Last week, I spoke at the CustomerThink customer experience researchers and practitioners sharing leading-edge practices. Bob Thompson, founder of CustomerThink, organized several sessions focusing on specific CX issues facing business today. In our session, titled Customer Service Excellence: How to Optimize Channel and Metrics to Drive Ominchannel Excellence, Stephen Fioretti, VP of Oracle and I addressed two areas about customer service. He talked about how customer service organizations can align their channel strategy to customer needs by guiding them to the right channel based on the complexity and time sensitivity of interactions. I talked about the different types of metrics to help us understand relationship-level and transaction-level attitudes around service quality.
Self-Service Channel Adoption Increases but Delivers a Poor Experience
Stephen reported some interesting industry statistics from Forrester and Technology Services Industry Association. While the adoption of self-service is on the rise, customers are substantially less satisfied (47% satisfied) with these channels compared to the traditional (and still most popular) telephone channel (74% satisfied). So, while automated service platforms save companies money, they do so at the peril of the customer experience. As more customers adopt these automated channels, companies need to ensure they deliver a great self-service experience.
Improving the Customer Experience of Automated Channels through Behavioral/Attitudinal Analytics
In the talk, I showed how companies, by using linkage analysis, can better understand the self-service channel by analyzing the data behind the transactions, both behavioral and attitudinal. After integrating different data silos, companies can apply predictive analytics on their customer-generated data (e.g., web analytics) to make predictions about customers’ satisfaction with the experience. Using web analytics of online behavior patterns, companies might be able to profile customers who are predicted to be dissatisfied and intervene during the transaction to either improve their service experience or ameliorate its negative impact.
Stephen and I cover a lot more information in the webinar. To learn more, you can access the complete CX Forum webinar recording and slides here (free registration required).
