Focus on The C

Produced by:CRM Media SILVER SPONSOR SPONSORS Bob Fernekees, Group Publisher212-251-0608 [email protected] Adrienne Snyder,Eastern/Midwest Account [email protected] Dennis Sullivan, Western Account [email protected] InMoment PAGE 8 CX: THE ART OF THE POSSIBLE Genesys PAGE 10 VOICE OF THE CUSTOMER:

MODERN APPROACHES TO DELIVERING REAL INSIGHTS Confirmit PAGE 11 LISTENING TO YOUR CUSTOMERS KEEPS YOU ON COURSE:

THE ROLE OF JOURNEY MAPPING Freshdesk PAGE 12 SERVICE AND SUPPORT IN “THE AGE OF THE CUSTOMER” Best Practices Series Good news!

Finally, voice of the customer (VoC) programs are moving beyond the single dimension captured in survey results.

As with many new initiatives, early attempts to actually listen to customers relied a bit too heavily on the technology at hand, and while survey tools are incredibly useful, they don’t tell the whole story.

In the following pages of this month’s Best Practices Series, you’ll be presented with ideas that look beyond simple survey metrics to offer insights on how to better perceive what your customers actually think about your company and products. Deeper insight into your customers’ thoughts and attitudes can provide invaluable guidance on how to structure their journey from first contact to service, and engender loyalty that keeps them coming back.

Bob Fernekees VP/Group Publisher, CRM Media Information Today, Inc.

Global Headquarters310 East 4500 SouthSuite 450Salt Lake City, UT [email protected] 1-888-GENESYSwww.genesys.com Voice of t he Customer: LISTENING TO YOUR CUSTOMERS KEEPS YOU ON COURSE 330 Seventh Avenue3rd FloorNew York, NY 10001+1 800 864 [email protected] 1250 Bayhill DriveSuite 315San Bruno, CA 94066 +1 (866) [email protected] WP8 July 201 6 | CRM Magazine Erich Dietz, VP, Worldwide Strategic Accounts BREAK AWAY FROM THE SURVEY/SCORE PARADIGM Let’s be blunt. The CX industry is in a rut. In many cases, CX has been forced into the ever-narrowing box of a survey and a score.

The danger in this approach is that brands risk missing out on the art of the possible—or understanding what’s truly possible in the world of CX. Instead of building a CX program that can affect organizational change, they settle for another metric on a spreadsheet.

The good news is that a shift is already underway. Brands across the globe are taking risks and expanding their CX horizons. They’re understanding and executing on sophisticated, complex initiatives that are leading to some remarkable outcomes.

In the past few years, CX leaders have taken their programs from score-based initiatives to an embedded part of company culture. It’s no longer one isolated team that runs a survey from a dark room.

Brands that want to succeed in today’s competitive world have embedded CX into their cultures from the C-level executive to the frontline employee. They use insights gathered from a variety of channels and touchpoints, integrated with customer data from multiple sources, mined by sophisticated analytics technologies, and then channeled to steer every corner of their businesses.

START THE SHIFT FROM THE TOP DOWN Making the shift, however, is much easier said than done, because today’s enterprises are increasingly complex.

The most successful brands have taken a top-down versus a bottom-up approach. This ensures a more strategic view of the program from a cultural and technological perspective. Successful brands have a leadership team committed to CX at every level of the organization. This team recognizes customer experience as a competitive differentiator and invests resources, hires talent, and consistently makes decisions that reinforce that commitment. Most times, this commitment is accompanied by the adoption of a comprehensive framework like a Net Promoter System (NPS) versus a single score.

True CX leadership is not achieved by sitting behind a desk every day. For those executives looking to make the necessary shift to a customer-centric culture, they need to lead the charge. They need to get their hands dirty. As an executive, when was the last time you did one of these things?

• Used your own product or service?

• Took a call in your contact center?

• Visited your own website?

• Used your mobile app?

• Sat down with a customer to understand how they use and view your product?

• Listened to a frontline employee about the customer experience and how it could be improved?

A culture of customer experience comes from a place of empathy. This means taking the steps to understand your business as customers experience it so you can make effective, impactful changes.

IDENTIFY BUSINESS OBJECTIVES AND STICK TO THEM At the beginning of your CX journey, your brand will need to have deliberate conversations and concentrated efforts to identify what you really want to achieve.

The roadmap you follow will be dramatically different depending on your goals. The route you follow, for example, will vary depending on if you’re trying to turn your business around versus trying to put your organization in a high-growth situation.

The best way to begin is to ask yourself and your team some very simple questions: • What do I want to measure?

• Why am I interested in this process?

• Where and when do I want to implement?

• How am I going to measure and listen?

• Which system will result in the best experience for the customer and employee?

• How am I going to take action on results?

Congratulations! You’ve now taken the right steps. You, as an executive, have fostered empathy, put the right people in place, and identified what and why you’re investing in your customer experience. Now what? The next step is to promote a culture of accountability.

Without clear goals and expectations, your plans will end up as a blip on the radar—a nice thought, but one without staying power.

The most important thing to remember is that every person in your organization—from the executive to the frontline employee—is responsible for the customer experience.

Every person needs to understand their role and how it impacts the business.

TURN IDEAS INTO IMPLEMENTATION Many CX initiatives fail because organizations lack the commitment or tools to take their ideas and turn them into reality. It’s a complex undertaking, but the key is having an enterprise-wide understanding of where you are on your CX journey, the foresight and follow-through to plan and execute on next steps, and then a commitment to choose strategic partners to help you get where you want to go.

CX Journeys are not linear. Your organization may excel at one phase of the journey and need to improve in another.

The key is discovering those areas of strengths and weaknesses so you can take the next steps.

Once you have pinpointed where you are on your CX journey, it’s critical to CX: The Art of the Possible Sponsored Content CRM Magazine | July 2016 WP9 continue that momentum and execute on the initiatives you’ve identified. For many brands this includes identifying and implementing a CX strategy or system (like PS).

CHOOSE STRATEGIC PARTNERS Understanding your CX journey and executing on a new strategy are critical components, but without the right partners, your efforts can slow or even stall. A comprehensive CX program will involve a variety of systems and processes.

Whether your brand has internal, homegrown solutions or is partnering to provide these capabilities, you will require a technology partner who can integrate with these systems or other vendors to provide a bigger view of the end-to-end customer experience.

When looking for a CX vendor, take the following into consideration:

Multichannel Listening — When it comes to a Voice of the Customer (VoC) vendor, look for one with a customer-centric listening approach. Your customers shouldn’t be limited by the technology your vendor does, or does not, support. A comprehensive VoC vendor should have the technology to support a variety of feedback channels, including voice, web, and video.

Advanced Analytics — Advanced analytics (including text and predictive analytics) allow you to understand the structured—but more importantly the unstructured—data you’re gathering from your customers. Most, if not all, VoC vendors offer the ability to crunch numbers and provide a score. The real sophistication comes in with unstructured data. A preferred VoC vendor will be able to synthesize and analyze massive quantities of comments, social stories, videos, and more and turn that into optimized, actionable insights. Data Integration — The days of a single system running an entire business are long gone. Most enterprises have dozens, if not hundreds, of technology platforms. The effect these isolated systems have on the customer is the same effect seen for years on organizations as a whole—a fragmented, disjointed experience. Look for a vendor who can integrate customer data from a wide variety of systems, including multiple CRMs, social, transactional, financial, loyalty, market research, competitive, and operational.

Flexibility — A large-scale CX deployment will undoubtedly be complex with extreme technological requirements.

It’s critical to evaluate a vendor’s ability to provide superior flexibility while still allowing advanced analytical capabilities that drive speed to insight.

Ongoing Support & Professional Services — A customer-centric organization will realize that a customer experience program will require ongoing maintenance. Technology will only take your organization so far. You need a team of knowledgeable consultants to help you design and implement the right solution to optimize your CX investments and deliver the desired outcomes.

EMBRACE THE ART OF THE POSSIBLE It’s time to get out of that rut. Learn from industry leaders and expand your view of the customer experience. Move beyond surveys to integrated listening that reveals in-depth insights. Stop looking at customers as data points in a graph and truly understand their stories. Share those stories with purpose so the right people can take the right actions to affect business outcomes.

The world of CX has changed. Brands that continue to view CX as a survey and score will quickly fall behind. But brands that embrace the art of the possible and create an end-to-end customer experience will transform from score-based followers to successful market leaders.

To read the full white paper, “CX: The Art of the Possible,” visit http://info.inmoment.com/art-of-the- possible.html Sponsored Content WP10 July 201 6 | CRM Magazine Not too long ago, listening to the voice of the customer (VOC) entailed gathering comment cards, feedback letters, phone transcripts, and customer emails—all with the intent of developing a qualitative way to address customer concerns and trending issues within an organization.

This process, while broad in data sources, often lacked the measurable results companies needed to capture the voice of their customers.

Today, businesses are moving beyond these cumbersome practices and embracing sharper VOC tools to quantitatively measure and analyze customer sentiment.

POST-INTERACTION SURVEYS One dynamic VOC approach in the market today is post-interaction surveys.

These could be sent after a customer contacts your support team or following an in-home service visit, for example.

Post-interaction surveys can provide insight into emerging issues before they spread to other customers or are shared via social media or word-of-mouth—and they can also help identify your at-risk customers.

Additionally, these surveys offer insight into the potential need for changes within your organization, updates to existing services, or ways to improve agent interactions.

Once the surveys are completed, the next step is to measure this information against key metrics to produce results. Which standardized metrics should you measure?

Here are a few examples.

• Net Promoter Score measures overall customer experience, which can be used to predict loyalty.

• Customer effort score measures the level of effort your customers expend while interacting with your company, which can help you design easier interactions with your customers.

• Customer satisfaction measures overall satisfaction with your products or services, which can help you update or prioritize your roadmap and customer communications. These tools are easy to implement across multiple channels and keep track of over time, and they make it quick and simple for customers to respond.

BEST PRACTICES Here are four best practices for building a successful outbound survey program.

1. Plan Properly Start by defining the scope of your survey program, including the audience, timing, and distribution, as well as how data will be collected and analyzed. Collect data as benchmarks and set goals for where you want to be. Identify which metrics are important, and create real-time analytics dashboards. Determine the precise timing for post-interaction surveys—one day after an in-home installation or immediately after a customer contacts your support team are ideal times.

2. Use Multiple Channels to Capture Feedback Outbound customer surveys can be conducted via the communication channels your consumers prefer: voice, text, email, mobile, and web. Sending survey requests over multiple channels will increase the overall number of responses you receive.

3. Close the Loop with Customers Create a formal process to follow up with customers after they provide feedback.

For example, an agent can proactively contact unhappy customers to resolve their issues and improve loyalty. Leveraging analytics dashboards and integrating your outbound dialer with marketing automation and CRM systems can easily close the feedback loop.

4. Analyze, Inform, and Improve Use analytics to classify responses, categorize feedback, identify areas to improve processes, and optimize your workforce. Collect trends and outliers.

Then analyze and validate the data to prioritize corrections and take action with people, processes, and technology to solve customer issues and influence internal changes. Make survey feedback actionable across the company, from the C-suite to the front lines. Communicate regularly across your organization to ensure your actions generate a positive impact.

CONCLUSION Understanding the voice of the customer is a vital part of any company’s outbound communication strategy. By implementing a formal outbound survey program that measures satisfaction after interactions, you can dynamically collect, manage, and respond to customer feedback. And remember: VOC surveys are not a one- time event but an ongoing process of listening to your customers and adjusting based on their insights.

With these best practices, you’ll not only earn long-term loyalty and repeat business, you’ll set your company apart from the competition and stay on track for success.

Want to learn more? To discover how Genesys can help you maximize the effectiveness of your outbound survey program and deepen customer loyalty, check out the on-demand recording of the webinar, “Listen, Act, and Build Loyalty: Best Practices for Outbound Customer Survey Programs” or read our analyst white paper, “Ovum—How Mobile Improves Outbound Engagement and Customer Experience.” Voice of the Customer: Modern Approaches to Delivering Real Insights Sponsored Content CRM Magazine | July 2016 WP11 Karine Del Moro, Vice President, Marketing The last couple of years have seen a huge rise in the discussion around customer journey mapping. Most importantly, the conversations, which until recently were restricted to the hard-core Voice of the Customer and customer experience experts, have shifted across the business and finally into the board room. As is the case with many emerging disciplines, it’s easy to get carried away and run headlong into it without fully understanding what the goals are.

At first glance, it is easy to over-simplify.

You might think, “OK, we have shops, a website and a call center. Done” . Customer journey mapping needs to incorporate much more than just a list of your sales and service channels. It needs to deliver an understanding of what your customers are trying to achieve, and the steps they take to achieve it. A true customer journey map provides a framework that encompasses the entire business, how each area impacts the customer and informs your Voice of the Customer program to ensure you’re able to capture feedback at the right moments.

Here we look at some of the key considerations for any business setting their sights on a true customer journey map that will guide their VoC efforts and ensure they stay on course.

CREATE A CLEAR PLAN A journey map must generate value and drive change if it is to improve customer centricity across the company. Are you going to use the map to improve the customer experience at specific channels?

To engage employees? To refine and consolidate your brand? You will probably find that you can do more than you imagine at the outset, but make sure you have measureable and achievable aims.

DON’T OPERATE IN ISOLATION You must include people from across your company. It’s a great rallying point for the business because you can see how different stakeholders fit within the framework and help them to understand their impact on the customer experience.

For example, front-line employees have a wealth of knowledge which must be included, and back-office areas like accounting or logistics will hold information about processes that directly impact the customer but are often virtually unknown outside their departments.

CONSIDER THE CUSTOMER’S VIEW OF YOUR COMPANY Remember that customers see your brand as a single entity. They don’t know (or care) that the website is handled by different people to the call center or the social media program. Or that some of your services are outsourced. As you build your map, think about the combination of touchpoints that customers go through, and consider how well you deliver your brand experience at each of them.

CREATE PERSONAS TO GUIDE YOUR PROGRAM Develop fictional characters who are trying to achieve something specific. You may only need a handful, or you may need more, but mapping the journey is much easier when you can focus on, say, “Brian” who has researched your product heavily before purchase but thinks his invoice is wrong, or “Jessica” who realizes she’s bought the wrong item and needs help identifying the right one and returning the original. This process enables you to look at what customers are trying to achieve at that point, how they feel and what external factors might be influencing them. This will help you to build programs that meet customers’ needs effectively.

INCLUDE FACTORS YOU CAN’T CONTROL It might not be entirely fair, but issues like roadworks outside your store or your customer’s internet connection making your website load slowly do impact their experience. When you build your map, make a note of the things that have or can affect your key touchpoints. In some cases you may be able to build strategies to mitigate against them.

REVIEW AND RENEW YOUR JOURNEY MAP Once complete, you need to revisit the map on a regular basis. It may not need amending most of the time, but in some cases a new store, sales channel, or delivery company, for example, will have kicked in and you need to build that into your map.

Otherwise, within a couple of years, you’ll have something resembling an out-of-date atlas that doesn’t acknowledge a major road! Listening to Your Customers Keeps You on Course: The Role of Journey Mapping Sponsored Content WP12 July 201 6 | CRM Magazine We’ve all heard that this is the Age of the Customer. While today’s customer is well informed, the customer of the future will be smarter and even better informed through evolving technologies and business processes. Expectations for a more personalized and proactive brand experience will mandate that customer service moves with this evolving customer.

Obviously, any successful business is tuned to the voice of the customer in terms of product and product feedback.

But there’s more to consider: By 2020, reports Walker, a customer intelligence firm, customer experience will overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator. As new technologies for customer service open up, the number of channels to interact with customers grows. The future of the support experience must be thoughtful and proactive.

CUSTOMER SERVICE VIA PHONE AND EMAIL Service via phone (call centers) and email (ticketing) are the most popular means of delivering support. Ensure that customers are having a great experience when they need the help that only an engaged human can provide: 1. Hire customer support employees who demonstrate the trait of empathy. Other important support skills can be trained, but empathy is a skill you cannot teach. 2. Empower customer support employees to use their judgment to solve customer issues. When management makes a statement that serving customers is a top priority, both employees and customers gain trust and confidence. 3. Analyze your customer populations. Direct-sales company, Jamberry , for example, has configured their support software to manage the needs of two populations: their own customers and 40,000 consultants who support their business model.

One solution for two categories of customer. SOCIAL CHANNELS When companies engage and respond to customer service requests via social media, those customers spend 20% to 40% more with the company than other customers do (Bain).

SELF SERVICE Self service popularity has been increasing year over year. Gartner reports that by 2020 the customer will manage 85% of the relationship with an enterprise without interacting with a human. LIVE CHAT A whopping 44% of online consumers (Forrester) say that having questions answered by a live person during an online purchase is one of the most important features a website can offer, and more than half (Forrester) are more likely to return to a website that offers live chat.

With VOC, the most important factor is finding the right tools to help your employees meet customer needs.

Whatever channels you use to deliver support, the right customer support solution makes it easy for support teams to relate to customers without barriers (missing information, unwieldy processes, inefficient workflow). The right tools will reduce customer frustration, build mutually satisfying customer relationships, and empower feedback. About Freshdesk Freshdesk is a cloud-based customer support platform founded with the mission of enabling companies of all sizes to provide great customer service. Our goal is simple: make it easy for brands to talk to their customers and make it easy for users to get in touch with businesses. Service and Support in “The Age of the Customer” Sponsored Content