A new Ventana Research report titled, "Customer Experience Management: Improving the Consistency and Quality of Customer Interactions," confirms that businesses are only beginning to make progress towards managing the customer experience across the broad set of customer interactions.

More than 253 worldwide companies from all major industries participated in the benchmark that researched the maturity and direction of business worldwide.

“Today’s customers may be one annoying phone conversation or frustrating experience at a poorly functioning Web site away from defecting to a competitor,” said Richard Snow, Ventana Research's vice president of customer performance management research. “To rise to this challenge, businesses need to practice customer experience management (CEM), addressing issues involving people, processes, information and technology that influence customers’ experiences and behavior at every point they touch the business."

This new research indicates that conceptually the majority of companies understand the point of customer experience management (CEM). However, the analysis reveals most have not acted upon a full CEM strategy--researchers found that only 12 percent of organizations provide optimal CEM.

The benchmark concluded that four of the top five factors impacting the customer’s experience during a call relate to agent performance:

• the agent’s attitude
• understanding the customer’s issue
• ability to resolve issues the first time
• general knowledge

Since the agent's desktop is the main tool that helps agents resolve customer issues, it's surprising that more companies aren't providing their agents with more intelligent unified desktops.   Only about one-third of respondents said their current desktop provides agents with "relevant information that depends on the caller’s profile and circumstances."

"The agent’s desktop is a primary source of frustration for both agents and customers. Agents don’t like these systems because typically they are hard to use, don’t provide all the right information needed to resolve customers’ issues and don’t follow the flow of interactions. While customers are not aware of these shortfalls, they suffer because agents cannot focus fully on them, ask them to repeat information and often don’t resolve their issues."

The complimentary Ventana Research benchmark report is available on Cincom’s web site at
www.cincom.com/CEMresearch