Focus on The C

Best Practices Series Produced by:CRM Media SILVER SPONSOR SPONSORS 10235 South Jordan Gateway Suite 500South Jordan, UT [email protected] Bob Fernekees, Group Publisher212-251-0608 [email protected] Adrienne Snyder,Eastern/Midwest Account [email protected] Dennis Sullivan, Western Account [email protected] MaritzCX PAGE 20 MAKING THE CASE FOR IMPROVING THE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE Verint ® PAGE 22 GREAT CUSTOMER EXPERIENCES AND ROI— CAN YOU HAVE BOTH? inContact PAGE 23 GUIDING THE OMNICHANNEL CUSTOMER JOURNEY Providing customers with a seamless, unified channel experience boosts business outcomes Scribe Software PAGE 24 USING DIGITAL INFORMATION TO CREATE THE ULTIMATE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE SAP PAGE 25 THE CUSTOMER JOURNEY:

A Handbook for Meaningful (and Profitable) Engagement NICE Systems PAGE 26 THE 5-STEP GUIDE TO SUCCESSFUL CUSTOMER JOURNEY MANAGEMENT Genesys PAGE 27 IMPROVE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE WITH CONNECTED DIGITAL JOURNEYS Customer experience management is a bit like throwing an important socia\ l event. The intended end result is to have your guests enjoy themselves and want to \ return, but achieving that personal engagement and connection takes planning. That’\ s where the notion of creating a customer journey comes into play. The journey is really th\ e only thing you can control and, in the end, the only way to encourage guests to have a posi\ tive experience.

In this latest installment of CRM magazine’s Best Practices series, our contributors take a look at customer experience management from a number of perspectives, ad\ dressing a very fundamental question: “Will better customer experiences improve \ the bottom line and increase shareholder value?” Assuming the answer to this question is “yes,” how can companies i\ mprove their customer experiences? The answer lies in creating customer journeys that foster b\ etter customer experiences and interactions with a brand, product, or company. This is \ no easy task, but the series of steps outlined in the following pages will help guide your\ own journey.

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

CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE MANAGEMENT:

Designing The Customer Journey 330 South Service RoadMelville, NY 11747Phone: 1-800-4VERINTwww.verint.com 7730 South Union Park AvenueSuite 500Salt Lake City, UT 84047Phone: 1-866-965-7227www.incontact.com 1750 Elm Street, Suite 200Manchester, NH 03104Phone: 603-622-5109www.scribesoft.com 3999 West Chester PikeNewtown Square, PA 19073Phone: 1-800-872-1727www.sap.com 461 From RoadParamus NJ 07652http://info.nice.com/cexa.comwww.nice.com [email protected] WP20 October 201 5 | CRM Magazine By Dave Ensing, Vice President of Automotive Solutions Strategy, MaritzCX Our clients are often asked by their executives, “How do we know improving the customer experience is important? How do we know it is worth it to our business?” To answer those questions, we commonly conduct “linkage studies.” These studies examine the relationship between measures of customer experience and downstream business metrics such as customer retention, increased sales and higher profits. Most people think it would be easy to establish a positive relationship between good customer experiences and good business outcomes. The general assumption goes something like this: happier customers churn less, buy more, are willing to pay more, and recommend products and services to friends. Therefore, happier customers lead to increased revenues, increased profits, and higher stock prices.

Unfortunately, it isn’t as simple as that. In their paper, “The High Price of Customer Satisfaction,” Keiningham, Gupta Aksoy and Buoye note that the overall academic literature “consistently finds that there is a positive, statistically significant relationship between satisfaction and a host of business outcomes…” However, their work also indicates that customer satisfaction explains only about 1% of the variation in companies’ stock prices. They go on to cite studies where there appears to be a reverse relationship between customer satisfaction and stock price (i.e., most hated companies perform better on stock price than their peers) and reference calls from consultants to abandon customer satisfaction initiatives because they are a waste of money.

So, why the mixed bag of findings?

Why can it be difficult to show a positive and meaningful relationship between good customer experiences and good business outcomes? There are several reasons why demonstrating this connection can be problematic. Many of these problems stem from the fact that these analyses are correlational in nature. Generally, all we can do is look at how two or more variables (e.g., customers’ levels of satisfaction and company profits) change together in real-world situations. We cannot conduct an experiment actually manipulating the customer experience to determine the effects of that manipulation. To do that, we would have to convince our clients to randomly assign their customers to groups — intentionally treating some customers poorly while giving others the normal level of customer service — and compare the different outcomes of those groups. Obviously, that will never happen, nor should it.

The fact that these studies are correlational in nature leads to two classic problems in interpreting their results.

• THE THIRD-VARIABLE PROBLEM:

College students in research courses often learn that a third variable can sometimes affect both the predictor and outcome variable in correlational research, and thereby distort the relationship between the two. In the case of linking the customer experience and business outcomes, the third variable is often high product demand.

A product that suddenly is in very high demand can lead to increases in sales and profits, but decreases in customers’ satisfaction with the sales process. This is because customers may have trouble finding the product, encounter long lines and wait times, have to deal with sales personnel who are overwhelmed with unusually high volumes of customers, and pay a premium for the hot product. Therefore, high demand is driving sales and profits up, while at the same time driving customer satisfaction with the sales experience down. Thus, there appears to be a negative relationship between sales and profits and the customer experience. When conducting linkage studies, there is not a lot we can do about this problem other than to try to control for potential third variables that might be influencing both the customer experience variable and the outcome variable. • BI-DIRECTIONAL RELATIONSHIPS:

Not only can increased sales and profitability seem to affect customer satisfaction through the indirect effects of a third variable like a hot product, but sales may affect customer satisfaction directly. Specifically, if sales and number of customers are down, it is much easier to satisfy those few customers who are left. I love to shop at stores that are in the early phases of going out of business (before they lay off staff). There are fewer shoppers to deal with, the staff is readily available to help me, and the shelves are usually well stocked. Because of this, stores with fewer sales often have higher levels of customer satisfaction. To address this issue when looking at the relationship between customer experience and sales, it is usually better to conduct the analysis across at least two points in time and relate change in customer satisfaction to change in sales. There are also a number of other pitfalls we need to be aware of when trying to relate the customer experience to business outcomes. These are related to what we actually measure and how we link them together to form our model of how customer experience links to business outcomes.

There are also a number of other pitfalls we need to be aware of when trying to relate the customer experience to business outcomes. These are related to what we actually measure and how we link them together to form our model of how customer experience links to business outcomes.

• INDIVIDUAL EXPERIENCES OFTEN AREN’T ADDITIVE:

Rawson, Duncan and Jones point out in their Harvard Business Review article “The Truth about Customer Experience” that many companies track transactional customer satisfaction and relate that to measures such as customer loyalty.

However, more important is a customer’s entire relationship with the brand or product. A customer’s overall satisfaction Making the Case for Improving the Customer Experience Sponsored Content CRM Magazine | October 2015 WP21 often will not be the sum or average of his or her individual transactional experiences.

For instance, I might be quite happy with the way my cable TV installation went or with how my automotive service event went — but I would have been even happier if I had not had to go through those events in the first place. In another common scenario, the effect of several great customer service events can easily be undone by one poor service event. Therefore, it is much better to use overall relationship measures of customer satisfaction rather than transactional measures when linking the customer experience to business outcomes.

• LAGGING INDICATORS:

Businesses typically respond quickly to low customer satisfaction ratings and slumping sales with improved customer service (e.g., better training, more employees, greater follow-up, etc.) and anticipate similarly quick increases in satisfaction ratings and business outcome metrics. However, while changes in customer experience metrics occur quickly, many changes in business outcome metrics take weeks, months or years to materialize.

For instance, if a dealership improves its sales experience, it may produce a small, short-term bump in sales due to more positive word of mouth recommendations.

However, the real bump in sales will come three to five years down the road, when customers who experienced those improved sales experiences are ready to purchase a new vehicle. This lagging indicator effect can cause it to appear as if changing the customer experience does not change business outcomes. Therefore, when conducting linkage studies, it is best to choose business outcome metrics that will show change in a relatively short amount of time.

• NONLINEAR RELATIONSHIPS:

Humans tend to think linearly. In this case, we think that there should be a straight-line relationship between the customer experience and business outcomes — the worse the experience, the worse the outcomes, and the better the experience, the better the outcomes. While this is generally true, the relationship often isn’t a straight line. The relationship tends to “flatten out” at the extremes of the customer experience scale. We’ll discuss why below. What is important to note is that linear measures (e.g., correlation coefficients and regression coefficients) of the link between customer experience and outcome variables may underrepresent their true relationship.

• UNDERSPECIFIED MODELS:

When people ask, “Why doesn’t the customer experience relate to sales?” they are often thinking of a very specific measure of customer experience and a very broad measure of sales. This is called an underspecified model because it is only considering one factor of many that influence the outcome measure.

For instance, in the automotive industry people often wonder why dealership sales satisfaction doesn’t relate more strongly to a vehicle brand’s sales. The reason is that the dealership sales experience is important but only a small part of what affects a brand’s sales. Other factors include vehicle quality and reliability, vehicle desirability, vehicle availability, the brand’s overall reputation, customers’ interactions with the brand, overall economic factors, and a whole host of other things. To address this issue in linkage studies, it is best to either use a simple linkage study in which the predictor variable and the outcome variable are “close together” in terms of causality, or perform a complex linkage study that takes into account all of the variables likely to affect the outcome variable.

What do these examples illustrate? We need to be thoughtful when investigating the relationship between improving the customer experience and producing positive business outcomes. However, when we are thoughtful, the positive relationships between customer experience and business outcome variables are almost always demonstrated. CONCLUSION Sometimes linkage analyses can produce counterintuitive results if researchers or businesses are not careful to account for all of the nuances in the data. Factors such as underspecified models, direction of causality, third variable problems, and putting too much distance between the predictor variable and the outcome variable all have deleterious effects. However, when done thoughtfully, a positive relationship between customer experience metrics and business outcome variables is almost always found. About MaritzCX MaritzCX combines technology, data, expertise, and services to help you instantly understand and improve every customer experience. This powerful combination brings together deep research expertise, award-winning technology, and best practice services unlike any other CX company.

MaritzCX provides everything companies need to transform all their static customer feedback into meaningful, actionable insights that ensure better business outcomes.

If you’re interested in CX, implementing a CX program, or need research for a specific line of business (LOB), let us help you.

To demo a product or to contact MaritzCX sales, call 385.695.2800 To download the Customer Experience Is Your Business eBook visit maritzcx.com/mcxbook Sponsored Content WP22 October 201 5 | CRM Magazine As the world grows steadily more competitive, it’s hard to fault organizations for wanting to operate as efficiently and cost-effectively as possible. But when it comes to managing the customer experience, viewing processes solely through the ROI lens may inhibit customer engagement and derail the customer journey. It can even cost you customers in the long term—particularly if you’re in a market with low barriers to entry.

At the heart of the issue are these simple questions: Are you truly engaging with your customers? Are you giving them the experience they want, or the experience you think they want? And are your process decisions completely based on ROI? It’s time to loosen up that Six Sigma belt and take a fresh look at specific actions to help you engage customers and expedite the customer journey.

1. ALIGN YOUR CHANNELS WITH CUSTOMER NEEDS.

For years, many organizations relied on the least expensive ways to serve their customers. But we’re in the era of digital disruption, and new channels— web, mobile, self-service, chat, and more—have dramatically changed customer expectations and the customer journey itself, especially within certain demographics. There’s no escaping this. If your competitors are easier to contact and do business with, it won’t take customers long to find out—or defect.

2. REFRESH YOUR VIEWPOINT.

Whether you are B2C or B2B, there is a tendency to work strictly from an “inside - out” viewpoint that targets efficiency, internal effectiveness, and productivity. That’s in stark contrast, however, to how customers view and approach sales and service experiences. They care about fundamental things, such as the product or service itself, price, quality, timeliness, and ease of doing business. But they also care about being engaged, treated, and valued as individuals. It’s no longer acceptable to defer responsibility for customer engagement to corporate marketing.

As an operations or technology leader, you’re responsible for developing the right processes and systems infrastructure to deliver it.

3. INCLUDE EVERYONE WHO IMPACTS THE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE.

Are you focusing on the customer experience during specific interactions at the point of purchase and/or during customer service transactions? That’s what many companies do first. While that’s a great start, there’s more that hangs in the balance, such as having the ability to get to the root cause of customer experience challenges, analyzing the issues, and taking corrective action.

To be sure, sales and customer service are critical, but in today’s omnichannel world, it’s critical to look beyond those areas and include everyone in the company who interacts with the customer, either directly or indirectly.

For example, your customers may interact with staff in procurement, legal, scheduling, training, billing, delivery, renewals, and disposals, as well as with your technicians and partners. These interactions are vital to delivering positive customer experiences and creating long-term relationships. 4. MOVE FROM PERSONAS TO PEOPLE.

Journey mapping and creating customer personas can be a great way to begin to understand your customer’s perspective.

But be careful not to do this in a vacuum.

Sitting in a room with a group of smart internal people and using the data you currently collect to project your views and perceptions to personas, and then developing the customer’s perspective can be risky. How do you know the data you are collecting is adequate? Do you understand the holistic customer journey, or just what happens at the transactional touchpoints?

So, how do you understand what your customers really want? You can start by asking them—in a coordinated, thoughtful and systemic way. Too many decisions are made without getting external customer input. They will tell you exactly what they want, and how they want it. You can also study the journey you take your customer on.

Then, you can invest your valuable capital (human and financial) in improvements that are meaningful to your customers and beneficial to the bottom line. Discover how customer engagement optimization can help you strike the critical balance between customer service and ROI at www.verint.com/customer-engagement . 1-800-4VERINT www.verint.com © 2015 Verint Systems Inc. All Rights Reserved Worldwide. Great Customer Experiences and ROI— Can You Have Both?

Sponsored Content CRM Magazine | October 2015 WP23 Customers expect to be able to communicate with companies through a variety of channels whenever they choose. However, when the rubber meets the road, many companies struggle to meet customers’ omnichannel communications expectations.

A big part of the reason for this disconnect is that while many companies provide customer support in different channels such as voice, chat, mobile, and email, these support functions are often handled separately by different parts of the contact center. As a result, this prevents customers from having a seamless, unified experience, especially when customers attempt to move from one channel to the next.

While providing customers with consistent support experiences across channels is critical to customer satisfaction, omnichannel customer support isn’t about replicating the customer support experience in each individual channel. It’s about optimizing each customer interaction seamlessly across the different channels used in the customer’s journey.

For instance, let’s say a retail customer orders a product online but they’ve misplaced the order number. When the customer calls back for this information, an agent who is able to see the thread of the customer’s interaction thanks to channel support integration is able to send the customer an SMS message with this information for a seamless interaction.

Companies that are able to work through these issues and deliver on customers’ omnichannel support expectations typically generate stronger business results than their peers. According to an Aberdeen Group study, companies that adopt omnichannel customer experience strategies enjoy 91 percent higher year over year customer retention rates than companies that don’t.

LAYING THE FOUNDATION A good starting point for addressing the omnichannel customer journey is to identify and understand the channels that customers prefer to use for support or would like to use for different types of support interactions. This can be achieved by developing a customer journey map to help plot out how customer segments use different channels for support and to identify and address any obstructions that prevent customers from moving effortlessly from one channel to the next.

Meanwhile, a consolidated agent desktop that provides agents with full system integration across all support channels, CRM, and other relevant customer systems enables associates to have a comprehensive and instantaneous view of a customer’s support history and interactions. By providing each agent with a complete picture of each customer and their channel behaviors, agents are able to provide knowledgeable and timely support. This results in an improved agent-customer experience and enhanced customer satisfaction. Providing customers with proactive outbound communications is a great way to offer customers helpful reminders on service appointments, online tutorials that can educate new product users and other types of assistance that can improve the customer experience and strengthen the customer-company relationship. By assessing the types of outbound communications customers prefer to receive, contact center leaders can then take steps to ensure that support channels are properly integrated to enable agents to support customers across those channels seamlessly. inContact is the cloud contact center software leader, helping organizations around the globe create high quality customer experiences. For more information, visit www.inContact.com or call 1-866-965-SaaS . facebook.com/inContact twitter.com/inContact Guiding the Omnichannel Customer Journey Providing customers with a seamless, unified channel experience boosts business outcomes Sponsored Content WP24 October 201 5 | CRM Magazine Many companies may miss or mishandle customer engagement opportunities. By delivering a fully integrated customer experience your company will improve customer retention, increase sales, improve customer satisfaction, receive referrals, and lower operational costs.

HOW TO DELIVER THE ULTIMATE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE Companies seeking to create the ultimate customer experience should strive to keep everything they do in context.

• When targeted customer segments respond to your campaigning, get them the right information the moment they click on your webpage.

• When a customer expresses interest with intent to buy be sure to update their customer profile with any new insights they provide, then offer the right help in the right context.

• When the customer makes the commitment to purchase , establish a foundation for success using your product and make certain they get the help they need to get started.

• During the lifecycle of regular use of the product, make sure the customer is connected to the right resources to answer questions, solve any problems, and repair anything that may go wrong. • At all stages , do everything possible to expand the relationship to increase the lifetime value of the customer through repeat sales at product end-of-life. DATA DRIVES PERSONALIZED ENGAGEMENT At each stage, providing and collecting data is key to your success.

• When the customer expresses interest, provide means to get their questions answered including telephone, online chat, email an expert, social media experiences and access to knowledge bases and product brochures. Be sure to collect those questions to have a record of their product concerns. • When the customer is ready to commit to the purchase, increase the bandwidth by adding escalated chat with an expert, video chat, co-browsing websites, shipping costs and other information to make the buying experience simple. • At the point where the buying decision is made , accelerate the process while increasing their satisfaction by offering a premium and making sure they know all their payment, shipping, and other options.

• Preclude any discomfort while the customer awaits delivery by keeping them informed of shipping progress at every step. Make sure they know everything they’ll need to know to get the product working as soon as it arrives. • Throughout the useful life of the product continue suggesting ways to get more value from the product. Make sure the customer knows how to easily obtain support. Capture all support questions or service requests to construct an ongoing history of the customer. MAKING THE MOST OF ALL DATA COLLECTED Data collected from every interaction during the customer experience is vital to your ability to continue to keep the perceived value high.

Companies that deliver the best customer experiences are highly informed, they understand the customer, and the customer’s history with their company. They fully appreciate each customer’s preferences, and know all the channels the customer may have engaged with them, driving an extremely personalized engagement that values customer’s needs and interests.

That data isn’t static either. You must continue to gather new information with each engagement, information that evolves from each interaction with the customer.

Successful customer engagement accumulates this information in real-time and incorporates that newfound learning into the evolving conversation. A big challenge for marketing and sales is that much of this knowledge and information exists across a multitude of systems and data sources that don’t communicate. BRING THE DATA TOGETHER TO CREATE THE ULTIMATE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE All the customer data you collect lives in multiple business systems and marketing applications. Most marketing applications were not designed to share information with each other, making it challenging to get the most out of marketing spend and driving a cohesive customer experience. One significant challenge is the data design of the CRM system is dramatically different than that of a marketing system. A CRM system is designed to support complex data relationships and human workflow, while a marketing system is designed for speed of execution. The marketing system may incorporate all of the information about a prospect or customer inside 1 or 2 data objects, while the CRM may use up to a dozen related data objects. As a result, it’s not practical to try to share all of the data between the 2 systems. This drives the need to identify critical information that needs to be shared to drive the most important business results and be precise when integrating data. There are three types of customer data you’ll want to collect that drive the three big areas of integration value to think about. They are:

1. How do you synchronize attribute data about a customer/prospect into the marketing or CRM system to drive highly targeted and personalized experiences? 2. How do I take information gathered in the marketing or sales interaction data and share it with the other systems for effective follow up and nurturing? 3. How do we close the loop and attach data regarding the outcomes or results you are looking to drive? SUMMARY:

Your ability to consistently drive the ultimate customer experience that will return tremendous benefits to you is rooted in your ability to manage this data and make it available at any touch point in the ongoing customer relationship. Using Digital Information to Create the Ultimate Customer Experience Sponsored Content CRM Magazine | October 2015 WP25 INTRODUCTION NEW GAME, NEW RULES. It did not happen overnight, but it happened.

Commoditization and global competition have put the squeeze on nearly every industry. To make matters worse, financial markets have become more demanding than in decades past. Everyone is looking for sustainable growth, but few have found the secret formula for achieving it.

What does this have to do with customer engagement? Everything. The rules of the game have changed.

YOU ARE NOT THE BOSS Customers are seizing control of the marketplace. They are more digitally connected, socially networked, and better informed than ever before. They have become savvy consumers in their personal lives and sophisticated buyers at work.

They source most of their information from third parties, and when they finally decide to interact with a business, they expect to be able to do their research, make a purchase, and get assistance on any channel they choose. They expect that each new interaction will be personalized and occur within the context of the last one. Their tolerance for fragmented experiences is lower than ever, and they are very much in control of their own journey.

TIME FOR ADVANCED THINKING This is a tall order for companies that have spent years investing in technology and establishing processes to manage a traditional customer relationship model. The old models were rooted in the idea that customers always move in a linear progression from awareness, to interest, desire, and action in a carefully orchestrated series of steps directed by a salesperson. That model divided marketing, sales, commerce, and customer service into silos with separate processes, tools, and goals.

It is time to toss out the old models. The modern customer journey is amorphous – spanning across channels and touch points.

Most important, each journey is unique. Whether buying or getting help for a product, customers will vary their process each time, based on what is convenient at that moment.

THE NEW CUSTOMER JOURNEY The journey from awareness to advocacy varies for each customer. It snakes and shifts, depending on each customer’s needs throughout. Businesses must deliver consistent engagement at each entry point and every phase.

PHASE 1 – AWARENESS The customer journey does not begin when people enter a store or visit a website.

It starts when they first become aware they have a need. A variety of sources create that moment – some your company can control, others it cannot.

PHASE 2 – DISCOVERY Customers are evaluating options at a high level. Their research is generally light and focused on their need rather than a specific business, product, or service. From quick Web searches to casual conversations with peers, customers are trying to get a sense of the scope of their requirements.

They are exploring both their need and potential ways to address it.

PHASE 3 – INTEREST During the Interest phase, customers cast a broad net to gather all their options, and quickly evaluate each one to determine if any can be dismissed. Their goal in this phase is to consider all of the possible solutions and narrow them down to a short list for an eventual purchase decision.

PHASE 4 – CONSIDERATION Your customer launches into the Consideration phase to make a final decision. This phase can vary in length, depending on the size of the short list, the number of key decision criteria, the quantity of stakeholders, and the size of the purchase.

PHASE 5 – ACTION The Action phase is when the purchase occurs. From a one-click online transaction to months of contract redlining and price negotiation, the purchasing process varies widely by industry. The Action phase is ultimately driven by the buying process, your company’s selling process, and any regulatory requirements governing the sale.

PHASE 6 – USE In the Use phase, customers have purchased their solution and are actively using it. For most industries, this is generally the longest phase of the customer journey, when people form their opinion of the product or service, and decide if your brand promise has been fulfilled. This phase is critical to developing loyalty and setting the stage for positive customer advocacy.

PHASE 7 – ADVOCACY The Advocacy phase is often short and may be interspersed among the other phases. Here, customers share their opinions, good or bad, online or in person.

These opinions are based primarily on experiences during the Consideration and Use phases, and are generally consumed by others during all phases of their customer journey. Engagement during the Advocacy phase should be a critical part of your growth strategy.

ONE SIZE DOES NOT FIT ALL Whether your customers are buying consulting services, camshafts, or cranberry juice, the phases of the customer journey do not change, and neither do their attributes.

What does change, by industry, is the relative percentage of time that customers spend in each of the phases, the level of engagement within each phase, and the length of the overall journey.

Do not forget to account for these factors when you map out your customers’ journeys. For more information about customer engagement solutions from SAP, please visit us at sap.com/customer-engagement Download the complete eBook at http://global.sap.com/community/ ebook/2015_04_customer_journey/index.

html#customerjourney_ebook/page/1 The Customer Journey: A Handbook for Meaningful (and Profitable) Engagement Sponsored Content WP26 October 201 5 | CRM Magazine New technologies are changing the face of customer service. Tech-savvy customers are always connected and expect service from an increasing number of channels.

Social media has given customers a voice, enabling them to disparage or promote organizations in a heartbeat.

A recent customer survey conducted by NICE found that customers are using on average 5.8 channels to communicate with their service providers. Whether it is via email, IVR, phone or social media, customers are communicating through a number of channels in an increasingly unpredictable way.

At NICE we have identified 5 key steps to help organizations with the strategy, tools, and tips required to utilize customer journey maps, putting the customer at the heart of the organization.

THE 5-STEP GUIDE TO SUCCESSFUL CUSTOMER JOURNEY MANAGEMENT 1. UNDERSTAND EACH INTERACTION Before starting to make sense of the end- to-end customer journey, it is important to take a step back and get a clear picture of what makes up customer experience.

In an attempt to increase customer engagement and reduce operational costs, organizations have been expanding the channels of communication and engagement available to their customers.

But each customer interaction needs to be properly tracked to understand its impact on the customer experience.

By integrating all interactions into customer journey maps, a culture of customer-centricity will arise and organizations will begin to understand the true customer journey in its entirety.

2. CONNECT THE MULTI- CHANNEL JOURNEY With data collected from every touch point, organizations will be able to move on to the next step in optimizing their customer journey maps – connecting the interactions.

Customer identities and behaviors across every touch point form a complete view of the multi-channel journey at the individual and aggregate levels.

An intuitive and holistic understanding of the journey experience will yield analysis into journey flows, enable identification of patterns and trends, and highlight pain points which provide the foundation of customer experience programs.

3. DERIVE INSIGHTS When measuring interactions, connecting the data is only half the challenge. The real insights can be derived from the details and emotion behind the journey.

Traditional analytics tools are able to process only structured data, such as transactions, but have limited or no ability when it comes to unstructured data, such as speech or texting. Organizations should employ a more sophisticated analytics tool that can unlock both structured and unstructured data, in order to get crucial insights into customer journeys.

4. OPERATIONALIZE This step is arguably the most crucial for creating perfect customer journeys – taking the insights and lessons learnt and operationalizing them by making them available and actionable to the relevant teams in real-time. Providing relevant customer journey information to employees will give them insights into observed customer behavior, identifying issues such as potential churn risk and up-sell opportunities in real time.

Further insights can be gleaned from patterns and persona mapping, which can automatically anticipate customer needs and predict future actions.

5. CONTINUOUSLY LEARN AND IMPROVE As insights are being operationalized, organizations will begin to see the benefits of real-time engagement. Customer loyalty will increase as quick solutions to their problems are offered, and they increasingly feel that the organization knows and understands their needs.

CONCLUSION With a well-implemented customer journey mapping system in place, organizations are well equipped to provide customers with a differentiated CX. That means service which is personalized, relevant and provided in real time.

The key to a successful CX program is empowerment.

Empowering… • Customers , by giving them the ability to jump across channels and still obtain a seamless experience.

• Employees , by guiding them with relevant data and the right tools to ensure success.

• Organizations , with the ability to put the customer at the core of every business decision: leading the “customer revolution”.

The time to bring customers into the heart of the organization is now. Make them feel understood, appreciated, and heard by optimizing their journeys and experiences. About NICE Systems NICE Systems (NASDAQ: NICE) is the worldwide leading provider of software solutions that enable organizations to take the next best action in order to improve customer experience and business results, ensure compliance, fight financial crime, and safeguard people and assets. NICE’s solutions empower organizations to capture, analyze, and apply, in real time, insights from both structured and unstructured Big Data. This data comes from multiple sources, including phone calls, mobile apps, emails, chat, social media, video, and transactions.

NICE solutions are used by over 25,000 organizations in more than 150 countries, including over 80 of the Fortune 100 companies. www.nice.com . The 5-Step Guide To Successful Customer Journey Management Sponsored Content CRM Magazine | October 2015 WP27 Companies are centering their contact center efforts and technology enhancements on improving end-to-end customer journeys. Customer satisfaction increases when companies focus on journeys rather than solely looking at individual interactions.

Competitively differentiating customer experience (CX) is at the core of optimizing those journeys. Being responsive to customers during their different journeys and delivering personalized experiences in this new mobile-first, social-enabled world requires modernized systems for most mid- sized contact centers.

Today, delivering great customer experience requires maximizing the time-to- value of enhancements and improvements to contact center capabilities. This means utilizing cloud-based applications and resources to speed up implementation and reduce capital expenditures.

Here are a few ways in which you can optimize your customer journeys:

REDUCE CUSTOMER EFFORT DURING JOURNEYS BY INTEGRATING SILOS Poor customer service and sales assistance comes when different departments or branch operations do not integrate their resources and efforts to support customers. Commonly, different customer touchpoints are siloed and fragmented within the organization across separate lines of business or divisions.

A cloud contact center more easily enables organizations to add capabilities, geographic coverage, and capacity as needed. Not only does this reduce customer effort during journeys, but it also reduces organizational effort − improving workload management, scheduling and quality control.

CONNECT WITH CUSTOMERS DURING JOURNEYS THROUGH NEW DIGITAL TOUCHPOINTS Your customers engage daily in conversations with family, friends and colleagues over their mobile devices and social networks. Increasingly, they are demanding that companies they do business with also support communications and connections over these same channels.

Clearly, a cloud-based contact center is the best way to add these new digital channels, to quickly support customers demanding interactions using their preferred touchpoint.

This enables you to scale channel capabilities from initial numbers of users to the broader customer base as adoption quickly grows.

DRIVE LOYALTY DURING JOURNEYS THROUGH PROACTIVE ENGAGEMENT Smart companies differentiate themselves not by waiting for customers to contact them, but by proactively reaching out and providing information and status updates in real time. This provides a higher level of customer care, and demonstrates a higher level of value placed in customer well-being.

Loyalty is the big benefit you gain when employing proactive communications to turn abandoned shopping carts into completed sales, and turn waiting customers into informed net promoters of your business.

IMPROVE JOURNEY QUALITY THROUGH WORKFORCE MANAGEMENT AND OPTIMIZATION Today’s mobile customers are being increasingly supported and serviced by distributed workers. Agents working from home or locations other than the central contact center are best supported in the Cloud.

Managing your workforce to support journeys across different channels leads to superior customer experiences. Workforce scheduling, real-time task management, and employee empowerment and enrichment should be tightly integrated with your contact center environment for maximum effectiveness.

PROTECT JOURNEY DATA FOR YOU AND YOUR CUSTOMERS’ PEACE OF MIND As systems move online and customers become more used to interacting with the Cloud, the focus on increased security, data protection and privacy is critical. A trusted cloud environment is one in which the vendor has industry certifications to help guarantee both the security and the availability of data. SUMMARY Customer journey management is a critical part of driving both loyalty and operational efficiencies. There are multiple ways to optimize journeys through a cloud contact center which provide benefits not only to customers, but also to the way your organization becomes more agile and capable of dealing with changing customer habits. As consumers move away from traditional telephones and computer interactions to mobile devices and digital channel connections, your business is faced with not only added contact center requirements, but also new competitive pressures.

Proactive communications ensure that customers are notified during critical stages of their journeys, and they begin to rely more on your ability to serve and inform them, building loyalty and trust. Employee loyalty also grows as workforce and quality management applications help your staff accomplish more in the time provided, and gain satisfaction from the increased efficiencies in serving customers. Trust is enhanced as the data protection and high availability of your contact center is maximized by a cloud deployment.

Overall, the benefits and scalability of the Cloud ensure that the journeys which your customers undertake are always low-effort and optimized for experience and satisfaction. Want more information?

If you want to learn more about building end- to-end journeys that will provide competitive advantage, reduce customer churn, and differentiate your brand from competitors, be sure to download our eBook, Supporting Customer Journeys using a Cloud Contact Center . Improve Customer Experience with Connected Digital Journeys Sponsored Content