Customer Intent to Insight to Impact: Customer Dynamics in Action

By Brian Spraetz

In a recent post, we introduced Customer Dynamics—the ongoing, complex interchange between businesses and customers occurring across all customer touchpoints. That post included an overview of a methodology for optimizing Customer Dynamics that involves capturing intent, extracting insights and acting to create an impact. In advance of the NICE webinar on March 25, featuring the success of WPS Health Insurance in optimizing its Customer Dynamics, it might be helpful to delve a little deeper into this methodology. That way, when you attend (for free!), you’ll be ahead of the curve. (Register here.)

It all starts with intent. It’s the driving force behind Customer Dynamics—the fuel, so to speak. Customers contact a company when there’s something they want to accomplish—that’s their intent. Solving a problem, getting an answer to a question, voicing a concern or buying something. The business also has intent, although we don’t usually think of it quite this way. But it’s easy to understand that there are things businesses want to accomplish, too, such as controlling costs and increasing revenue. To truly understand customer relationships, an organization needs to grasp both types of intent.

The reasons for this are fairly intuitive. For one, if you don’t understand what a customer wants, how can you meet their expectations? And two, if the company’s intent stands in the way of taking care of the customer, bad things are bound to happen. Collect the raw material of intent by capturing customer interactions across all touchpoints—phone calls, emails, chat sessions, etc. 

The next step in optimizing Customer Dynamics is analyzing this unstructured information to understand intent and extract insights. What was the customer looking for? Did we satisfy their intent? Are our processes helping…or hindering? To extract insights you need to look at customer interactions in different ways—across and within contact channels, by customer and type of interaction, by individual agents and groups. This multidimensional analysis yields insights that are not apparent when looking at individual interactions. For example, without cross-channel analysis, you might consider a customer who called Customer Service and got the information he needed as a successful, first-call-resolution interaction. But with customer or cross-channel analysis, you would see he had tried your self-service and chat channels first, then called the call center as a last resort. Quite a different picture.

Once equipped with insight, you know what needs to be done, and, given the right tools, can act decisively to impact Customer Dynamics. You can update processes so that self-service channels work better. Reach out proactively to dissatisfied customers. Allocate agent resources more effectively. Cue agents to cross-sell opportunities in real time during interactions.

Next time, we’ll discuss the Customer Dynamics Value Hierarchy and how you utilize the optimization methodology to deliver benefits across four business imperatives: ensuring compliance and managing risk, streamlining operational efficiency, differentiating the customer experience, and expanding value beyond the contact center into sales, marketing, back-office and other operations.

Until then, be sure to tune in to our March 25th webinar, hosted by CRMXchange, to see Customer Dynamics optimization in action.