A new Ventana Research report titled, "Customer Experience Management: Improving the Consistency and Quality of Customer Interactions," reveals that the agent's desktop is a primary source of frustration for both agents and customers. That's no surprise to anybody who has been forced to navigate these systems or sit on hold while the agent navigates them.

The expanding desktop
Companies today are continuously gathering more and more information. In a typical organization, the various business units record the information that is important to them and store it in a manner convenient to them. In the past, little thought was given to the fact that the information could be valuable to other business units, especially the contact center.

According to Ventana Research, only 35% of respondents said their desktop provides agents with "relevant information to the caller's profile and circumstances." Customers at these organizations have come to expect an excellent customer experience.

On the other side, that leaves nearly two out of three contact centers
ill-equipped to search for information that is probably locked in independent silos. This creates a tremendous challenge for the agent. The results are frustrated agents and customers.

My neighbor was preparing a spaghetti and meat sauce dinner for her family when she was interrupted by an alarming phone call. “This is Kroger calling to notify you that the beef you bought at our store may be tainted. Throw it away—it could cause severe illness!”

Of course she was very grateful that the nation’s largest traditional grocer had personally warned her about this week’s Nebraska Beef recall alert. She immediately discarded the partially cooked meat sauce—suddenly take-out sounded far more appealing!

I was also impressed with Kroger’s responsive notification. But I was also curious ... in this age of megastores and customer anonymity, how did Kroger know that she had purchased potentially tainted beef? Could they have tracked her down through their “Kroger Plus” customer loyalty program?

I did a little research and found out that’s exactly what happened.

After the 2007 “pet food recall” and other recent scares, a few months ago Kroger implemented a “register receipt notification system.” Now Kroger can call customers that purchase tainted products if they used their Kroger Plus loyalty card at the register. That’s because Kroger’s new system matches customers to contaminated products and sends an alert to anyone impacted by a recall.

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."

Read more »

In the Advertising Age article, "How Apple Is Blurring the Line Between Marketing and Service," Pete Blackshaw finds that leading brands like Apple and Zappos are redefining and reshaping the consumer experience through better customer interaction.

"Whether explicitly acknowledged or not, there's an unmistakable "service is marketing" mantra pervading every aspect of the Apple Store. And that's something every brand, even those not as shiny as Apple's, can learn from."

Blackshaw outlines important new lessons being introduced by Apple:

This article is an excerpt from the white paper, Customer Experience Happens in the Contact Center, With Insights From Shaun Smith.

It's no coincidence that a number of the companies delivering an unmatched customer experience are among the newest. Relative newcomers such as Amazon.com and Prudential Banking'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 whom 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.