated experience (read my previous posting on the Domino's Big Fantastic Deal). And deliver that experience with consumate consistency.
3. Focus first on your current customers. Show these customers how you can make them more successful -- even if you don't sell them anything new. Turn them into advocates so they tell their friends and colleagues about you.
4. Then extend out into the marketplace and promote your unique, innovative, helpful, valued, consistently delivered customer experience.

Source – Dale Wolf, Cincom Systems