We all know that a call center experience can often make or break a customer’s decision to continue purchasing services from a company. Too often, it’s on the break side, with uninformed call center agents not knowing the right steps, doing the wrong thing and sometimes even lying. To provide the best possible customer experience, technologies must empower call center agents to have intelligent, informed, appropriate conversations.

The name of this game is Next-Best-Action recommendations. Technologies that enable NBA recommendations are actually able to “listen” to the conversation a call center or branch agent is having with a customer and dynamically re-apply models and rules to every new input, thanks to advances in predictive analytics and decisioning. The technology can then give the agent expert, real-time guidance about how to treat customers, answer questions, resolve issues, give advice and recommend products.

Churn is one of the single greatest problems facing the major Telco’s today. With outdated back end systems trying to keep up with regulation, competition, and an increasingly demanding consumer, many of these companies are seeking out new technologies to help them streamline and improve the customer experience.

Telecommunications companies have learned the hard way that if you ignore the customer experience, consumers take their business elsewhere, and it’s all too easy to do. Industry headlines are drawing attention to this issue in 2008: Blogs from desperate customers trying to get Verizon and other carriers to follow through on service requests appear regularly on the Internet; Sprint admitted that delivering poor customer experience to their customers led to the loss of more than 2 million of them.

A recent benchmarking of customer experience in the insurance industry by international research firm The Customer Respect Group placed insurers at an unhealthy 5.5 out of 10 when it comes to interacting with customers online.

Shocking?

Unfortunately, no, not for that industry which is already weighed down by regulatory compliance, complex relationships and a steady stream of new entrants to the market.

I recently wrote an article that explains how just analyzing the online experience is only a small fragment of the greater customer relationship picture, and I outline how the industry needs to consider more angles in order to work toward a higher customer experience score.

Read the full article.

In 2007 we saw organizations rally around Customer Experience practices. Many companies across a wide range of industries – insurance, banking, telecom to name a few -- now have Customer Experience Management (CEM) ambitions, departments, and directors. Much effort, both by organizations and CEM vendors, was understandably focused on delivering a good customer experience. In 2008, we expect this to continue in full force, accelerated by the early successes of the past year. However, we will also witness the introduction of technology that enables companies to plan and simulate the customer experience.

In Silver Blaze, a murder story featuring that incomparable master of deductive reasoning, Sherlock Holmes, the key to solving the mystery lies in the "curious incident of the dog in the night time." The clue? (Warning, spoiler alert if you haven't read the book) The dog fails to bark when circumstances suggest it should be woofing its head off. The logic employed by Arthur Conan Doyle's legendary detective in unmasking the perpetrator highlights a fundamental tenet of both successful sleuthing and customer-relationship building: The best interactions are often defined by what is not done or by questions that are not asked.

A traditional customer interaction might be described as "bottom up." It requires first establishing a 360-degree customer view and then applying a set of rules to reach a conclusion. This tends to be both time- and resource-consuming and often necessitates that the customer answer a series of questions of dubious relevance to the specific purpose for the call or visit to the web site. In a "top down" approach, on the other hand, you minimize data requirements by first asking what needs to be known for the optimal completion of a transaction. This results in a faster, more efficient and generally more economical interaction with the customer.