An innovative prescription benefit management leader was filling almost two billion prescriptions annually but lacked the tools and data to provide visibility into performance and enable more accurate data.

The company brought in Verint Enterprise Workforce Management, Verint Desktop and Process Analytics, and Verint Advanced Scorecards and gained a new understanding of workflow and improved visibility into performance.

As a result, the company saved approximately $200,000 a month by reducing downtime and balancing workloads of over 5,000 employees.

Read more about how this company found success through Verint.

The post Innovative Prescription Benefit Management Leader Find Its Remedy with Verint appeared first on Customer Experience Management Blog.

Is your organization struggling to achieve its performance goals due to operational silos? If so, you’re not alone.

I see this time after time across industries and company cultures. Data, systems and processes differ from group to group.

Wouldn’t it be great if the key management processes across the organization were consistent—with a single repository for operational data?

It all starts with an operational framework that combines technology and business processes together to help drive a culture of continuous optimization. Learn where you stand by taking the Back-Office Management Process Survey—you’ll see where you excel and where you have improvement opportunities. We’ll also send you a complimentary copy of the benchmark report that will be created based on survey data.

Watch my short video. And when you’re ready, take the survey!

The post How Effective Are You at Operational Management? appeared first on Customer Experience Management Blog.

The Intelligent Contact Center meets customers when and where they are, providing connected service on a variety of channels.

So, what does this actually look like in practice—and how can you get started to provide intelligent service to your customers?

For one home repair and maintenance provider, intelligent service centered around connected systems. Through extensive customer and employee feedback, the company realized that employees needed to navigate across several disconnected applications to provide service to customers. This resulted in slow and sometimes inaccurate information.

To resolve this issue, the company deployed the Verint Employee Desktop, which combined data from their 13 systems into a single interface and resulted in a quick turnaround in agent productivity. Training time decreased, while first contact resolution increased. At the same time, customer satisfaction ratings rose to 94 percent, indicating the ultimate success of their efforts.

While the previous example focused on connecting systems of record, another customer focused on connecting the systems of engagement used by their customers. This large insurance company found that their customers were using more and more channels to communicate in their daily lives, especially digital channels such as live chat and web self-service.

So, this company deployed Verint Web Self-Service, Email Management and Live Chat to allow their customers to communicate when and how they want to. The customers responded immediately to the change. Conversion rates for premiums written online doubled when live chat was used, and a total of 40% of high-cost change of address transactions were moved to self-service.

In all, the organization saved an estimated seven figures in just the first 12 months.

Do you want your company to join the examples above as a success story in intelligent customer service? Join guest speaker Kate Leggett, VP and Principal Analyst of Forrester Research and Kelly Koelliker, Director, Solutions Marketing of Verint on March 30 @ 1 p.m. ET for a live one-hour webinar. Learn how to become a smarter and better connected organization to keep pace with the new breed of customer—one who is smarter, more engaged, connected and informed than ever before.

Register here.

The post The Intelligent Contact Center in Action appeared first on Customer Experience Management Blog.

Do your customers know you are really listening to them?

These days it’s more important than ever that organizations respond in a timely manner to their customers’ concerns and ideas. It’s quite likely that customer surveys have provided a valuable reference point for any other feedback-gathering initiative your organization has taken.

When you are ready to go beyond the survey, you have some great options. Some of these are traditional and others leverage new technology tools that give remarkable and immediate insight into how customers feel about their interactions with your company.

In my new blog for Customer Think, I discuss five methods that can help you gain a clearer understanding of what is affecting your customers.

Read more.

The post Beyond Surveys: 5 Methods to Learn More About Your Customers appeared first on Customer Experience Management Blog.

Chief Data and Analytics Officer

March 6-8; Sydney, Australia

Verint’s Belinda Haden, head of customer analytics, Asia Pacific, will present “Discussion Group: Operationalizing Analytics to Drive Value” on March 7 at 2:30 p.m. AEDT. Haden will share ways to speed up the “time to value” of data programs and projects—and how to encourage a culture of test and learn with ‘fast-fail’ KPIs to foster learning and help enable innovation. She will share experiences, challenges, wins and the future of successfully using analytics to drive value.

Making Sense of Compliance

March 7 and 14; Ovum and Verint Webinar Series

These two joint UK-based webinars will walk through the complexities of the new financial regulations around PCI Compliance, General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID II) and vulnerable customers. Each webinar will show how technology can help organizations comply and secure a competitive advantage. Ovum’s Rik Turner, senior analyst, and Verint’s Robert Barnes, global vice president, product strategy, will present “GDPR:  The New Regulations and Its Implications on Organizations” at 10 a.m. GMT on March 7.

The European Union’s (EU) GDPR legislation takes effect on May 25—all organizations need to be ready, regardless of whether they have operations located within the EU. Required changes include the appointment of a data protection officer (DPO), and potentially hefty fines can accompany data breaches. Turner and Barnes will review the impact of the new regulation on all firms operating in the EU—and how technology can help them comply.

On March 14 at 10 a.m. GMT, Ovum’s Dan Mayo, chief analyst, and Verint’s Alexander Fischer, director enterprise WFO, EMEA, will discuss MiFID II and its impact on retail financial services once it comes into play in January 2018. Changes, requirements and implications for organizations include:

• Extension of record-keeping requirements for order and processing data
• Mandatory recording of client communications across all channels
• Retrievable recordings for at least five years to ensure compliance

Mayo and Fischer will discuss how to help ensure existing processes are equipped and flexible enough to adapt to and comply with these new regulations.

Consero Customer Experience Forum

March 12-14; Pasadena, California

Verint’s Nancy Porte, vice president, global customer experience, will present a session called “On All Fronts: The Omni-Channel Experience & Emerging Trends” on March 13 at 8 a.m. PT. Do you know what consistency in CX really means? It’s important to help customers feel like they are landing on the same planet each time they interact with you. Do you know what omni-channel efforts are creating the most valuable experiences for your customers—and why? Porte will help attendees identify internal breakdowns across channels and how to mitigate them.

The post Verint Speakers: The Omnichannel Customer Experience, Analytics-Driven Value and Financial Compliance appeared first on Customer Experience Management Blog.

The mail-order pharmacy unit of a healthcare insurer recently upgraded to the latest version of Verint^® Workforce Optimization^™. The upgrade was no easy undertaking as it extended the solutions to include thousands of employees in blended environments, in which staff engaged with customers on the phone and performed order fulfillment off the phone. 

At Verint’s most recent Engage customer conference, the insurer shared the following six best practices with attendees.

1. Plan, plan, plan. With the number of solutions, roles and constituents involved, the insurer spent a full year planning for the migration before actually flipping the switch.
2. Create advocates out of your managers and directors. Managers and directors were charged with setting the vision and creating enthusiasm for the change among their team members and front-line staff.
3. Identify and recruit subject matter experts (SMEs) in each business area. The SMEs helped shape the direction the insurer took with the solutions. They became champions of the initiative and trainers during the deployment. Even after the upgrade, they are key contributors, helping the insurer identify and problem-solve issues as they arise.
4. Establish a process for error resolution before you start. Working with Verint, establish how you will communicate errors and what the escalation process will be. For example, what’s the service-level agreement on issues? Will Verint need screenshots or video?
5. Allow Verint access to remote into your system. The insurer highly recommended allowing Verint remote access to your environment to replicate errors and test changes. It can make the process so much simpler and speed up issue resolution.
6. Create a lab environment and conduct user adoption testing (UAT). The lab environment allows you to iron out the kinks before going into full production. During UAT, Verint application consultants focus on how the Verint solution works in your environment. Does the software work in the way that different groups or types of users expect? Based on the results and feedback from a test group of users, Verint can make final adjustments to help optimize your solution before it goes live.

The “big bang” benefit that the insurer is most excited about is the new Performance Management user interface and functionality.  The solution provides greater visibility into KPIs and performance trends for not only employees and managers, but also the analytics, process and quality teams.

To learn more about these Performance Management features, read the earlier blog post, “The New Face of Performance Management.”

The post A Customer’s Best Practices for Upgrading to Verint Workforce Optimization appeared first on Customer Experience Management Blog.

Contact center leaders and managers understand time and resource challenges all too well. Add an ever-increasing need for a great customer experience to the mix, and it’s clear that every advantage is needed to stay competitive.

In many customer service environments, IVR and WFO analytics have not been considered together—and that presents an improvement opportunity. Why see only half the picture when you can see the whole one?

Today’s contact centers need easily available and actionable data analytics to gain the insights needed to keep their agents successful—and their customers satisfied.

Contact Solutions’ Andrea Katsivelis explores the importance of this combination—and the powerful advantages it offers.

Read her blog.

The post Rev Up the Pulse of Contact Center Operations appeared first on Customer Experience Management Blog.

Verint recently took part in the Customer Response Summit in Las Vegas, a forum for customer experience and customer service executives.  One of the primary themes of the conference was “Leaders Learning from Leaders.”  

Verint’s contribution to this theme was an interactive general session called “Customer Engagement LIVE!” where we grouped executives into discussion groups of nine or ten for interactive discussions and summary presentations.  Here are some of the highlights we heard during the read back presentations around customer engagement strategies:

What’s Old Is New Again. When is the last time you received a handwritten note or personal email from a business you engage with? It was memorable, wasn’t it? Think of ways you can incorporate genuine, personalized touches with customers. The strategy can be scalable: one “wow” moment can generate genuine delight and powerful word-of-mouth amplification.

Think Mobile. Do you have a mobile strategy? The need is clear: provide information, customer support, “wow” moments via mobile channels. But be careful: consumers often have limited ability to “digest” content you are sharing with them (because they are at the airport, walking, at home, multi-tasking), so be sure your content and communications are as short and to-the-point as you can.

Develop a Journey Map as Part of Your Customer Experience Strategy. Our group defined a journey map as a diagram that illustrates the steps your customers go through when they engage with your company across different channels and touch points. The more touch points you have, the more complicated—but necessary—the journey map becomes. Creating a customer journey map is an investment but is well worth the cost. For some creative ideas on journey maps, check out this recent blog post by Verint’s Nancy Porte Five Tips for Building a Customer Journey Map.

Develop a Comprehensive Work-from-Home Strategy. One great reason to offer work from home is that you have the ability to recruit some of your organization’s biggest “fans,” regardless of their location. If you offer part time or flex time, you could have highly enthusiastic providers of information—and raving fans—who support your solutions or services. The customer experience these fans deliver could be very meaningful.

Build the Feeling of an In-Store Experience Online. Meet customers at the right moment when they are challenged. Know when they are about to defect. Provide the support they need when they need it. (How are you doing in this area? One idea is to implement a journey map project as mentioned above.)

Consider an Automation Pilot. Organizations are under pressure to increase processing efficiency and productivity, reduce errors, cut operational expenses, and maintain security and regulatory compliance. Key advancements in the areas of robots/bots, artificial intelligence, and machine learning are creating opportunities to service and engage with customers like never before.

Organizations should consider automating repetitive and time-consuming processes, allowing employees to focus on more complex tasks, cross-selling and delivering a personalized experience. The net: position automation as beneficial—and not a threat to your employees’ jobs.

Do you have some creative or best practices ideas to add? We’d love to hear those, too. Help us continue the conversations and submit your idea in the Comments section below.

The post Customer Engagement LIVE! Executive Summary appeared first on Customer Experience Management Blog.

Renowned photojournalist, author, and adventurer Dewitt Jones will be a keynote speaker at the Verint Engage Global Customer Conference in Orlando.

Held May 22- 25, Engage provides a unique forum for Verint customers and partners to network with industry leaders, share ideas and perspectives, and learn from other attendees and speakers—including Jones, who spent 20 years capturing stories from around the world as a freelance photographer for National Geographic.

Jones demonstrated his skill behind a camera early in his career, when two documentary films he produced were nominated for Academy Awards before he was 30 years old. He is also known and respected in the commercial photography world, where he has photographed advertising campaigns for leading consumer brands.

Additionally, he is the author of nine books, including The Nature of Leadership, created in collaboration with Stephen R. Covey.

By combining stories from his career with his extraordinary photographs, Jones teaches both creativity and vision. His genuine style and ability to connect with audiences helps them see the world with new eyes and shows them how to tap into and rediscover their own creative gifts.

Jones takes the stage on the morning of May 23.  His presentation is one of the highlights of this action-packed conference, which features breakout sessions, user groups, demonstrations, pre-conference workshops, and much more. For more information or to register for the event, visit the conference website.

The post Photojournalist and Author Dewitt Jones to Speak at Verint Engage Customer Conference appeared first on Customer Experience Management Blog.

We love “before and after” pictures.

A house that’s fallen into disrepair can be renovated into a design showpiece. An abandoned, malnourished puppy can be nursed back to health. A closet or garage can be organized from a complete mess into a system that is easier to use day in and day out.

Why are these contrasts so appealing? Because they help us to see the potential in a way that can inspire us to tackle a similar change with the expectation of similar positive results.

The same is true with written case studies. We value the information that is shared from the customer’s viewpoint that articulates what the previous challenges were, what actions were taken to address those problems, and the business benefits and ROI realized.

Organizations using Robotic Process Automation (commonly known in the industry as RPA) see the before and after results of each new automation firsthand. (What is Robotic Process Automation? View this short video to learn more.)

Here’s a before and after example from an organization using RPA:

The customer service department of a multinational technology company needed to migrate their customers to new service contracts at the end of the current term as part of the renewal process.

Before they implemented RPA, the employees in the group would need to manually transfer the customer’s information from the old contract to the new one and then send it out.

The company used Robotic Process Automation to automatically process more than 65,000 service contracts, migrating them to the new documents upon renewal.

The “After” view showed a big change—the time for each transaction went from 12 minutes down to 7 minutes, improving productivity more than 40%. As an even more important benefit, however, the improved accuracy in the new contracts migrated by the RPA software robots led to improved customer satisfaction and reduced cost of operations.

Want to learn more? We’d love to share more before and after stories with you.

Read our Executive Perspectives: Prioritizing Your Organization’s Processes for Automation or contact Verint today at info@verint.com.

The post Before and After Robotic Process Automation appeared first on Customer Experience Management Blog.

Milestones are important reminders. What will your brand’s promise and purpose be in 2017, and where does the Customer Experience (CX) Program fit in? Perhaps more importantly, what should we as CX professionals consider about the brand?

It’s no secret that the New Year is when most of us slow down for a moment to ponder life—what we’re doing right and where room for improvement lies.

For the cynic, such introspection is all too often brushed off as a formulaic nod to the calendar and the exuberance of the holiday season that is too quickly forgotten. On some level, however, the cynics have a point. Let’s face it, how many times have we all started the year off with great intentions to eat better and exercise more?

Even so, I’ve always preferred to look at the start of the New Year as a great time to take stock of where things are—not only in my personal life, but also with my CX program. Setting time aside to review the achievements of the CX team, and determine where more needs to be done, has become a tradition in its own right. And over the years, one question has become an integral part of my process of closing out one year and beginning a new one:

What will the brand’s promise and purpose be in 2017?

The topic of brand strategy absolutely lies with our marketing experts, but the more I talk with customers, the more I hear the undeniable connection between their experience and brand perception. In fact, at a recent event, a customer shared how his organization really felt that we delivered on the promise of what our solutions and services can provide. That is when it became clear to me that the brand sets expectations, but it’s the customer experience that meets those expectations (or not).

So, yes, there’s a symbiotic relationship between CX and brands. In fact, I consider the relationship in three significant ways. When taking that annual inventory and setting resolutions, I approach each of the three in a deliberate fashion, monitoring progress and results and planning for the following year.

Three Ways CX Impacts Your Brand

1. CX Supports the BrandMarketers and branding experts may apply a more nuanced view, but for the purpose of CX the brand promise is just what, when everything else is stripped away, you promise to do for your customers. Similarly, the brand purpose is what the organization exists to do (not in the sense of making money or gaining market share), and what value it seeks to provide with the products and services it offers.

   The Verint brand offers improved customer engagement and operational efficiencies. CX is a primary mechanism through which the brand promise and purpose are transformed from aspirational and hypothetical ideas into reality. As an example, our annual survey indicates that customers wanted more than an effective system implementation. Specifically, they want to understand the path from point-of-purchase to point-of-value. With that knowledge, we’re redesigning the onboarding process to proactively communicate this path, accompanied by a detailed view of the process and resources available.

2. CX Helps Evolve the BrandIn past columns, we’ve explored not only how to gather and track data from the CX program, but also how that same information benefits other business units and the organization as a whole. Those who oversee the purpose and promise of the brand are particularly well positioned to benefit from information gathered through the CX program. All brands evolve and CX done right can play an important role in the process. The marketers and strategy teams, for which the brand is a key focus of their work, should be the first people you think of when starting a new project or measuring the results of a longstanding one.

   Since Verint’s brand promise includes the delivery of operational efficiency, all of the surveys and efforts to gauge customer perceptions embodies a section on how the company is performing. After all, the customer-facing and customer-impacting functions must also be efficient in their dealings with customers to make its brand promise a reality. We’ve seen changes in customer perception over the years and have shared the insights with marketing and strategy teams so they can reflect the changes in the brand promise.

3. CX Drives the BrandIn today’s age, we see CX more clearly playing a role in driving the brand, but the reality is that the customer experience has always driven and defined brands, with or without the brand owner’s cooperation. Henry Ford promised to make automobiles accessible to the average American and in keeping with that focus on economy and value, consumers could buy cars in every color as long as it was black. The customer experience, and their demand for more choices, resulted in a brand that ultimately conveyed economy, luxury and distinction.

When the customer experience demands change, brands must adapt accordingly. The greatest brand promise and purpose means little if the customer experience leaves customers with a very different impression. In fact, you can make a strong argument that CX today drives the brand to a greater extent than ever before.

Once you begin to appreciate this increasingly direct relationship between CX and the brand—and the impact the CX team has on the brand—it quickly becomes apparent just how much of a difference the CX team can make. This applies to the interactions with customers it shapes, and the ability it gives companies to truly hear the voice of the customer and to refine the brand accordingly.

What’s Your Brand Promise Question?

To align CX efforts with the promise and purpose of the brand, it’s important to have what can best be described as a “brand promise question.” The value of this question is two-fold: First, because it cuts to the core of the brand, it can serve as a great litmus test when asking if any new CX initiatives align with the brand. Secondly, and more importantly, asking it and tracking related customer sentiments enables you to answer two singular questions: Is the brand, and its promise and purpose, consistent with the reality of how customers view it? And, is the brand evolving and if so, how?

You can create an effective brand promise question by considering the following:

• What benefit, more than anything else, are customers seeking when they do business with you?
• What do departments across the organization want customers to attain through the company’s products or services regardless of the role these departments play?
• Would a change in how customers answer this question be considered important?

Increasingly, businesses are realizing that the brand is not what we say it is. Rather, it is what the customers say it is. With instantaneous communication and social media, flawed CX will impede even the most robust brand. Brand becomes a guiding principle for the CX team against which all processes and systems—from onboarding, to service delivery, renewals and billing—should be vetted to ensure quality and alignment. With this diligence and a strong CX program, 2017 just might be the finest year yet for your brand.

This blog originally appeared on CustomerThink on December 9, 2016.

The post CX Can Make 2017 the Finest Year Yet for Your Brand: 3 Ways appeared first on Customer Experience Management Blog.

How committed are you to engaging with customers?

Leading organizations share a commitment to engaging with customers—capturing their feedback across all channels and then tailoring their omnichannel approach to their customers’ individual needs and preferences.

Have you considered if your omnichannel strategy is customer-centric or self-centric? If you’re not capturing feedback from customers across all of your channels, your approach may be more self-centric than you think.

Read more in my recent article.

The post Is Your Omnichannel Strategy Customer-Centric or Self-Centric? appeared first on Customer Experience Management Blog.

We hear a lot today about employee engagement. But according to the Hay Group, “engagement alone does not drive employee effectiveness.” Employees also need to be enabled.

In other words, employees need to be in the right role and given a supportive environment with no significant barriers to performance.”¹ To measure and manage employee effectiveness, organizations need:

• Operational dashboards that aggregate performance data from across the organization for better decision making.
• Individual and team scorecards that provide data-driven performance metrics to focus employees on the right behaviors and drive accountability.
• Access to coaching and eLearning to identify and rectify knowledge and skill gaps that help ensure employees have what they need to perform their jobs.
• An employee feedback program that gathers feedback from employees to increase employee engagement, effectiveness and retention.

Here are some steps you can take to improve employee effectiveness in your operations.

1. Conduct an employee skills and proficiency inventory.
2. For each role, identify the key performance metrics/indicators (KPIs) that tie to desired business outcomes and company priorities.
3. Identify the data sources to feed the KPIs and gaps where no data source is available or accessible.
4. Create a standardized performance management framework across all groups with multiple views that are role- and function-specific: individual scorecards, team, group/department and enterprise dashboards
5. Establish new managerial processes that use performance data to identify opportunities sooner and increase the effectiveness of employee coaching.

Most operations managers lack visibility into what employees are doing—and when, and for how long. A modest first step would be to understand what percent of time employees are spending on production vs. non-production activities.

Many organizations have found a 10 percent increase in productivity just by capturing this metric. A leading online higher education provider increased productivity from 5 to 15 percent by giving frontline staff visibility into their performance scorecards that measure their actual performance against activity standards.

Employee effectiveness is one of the five key components of an optimized back-office management process. To learn how your organization ranks against our Back-Office Management Process Maturity model, take the self-assessment survey.

¹ “Employee Effectiveness – employee engagement and enablement survey,” The Hay Group website.

The post Employee Engagement Does Not Equal Employee Effectiveness appeared first on Customer Experience Management Blog.

As a global laboratory supply and distribution company, VWR needed a platform to capture, collect and analyze customer feedback.

To better capture the voice of the customer, the company selected Verint Enterprise Feedback Management (EFM)—through which the company has been able to identify areas of improvement, assess training needs, and hold agents responsible to a standard of customer care.

As a result, VWR has been able to successfully understand and address how they are performing for customers and change when needed.

Read more about how VWR International has used Verint to its advantage.

The post VWR International Puts Verint Enterprise Feedback Management to Work appeared first on Customer Experience Management Blog.

I recently shared my thoughts with the Technology Services Industry Association (TSIA) about how a connected, contextual and consistent approach to customer service helps customers do business efficiently—and then get back to their busy lives.

Moreover, employees benefit too, because a central set of cross-channel tools gives them the unified customer history, joined up processes and consistent answers they need.

Everyone wins.

Read my blog for more.

The post Connected, Contextual, Consistent—Intelligent Customer Service appeared first on Customer Experience Management Blog.

Toward the end of 2016 I had the opportunity to hear the perspectives of many people who worked at city, state and national government and who participated in the first few Citizen2020 ‘Conversations Workshops.’

Our most recent workshop was held in San Francisco just a few weeks after Donald Trump was elected President.

Many of the spokespeople at that event were speculating as to how a Trump presidency might make fundamental changes to President Obama’s commitment to technology as a means of transforming government. Perhaps the new President’s commitment to social media (especially Twitter) implies a greater focus on grassroots citizen engagement.

Who knows?

The Editor of Citizen2020, Jeff Peel, has been reviewing some of the more interesting articles and reports published during 2016 and provides an interesting overview in this short ‘perspectives’ primer. He also references source articles—from IDC, McKinsey, 18F and Fast Company—that provide insight into the reasons we need digital transformation and the prize we’ll win if we achieve better, citizen-focused services.

Technology, of itself, is not the means to achieve better digital services. To an extent, service enabled by digital technology is a no-brainer. Most people get this. But leadership and commitment are needed to create services fit for purpose. Thinking about citizen experience and tangible improvements in business processes are the routes to better provision.

I highly recommend Jeff’s short paper—and the articles upon which his reflections are based. Click here to download it.

The post 2017: Transforming Government Perspectives appeared first on Customer Experience Management Blog.

While the world has embraced digital for both their entertainment and business purposes, something has emerged recently that may surprise a few people.

The human element of customer service is not going anywhere—in fact, it may be more important than ever. A Verint survey of more than 24,000 customers across 12 countries, in collaboration with research firm Opinium, provided some important insights on how to find the right balance between digital and human customer service.

That’s right—people still want to connect with people.

So, to provide exceptional customer experiences, businesses need to deeply understand evolving customer preferences and attitudes. Through mining human interactions such as phone calls, deep customer insights can emerge that can then be acted upon for competitive advantage.

I explain this more in my recent article in Insurance Post. Read more.

The post The Surprising Answer to the FinTech Threat appeared first on Customer Experience Management Blog.

A recent Insurance Networking News article by Nathan Golia (@NathanGolia) references a West Monroe Partners’ study on data analytics in insurance companies that found “Two-thirds of the 122 respondents to the survey said data quality and accuracy was the greatest challenge to advanced analytics.”

But when done right, the use of quality data analytics can lead to “increased engagement, improved production by existing advisors and reduced attrition.”

We too have heard similar complaints from customers who are looking for one source of operating data that everyone in a company agrees is the real, trusted number with which to plan and measure performance. Without this definitive information, people spend a lot of time arguing about the validity of numbers, the impact of a challenge or opportunity, and the cause of issues and/or breaks in processes.

“One version of the truth” is hard to come by because of:

• Organizational silos, each with different tools, methodologies and metrics
• Disparate systems with little real-time data
• A status quo mentality.

The following two case studies demonstrate how organizations across various industries broke through these barriers to create a standardized framework and an acknowledged, one version of the truth to improve operational agility and performance.

An HR services outsourcer struggled with managing seasonal peaks, resorting to excessive overtime and temporary help to manage demand. It wanted the agility to move resources between the contact center and back office as customer demand fluctuated. However, in order to share resources, it needed a single source of data to get insight into the types and volume of work being handled, forecasted demand and true capacity needs.

They implemented a Verint Enterprise Workforce Management solution across functions which increased accuracy and enabled the company to handle a larger amount of work items for their clients’ customers with the same number of people—saving one of the outsourcer’s clients $100,000. Verint Enterprise Performance Management scorecards enabled them to effectively measure front and back-end productivity, even if an individual switched between functions. It allowed them to redeploy resources based on what the true needs of the work were—and still track key measures such as quality, adherence, productivity and customer survey scores.

The outsourcer itself saved $300,000 in overtime in the first year and, as a side benefit, was able to generate cost-to-serve reporting by customer and product line.

A large insurance company had created a shared services group which was charged with developing a global, standardized performance management framework and consistent metrics that would help it break down silos between its many companies, functions and locations. The insurer also turned to the employee desktop as the source of trusted data and implemented Verint Desktop and Process Analytics and enterprise performance management. The insurer subsequently experienced greater processing consistency and productivity.

Specifically, they’ve seen a 36 percent increase in time spent in production applications, and a dramatic decrease in time spent on non-production-related activities, saving them over $9 million USD.

Ultimately, the HR outsourcer, insurance company, and numerous other organizations have chosen the employee desktop as the trusted source of data for their operational and performance management reporting.  The standardized performance management framework across functions provides management and employees with the data, tools and disciplines needed to be successful in their roles, break down silos, improve operational agility, and meet organizational goals.

The post Organizational Agility Hampered by Data Quality appeared first on Customer Experience Management Blog.

Building a great journey map is not easy.

In our experience, the best approach is to make the initial investment in a holistic map and its supporting customer data, and then drill down to solve transactional issues in the next phase.

Holistic maps help us take the customer’s view—and that’s not always easy for a company to do if they are looking at a single part of the journey.

I say this because the more you know about your customers, their experiences with your company and what’s most important to them, the greater the return you’ll get from your mapping investment.

In my new blog for CustomerThink, I discuss five key steps that will help keep your building process on-track.

Read more.

The post A Tool For Positive Change: Five Tips for Building a Customer Journey Map appeared first on Customer Experience Management Blog.

These days, organizations across all industries need to make good use of their time and resources—and discover ways to strengthen customer relationships.

Verint customers have the opportunity to do all three in sunny Orlando, Florida, May 22-25 at the Verint Engage Global Customer Conference.

Our agenda is packed with opportunities to learn from experts, share insights, and network with other attendees. Here are just a few of the sessions we have planned:

• A premier cruise line will share best practices, lessons learned, and the benefits it receives from Verint’s strategic planning functionality.
• A not-for-profit financial cooperative will explain its approach to dividing a large speech analytics sentiment category (“confusion”) into manageable pieces.
• A healthcare organization will explain how it maximized its investment in workforce management and optimized its operations by adopting flex scheduling.
• A leading personal lines insurer will share how it maximizes the use of desktop and process analytics within its contact center operations.

If you’re a Verint customer, why not share your story as well? It’s a great way to gain recognition and build your company’s brand.  If your topic is accepted, you’ll receive a complimentary conference pass (up to a $1,095 value).  Click here today to complete and submit a short speaking proposal form—they’re being accepted through April 14.

Have you heard about the sweet deal on registration that we’re offering for Valentine’s Day?  From now until February 15, you can purchase one registration for your organization and get another for 40 percent off.  Email us at conference@verint.com for your special discount code.

We’ll see you this summer in Orlando!

The post What’s in Store at the Verint Engage Global Customer Conference? appeared first on Customer Experience Management Blog.

Speech Analytics (SA) was introduced to the call or contact center a decade or so ago. SA transcribes and analyzes audio in every phone call to discover powerful, rich actionable insights.

It has now reached a stage akin to how other contact center technologies such as Quality Management (QM) and Workforce Management (WFM) are viewed as must-haves by contact centers.

Among the multitude of factors that make SA a must have are:

• Despite the exponential growth of self-service and digital mediums of customer engagement such as chat and social media, the traditional phone call, or voice, continues—and is expected to continue—to be the dominant mode of customer engagement for the next few years.
• The latest generation of SA has taken giant strides in improving accuracy, speed and ease of use, and lowering the cost of ownership.
• SA can be flexibly deployed and used either on premises or in the cloud.
• There are now several well-documented case studies of organizations having achieved tangible benefits in multiple areas, both in the contact center, as well as in customer-engaging operations in the broader organization. I offer brief examples of areas of impact below.

Speech Analytics can deliver business value across the organization. It can impact both:

1. Contact Center Performance and
2. Customer Experience

The business impact of SA on contact center performance can be categorized into:

Cost Reduction: SA can help improve operational efficiency and reduce costs by detecting self-service issues and agent knowledge gaps, and reducing repeat calls, handle time, holds and transfers.

Quality Management: SA helps evaluate a larger “statistically valid” sample of calls, eliminate human bias in selecting calls for evaluation, focus on high-value calls, and enable targeted agent coaching.

Sales Effectiveness: SA can compare successful to non-successful sales calls and agents, find the best words and phrases that lead to a sale, and identify words and phrases that are sales detractors.

Compliance: SA can monitor 100% of interactions for agent script adherence and help reduce the risk of breaches, even if they’re very rare. It also allows organizations to show their internal processes and solutions to regulators.

The business impact of SA on customer experience can be categorized into:

Reduce Customer Churn: SA can examine “churn history” calls to detect root causes and discover common calling patterns, identify at-risk customers and predict “super detractors,” intercept at-risk customers and learn from their success.

Improve CSAT: SA helps increase understanding of what drives high and low CSAT—and help spot early-warning signals before they go viral on social media.

Detecting Business Process Issues: SA can reveal business process issues in other departments and processes in the organization that can impact the overall customer experience.

In summary, SA can have tremendous and broad positive impact in optimizing your customer engagement.

Click here to learn more about case studies and videos on SA successes. And, click here for the eBook called “Transforming the Contact Center into an Enterprise Change Agent.”

The post Why Speech Analytics Is a Must Have appeared first on Customer Experience Management Blog.

Customer Response Summit

February 6-8; Las Vegas, Nevada

Verint’s Greg Sherry, vice president, marketing, will lead an interactive general session with conference executives called “Customer Engagement LIVE!” at 2:30 p.m. PT on February 7. 

Discussions will include how customer-centric organizations can enrich interactions, improve business processes, and optimize the workforce. Participants will meet and exchange ideas with executives from other leading companies and industries around customer engagement and business optimization strategies.

TEISS 2017: The European Information Security Summit

February 21-22; London, United Kingdom

Verint’s David Belder, chief information officer, cyber intelligence, will participate in a roundtable called “Tackling the Key Challenges of an Efficient Detection and Response Cyber Security Operation” at 11:30 a.m. GMT on February 21. Despite best efforts, cyber attacks are getting more aggressive and sophisticated, so the cyber security landscape must become more vigilant. Leading analysts are encouraging organizations to deploy solutions that go beyond the traditional defenses of “siloed” products, such as firewalls and antivirus software, and choose technology that works to disrupt assaults across the entire attack chain—from break-in to exfiltration. The goal is to move beyond prevention to a fully integrated detection and response solution that enables an adaptive approach to security.

CRM Webinar

February 22; Webinar

Verint’s Daniel Ziv, vice president, customer analytics, will participate in this webinar called “Analytics: Data-Driven Relationships for Better Customer Experiences” at 2 p.m. ET. Ziv will explore how to strike the right balance between digital self-service and human touch—and how to effectively leverage insights from human interactions to improve digital transformation.

The post Verint Speakers: Engaging Customers, Tackling Cyber Challenges, and Using Data to Improve Experiences appeared first on Customer Experience Management Blog.

Today’s customer is smart, engaged, connected and informed. To keep pace with this new breed of customer, organizations must also become smarter and more connected.

Your employees are the gateway to your customers. The best way to help ensure your customers are satisfied and loyal is to empower your employees with the tools and tactics to provide superior service.

Organizations that seek to provide intelligent customer service provide this level of service throughout the customer journey, even—and perhaps especially—as it spans multiple channels.

Technology is a constant presence in the life of today’s customer. Over the course of their daily lives, customers may need to interact with an organization via self and assisted service, on a mobile device, through social media, and other channels.

Customers assume these channels will all be available to them. They often don’t pay attention to which channel is used and just use whatever is convenient at any particular moment.

Simply providing service across multiple channels is no longer enough. Smart omnichannel service must be connected, contextual and consistent.

Connected: Each customer interaction is just one touchpoint on the course of their journey. With today’s customer, that journey is likely to include multiple touchpoints on multiple channels. Accordingly, the intelligent contact center is able to connect these touchpoints seamlessly. When a customer initiates a conversation—whether it is on the phone, through chat, or any other channel, the employee handling the interaction should be able to easily see the previous interactions with the customer across channels.

With this connected view, employees will have the full picture of the customer’s journey. They can see what has already occurred and what the logical next steps should be, without making the customer repeat themselves again and again.

Contextual: No customer wants to feel like just a number. Personalization not only helps the customer feel valued by the organization, but it can also improve service quality by improving resolution speed. Contextual service takes into account everything the organization knows about a customer—location, purchases, and other factors—and uses this information to tailor the experience.

For instance, if a telecommunications provider knows the phone, plan, billing information and location of a customer, the employee can automatically see all of this data and use it to assist in the interaction. Filtering knowledge, process and data to just what is relevant to the specific customer has a significant impact on the speed and quality of service.

Consistent: Consistency has perhaps become the biggest challenge in an omnichannel world. With each channel, organizations may find themselves with different agents, different tools, and different processes. This variation is not only a maintenance headache but can often lead to multiple sets of conflicting information, causing agents to give out different answers to the same question.

In many organizations, customers will “answer-shop,” trying different agents on different channels until they finally get the answer they are looking for. Therefore, it is critical to leverage a central repository and shared governance to help ensure consistent information is provided to your customers across all employees, on all channels.

To learn more about how to become an Intelligent Contact Center by providing a superior omnichannel experience, read Aberdeen Group’s Executive Summary: Four Steps to Smart Omni-Channel Customer Service. You’ll learn what separates best-in-class organizations from others when it comes to omnichannel service—and how you can join the ranks of the best.

The post Intelligent Customer Service: Connected, Contextual, Consistent appeared first on Customer Experience Management Blog.

Here at Verint, Customer Experience remains at the forefront of how we operate. We have a thoughtful, dedicated CX initiative with broad cross-functional support and fantastic customer advocacy.

A big part of this success is having a dedicated operational leader for CX. 

Our own Nancy Porte, vice president of global customer experience, tirelessly commits her time and energy to moving Verint forward with our customers. Having earned recognition previously, she recently earned two more awards that I’m proud to tell you about.

She was recently named on the new ICMI 2016 “Top 50 Thought Leaders” to follow on Twitter—which includes other noted customer service experts, speakers, trainers, business analysts and authors. A Certified Customer Experience Professional (CCXP), Porte is regularly published in media articles, is a frequent contributor to the Verint InTouch blog and frequent speaker at industry conferences. Her Twitter handle is @nporte.

In addition, CustomerThink, the world’s largest online community focused on customer-centric business, recently named 12 Global Thought Leaders as Advisors for 2017—and Nancy is one of them! Her popular “A CX Practitioner’s Playbook” blog for this online community offers its readers first-hand, from-the-trenches insights on how organizations can elevate the customer experience to be a major influencer in high-level business decisions. She offers practical advice that readers can immediately apply to their day-to-day work.

I’m proud to be one of the executive sponsors of Verint’s Customer Experience Program, and as such, I interact with Nancy and our cross-functional “Customers for Life” steering committee on a regular basis.  This is a passionate group who brings the voice of the customer into our day-to-day thinking here at Verint!

You can check out her blog regularly here.

We at Verint are proud to have Nancy on our team and are pleased that her exceptional efforts have been recognized industry-wide. For more recent awards related to Verint’s customer focus, read last week’s press release.

The post Verint Customer Experience Program Earns Two New Industry Honors appeared first on Customer Experience Management Blog.

Voice of the Customer and Customer Experience initiatives are strategic imperatives today, helping organizations measure and enhance experiences, satisfaction and loyalty.

Organizations that elevate and improve these areas can potentially realize powerful benefits including improved customer loyalty, reduced customer churn and deep insights into customer behavior. 

Last week I interviewed the Director of Customer Insights from a large telecom company and the Regents Professor of Marketing Emeritus from Georgia State University, who wrote a blog post on Delivering Great Customer Service, where he shared customer service excellence examples from  Chick-fil-A, Mercedes Benz and others. The director believes there are seven core areas that are fundamental to a well-developed VoC strategy:

1. Assess and incorporate existing VoC programs: What programs are in place today across the organization? Who runs them? How are they being used? Can they be part of a centralized program? Centralizing and aligning existing programs can help improve comparability across business units, ensure consistency of programs and reduce costs.
   

2. Gain support for metrics and governance: Determine shared CX measures. Gain support from key managers, directors and executives in the organization. Establishing and collaborating with a network of stakeholders and champions is one of the most powerful ways to help ensure your strategy is a success. (This is also often one of the more overlooked areas, as many VoC program owners focus a disproportionate amount of time on data and dashboards, and sometimes neglect communication and collaboration.)

3. Partner with champions on a survey strategy: Establish key business partners and identify attributes/levers to examine and take action. Here are some common areas to develop: Net Promoter Score (NPS) champions, engage in journey mapping, measure First Contact Resolution (FCR) in addition to CX areas.

4. Employ Appropriate Sampling: Make sure to have appropriate sampling. Determine a consistent process; minimize changes in data sets and timeframes. Why? Because you want to make sure a movement in scores/results is based on performance, not based on different data samples or out-of-synch time frames. Also watch out for “toxicity”—don’t overwhelm the target audience with too many surveys or too many questions.  

5. Strive for actionable reports: The telecom director showed a power slide that showed the value of at-risk customers based on their level of satisfaction and their potential re-purchase $ value: 95% of promoters plan to re-purchase, followed by 65% of passives, 17% of mild detractors and 3% of detractors. The organization identifies customers that are at risk—and then takes action.  (We aren’t able to share the slide here, but email me at greg.sherry@verint.com for a .pdf version.)
   

6. Close the Loops: Focus in “big loop” areas include strategic, cross-functional, systems and policy areas. At the same time, give attention to “small loop” areas such as front-line employee feedback and individual customer feedback from verbatims. Retain customers one by one and turn detractors into promoters.
7. Foster a Customer-Centric Culture: Integrate customer feedback into the rhythm of the business:

• Have live customer data on internal intranet
• Present VoC insights regularly
• Share customer comments at start of meetings
• Recognize successes
• Continually learn and evolve.

Regarding VoC and CX excellence, did you see the exciting news about the combination of Verint and OpinionLab? OpinionLab captures desktop, mobile web and mobile app “opt-in” customer initiated VoC to let customers describe their experience in their own words. The platform is a powerful complement to company-initiated surveys and helps support a comprehensive VoC strategy. Check it out!

The post 7 Areas to Consider for Your Voice of the Customer Strategy appeared first on Customer Experience Management Blog.

Organizations are amid a shift in customer handling philosophies in an age where interactions between customers and brands are occurring increasingly primarily through online and digital channels.

The philosophy is customer experience. Brands are looking at the entire experience their customers are having and trying to first understand what the experience is and how to influence it.

Why?

Because brands are feeling a loss of control, they are experiencing an inability to interface directly with the customer—and they are seeing customer movement that suggests that their customers may not be as committed to them as they had thought.

According to the recent Verint Digital Tipping Point survey in which 24,000 consumers in 12 countries across nine industry sectors  were polled, it was found that customer retention is down from the 2015 version of this study, with the percentage of customers staying with providers for more than three years declining from 61 percent in 2015 to 53 percent in 2016.

It is essential that brands hone in on the subtlety of what the Verint Digital Tipping Point brings to light. We know there is an increase in the use of digital channels. We witness it every day.  As the above data shows, there is generally less stickiness among customers. Brands are faced with a perplexing problem. How to improve loyalty and stickiness when they don’t interface with the customer 1-1?

There is a window of hope. Customers reflected across the board that personalized, 1-1 interactions through service resulted in positive outcomes. Of the survey respondents, 64% reflected that ‘on the whole, I think it is more convenient and I get better service using traditional methods of contact (e.g., phone, in-store/in-person).’

How can brands capitalize on this fact? What is going on in these interactions?

Stickiness is often referred to as customer ‘loyalty.’ From a brand’s perspective, customer loyalty means customer retention, or more meaningfully, low or lack of customer attrition, a measure of lifetime-value in the form of revenue over time and hopefully an increasing share-of-wallet.

But what does loyalty mean to a customer? As an individual, and not as a brand, I think of loyalty as a behavior rooted in an emotion. At the risk of using a weak commencement speech convention—a definition—loyalty is defined as being ‘faithful to any leader, party, or cause, or to any person or thing conceived as deserving of fidelity.’ I’m going to roughly translate that into, ‘you be true to me and I’ll be true to you.’

So, I am loyal to my family or my friends by virtue of the fact that they deserve it. They have demonstrated over time positive behavior that motivates me to give them my fidelity or my commitment. What is the equivalent of this with my interactions with a brand?

In an IDC survey on customer experience, respondent organizations were asked what the top ‘tasks’ or reasons were that their customers contacted them. Interestingly, the top reasons were all practical needs based on a purchase: pricing questions (55%), product or service support (50.1%), billing and payment (49.4%) and shipping information (47.1%). These types of customer-to-brand interactions are not the sorts that would be conventionally opportunities for ‘relationship building.’

Customers are not contacting the brand just to chat or to spend time in their tastefully appointed retail location—they have a specific need that they want serviced. This data is supported by Verint’s 2015 Research Survey “The Rules of Engagement” in which customers rated the response of the brand to answer their inquiries quickly as being the most important factor in customer satisfaction.

These two pieces of data highlight the same focus point on the part of the customer. They purchased a product or a service—they paid their money. So, they want that contract to be honored by either receiving a quality product or service in support of that product, quickly or having their issue resolved. If these things happen in a satisfactory manner, they will be ‘loyal’ because the brand has lived up to their part of the contract.

Now that the brand has successfully executed on their part of the equation, the customer’s ‘loyalty’ is theirs to lose. Perhaps this is the bigger challenge to organizations: the ever-moving target of retention. Each progressive interaction builds on the history of trust established by the previous interaction. You will gain my fidelity if you earn it—over and over again.

Now we return to the idea of customer experience. Execution needs to occur in a manner that is comfortable, stress-free and through the channels desired by the customer. Once the customer’s needs are met through positive experiences targeted at their needs, it is ok to introduce organizational goals.

Upselling and cross-selling to gain share-of-wallet are fine—particularly if they are well targeted to the shopping basket or complimentary to existing customer product ownership, and also occur in a manner that is comfortable to the customer. Obviously, this warrants a separate discussion.

Loyalty doesn’t come just because a brand wants it, and once gained it can be lost. But keeping the following in mind will keep the focus on course to engender true customer defined loyalty:

• Focus on the things that are important to the customer
• Meet the customer in the middle between corporate goals and customer demands
• Understand the moments that engender loyalty in all stages of the customer life cycle
• Orchestrate multiple channels that suit the customer: phone, in store, mass media, Web, social, mobile, etc.

To learn more about the 2016 Verint Digital Tipping Point Survey, go to www.verint.com/digital-tipping-point.

The post Is There Common Ground Between Customers and Brands on What Loyalty Means? appeared first on Customer Experience Management Blog.

Recently, the British government announced a £1 billion pound investment for faster broadband and 5G in the UK, which will benefit consumers and businesses.

Unfortunately, government departments or local councils looking for a boost in funding to improve digital services were left empty-handed.

The investment in faster broadband and cellular infrastructure shows that the demand for digital services in the UK is high. As more people become connected to high-speed internet, the expectation for businesses and government agencies to use digital channels to engage with customers will grow.

The improved access to high-speed broadband will create additional demand for online government services, but the government has not built additional capacity for digital engagement. Soon England will have more citizens digitally empowered and engaged but unable to access basic government services online, particularly at the local level.

Some government departments have great digital experiences, while others are well behind. Then, when it comes to local government, the online experience varies from one authority to another, which can be incredibly frustrating as a citizen.

For example, while it is relatively straightforward to lodge a self-assessment with Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC), it can be very difficult to track a passport renewal with HM Passport Office, especially during peak holiday season. Then if I want to pay my council tax or apply for a parking permit in my local authority, it is entirely hit or miss.

Compounding the problem, no two government organizations are in communication with the other. So every time citizens interact with an additional department, they must enter the same information, such as address, date of birth and national insurance number.

I’m pleased to say this is improving greatly across central government thanks to the government’s verification tool GOV.UK Verify, which launched in May 2016. This tool helps authenticate citizen identities and provides a simple and standardized way for people using online government services to complete transactions. It provides the improved customer experience outlined earlier—however, so far, local governments are unable to use this tool.

Of course, there is a lot at stake for governments, and no one is saying digital transformation in government is easy. Government is under constant scrutiny, and the threat of cybercrime is higher than ever. It is a fair assumption that consumers have even higher expectations of their government than a private sector enterprise.

Research from Verint found that 20 percent of consumers do not trust any of their service providers to keep their data secure. The stakes are certainly high, but there is also considerable reward for the government to get this right.

It’s no secret the government is facing budget pressures. They are delivering services for a growing population but have fewer funds to deliver them. Improving the digital experience will not replace the need for customer service teams, but it will allow the government to streamline its operations and boost efficiency—creating significant cost savings.

As more government agencies improve their digital experience, the demand for digital services across other departments will increase and generate even more opportunities for cost savings and efficiencies.

The good news is that the Government Digital Service (GDS) has announced a pilot project to give local councils access to GOV.UK Verify, helping citizens of these authorities to apply online for travel passes and parking permits. Only 19 authorities have signed up for the program so far. However, the first step for the government to boost digital engagement is to make this tool available at the local level—so progress is underway.

If the UK government is serious about using digital engagement as a means to make ongoing cost savings, it requires upfront investment. This investment will be a short-term pain for a long-term gain. Making Gov.UK Verify available to local authorities is a vital first step to create a consistent process.

The post Improving Digital Engagement with the UK Government appeared first on Customer Experience Management Blog.

How can organizations start to think more strategically in the New Year about maximizing their technology investments?

One way is by looking at IVR and WFO-generated customer insights as a single entity—rather than separate ones.

Enterprises can thus strengthen the value from both solutions and likely be on their way to improving the customer experience. Paul Stockford of Saddletree Research explores how looking at IVR together with WFO is just one example of how different technologies can be brought together to address a significant objective: optimizing the customer journey.

Read his blog.

The post For 2017, Resolve to Maximize Your Contact Center Technology Investments appeared first on Customer Experience Management Blog.

Providing great experiences for customers has become an important goal for many companies today.

They recognize that creating compelling experiences is the best way to attract, retain and delight customers; engage employees; and differentiate their company from the competition.

As I have discussed in a previous blog for the Atlanta Business Chronicle, Bain & Company has conducted research that found that 80 percent of companies surveyed believe they deliver a “superior experience” to customers, but their customers stated that only 8 percent of these companies were really delivering on that.

Bain also reports that companies that excel in customer experience grew their revenues by 4 to 8 percent above the average growth rate in their market. They discovered that delivering superior experiences typically yields stronger loyalty among customers—some of whom become promoters, buy more, remain customers longer, and recommend the company to others.

So how does a company deliver outstanding customer experience? First, it requires a cultural transformation driven from the top. Customer input and understanding must be infused throughout the organization. Strategic intent, why the company exists and what it wants to be known for must be clear throughout the organization.

Perhaps the best example is Ritz Carlton’s credo: “We are ladies and gentleman serving ladies and gentleman.” At the Mayo Clinic, everyone understands that “the patient comes first.”

When companies are serious about customer experience, there is no doubt who is in charge.

At Chick-Fil-A, a company I have worked with for many years and a leader in customer experience, it is clear who “owns” customer experience. It is Dan Cathy, the CEO, who when asked what he does at the company always responds by saying he “is in customer service.”

At Chick-Fil-A, the mantra to employees is “Be REMARKable” (meaning provide an experience so outstanding that customers will tell others about it). Cathy has focused the company on building “Raving Fans” through a strategy of delivering “Second Mile Service.” The first mile includes the basics such as delivering good food at the right temperature, quickly, in a clean restaurant, together with attentive and courteous customer service. The company calls these things “Operational Excellence.”

Chick-fil-A has differentiated itself from its considerable competition by having everyone go the extra mile. The “Second Mile” customer experience includes doing remarkable things such as carrying trays to the table for moms with young kids and people with physical handicaps, saying “My Pleasure” instead of “No Problem” or “You’re Welcome,” putting fresh flowers on the tables and showing genuine empathy if a customer’s expectations are not met.

Another company that is typically mentioned as a leader in customer experience is Amazon.com. There Jeff Bezos, the CEO, often sets up an empty chair at the conference table when major decisions are being made to represent the customer—and how this person’s desires should always be considered.

Customer experience is just as important in business-to-business marketing.  A key point regarding this was made in a classic Harvard Business Review article called “Staple Yourself to an Order.”¹ The researchers often saw customers who could not understand a bill they had received or thought it was inaccurate. Usually the bill wasn’t inaccurate—however, it had been put together to please the billing department and not the customer.

“Ease of doing business with” is an important factor in business-to-business marketing. How the bill is configured is critical to the overall experience.

What does it take to become a customer experience champion? Set high goals, benchmark the best players, recognize the important role employees play, honestly assess your current state relative to what you envision, communicate the vision often, provide key performance measurements, and develop the tools, recognition and rewards for success.

Do you want to learn more about delivering a great customer experience? Then join me and the Director of Customer Insights from a major telecommunications company for a private Web seminar this Thursday, January 26, from 2-3 p.m. ET. For more information, email mary.zellers@verint.com.

Ken Bernhardt is a Regents Professor of Marketing Emeritus, Robinson College of Business, Georgia State University

¹ Shapiro, B. P., V. K. Rangan, and J. J. Sviokla. “Staple Yourself to an Order.” Harvard Business Review 70, no. 4: 113–122.

The post Delivering Great Customer Experience appeared first on Customer Experience Management Blog.

Has the news of your successful robotic process automation initiative spread across your organization? Are you getting new suggestions each day of processes that should be automated next?

Or, are you just getting started with RPA and thinking about how you might manage the technology so that it could be used to complete numerous tasks or entire processes in the future?

These questions likely apply in all cases. Maybe you are using desktop automation such as Verint Process Assistant to help your back-office employees, contact center agents or other employees complete tasks more quickly, easily and accurately—or you may have software robots automatically doing the work on a virtual desktop.

Here’s what is clear: You have to start somewhere. And then you need a way to decide what to tackle next.

We recommend you determine “who gets to decide” as a first step. This isn’t usually a single point of contact within your organization—as there are multiple viewpoints to consider—but you can start as a small group of decision makers.

Or, you may opt to establish an automation center of excellence (CoE). This group can include not only key personnel but also comprehensive governance, security, development, testing, support, approval, analysis and reporting, and associated communication roles and processes.

Along with this “group who decides,” it’s important to establish—and communicate—a consistent set of criteria that will be used to evaluate and prioritize all requests. This same framework can also be used as a tool to reprioritize items already on your list as it continues to grow.

You can learn specific recommendations on what to include in your automation evaluation and prioritization scorecard in our complimentary Executive Perspectives, Prioritizing Your Organization’s Processes for Automation.

Contact us for more information about our Robotic Automation solution by email at info@verint.com.

The post What Next? Tips for Prioritizing Your Automations appeared first on Customer Experience Management Blog.

Verint’s Ryan Hollenbeck recently spoke with Contact Center Pipeline about the art of balancing the digital and human elements of the customer experience.

Organizations that strike this balance effectively can offer a broader range of customer service options to meet the needs that stem from constantly evolving customer preferences.

Hollenbeck noted the following as he looked ahead to 2017 and evaluated the appeal of digital—and its associated cost savings—with the need to offer customers the human touch they have clearly stated they still want:

For more on what Contact Center Pipeline sees in store for contact centers in 2017, click here.

The post Getting the Customer Experience Right in 2017 appeared first on Customer Experience Management Blog.

Managing to Service Level Agreements (SLAs) can be a daunting challenge, mostly because few organizations can view and track service requests and work items from the point of origin all the way through execution. 

One work item can easily cross three to five functional areas, e.g., contact center, account maintenance, order fulfillment, shipping, billing, etc. And within these functions, multiple people might handle the same work item. Each person may meet their SLA or turnaround time for their task, but collectively the work item might miss its SLA due to lag time between hand-offs, an unscheduled absence that leaves a piece in someone’s work queue, or an item is “pended” until more information is obtained—but  then forgotten.

To effectively meet SLAs, organizations need to manage resources and work volumes—both new arrivals and backlog—to end service goals while still helping to ensure high quality to limit errors and rework, which will negatively impact your customer experience.

Key capabilities include the ability to:

• Track work items against service goals
• Re-prioritize/re-allocate work and resources intraday to meet service goals
• Monitor work for quality, accuracy and processing compliance.

Here are some steps you can take to help improve service delivery management in your operations.

1. Use a desktop analytics tool such as Verint Desktop and Process Analytics to tag each work item with a unique identifier and descriptive attributes, enabling your organization to track a work item through its execution and against its individual service goal, retrieve that work item for quality review and auditing purposes, and conduct cost-to-serve analyses by product type, team, department or customer segment.

2. Utilize a production dashboard that incorporates all work types and shows in real-time actual volumes (new and backlog) against forecasted, enabling managers to proactively adjust schedules and allocation of work to meet service goals.

3. Automate quality reviews, incorporating customer feedback into quality scores for individuals and teams to help ensure consistent and specific feedback to employees and managers for continuous improvement.

You might also benefit from reading the blost post, “What Is Predictive Work Aging Analytics?” In this blog we discuss how instead of just a current-state view of work item aging, Verint Work Item Tracking can predict if work items will be completed within service goals based on resource availability and work volumes. The solution highlights at-risk items, which helps enable managers to proactively prioritize work and better meet SLAs and customer expectations.

Effective service delivery management is one of the five key components of an optimized management process. To learn how your organization ranks against our Back-Office Management Process Maturity model—and to see the other four key components—take the self-assessment survey.

The post Why Is Meeting Service Level Agreements So Challenging? appeared first on Customer Experience Management Blog.

Are you interested in presenting during a breakout session at Engage 2017, the Verint Systems Global Customer Conference? This year’s conference will be held in Orlando on May 22 – 25, and Verint is seeking customers and partners who would like to share their experiences, expertise, opinions, and best practices with other conference attendees.

There’s no bigger compliment to Verint than when our customers want to share their Verint success stories with others. Whether it’s your unique application and execution of Verint solutions, knowledge of industry trends and strategies, the results you’ve achieved, or your technical prowess, the conference agenda may have a place for you.

In addition to benefitting your fellow attendees at the conference, presenting in a breakout session can be fulfilling in other ways. You can:

• Gain recognition from your industry peers and increase networking opportunities.
• Build thought leadership and acquire insights from other users.
• Enhance valuable presentation skills.
• Receive a complimentary conference pass (up to a $1,095 value)!

Click here today to complete and submit a short speaking proposal form—they are being accepted through April 14, 2017. We look forward to hearing from you!

And, don’t forget that early-bird registration for the conference ends March 13. If you register by then, you’ll qualify for the early-bird registration fee of $695 USD. Register three people from the same company before April 21 and all registrants will receive 20 percent off!  Even better—register six people, and you’ll receive 25 percent off! Email us at conference@verint.com for your special discount code.

The post Call for Speakers: Engage 2017 Verint Global Customer Conference appeared first on Customer Experience Management Blog.

Verint recently introduced Mobile Work View to meet the evolving needs of organizations that need to access workplace information anytime, anywhere.

Because work doesn’t just happen in the office, this application extends common work activities across devices so that employees can access the capabilities they need—without compromising data security.

This app offers a view into schedule information and the ability to request time-off, regardless of employees’ locations—serving as an extension to Verint’s broad suite of Workforce Optimization solutions, including its other mobile applications.

Read more in the recent article from KMWorld.

The post New Verint App Extends Employee Engagement Capabilities on Mobile Devices appeared first on Customer Experience Management Blog.

This personal property and casualty insurance provider needed the tools to address complexities that the company’s traditional methods for understanding the voice of the customer failed to address.

Their previous platform was not delivering effective data that company representatives needed, so they chose Verint Workforce Optimization and Customer Analytics solutions—including Verint Call Recording, Verint Quality Management, Verint Workforce Management, Verint Desktop and Process Analytics, Verint Speech Analytics, and Verint Enterprise Feedback Management.

With these solutions, they have been able to reduce live calls to agents, improve customer service rankings, and save over a million dollars.

Read more about how this company used Verint to its advantage.

The post Leading Personal Lines Insurer Prioritizes Customer Engagement appeared first on Customer Experience Management Blog.

These days everyone is trying to better understand their customers’ needs and preferences. Armed with this knowledge, organizations can better prioritize the customer experience and build more loyal, long-term customers.

As part of this process, there’s real value in mapping customer journeys. These maps help illustrate the interaction between company and customer at every point in a clear, understandable way.

As a result, customers become real-life people with real-world challenges. This brings to life what needs to be done to better serve them.

In my new blog for Customer Think, I discuss some ways to use journey maps wisely and how they can contribute significantly to improving the customer experience.

Read more.

The post Still Just Upgrading Touchpoints? Create Future Journey Maps for Real Value appeared first on Customer Experience Management Blog.

Are your managers drowning in too much information?

It’s quite likely they are. Operational areas are typically under pressure to achieve better results, but it can be challenging for managers to know where to make changes or focus their efforts.

Rather than not having enough information, this uncertainty can spur some managers to overcompensate by spending excessive amounts of time designing, generating and reviewing numerous reports.

The abundance of data on-hand may be overwhelming—and yet still not provide the answers they need. So, how can managers quickly analyze what’s going on? What tools can you provide to help them measure what matters—and to help them get employees aligned with corporate expectations and goals?

You need to measure what matters. Rather than trying to assess every detail of each employee’s individual performance, what are the top five key performance metrics (KPIs) connected to your organization’s strategic objectives that you can monitor on a daily basis?

Share the metrics and associated goals with employees. Engage your team members and set expectations on performance so that they understand how they will be evaluated and can better understand how their actions help support the organization’s goals.

This isn’t a one-time activity, however. It’s critical that a review of these metrics becomes part of regular conversations and engagement with each team member to reinforce their importance and keep the discussions going.

Leverage an enterprise Performance Management solution. Verint Performance Management can be configured to identify when and where corrective action is needed. Enable automatic scheduling of coaching and eLearning when performance falls below a threshold. Review how an individual employee is doing across multiple metrics, or review how a team of employees is doing across a single metric to determine how broadly you may need to focus training efforts.

Verint Performance Management includes an Improvement Opportunities widget that can make it easier for managers to quickly see which of your central KPIs is furthest from goal, or which may have experienced a severe decline recently.

Learn more in our complimentary Executive Perspectives, Four Steps to Improve Manager Effectiveness. And, you can always contact Verint for more information about our Performance Management solution by contacting us at info@verint.com.

The post Helping Managers to Quickly Know Where to Take Corrective Action appeared first on Customer Experience Management Blog.

When you first say production management, I think most people envision an assembly line—perhaps at an automobile plant.

Production management in a service support organization is similar in that you know the type of work and process steps needed to execute the work, and the skills required to do the work.

What differs in a service organization is the visual—the ability to see all the parts needed to execute the work, and the state of completion for the work item. For more similarities and differences, read the Houston Chronicle article, “Service Operations vs. Manufacturing Operations.”

Operational visibility into order or service request processing differs by organization depending on the systems used and the complexity of the work processed. Most service organizations are challenged to gain a holistic view of all work types, processing requirements and capacity within their organization.

Many are unable to create a clear picture of who is doing what, when and how. To optimize employee utilization and process work efficiently and economically, organizations need to be able to:

• Capture work volume from multiple systems (including manual work items)
• Build holistic capacity plans to optimize utilization
• Allocate work by employee skill, availability and work priority/service goal
• Schedule resources to match demand.

Here are some steps you can take to improve production management in your service operations:

1. Build an activity-based capacity model. This model should factor in all work types (production and non-production), volume, and standard handle times for each work item, employee skills and availability.
2. Create activity-based schedules that align work volume and arrival patterns to individual employee schedules, thus optimizing employee utilization, productivity and service goal achievement.
3. Monitor actual performance against plan, making intra-day adjustments to resources as volumes, priorities and employee availability change.

A leading investment management firm was able to reduce overtime by 37 percent by analyzing work types and arrival patterns, as well as modifying shift start and stop times to adequately process incoming volumes while reducing backlog volume.

Effective production management is one of the five key components of an optimized back-office management process. To learn how your organization ranks against our Back-Office Management Process Maturity model, take the self-assessment survey.

The post Production Management in Service Organizations: Operating Blind? appeared first on Customer Experience Management Blog.

At Verint, we are grateful for our customers, partners and all our blog readers! We wish everyone safe and restful holidays. We look forward to a fantastic 2017!

The post Verint Wishes You Happy Holidays! appeared first on Customer Experience Management Blog.

Despite our best efforts, cyber attacks are getting more aggressive and sophisticated.

The threat of targeted attacks is real, and the cyber security landscape must change with the need for greater vigilance.

Today leading analysts are encouraging organizations to deploy solutions that go beyond the traditional defenses of siloed products, such as firewalls and antivirus software, and choose technology that works to disrupt assaults across the entire attack chain—from break-in to exfiltration.

The new thought is to move beyond prevention to a fully integrated detection and response solution that enables an adaptive approach to security.

Read more.

The post Webcast: What to Look for in an Effective Cyber Detection & Response Solution appeared first on Customer Experience Management Blog.

Surveys play a vital role in customer experience (CX) and are often referred to as the “backbone” of a successful program. While there are many ways to gather information from customers and consumers, surveys serve as a very important tool in collecting and managing feedback. 

As an experienced CX professional, I can tell you firsthand that most of us—even with operations or marketing backgrounds—often lack formal training in market research techniques or survey construction and administration.

This reality can be a tough pill to swallow and overwhelming for those just starting out. Add to this the shortage of resources needed to bring in survey-related help or expertise, and you’ll find yourself searching for answers about how to design, deploy and analyze a valid survey. These answers might not be found simply through a Google search, as a poorly constructed survey will ultimately point you in the wrong direction and create problems down the road.

So how then is a great survey created, and beyond that, how do you ensure effective usage of the truth that a well-constructed survey provides? CX professionals can position themselves for survey success by keeping a few fundamentals in mind:

1. Focus on a specific goal. There is value in general, small group, transactional and ad hoc surveys, but no one survey or survey approach is effective for all of them. Be precise about the information you want to gather and what you want to do with it. Ask yourself, am I being formulaic or am I asking the most salient questions given the facts I want to uncover? Every survey should be undertaken as a distinct effort and one that deserves individual attention. Even after years of writing and deploying surveys, I formulate a goal statement for each new survey. This helps me stay focused as I proceed to the next steps of survey development.

2. Survey the right people. Even the best survey is of little value if you put it in front of the wrong audience. Make sure you are getting insights from those individuals who can provide you with the facts you seek. If you are in doubt, hold off—the costs of incentives (which are a legitimate debate among survey experts) or additional lists pale in comparison to a survey that is fielded to the wrong customers.

3. Use reminders and deadlines to ensure the highest response rates possible. In today’s busy world, presenting customers with a survey is merely the first step. You’ll want to make sure you do everything possible to secure participation. At the same time, there is a balance between gentle reminders and irritating emails. If your customers are complaining about the number of reminders, stop! Generally, I send out no more than two reminders for quarterly or annual surveys. If you’re responsible for an ongoing, transactional survey, you might consider sending no more than one reminder to ensure that a reminder from one transaction doesn’t cross with an invitation to the next survey.

4. Proactively address survey fatigue. It’s a real condition, and poorly configured surveys are a leading cause. Ask yourself, would I take this survey if I were asked to be a respondent? Is it too long? What would I think of the company after taking it? If you struggle with your answer to any of these questions, your survey isn’t ready to issue.

5. Don’t ask questions to which you should already know the answers. Nothing turns a potential respondent off faster than being asked a question that the surveyor should already know. For example, asking a customer what company they work for not only wastes their time, it also comes across as disrespectful. For our surveys, we extract what we know about the account and customer from our CRM system, preloading the data into the survey. By taking this extra step, we don’t ask our survey respondents needless questions. At the same time, this allows us to segment the data based on region, size of account, etc. and makes our analysis much more precise.

6. Ask objective, real questions. Resist the temptation to sugar coat your survey or pose questions you don’t want the answers to. A few months ago, I took a survey that asked me to characterize my experience using a multiple-choice format, but every choice was complimentary of the company. I’m sure the CX professional meant well and probably was genuine in their enthusiasm, but no one wants to be forced to paint a rosy picture, especially in a survey that reports to be objective.

7. Conduct a trial run. Make sure the flow of your questions makes sense by asking colleagues to carefully take and critique the survey. Ideally, you can present the survey to several objective individuals who can give you an unrestrained appraisal, not only of the structure of the survey, but how it made them feel about the company. Again, this extra step is tempting to skip, but even after years of deploying customer surveys, we still find opportunities to improve the tool in this testing step. Remember that your customers deserve the best survey you can offer them!

8. Use the information you gain in the survey company-wide. Don’t be stingy in your use of the facts you gain through surveys. My team presents the results we gain to various departments throughout the company, leading to discussions with many teams about how the feedback can help better serve customers. Invariably, this also helps our CX team uncover opportunities to align siloed improvement efforts around a more strategic list of priorities.

9. Close the feedback loop. Make sure you act on the findings of the survey with the individuals who matter most—your customers. While most are quick to point out the value of addressing any concerns raised by customers, it’s equally important to follow up with those who are complimentary. In addition to developing action plans for dissatisfied customers, we ask happy respondents about their willingness to be references. Of course, the other feedback loop is around acting on trends and themes in the data. These help set priorities for the organization to improve, invest in or even lower the investment. For our organization, the executive team tracks trends and includes them as priorities and primary metrics in our operational areas.

10. Don’t be afraid to ask for help. As noted above, surveys are a discipline. Over time, we’ve expanded our survey organization to include experts on everything from methodology to predictive analytics, to ensure that we focus on the right things. It takes time to get to that level of sophistication, but we would never have achieved it if we did not appreciate the fact that surveys, like any distinct discipline, require deep expertise to perfect.

Surveys are at the core of our feedback efforts. They present us with an exceptional opportunity to discover what our customers think of our products and services, and what their expectations are. More to the point, surveys provide us with the facts on which we base our CX efforts. And in a very real way, the information surveys lay bare is the foundation for the roadmap that lays out where we are going with our programs—all while providing us with the benchmarks needed to gauge our progress along the way.

Because of this critical importance to the organization, it’s important to develop a discipline around the design, deployment and analysis of the survey tool. The long and short of it is that for great CX, you need great surveys.

This blog originally appeared in Customer Think on September 29, 2016.

The post 10 Lessons Learned from Voice of the Customer Trenches: How to Design and Build a Great Survey appeared first on Customer Experience Management Blog.

This leading media company needed a program to efficiently identify agent improvement opportunities to better manage its quality assurance program—as well as maintain the high level of quality its customers had come to expect.

The company’s existing platform was no longer meeting the needs of the growing business, so it brought in Verint Workforce Optimization and Analytics solutions, including Verint Call Recording, Verint Quality Management, Verint Workforce Management and Verint Speech Analytics.

Through these solutions, the company has gained powerful data and insight into customer trends and has been able to more easily schedule staff, drive accountability and improve customer satisfaction.

Read more about how this company has used Verint to its advantage.

The post Dynamic Media Leader Uses Verint to Improve Customer Satisfaction appeared first on Customer Experience Management Blog.

By now, the concept of the cyber attack chain—or kill chain—is widely accepted as a way to understand and deal with threats.

The first thing that malware does once it’s established on the network is call home—reach out to a Command and Control (C&C) server. C&Cs are famous for controlling botnets, but they are essential for any multi-stage attack. For example, ransomware calls a control server to obtain a unique encryption key.

As we discussed in a previous blog, to detect complex attacks, you need to monitor and analyze information across attack vectors (such as web, email and files), the attack chain, and the IT infrastructure. We’ll talk more about this later but for now, let’s focus on how to effectively detect C&C communications.

Read more.

The post Detecting Command & Control Communications—Context Is Key appeared first on Customer Experience Management Blog.

Tis the season to take stock of where things are—and CX programs are no exception.

The New Year is a good time to ask if your organization’s customer experience is reflecting well on your brand. Is there room for improvement? Over the years, one question has become an integral part of my process of closing out one year and beginning a new one: What will the brand’s promise and purpose be in 2017?

In my latest article for CustomerThink, I share why I think there’s a symbiotic relationship between CX and brands—and describe three significant ways that CX impacts your brand.

Read more for the details.

The post 3 Ways CX Can Make 2017 the Finest Year Yet for Your Brand appeared first on Customer Experience Management Blog.

Earlier this month, we wrapped up Verint’s global Engage customer events for the year at the amazing Savoy Hotel in London.

What started in a beautiful harbor in Sydney, Australia with a bang in May has now finished strong in December in London, where we doubled last year’s number of customer attendees and had the highest number of registrations and percentage of turnout. 

Naturally we’re thrilled, and this speaks to the relevant and timely content—60 percent of which is customer-led—at the event for both our commercial and public sector customers. We couldn’t be happier when our customers share with each other how Verint has helped them succeed and overcome challenges.

After interacting with thousands of customers across multiple events around the world, what have we learned? A lot! To start, all attendees were able to engage with industry colleagues, take part in breakout sessions, learn from industry visionaries and product experts in the Technology Showcase, and share best practices with peers.

Many customers now rate Engage as a must-attend industry event for thought leadership and education. In fact, we even saw a few customers who joined more than one Engage event because they thought they were so valuable!

Joining the Customer Experience Zone this year was the Product Innovation Zone, which gave thousands of customers the opportunity to provide direct feedback and influence into product direction. Not surprisingly, we do a lot of listening at these Engage events. One concrete example is in 2015 we heard that customers wanted an online community so they could interact with other customers throughout the year.

So this year, we were proud to announce the Verint Online Community—and already have more than 1,200 members continuing the conversation and living out the phrase “Engage every day!” Furthermore, we learned about some of the current and future trends that customers are grappling with across multiple industries and geographies.

During the many Customer Advisory sessions I participated in this year, I had the pleasure of hearing about these trends firsthand. Here’s a quick summary:

This is consistent with the research results we recently published.* For example, in terms of leading customers on a digital journey, speed, insight and desired outcomes are the biggest factors.

More than two-thirds (67 percent) state that customer service online and via mobile devices should be faster, more intuitive and better able to serve their needs. However, as you might expect, as customer service requests become increasingly complex, reliance on human interaction increases.

You can find all of the global research results here.

So where are we going in 2017? You might not be surprised to hear that we are already hard at work making the Engage events even better for next year! That means asking our customers what they think we should do to improve.

It’s part of our guiding principle here at Verint to develop customers for life by enabling customers to realize the full benefits of Verint solutions and transform the way they engage with their customers. We do this when we understand their business needs, proactively communicate with them, and make it easy to do business with us throughout their journey.

Are you a customer with specific ideas or suggestions for future Engage events? Just sign in to the Verint Customer Community and share them.

I would like to thank all of our amazing Verint customers around the world! Happy holidays to all!

* The results of a large-scale study of more than 24,000 consumers in 12 countries published by Verint Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: VRNT), with support from Opinium Research LLC, and research and advisory firm IDC, identifies a tipping point between digital and traditional customer service.

The post The Best Part of 2016? Global Customer Engagement appeared first on Customer Experience Management Blog.

In the previous blog post, I introduced the director of global business process services at a leading enterprise technology company.

The director set out on a journey to provide back-office managers with the data they needed to make effective decisions around employee productivity. 

Part one covered the first four hurdles she had to overcome. Following are four more she conquered to make her vision a reality.

Hurdle #5: Condensed Timeline. The initial plan called for six months of pre-work, deployment and then three months to settle in before they would start doing their analysis and begin realizing benefits. Executive management, however, felt they needed to show ROI sooner rather than later, and set a target of four months for pre-work and two months for settling in.

Hurdle #6: Big Bang vs. Rolling Thunder. Because of the compressed deadline, the corporation deployed DPA all at once to more than 5,000 employees. However, per company policy, the employee had seven days to download any new applications and restart their machine.

It became a logistical nightmare to try and track who had downloaded, who was sending data, who wasn’t, etc. So, phase 2 will be a rolling wave—going country by country, team by team, monitoring deployment, restart efforts, and validating data sends. They will also have a migration team in place to identify, correct and fix any issues as each group gets deployed.

Hurdle #7: What To Do With the Data. Suddenly the managers and directors of back-office functions are receiving reports on application usage, employee utilization and productivity—data they’ve never had before.

Their question: What am I to do with this? Extensive training was needed so managers would know how to:

• Pull reports
• Interpret the data
• Use the data to have conversations with their employees focusing on the positive—increasing productivity time—and not on the negative—time spent in non-productive-related applications or activities.

To support their objective of increasing not only employee productivity but also manager productivity, the corporation purposefully chose to only use standard DPA reports—no customized reports would be supported. They also limited the granularity of data available to managers, so they can’t see every URL an employee visits—which could prove to be a rabbit hole of wasted time for managers.

Hurdle #8 (Last One!): Ongoing Governance. With a global implementation, it is critical to actively manage change, solution adoption and training, and issue resolution. The director and her team created a center of excellence to manage the “steady state” support for the areas in which the solution was deployed.

Staffing this with the expertise needed with coverage in relevant time zones is quite challenging. In addition, the corporation’s approach is to keep things small and contained, adding resources as needed. The center of excellence currently has seven full-time resources supporting 300 leaders in APAC and the Americas. As Phase 2 rolls out in EMEA, they likely will add another resource, mostly to cover the time zones.

After a long journey to provide back-office managers the data they need to make decisions, the technology company is starting to see the dividends. With the solution live for only four months, they are already on their way to achieving a 10 percent productivity improvement in 12 months (five months sooner than planned). This is being achieved mostly through attrition, by not backfilling positions or filling planned headcount increases.

In addition, some areas of the corporation have signed new business but have not had to add headcount to address the volume increases. And, some managers are seeing their inventory levels going down, which means they are processing more with the same or fewer headcount.

I think you will agree after reading the director’s story that she truly deserves the award for Most Persistent Driver of Change. Have you taken on a global implementation? What were your greatest hurdles to success? Share your story below.

The post The Award for Most Persistent Driver of Change Goes To … (Part 2) appeared first on Customer Experience Management Blog.

As you start to finalize 2017 planning for your organization, have you looked “outside in” and gathered ideas and insights from other organizations for the customer engagement optimization elements of your planning?

Considerations for a well thought out customer engagement strategy include determining how you can enrich customer interactions, improve business processes, and optimizing the workforce in order to enhance loyalty, increase revenue, and reduce operational costs. 

As part of this week’s Verint Customer Advisory Council (CAC) meeting, executives from a leading insuring company and a global business process outsourcer facilitated a session on 2017 business challenges and opportunities. Discussion topics included these two areas:

Customer Engagement/Experience: What business or customer trends are driving the biggest changes in your contact center or enterprise?  What are you doing about it?

Enterprise Workforce Optimization: What are some of the biggest challenges facing your enterprise or contact center over the next 12-18 months? What are you or your organization doing to address the challenges through strategy update, project reviews or organizational change?

What did our customer council members have to say? Here are some example business challenges they discussed:

Insurance company: Building an effective target operating model. Increase our ability to scale for growth. Shift from an inside-out to an outside-in customer service model. Drive more effective performance measurements that are better aligned with our expected business outcomes.

Healthcare: Implement new technology to drive productivity improvements, improve customer experience metrics. Increase customer satisfaction at the point of interaction, and strive for a top J.D. Power rating.

Communication: Reduce customer churn, increase self-service, reduce the number of unnecessary service truck dispatches (truck rolls).

Financial Services: Increase customer satisfaction in a constantly changing, highly regulatory environment.

A comprehensive list of the business opportunities that customers said they could include in their 2017 planning can generally be grouped into three areas:

1. Operational Efficiency: One member defined operational efficiency as “delivering products or services to customers in the most cost-effective manner possible, while still ensuring the highest quality for products, services and support.” This was one of the most common topics among the group—group members further defined this area in context of workforce optimization and process improvement. Customers gave these examples of planning to drive operational efficiency: knowledge management, case management, performance management, quality management, workforce management and employee gamification.

2. Enhance Customer Experience (CX) and Loyalty: Attributes for measurement in CX and loyalty areas include a customer’s attraction, awareness, discovery, cultivation, advocacy, and purchase and use of a service. Related planning areas customers mentioned during the meeting included leveraging enterprise feedback, customer feedback and quality management to gather data and drive internal change and improvements.

3. Increase Revenue: Right up there with operational efficiency strategies that help reduce costs are strategies that help organizations make money. Performance management initiatives help customers determine and measure key performance indicators (KPIs) such as “cross sell” and “up sell”—areas that directly contribute to the bottom line. Quality management and eLearning projects also help drive and measure sales efforts.

The topic of digital versus traditional customer service also came up in this week’s discussions.  One CAC member from a large financial institution mentioned a key 2017 strategy for her organization was to optimize their multichannel support areas that include phone support, email and live chat.

Would you like to learn more about the “tipping point” that is upon us regarding traditional and digital customer service? You can.

A recent global study from Verint revealed the customer service and channel preferences of more than 24,000 consumers across 12 countries. For more details, check out the white paper “The Digital Tipping Point: How Do Organizations Balance the Demands for Digital and Human Customer Service?”  which is downloadable here.

Keep going with your own 2017 planning. The New Year is just around the corner!

The post Looking Ahead: 2017 Business Challenges and Opportunities appeared first on Customer Experience Management Blog.

Verint’s John Chmaj, senior practice director for knowledge management, recently shared his thoughts with the Technology Services Industry Association (TSIA) about why knowledge management can be a potential game changer.

Organizations interested in developing loyal, long-term customers—not to mention more satisfied employees—should consider taking a look at the many advantages that knowledge management offers.

Read the blog.

The post Why Knowledge Management Is Important appeared first on Customer Experience Management Blog.

Business agility has been described as the ability for organizations to sense, prioritize and act. First a business must be able to rapidly sense an opportunity or threat to its business.

It must then have the ability to prioritize and evaluate potential responses to these challenges. And finally, it must be able to act effectively, if necessary.

While many social media monitoring and listening tools enable organizations to sense, they fall short when it comes to prioritization and providing the ability to act.

We see this when we contact an organization on social media with a complex customer service issue. We find that we get a rapid initial response or acknowledgement to our request—the organization has sensed our problem.

However, follow-up for complex issues raised on social media is often poor and often no better than for traditional channels, thus indicating that the organization’s ability to prioritize and act is compromised.

Customer service speed expectations are higher on social media than for other customer engagement channels. Customers frequently use social media channels as a customer service short-cut and a way of avoiding contact center delays.

Where customers may be prepared to wait 24 hours for an email reply to a problem, on social media this isn’t the case. In addition, customers are choosing social media for more urgent requests and expect to get an answer—not just an acknowledgement—inside an hour or less. In order to meet these expectations, organizations must become more agile and enhance their ability to prioritize and act.

A number of software capabilities are necessary to deliver the ability to prioritize incoming social items and then act effectively. Enhanced business rules functionality such as Verint Smart Match can be deployed to address prioritization. Key to transforming how issues are prioritized are rules that enable social requests to be given a higher priority, automatically routed to customer service based on topic or sentiment, and routed based on employee skills, availability, workload or department.

Organizations also need the ability to act effectively on social media. Customers expect a similar experience and quality of service via social media that they would receive via email, voice, chat or any other channel.

It should also be remembered that younger customers may not even use email or voice. This means that employees engaging socially must have access to customer account information and contact histories in the same way as a traditional contact center agent. This can be done by automatically linking customer social IDs with an existing customer record and ensuring that social conversations are stored in the customer contact history.

In addition, supporting employees with knowledge management and case management applications can help organizations meet their speed expectations when employees are asked to act on a social issue.

Social engagement is different from other customer engagement channels. If you are going to engage socially with customers, you need to become agile. That means you must not only sense issues on social media, you also must be able to quickly prioritize and act.

Find out more about how Verint can help transform your social engagement agility.

The post Social Customer Engagement Requires Agility appeared first on Customer Experience Management Blog.

In another life, as “Bob the Movie Man,” I am a prolific film reviewer—so, I often frame business problems in terms of famous movies.

For those old enough to remember “Back to the Future,” Marty McFly jumped into Doc Brown’s souped-up DeLorean and traveled back in time.

What would happen if Marty got into the DeLorean today and went back to 1985? What would Marty have found in terms of local government citizen service?

The answer is he would have found an environment where customer contact by phone was king but was made in a highly siloed fashion. Marty would have found government organizations with a telephone book of numbers that poor citizens had to wade through to reach the specific area of government they needed. He would have found no centralization of customer contact and high inefficiency in staff usage.

This, of course, was massively improved in the first decade of the century with the rise of contact centers based around either one single contact number (also known as a “golden number,” such as “311” in North America) or, at most, just a few contact numbers (or “silver” numbers). Verint solutions led the charge that delivered significant savings through this better management of customer access.

If we rev up the flux capacitor again and return to 2016, we would find that customer contact by digital is now king! But, with an ironic sense of déjà vu that only movie director and producer J.J. Abrams could dream up, most government organizations don’t have a single “golden” web portal with a single user ID and password.

Instead, many have a plethora of departmental portals—for example, one for “Taxation”; one for “Planning/Permits”; one for “Social Care”; etc. And, each of these has its own separate registration and log-in requirements.

Remember the phone book from 1985? Once again, the poor customer is left with complexity and frustration—something that acts as yet another barrier to further channel shift.

A technical answer exists for this problem, and that is the use of an Identity Provider (IdP), which is sometimes also referred to as an Identity Assertion Provider. When you log in to the “portal,” you are passed seamlessly across to the IdP for authentication. Once done, you are passed back into the portal in an authenticated state and, in theory, are authorized to access any of the underlying department-specific portals.

The Scottish Government (in the form of the Scottish Improvement Service) is leading the way in citizen identification. It created an IdP called “My Account” (not to be confused with Verint’s “My Account” digital portal!), which Verint customers in Scotland—for example, North Lanarkshire Council—are starting to connect to.

Another system being beta tested in England and Wales, as a more commercial-outsourced model, is Gov.UK Verify, which started operation in central government departments but is now attempting to be rolled out more broadly across the U.K. public sector. The government of Singapore has instituted its “Singpass” system. The U.S. and Canada currently have no recognized national system.

All these IdP approaches, however, require interoperability standards to avoid extensive customized integration work, with Security Assertions Markup Language (SAML) being the standard that best supports this cross-system authentication. Unfortunately, not all government systems use this standard yet.

The best approach, in my opinion, would call for government regulation that dictates SAML support be a key requirement for inclusion in government frameworks, as well as making SAML support a mandatory requirement of any purchased digital systems moving forward.

In that way, at least, when Marty gets to 2020, we might see an integrated digital environment that is ‘Fit for the Future.’

The post Going “Back to the Future” with Silos appeared first on Customer Experience Management Blog.

The Director of Global Business Process Services at a global enterprise information technology company came to a realization many years ago.

The managers of back-office operations were at a handicap due to a lack of data and no standard, consistent program for workforce management (WFM).

The corporation had been using the Verint Workforce Management (WFM) solution in their front offices for many years, so the director took on the mission to convince the organization that the data and similar solutions could be used to manage back-office operations.

Her initial plan was to start small in one region (U.S.) in one industry (healthcare) and limit the number of locations to ten with roughly 1,000 employees.

Two and a half years later the program is global, multi-region, multi-industry, and multi-site, covering 7,500 employees.

With any epic journey, the story is long and the hurdles to overcome are many—too many for a single blog post. So today we will learn about her first four hurdles—and part two will cover the remaining four.

Hurdle No. 1: Executive Buy-in. And when she talks about executive buy-in, she’s not talking about a software purchase. She had to start with educating executives on the true needs of the back-office and the ability to capture and use data there to drive productivity and management decisions.

Hurdle No. 2: A Business Case. Being a large, complex organization, a business case was required for every major purchase or initiative. This might be easy in a small organization, but in hers all the relevant corporate entities had to have a say in what they wanted to see and understand how and why this was going to drive value.

The good news was she and her team—supported by the Verint team—crafted a strong business case that gained the enthusiastic support of upper management. The bad news? They did such a good job demonstrating the value that the corporation did not want to limit the deployment to the initial plan, so they decided it should be a global initiative.

So the scope expanded to APAC and the Americas (with EMEA in a Phase 2), five industries, 15 countries, 75 sites, and between 7,500 to 9,500 employees. The proposed solution also changed from WFM to Verint Desktop and Process Analytics (DPA), because DPA was seen as a foundational step to get data into the hands of back-office managers.

The change in scope meant she had to redo the business case over and over again as different regions and business leaders were brought into the decision-making process.

“I put myself out there to try and recommend a solution, believing that we really could improve the back office. But I don’t know if I actually would have been successful in getting approval to move forward if I did not have a vendor who was truly with me side-by-side, living the pain, giving me answers, and going through the process,” said the director.

Hurdle #3. Organizational Change. In the middle of this process, the corporation reorganized.  Luckily, most of the executive management team, and consequently support for the initiative, remained intact. There were new requirements and processes she and her team had to follow, but they didn’t really delay her progress.

Hurdle #4. Ask for Requirements Once. The director and her team believed they had done their due diligence in collecting the requirements from the various constituents. They sent out their pre-work package of data requests and templates to each of the business owners.

Unfortunately, as they continued to meet with different functions and regions, they learned of additional data requirements and had to return to the business owners more than once to ask for more information. They truly didn’t realize the complexity of how different the systems, processes and people requirements were by region, function and site.

Look for Part 2 of this journey in an upcoming blog post to learn how the director persevered to help the corporation achieve a 10 percent improvement in productivity while providing back-office managers with actionable data to make better business decisions.

The post The Award for Most Persistent Driver of Change Goes To … (Part 1) appeared first on Customer Experience Management Blog.

Future Branches

November 29 – December 1; La Jolla, California

Verint’s Jenni Palocsik, solutions marketing director, will participate in a panel discussion on December 1 titled “Avoid Bright Shiny Object Syndrome: Using Technology the Way Your Customer Needs It” at 12:55 p.m. ET. Buying the latest tools doesn’t necessarily make them right for your customers. Participants will learn how to better understand the needs of their business, invest in solutions and not gimmicks, and how to discern the things that actually drive engagement.

Knowledge Is Power

December 1; Webinar #4 in Four-Part Series

Verint’s John Chmaj, senior practice director, KM Strategy, and Asurion’s Sarah Sheets, content publication manager, Solution University, will present “How Do I Ensure Success in Knowledge Management?” at 2 p.m. ET. Learn how the development of support-focused content, standards and a ‘cultural refresh’ transformed the value and impact of the support knowledge base at Asurion. John and Sarah will explore how the implementation of specific KM best practices drove significant improvements in the usage, efficiency and overall adoption of KM.

Engage 2016 UK Customer Conference

December 1; London, United Kingdom

Verint subject matter experts and executives will gather in London to discuss customer engagement optimization, customer analytics, workforce optimization, engagement management and more. Customer presentations, demonstrations and the popular Customer Experience Zone will help attendees gain insights and new perspectives on increasing customer loyalty and optimizing their Verint solutions. Event speakers will include news broadcaster Natasha Kaplinsky and noted author and professor Jamie Anderson—named one of the world’s top 25 management thinkers by Business Strategy Review; Ovum’s Daniel Mayo, chief analyst of financial services technology, and Rik Turner, senior analyst of IT infrastructure solutions, who will discuss regulatory issues facing organizations and addressing the related challenges; and Forrester’s Andrew Peach, vice president of custom data insights, who will examine how Forrester’s CX Index™ benchmark data and revenue modeling helps strengthen customer experience programs.

Robotic Process Automation in Shared Services

December 1-2; Braselton, Georgia

Verint’s Craig Seebach, vice president, business strategy enterprise workforce optimization, will moderate a panel for shared services centers on December 1 at 2:15 p.m. ET called “How to Determine When It’s the Right Time to Apply RPA into Your SSC’s Process Management Framework.” Panel participants include Marc Pauls, senior vice president, strategy manager, wholesale banking & corporate risk & credit divisions, enterprise global strategy, Wells Fargo; Stephen Miller, senior director robotics & automation practice, HP Enterprise; and Henry Lyles, director, global shared services, strategy & execution – CI & business technology, McDonald’s. Discussion will focus on using RPA to help streamline back-office processes to increase productivity and reduce costs. Specific topics include the ideal timeline for implementing RPA initially and how to introduce it to new functions and departments, as well as defining a step-by-step action plan for the various stages of RPA implementation, management and growth.

Actionable Insights from Data

December 8; CRMXchange Webinar

Verint’s Daniel Ziv, vice president customer analytics, will participate in this 2 p.m. ET webinar that examines how leading organizations are mining human-to-human interactions to improve their digital channel strategy—and the strategic role of analytics and customer insights within a holistic customer engagement platform. Putting data to good use can make a big difference, but many companies are swimming in a sea of it and are not properly positioned to access it for improved customer interactions. Organizations need to sift through unstructured data to locate critical business intelligence that can help them deliver the right information, at the right time, across every channel. Multi-channel data—when properly unified—can be analyzed to help determine the relationships between the behaviors and attributes of customers and agents to benefit first-call resolutions, sales, and customer satisfaction and retention.

The What, Whys and Hows of Robotic Process Automation

December 13; Webinar

Verint’s Jenni Palocsik and guest speaker Craig Le Clair, vice president and principal analyst, Forrester Research, will discuss at 1 p.m. ET what Robotic Process Automation is, industry drivers, the current state of adoption and usage, and best practices for getting started—and deploying RPA for the greatest benefit.

The post Verint Speakers: Robotics, Knowledge Management—and Using Customer Insights Wisely appeared first on Customer Experience Management Blog.

Aware of the dangers and probability of suffering a data breach, organizations are rethinking their security posture. They realize that the traditional prevention-based security model, based on signature-based perimeter tools, is no longer effective against advanced cyber threats.

To avoid being the next victim of a high-profile data breach, organizations are seeking advanced and post-breach threat detection and response. This is where a Security Operations Center (SOC) can help.

If your organization is planning to upgrade its traditional SOC or build a new advanced one from scratch, you can get an in-depth analysis of the various options available and their relative costs in our new white paper: The Real Costs of Building an Advanced Cyber Security Operations Center.

Want to know more about what a successful security operations center looks like?

Read more.

The post Revealing the Long-Term Costs of Building an Advanced Cyber SOC appeared first on Customer Experience Management Blog.

During the first two webinars in our Knowledge Is Power series, we learned how Knowledge Management, when done well, can provide tremendous benefits to your customers, employees and organization.

We all probably know that KM drives business outcomes, but how does it generate value? How can you build a credible business case?  How can you sell KM to your organization amidst tight budgets and competing priorities?

The days when projects were funded because an executive thought it was a “good idea” are long gone. In today’s business atmosphere, every investment is closely scrutinized. Knowledge Management is no exception. In this blog, we’ll share a few tips and tricks for how to build a rock solid KM business case.

The process of building a KM business case involves three key steps: vision, strategy and value.  We’ll start with KM vision: clearly defining the outcomes that KM will achieve for your business.  These benefits can be internal or external, strategic or operational. When defining your KM vision, it’s best to develop a balanced approach with at least one outcome from each area.

Next, let’s focus on your KM strategy: the key drivers and priorities that will allow you to achieve your vision. More and more, executives want to know the specific activities that will help drive KM value in your organization. It’s not enough to rely on industry data that shows an average percentage increase across a few key metrics; a defendable business case must clearly link outcomes to KM drivers and their measures.

Here’s an example that links KM activities to First Contact Resolution:

The final step in the business case process is to define value: how your KM vision and strategy will “move the needle” and deliver measurable financial results for your organization. For each outcome, we need to project an improvement range and determine the financial impact of our projection.

Some cheap advice: make sure your projections are reasonable and credible. Last year, I was working with a customer that used knowledge on average 90 seconds per call. But in their original business case, they showed that implementing KM would reduce their handle time by 150 seconds. We all know that Knowledge Management is powerful, but it’s not magic!

So, now that we have clearly defined your KM vision, strategy, and value, we need to tie it all together in a business case that shows return on investment (ROI) and simple payback. Your executives will want to know when they are going to get their initial investment back, and how much their investment will earn in three and five years.

To build your business case, consider these elements:

KM Costs:

• Technology
• Services and training
• Resources
• Ongoing maintenance

KM Benefits:

• Customer experience
• Quality and compliance
• Operational excellence
• Employee engagement

Timeline:

• Implementation
• Rollout schedule
• Benefits realization
• Phase two activities

It’s important to understand that 100% of your costs won’t occur in the first month, and your benefits won’t start coming to fruition in month two. KM involves significant cultural and organizational change, and that takes time. Make sure your timeline is realistic and obtainable.

At Verint, we believe that Knowledge Management is a lifestyle, not a project. And, we understand that KM success is a journey, not a sprint—building a solid and credible KM business case is a critical first step. We have the experience and expertise to help. Contact us to start your KM journey today.

• For more information, view the webinar recording: How do I build the business case to invest in knowledge management technology?
• Register for the complete Knowledge Is Power webinar series
• Tune-in to our next webinar on December 1 to hear a Verint KM customer share their journey to success!

The post Building a Knowledge Management Business Case appeared first on Customer Experience Management Blog.

I originally wanted to title this blog “Answering the Musical Question: How Do You Know What You Don’t Know If You Don’t Know That You Don’t Know It?”

Then I realized that the title had so many characters that it would pretty much exclude me from Tweeting about it, so I decided to back off and keep it simple. 

But the rejected title really does describe the job of desktop process analytics in the contact center, even if it didn’t make the cut. It’s an effective means of finding out what you don’t know so you can do something about it.

I’m a huge fan of analytics of all descriptions in the contact center. Gazing into my analyst crystal ball, I see analytics being the foundation of all contact center solutions and strategies in the not-too-distant future. Analytics will be part of every decision matrix whether major or minor.  Analytics solutions will proliferate throughout the enterprise, with many of those solutions starting in the contact center and finding their way throughout the rest of the organization, including the middle and back office.

Lately, speech analytics seems to be grabbing all the headlines, and I’m fine with that. As the saying goes, any press is good press, so I expect to see the high profile of speech analytics drive interest in other analytics solutions, especially desktop process analytics.

Desktop process analytics addresses the study of time and motion that occurs at the agent desktop. There is a general misconception in the contact center industry that desktop process analytics is another “Big Brother is watching” solution designed to drain the last drop of potential productivity out of each agent’s performance.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

While desktop process analytics does identify variations in agents’ skills and training, it also identifies often overlooked system performance issues that go unreported yet impede call progress and impact performance metrics.

Most managers and supervisors today still rely on the review of random recordings on the quality management solution to uncover system issues that impact performance. The flaws in this strategy are obvious and if agents don’t report system issues as they occur, they often go unaddressed—to the detriment of the customer experience.

Desktop process analytics can pinpoint system problems such as error messages that impede call flow; screens hanging and causing delays in call completion; and slow page rendering that hinders efficient customer service. How many times have we, as customers, had an agent apologize during a call because the “computer is slow today?”

Desktop process analytics identifies these and similar issues before they become barriers to optimizing the customer experience.

Similarly, desktop process analytics can help users identify agent deficiencies and (re)training or coaching needs. When agents take a lot longer to complete particular steps in a process than others in their group, accessing multiple systems or spending excess time in the knowledge base to find answers, that can be a red flag. The opposite can also signal an opportunity—agents who aren’t using the knowledge base may not be providing accurate information or delivering a consistent experience to customers.

Desktop process analytics also functions as a data gathering tool, working along with performance scorecards to provide management with visibility into agents’ execution against key performance indicators (KPIs). In this capacity, desktop process analytics further proves its value as a key decision-making tool while supporting and reinforcing the overall performance of the agent team.

I submit that the identification of problems at the desktop, if presented properly, will not be viewed as another “Big Brother” activity by most agents. Rather, I believe most agents welcome the identification of problems not rooted in their work habits and that, once addressed, have a positive effect on their performance and subsequent compensation.

The elimination of system latency and error issues has an unquestionably positive impact on metrics such as average handle time (AHT) and first call resolution (FCR). Improvements in agent skills and knowledge have a similarly positive impact on agent performance with the added bonus of improving workforce morale. A workforce that is performing well in concert with a system that is firing on all cylinders makes for a happy workplace.

My admiration of analytics aside, I believe the implementation of desktop process analytics in the contact center has the potential to save thousands, if not millions, of dollars in lost productivity while positively impacting agent turnover rates. Like others in the contact center analytics family, desktop process analytics is an overachiever. Don’t overlook it.

The post Desktop Process Analytics: The Overlooked Overachiever appeared first on Customer Experience Management Blog.

We want our operations to run more smoothly, efficiently and productively.

We need insights into how and where we can make changes to help achieve better results.

We strive to allocate resources and effort for improved outcomes.

How can you tackle these business challenges? I recommend the following strategy: Uncover. Analyze. Improve. Automate.

Uncover – “How can I learn what I can’t see?”

Years ago, managers were advised to MBWA—manage by walking around—to learn what they needed to know. They could see who was working productively, and who was not—whether it was in the contact center or performing front or back-office functions.

Today, the sheer size of operational teams—and their distributed locations—makes that unrealistic.

Organizations with Verint Process Discovery, part of Verint Desktop and Process Analytics, can use it to uncover desktop activity across their operations, capturing process steps, sequence and durations for all the work being done. This data can help provide critical insights into their day-to-day operations—both for individual employees and across larger groups performing the same work.

Analyze – “What’s going on and why?”

Once you have the data, the next step is the analysis. Verint Process Analysis generates a visual map of the steps taken to complete a particular process, showing how many employees followed the mainstream or direct path, as well as those who followed a different process, bypassing steps, circling back to repeat steps out of sequence, or simply terminating the work unsuccessfully.

In addition to capturing the process flow, the solution also captures the duration for each step which can be used for updating time standards, as well as to identify employees who may need coaching or training.

The resultant visual flow can alert you to compliance or policy issues, and can also help you identify how your top performers complete a process so that it might be taught to others.

Improve – “Where can we make specific changes for better results?”

Understanding what is happening provides management with Actionable Intelligence. Having data to show that employees are struggling with a single step in a process is a sign that the process may need to be reviewed and revised. Related required information could be presented in a different sequence to reduce employee effort, or help tips or guidance prompts can provide instructions to help them complete the task more easily and accurately.

Automate – “What work can we offload from employees to improve productivity?”

After you’ve mapped your operational processes, consider whether some of them might be effectively automated using Robotic Process Automation to increase productivity and quality—and, importantly—offload repetitive and boring work from your employees. By shifting some tasks and processes to software robots that can do the work automatically, you can focus your employees’ efforts on more value-added, customer-facing work that requires human decision-making.

Four Steps to Repeat for Better Outcomes

Uncover. Analyze. Improve. Automate.

By leveraging the capabilities of Desktop and Process Analytics and Robotic Process Automation, you can take a systematic approach to reviewing, optimizing and automating the work in your organization—any maybe even have more satisfied employees.

Learn more in our white paper, Five Steps Toward Sustainable Process Improvement.

The post Uncover. Analyze. Improve. Automate. appeared first on Customer Experience Management Blog.

Now, if a customer can say it, write it or click it, Verint and OpinionLab VoC solutions can collect, analyze and enable organizations to take action on it.

Verint and OpinionLab are now one!

With more customers than ever taking a “digital-first” approach to how they conduct research, perform transactions and solve problems, savvy companies need the ability to measure these digital experiences and act quickly on the resulting insights in order to deliver consistent, personalized service; foster seamless transitions from digital self-service to assisted service channels; and connect the complete customer journey.

Through its acquisition of OpinionLab, a leader in customer-initiated digital channel VoC, Verint has extended its customer engagement optimization portfolio to do just that.

With this combination comes the ability to measure digital transactional interactions on web and mobile devices, and analyze and act on feedback in-the-moment during the actual digital customer journey.

Together with OpinionLab, Verint offers the broadest VoC suite for listening, analyzing and acting on the voice of the customer across channels—digital, voice, text and social.

Now, if a customer can say it, write it or click it, Verint and OpinionLab VoC solutions can collect, analyze and enable organizations to take action on it.

Notes Derek Koecher, senior vice president, corporate strategy and business development, CenturyLink:

“Customer experience is a centerpiece of CenturyLink’s strategy and critical to how we measure success. As our customers continue to engage us across channels, our combined Verint and OpinionLab solutions will enable us to measure and act even more effectively on their experiences throughout the customer journey.”

Learn more here.

The post Verint Extends VoC Suite to Digital Engagement with Acquisition of OpinionLab appeared first on Customer Experience Management Blog.

As a consumer, digital channels play a big part of any decision I’m making. Digital channels, in particular online communities, enable me to:

• Take less risk in my choices and decisions, as I can learn from those that have gone before me.
• Preview how I will be treated as a future customer.

In fact, I expect the businesses that I interact with to offer numerous digital channels. I don’t necessarily care if they are on Facebook—as that isn’t where I want to interact with them—but I do want them to be on Twitter, and I do want to have a place where I can interact on a more personal level with that brand.

For example, if I’m buying a new triathlon bike: I’ll look for the brand on Twitter, I’ll read reviews on Amazon, and then I’ll visit their community to ask product-specific questions from existing customers. From this collective set of interactions, I’ll form a buying decision.

Therefore, it comes as no surprise when analysts routinely report that upwards of 70% of today’s sales start online.

3 Challenges Organizations Must Overcome

There are three specific challenges that organizations must overcome as they shift away from the traditional marketing funnel and toward the customer’s experience:

1. Embrace Digital Channels

Today’s consumer is better educated than ever—with information readily available on our phones. All of this rich data originates from digital channels: Twitter, online communities, ratings and reviews all continue to feed the wealth of product knowledge immediately available at your fingertips.

2. Everyone Is in Customer Service

Customer service is the front-line leader for helping to ensure a great customer experience.  Organizations must recognize that everyone is in customer service, not just the customer service department.

We’ve seen this with some of our customers who now lead internal training sessions for everyone in their company to instruct them how to interact with customers on Twitter and the company’s online community.

3. Empower Me

As a consumer, I want the ability to interact with your brand. I want to give feedback. I want to read reviews—both positive and negative—and have the ability to provide my own commentary. Give me the opportunity to share my experiences and embrace my feedback. When you do, you’ll find it is yet another way to impact my experience as a customer.

Understanding and embracing digital channels are no longer optional—digital is simply table stakes for today’s successful organizations.

The post The Rising Importance of Digital Channels appeared first on Customer Experience Management Blog.

Not too surprisingly, employees do better work when they have access to what customers are thinking.

So, how do you apply everything you’ve learned about customer wants and expectations to the front lines—where it makes the most difference?

I’ve spent many years leading customer experience efforts and learning valuable lessons.

In my latest article for CustomerThink, I share why it’s important to take a look at what you’re doing to align the longstanding behavioral norms within your organization—and align them with your customers’ expectations.

Read more for the details.

The post Cultural Change: 5 Ways to Empower Employees with Customer Insights appeared first on Customer Experience Management Blog.

Performance management lets employees, managers and the organization know where they are achieving or falling short of their goals. But knowing where you need to improve—and how to improve—are two different things.

Gamification solutions such as Verint Gamification provide the how. It helps managers understand how to engage, influence and motivate employees—presenting employees with learning activities and next best actions they can take so they know how to improve their skills. 

Gamification works in tandem with performance management systems, limiting the KPIs to those that drive employee behavior and desired outcomes. Following are some of the key attributes of gamification that make it a compelling proposition for organizations wanting to improve performance.

Consumable. Gamification presents micro-learning that is easy to digest and can be taken at the employees’ convenience—between calls, tasks, on breaks, etc. Within the Verint solution you can build simulations, quizzes or link to videos or clips in your existing LMS system. Keeping these learning activities short but targeted helps make them more effective.

Progressive. It’s not so much about hitting KPIs but rather about modifying behaviors. Employees can see where they started and how far they’ve come—and are recognized for making progress on their goals. The tool has built-in levels to continually motivate employees to do better and grow their skills.

Visual and Positive. Presented graphically in a game narrative, employees can easily see where they stand against goals, peers and their personal best, vs. a busy spreadsheet or monthly shared report summary. These often have too much data and graphs that focus on past performance and shortfalls vs. a positive focus on progress and future potential.

Expansive. Shifts time and focus from 1-to-1 to 1-to-many. Instead of:

• Identifying skill deficiencies by employee and assigning 1-to-1 coaching or eLearning through targeted games or learning assignments, managers can now assign learning to multiple people, teams and/or business units with similar challenges to improve performance—saving manager time and extending the benefits beyond one employee to many.
• Recognizing goal achievements of a single employee in a 1 on 1 or a few in team meetings/calls, employees can be recognized by peers and other teams across the world for achievements.
• Relying on just their manager to answer questions, employees can build their own network of resources in the game community to ask questions.

Agile and Balanced. Gamification is not one and done. It’s a continual process to adapt the games to match the constantly changing priorities and needs of the organization. It also helps ensure checks and balance. Instead of pushing to improve one behavior, the games are designed to emphasize a desired behavior, perhaps through awarding higher points or a badge for taking related learning activities, but keep the other KPIs in focus as they are collectively needed to “win the game” and achieve performance goals.

Employees benefit from gamification because it makes it easy for them to understand how they can improve and rewards them for their efforts. The recognition and advancement in skills helps increase their job satisfaction and engagement. Organizations benefit by continually motivating employees to achieve their performance goals and, consequently, the company’s desired business outcomes.

Want to learn more about progressively improving employee performance? Read the Executive Perspectives: Moving the Middle.

The post Gamification Is the HOW of Performance Management appeared first on Customer Experience Management Blog.

November 17
CRMXchange Webinar to Explore the Difference between Customer Experience Failure and Success

The difference between delivering a customer experience failure or success can be razor thin.

A colleague worked with a technology company that differentiated their commodity services with a brand promise of superior customer support. The brand promise was difficult to prove until a customer had a problem—the company invested heavily to proactively prevent problems.

When a customer contacted their company the first time for support, it was a critical “moment of truth.”

• Would this first interaction prove or disprove their brand promise?
• Would this first interaction result in positive or negative emotions?
• Would this first interaction increase or decrease customer loyalty?

I placed the word “failure” before “success” in this blog’s title to emphasize the emotional impact of every “moment of truth.” The negative emotions from a single customer interaction can destroy years of successful customer experiences.

Learn More from a Verint Customer Experience Expert

Join Verint and CRMXchange on November 17, 1 – 2 p.m. ET, to learn what CRMXchange readers say makes the difference between good and bad customer experiences. Verint’s Brian Koma, Vice President of Research, Enterprise Feedback Management Practice Leader, will share insights you can apply at your organization.

The post Customer Experience: The Difference Between Failure and Success appeared first on Customer Experience Management Blog.

Interest in Robotic Process Automation (RPA) remains high. More and more organizations are exploring the potential use of software robots to automate tasks or entire processes using desktop applications to improve their operations. This often aligns with the ongoing need to improve productivity and quality without increasing team size.  

Another significant benefit of RPA relates to “human resources considerations.” By relieving employees of repetitive and time-consuming work that can be automatically executed by software robots, you free up their time to leverage their skills in more value-added customer-facing work, often increasing employee engagement and satisfaction.

When employees have the opportunity to let go of the boring work—and improve their skills and advance their potential within the organization—they usually stay longer. You may see benefits in HR savings as a result: less attrition means less recruiting, interviewing, hiring and training, and a better bottom line.

With a compelling business case to move forward, often the more difficult task is to identify which tasks and processes to automate. Continuing the topic from an earlier blog, 25 Examples of Processes for Robotic Process Automation, here are some additional use cases to consider:

Healthcare

• Preparing and submitting claims to insurance providers
• Administering Medicare billing and compliance
• Applying billing code changes to procedure records
• Checking the status of accounts payable and issuing new invoices
• Verifying insurance enrollment and eligibility
• Comparing medical records across systems
• Sending patient appointment reminders
• Providing clinical documentation

Transportation

• Managing fleet status
• Notifying drivers of construction route changes
• Processing invoices for billing
• Monitoring service and repair records
• Verifying shipping and delivery dates

Retail

• Managing complaints
• Enrolling customers in loyalty programs
• Issuing loyalty rewards
• Processing return authorizations
• Sending shipping notifications
• Reordering inventory when supply reaches threshold
• Completing month-end documentation

It helps to remember that Robotic Process Automation is well suited for processes that are clearly defined, repeatable and rules based. As the above list makes clear, organizations across many industries can automate the completion of a wide variety of tasks. Learn more and consider how you can start to realize the benefits of robotic process automation.

The post 20 More Examples of Processes for Robotic Process Automation appeared first on Customer Experience Management Blog.

It’s not difficult to see how knowledge management can save your organization money. If agents can quickly find consistent, accurate answers to customer service questions, handle time and error rates should go down and customer satisfaction should go up.

In fact, Aberdeen Group has found that best-in-class knowledge management users have significantly higher customer retention rates, SLA compliance rates and first-time fix rates.¹

While this probably seems straightforward, getting budget approved for your own knowledge management project may not be quite so simple. With competing projects throughout the organization and ever-tightening budgets, executives are looking for detailed and specific ROI calculations.

In order to get your project funded, you will likely need to build a tailored ROI describing exactly how knowledge management will benefit your organization.

In our upcoming webinar, Verint’s knowledge management experts Brad Bannwart and Cameron Hissey will walk you through how to do just that, providing guidance on a variety of approaches and metrics so you can find what works for you. Some metrics, such as handle time, are likely to factor into almost every KM ROI, but there may also be unique factors that you specifically want to call out—such as reduced training time, increased compliance, or simplified maintenance.

Our experts will walk through these topics and how to bring them together into a complete business case.

This webinar is part of our ongoing Knowledge Is Power webinar series. If you haven’t already signed up for this series, it’s a fantastic way to get acquainted with the basics of knowledge management and then learn how knowledge management can benefit your organization and how to get started.

In the first two webinars, we’ve spoken with Ian Jacobs, Senior Analyst, Forrester Research to define some knowledge management fundamentals and market trends. Next, I spoke about some efficiency challenges that contact centers are facing and how KM helps to resolve them.

Brad and Cameron are up next to discuss this current topic of the KM business case—and then we’ll wrap things up with Sarah Sheets, Manager of Solution Publication at Asurion, a Verint customer who will speak about her own experience with Verint Knowledge Management.

I hope you will join us for this webinar series so you can get started with your knowledge management program!

Knowledge Is Power Webinar Series: Webinar 3

How do I build the business case to invest in knowledge management technology?

Thursday, November 10, 2 – 2:45 p.m. ET

Register here.

¹ Aberdeen Group, Field Service Knowledge Management: The Link Between Service Excellence and Efficiency, March 2016

The post Building a Business Case for Knowledge Management appeared first on Customer Experience Management Blog.

Most process improvement initiatives start as a reaction to a missed goal in a division or workgroup. The managers overseeing this division decide to improve the process to try and improve outcomes.

Yet, this approach may be flawed from the start. Improvements made in silos fail to account for activities related to the process that take place outside of that division. Changes in one group typically impact others down the line—often with a negative effect.

In the Wednesday, November 9, 2 p.m. ET webinar titled “Creating Competitive Advantage through Process-Led Transformation,” Accenture Managing Director Mark George and I will discuss a new, enterprise approach to process improvement that:

• Begins with desired strategic outcomes
• Identifies related activities regardless of their functions or processes
• Creates connected value streams that traverse the organization
• Assesses organization complexity for processes that add or support customer outcomes, and those that impede them
• Monitors and measures the impact of enterprise-level process changes on resource utilization, employee productivity, service delivery and customer value.

Accenture research has shown that fewer than 20 percent of all business processes create market differentiation. Yet, processes that directly support speed and strategy—such as those focused on optimization and innovation—are worthy of investment.

In fact, those that simply enable outcomes should be standardized, codified and re-used with ready access. In this webinar, participants will learn about the processes and tools that can help them distinguish between these two types of processes and drive value from organizational process-improvement initiatives.

Register here.

The post A New Enterprise Approach to Process Improvement Drives Customer Value appeared first on Customer Experience Management Blog.

Four ways that speech insights can impact the contact center and beyond

Speech analytics technology is becoming an essential change agent across the enterprise, with impact beyond the contact center, or customer engagement center.

Many forward-looking organizations are using speech analytics to mine millions of customer call recordings for powerful actionable insights that can help improve the customer experience and optimize business processes.

How It Works: Mining Call Recordings for Customer Insights

Today, the phone call remains a top channel for customer interaction by volume—and a gold mine of information. For instance, a five-minute call can contain about 1,000 words that can reveal needs, complaints, product feedback, and potentially even competitor data.

Speech analytics can automatically analyze millions of call recordings to help make important discoveries for the organization:

• Categorize calls (e.g., by call type, product/service, outcome, emotion)
• Discover trending topics
• Gauge customer satisfaction and churn risk
• Track agent performance
• Analyze root causes of issues

Four Ways Speech Analytics Makes Businesses Better and Customers Happier 

Speech analytics can produce powerful actionable insights that can help the contact center, as well as other parts of the organization. Here are four potential ways, with examples:

• Lowering Contact Center Costs and Improving Agent Productivity. In one case study, Verint Speech Analytics helped a large North American telecommunications company with 9,000 agents discover why it was receiving millions of highly similar customer calls asking “where’s my phone?” It was due to a misalignment between order fulfillment and delivery processes—a critical insight that enabled the company to fix the issue and save $30 million Canadian dollars in the first year alone.
• Fixing Self-Service Issues. In another case study, a leading U.S. personal property and casualty insurer used Verint Speech Analytics to discover confusing IVR prompts that were frustrating customers and leading to unnecessary phone calls. Those insights led to IVR enhancements that reduced agent call volume by 60% for a savings of $1 million U.S. dollars since implementation.
• Reducing Customer Churn. In this customer example, an international financial services company with 3,000 agents used Verint Speech Analytics to identify “at-risk” customer accounts by analyzing previously lost accounts and their associated speaking patterns within phone conversations. By implementing changes to address this issue, within three months its agents prevented 600 current at-risk customers from leaving, saving $1.7 million USD in revenue.
• Detecting Business Process Issues to Improve Outcomes. In another case study, a leading supplier of maintenance, repair and operations products used Verint Speech Analytics to reveal business process issues that, once addressed, resulted in reduced product returns by a significant margin.

Interested in learning more about these case studies? Click here for the eBook called “Transforming the Contact Center into an Enterprise Change Agent.”

The post Speech Analytics as an Enterprise Change Agent appeared first on Customer Experience Management Blog.

Even as many financial institutions and retailers decrease the overall number of branches or stores in their network, research shows that having a physical presence is still valued by consumers today.

Customers may turn to a digital channel first to complete a transaction—they could attempt a mobile deposit or do an online product search, for example. Or quite possibly, they may require more detailed information or the expertise and help of a financial advisor to complete their transaction with confidence.

So, how do you know if your employees are delivering the face-to-face customer interaction you expect, and in many cases that regulations require?

Recording and assessing the customer interactions on phone calls are foundational to managing quality in the contact center. Why not also benefit from the capture and evaluation of the face-to-face conversations between your employees and your customers in the branch or retail store. How effectively do they handle sales opportunities and other interactions with your customers?

Many organizations lack visibility into the quality and accuracy of customer interactions in their brick and mortar locations—and this can represent a serious risk. This applies not only to compliance, but also to measuring the in-store customer experience and sales effectiveness of employees.

Organizations need to be able to help ensure that these face-to-face interactions are monitored and conducted in accordance to regulatory guidelines and organizational policies.

Imagine a retail counter at a mobile phone store where discussions about data and calling plans, pricing, and contract specifics can be recorded and then reviewed for quality, customer satisfaction, and the retailer’s protection.

Face-to-face voice interaction recording, combined with quality management and speech analytics, can provide the actionable intelligence you need to meet these compliance requirements—and can also help to ensure your employees are delivering a quality customer experience and effectively helping to increase sales.

Learn more by reading our new Executive Perspectives: Deepen Insights into Quality and Sales Effectiveness with Face-to-Face Voice Interaction Recording. It describes three technologies that can provide insight into customer interactions at your branch or retail network.

You can also learn more about Verint’s vision on the evolving branch by joining us at Future Branches, November 29 – December 1 in San Diego, California. Use code FB16VT and receive a 20% discount off your registration fee. We’ll see you there!

The post Improve the Customer Experience—Listen to Your Branches appeared first on Customer Experience Management Blog.

More digital and automation is what consumers want, right?  Well not so fast.  Consumers around the world have spoken—and more than four out of five of them believe speaking with a person will always be an important part of the customer service equation.

Did you see that coming?

The Verint study carried out by Opinium Research with insights and commentary from analyst firm IDC reveals that organizations need to balance both digital and human customer engagement to thrive—and to survive.

These conclusions were based on research findings from more than 24,000 consumers in 12 countries and more than 1,000 businesses around the world.

There is much more to this story. As part of this study, Verint partnered with research and advisory firm IDC to launch a new report titled The Digital Tipping Point: How Do Organizations Balance the Demands for Digital and Human Customer Service? This report, which is downloadable at www.verint.com/digital-tipping-point, shares insights, practices and advice for organizations on which channels and methods of contact matter most to consumers today, and how this differs across service query types, industries, territories and demographics.

In addition, we invite you to join us for a webinar on the Digital Tipping Point report on November 15 that will feature myself and IDC’s Mary Wardley, vice president, enterprise applications and CRM software. Participants will learn about the importance of understanding customer engagement preferences and improving customer experiences in the digital age. Click here to register.

The post Global Study Reveals Resounding Need for Human Touch in Today’s Digital First World appeared first on Customer Experience Management Blog.

CRM Xchange Virtual Conference

November 3; Best Practices Roundtable

Verint’s Rajeev Venkat, senior director, solutions marketing, will present “E2 = CEO” as part of the “Best Practices in 60 Minutes” roundtable at 4 p.m. ET with an emphasis on employees and the enterprise for successful Customer Engagement Optimization (E² = CEO). Venkat will also discuss how identity authentication / fraud detection helps improve employee engagement. Attendees will receive a quick overview on the importance and benefits of an employee-engagement and enterprise-wide focused approach to interacting with customers.

Customer Engagement Summit

November 8; London, United Kingdom

Verint’s Rachel Lane, director, customer analytics, EMEA, will present “Humanising Customer Engagement in a Digital World” at 2:20 p.m. BST. Lane will present Verint’s latest research findings on consumer preferences and expectations around digital and traditional customer engagement. Conducted in association with Opinium Research LLP, this Verint-commissioned research involved consumer interviews with more than 24,000 people from across 12 countries worldwide. Session attendees will find out which channels and methods of contact matter to today’s consumers and how to humanise customer engagement regardless of channel.

Creating Competitive Advantage through Process-Led Transformation

November 9; Accenture/Verint webinar

Business Process Improvement (BPI) has often been a bottom up, local initiative to improve the performance of one functional group. Unfortunately, this approach had limited value, created complexity as each function had their own processes, and did not provide groups the needed tools to measure the impact of their changes on other functions. Join Accenture’s Mark George, managing director, global operations and process transformation, and Verint’s Craig Seebach, vice president, enterprise workforce optimization, business strategy at 2 p.m. ET as they present a higher value-add approach to BPI – Prime Value Chain and Complexity Analytics (PVCCA). This takes a top-down approach, looking across functions and processes to:

• Identify inefficiencies at the enterprise level to find the initiatives with the greatest potential to close performance gaps
• Analyze complex performance issues and their impact on business outcomes
• Create a “world on a page” with all the core activities for each initiative
• Map all the activities, ownership and overlaps of the end-to-end processes
• Create an operating framework to measure and analyze the impact of changes to these activities and processes to help ensure the benefits are realized and the changes operationalized.

The Digital Tipping Point – Six Steps to Improve the Customer Journey in a Digital World

November 15; Webinar

Join Verint’s Dave Capuano, global vice president, integrated marketing, and IDC’s Mary Wardley, vice president, enterprise applications and CRM software, at 11 a.m. ET as they explore key findings from this digital tipping point study and what organizations need to do to improve customer engagement in an increasingly digital world. Global research commissioned by Verint and conducted by Opinium reveals that despite the rise in digital customer engagement options, the human touch remains supreme. Given this, attendees will find out what to invest in—and when—when it comes to digital and more traditional channels.  

Citizen 2020

November 17; San Francisco, California

Verint’s David Moody, vice president, public sector, will participate in a speaker panel called “The Digital City-State? A Workshop. San Francisco” at 10 a.m. PT. At the heart of the discussion will be how the cities of the future might emerge as they clamor for more power and self-determination—and challenges that may well arise as devolution advances and cities become more dependent on technology to be able to function. The speaker panel will review how cities are building better means of engaging with citizens, better analytics and more community-focused channels.

The post Verint Speakers: Humanizing Customer Engagement in a Digital World appeared first on Customer Experience Management Blog.

One complaint we hear often in the age of Big Data is that we now have too much data.  You may ask: How do I dig through all the noise and find the data that truly helps me measure and manage my operations? 

Here are five steps to break through the noise and transform data into actionable intelligence.

Start with the end in mind.  Ask the question, “What business outcomes are we trying to achieve?” Use a clean slate but keep your ultimate goals in mind. Share these to gain consensus on the top priorities. Don’t try to boil the ocean—start by focusing on a few goals to work out the process for your organization before you tackle additional objectives.

Identify the behaviors that drive business outcomes. You’ve determined the top business outcomes you want to achieve—now comes the hard part: identifying the behaviors that drive those outcomes.

If your goal is to improve the time to delivery by 20 percent in the next 6 months, what activities impact the execution of orders or services in your organization? Can you map these activities into a single process and timeline? Once you have done that, you can tie activities to specific behaviors and roles that execute those activities.

Set goals for the behaviors. After you’ve aligned the activities with who performs them, you need to set goals for each of the behaviors. For a five-step order process: Order Receipt, Order Entry, Fulfillment, Shipment and Billing, assign a target for how long it should take, including setting an SLA for hand-off to the next step.

Looking at the overall process, set target time standards for each step that cumulatively will help you achieve your end goal of a 20 percent reduction in processing time.

Identify the data sources that measure the desired behaviors. Once you have the activities mapped and have set timing targets, identify the data sources to measure the behavior that is driving the outcome. If an order comes into the contact center by phone, the ACD can report on how long that step took.

Even in the age of Big Data, there are still areas where information is not readily available. In the back office, so many different legacy systems may be used to process work that extracting direct data feeds to measure the activities may not be possible. Non-system-related activities such as opening mail or scanning documents may need to be estimated and incorporated by doing periodic time studies because they are not automatically measured.

Convert the data into strategic metrics in performance scorecards. Present the data in a standardized framework that enables employees and managers to clearly see the composite metrics used to assess their performance, the targets for these metrics, and their current status against goal.

The scorecard should roll up into an operational dashboard that captures all of the enterprise or cross-functional activities and aggregates them into an overall performance score. This view enables the organization to see how they are progressing against their goals on a continuous basis.  Executive management needs to be able to drill down from the dashboard into the functional, team and individual scorecards to identify any shortfalls, so that they can take corrective action.

Verint Operations Visualizer can help organizations overcome some of the challenges of creating an enterprise operational dashboard.  The solution includes Application Analysis, which can capture employee system data directly from the desktop, even to the level of start and stop times of activities on a legacy processing system.

For manual or non-system-related activities, employees can log their time into Operations Visualizer to capture those activities.  Data from these solutions and your other systems can be imported into Verint Performance Management Scorecards to create the standardized framework needed to evaluate behaviors and drive desired outcomes.

Read how a healthcare insurer was able to improve employee productivity by 16 percent with Operations Visualizer.

The post Five Steps to Transform Data into Actionable Intelligence appeared first on Customer Experience Management Blog.

Have you filled a prescription at a pharmacy or through mail-order recently?  It’s a process that seems simple enough.

However, for a leading prescription benefit management (PBM) company that fills almost two billion prescriptions annually, it requires a lot of synergies among people, processes and technology so the process is smooth and efficient.

I recently met with an executive from this PBM company who shared his thoughts on how to enable greater productivity and more effective processes in the contact center and across the enterprise.  His group supports more than 4,000 contact center agents, back office data entry and process staff who fill around 30 million prescriptions annually.

Because growth through acquisitions and mergers had created numerous system and process integration challenges, his primary focus was to drive process and productivity improvements through a carefully planned change management strategy.

As a heads-up, for those of you reading this blog who are contact center executives, I think there are some powerful takeaways from this story.  You can leverage your group’s skills and competencies to help amplify workforce and business optimization in other parts of your organization.

Similar to the scenarios in contact centers, forecasting and scheduling of back-office processing and data-entry personnel at the PBM company were previously completed using spreadsheets.  By leveraging the Enterprise Workforce Management solution and supporting processes, the company was able to more efficiently plan, forecast and schedule employees to meet service level goals.

This solution provided holistic visibility into and manageability of the work, people and processes.  The executive also said that enterprise WFM “gave us time back—we now have more time to analyze performance and course correct intraday vs. just generating schedules.”

With many systems in use, the company also lacked the tools and insight into employee performance to provide the level of informed, data-driven decision-making they desired.  So, the company leveraged Verint Desktop and Process Analytics to provide visibility into how employees use different systems, applications and processes to perform their work.

They were then able to capture time spent in applications, map processes to streamline them, and reduce variability, errors and re-work.  What were some of the results?

The company:

• Drove more effective work categorization, enabling it to better align work with employee skills and availability
• Identified large-scale, work-associated idle time opportunities—idle time was previously as high as 40 percent
• Created transparency and a common language for performance discussions
• Changed behaviors to focus more on production-related activities and achievement of performance goals.

The net: Recapturing idle and non-productive time, plus other business optimization areas, resulted in savings of more than $6 million over 12 months.

Have you considered looking into ways to leverage your workforce optimization solutions and practices in other parts of your organization?

Quite often there are off-line groups, work processing teams and other areas where there is a large opportunity for optimization, but no one has introduced the tools and expertise to drive improvements. Finding and addressing these areas can amplify current workforce optimization efforts—and potentially your career—when you help drive workforce optimization across the entire enterprise.

The post Amplify Your Workforce Optimization Strategy appeared first on Customer Experience Management Blog.

October 27^th CXPA Webinar with Forrester to Explore the 3 E’s of CX Quality

Effectiveness, ease and emotion are three key benchmarks to measuring the quality of your customer experience program.

The latter is an especially powerful indicator of customer loyalty, not to mention a key trigger that allows for immediate action.

Knowing a customer is unhappy immediately after an interaction provides a “moment of truth” in the customer journey—a moment in which your response can impact and potentially change emotions, outcomes and satisfaction.

At Verint, we’re focused on helping organizations better engage with customers in ways that most resonate with customers.

What we’ve found is this: Customers will provide feedback if you make it relevant, contextual and in the moment. This may be as simple as providing post-transactional IVR or SMS surveys and can extend to using real-time speech analytics that measure emotions, so your agents have the insights they need to respond effectively during interactions.

For digital transactions, a better customer feedback experience may be to add interaction feedback directly within your branded mobile app without the need to send customers to a secondary mobile app or launch a browser-driven survey.

Learn More from Forrester and Verint Customer Experience Experts

Join Verint and the CXPA to gain insights into the three E’s of CX quality and the critical role they play in creating outstanding customer experiences.

Date: October 27, 2016

Time: 1 – 2 p.m. ET

Presenters: Roxana Strohmenger, Vice President, CX Index, Forrester and Brian Koma, Vice President & CX Practice Leader, Verint

The post Customer Experience Quality: Measuring Effectiveness, Ease and Emotion appeared first on Customer Experience Management Blog.

Executive boards and senior leadership teams represent a variety of personalities and management styles, but one thing they definitely have in common is this: they’re busy.

A customer experience (CX) program cannot thrive without broad-based organizational support, so here’s how to keep CX front-and-center in the busy lives of leadership teams and sponsors.

Communicating the voice of the customer—through feedback and insights—to organizational leadership is one of the primary duties of the customer experience leader. In an ideal world, the entire management team should understand the link between customer loyalty, revenue and the importance of employee engagement. And, they should also offer the required support to extend the value of the customer experience program across the broader organization, creating a customer-centric culture.

While this organized and highly effective approach can be beneficial to all, let’s get real.

Customer experience leaders today are constantly faced with organizational changes, competing priorities and shifting economic landscapes. These are time-consuming issues that require a lot of attention. In addition, we are asking these leaders to understand a relatively new discipline called customer experience and give it their full support.

In my last column, we looked at how to build a compelling business case for your CX program. Let’s now take the next step in the process, which is focused on gaining a broad-based support system across the enterprise. Relationship building with organizational leaders during this phase is critical. As a CX practitioner, we naturally assist organizations in building relationships with their customers. Why not apply some of those same techniques—blended with a few new and different ones—to also develop strong relationships between these internal stakeholders and the CX program?

I recommend organizations take these five techniques into consideration when developing the broad-based support CX programs need to survive:

1. Welcome and Instill New Leaders

Leadership team staffing changes are inevitable and expected. It can be painful to lose a leader who has been very supportive of the program. Don’t waste valuable time feeling sorry for yourself. Instead, get on the new leader’s calendar and educate her about the CX program goals, governance structure and what has been achieved.

To avoid overwhelming this new advocate with data, be selective and share overall customer satisfaction ratings coupled with customer feedback specific to their department. It’s helpful to schedule this meeting 6-8 weeks into their tenure with the company. At that time, she is still formulating ideas about priorities and plans for her area of responsibility and customer feedback is helpful.

2. Go Beyond Group Meetings

I learned this technique during a summer month when it seemed impossible to schedule an executive meeting where all were available to attend. As a result, I decided to cancel the group meeting and my executive sponsor and I met with each member individually. The meetings were so valuable that it has become a regular practice. Of course, you’ll want to have group meetings with the executive team on the calendar, but don’t rely solely on them.

By meeting with each stakeholder, we walked away with more opportunities to share in-depth customer feedback and possible approaches to further improvement for the business functions they oversee—ultimately creating strong executive sponsors. Ask for their feedback on the CX program, with questions such as: Do you think we are headed in the right direction? Are we gathering feedback that is helpful to you in your day-to-day operations? We find that these individual meetings are invaluable for that type and quality of feedback.

3. Give Credit Early and Often

Celebrate when there is a win for the customer experience! And, while most often, the CX team has played an instrumental role in gathering customer insights, identifying drivers and, perhaps, organizing project teams around targeted improvements, it’s important to highlight the efforts of the functional areas involved.

Whenever I present results at a company meeting, I always credit customer satisfaction improvements to department leadership and teams where the improvements were made. This sharing of credit helps strengthen trust and builds relationships between the CX team and the departments it serves and, ultimately, builds support for customer experience.

4. Keep an Open Mind

The backbone of any customer insight program is the relationship survey. We pore over it for weeks or months, taking the bias out of our questions, choosing the right scales and most importantly, asking about the right interactions. So when someone asks us to make a change in the survey we bristle just a bit. Introducing a change into our masterpiece seems unnecessary—not to mention how it affects our trend data.

However, it’s important that all stakeholders feel that the survey is relevant to their needs. So, remember this: It’s not YOUR survey. It belongs to the organization. If a team wants to add another data point or modify an existing question, meet with them to find out why the change has been requested. Sometimes you’ll find that the need is better served by another type of feedback tool or you may discover that the requested change makes your survey better.

5. Tell a Story

Storytelling shouldn’t be limited to the business case. Make it a practice. Sharing customer feedback to management can be a tough job and best done through storytelling. Everyone (myself included) has made the mistake of trying to present a myriad of slides showing every single piece of data collected—and segmented in every possible way. To be fair, those of us who like data really think this is exciting. However, most management teams want to walk away with the highlights that underscore how and why the CX program is relevant to their department.

A great example is when we asked field reps to participate in the closed-loop processes for our surveys. As part of the process, we first needed our executive team to approve a policy that would require the reps to respond to dissatisfied customers within 24 hours. The executive team was hesitant, saying that the field reps had busy schedules and were travelling frequently. They didn’t feel that there was enough benefit to the policy. That was, until I told them a story…

During the previous quarter, one of our field reps received a notification of an unhappy customer in his area. Immediately, he picked up the phone, made an appointment and was in that customer’s office the next day. He listened patiently to the customer’s concerns about the previous product implementation. He responded saying that, if given the chance, he would personally guarantee a great experience and be an advocate at each step. The customer responded well to field rep and because of the timely and sincere response, he decided to include our company in the search. The result: he decided to buy our solution, and we’ve since added this customer to our reference program. After telling that story, our executive team unanimously approved the new policy for closed loop processes.

Stories bring life to data and facts. They make it easy to remember key points and can paint a vivid picture of what it’s like to be a customer. A good story is interactive. Use words and pictures that your audience can picture themselves in, so they become more engaged, understand the information better and walk away with key points to share in other meetings. Day-in-the-life stories are a nice way to portray the experience of a highly satisfied customer who received great service versus one who had a less than satisfying interaction.

Broad-based organizational support to a customer experience program is like water and sunshine to a garden. By incorporating these practices and insights, CX leaders can foster the executive-level support and sponsorship they need for their programs to grow and thrive. Now, we’d like to hear from you!

This article originally appeared in CustomerThink on September 9, 2016.

The post Cultivating Leadership Support for Customer Experience: 5 Ways appeared first on Customer Experience Management Blog.

In a high-volume contact center, shaving a few seconds off of average handle time (AHT) can potentially save millions of dollars. Importantly, other metrics such as accuracy, compliance and customer satisfaction should not be sacrificed for time savings.

The good news is that it’s possible to improve all of these metrics while reducing AHT.

“How’s that?” you say. I’ll tell you in a moment. First let me paint the picture of the status quo in many contact centers.

Like good customer engagement practitioners, let’s start with the customer’s perspective—“outside in,” as they say. Research from Forrester shows that 73% of U.S. Online Adults say that valuing their time is the most important thing a company can do to provide good service. (Source: Trends 2016: The Future Of Customer Service, Forrester Research, Inc., January 5, 2016)

According to Aberdeen Group, contact center employees spend 14% of their time looking for relevant information to do their jobs. Time is money. On average, that costs organizations $1.45 million each year. (Source: Knowledge Management in the Contact Center: Guide your Agents to Smarter Customer Interactions, Aberdeen Group, November 2015)

In essence, customers are saying “Make it easy and get it right.” Employees are saying, “Make it easyto get it right.”

A well-tuned knowledge management system can meet these expectations. We recently kicked off a 4-part webinar series entitled “Knowledge Is Power” where every webinar covers a different “how to” topic related to knowledge management. It’s very pragmatic, prescriptive content to provide you with a step-by-step path from getting your knowledge management project approved to making it really move the needle for your customers and employees.

Here are a few teasers from that series:

• Use customer context (perhaps dozens of data elements) to automatically drive the display of relevant knowledge articles, often without manually searching at all.
• Develop consistent, well-designed templates for knowledge articles to make it easy for users’ eyes to jump to what they need.
• Segment content that changes frequently into separate, embedded knowledge objects that can be changed in one place and automatically syndicated to all related articles.
• Make knowledge use and continual improvement of knowledge a way of life in your organization, using measurement and gamification to reinforce positive behaviors.

SPOILER ALERT: The audience on the first webinar had a surprising and overwhelming response to this poll below. “Accurate and consistent responses” outranked the other three answers—all related to cost and time savings—combined!

The moral to that story is: Get the info right (accurate and consistent), THEN make it fast and easy to deliver it (to the agent and/or customer). There is no point in doing that in the reverse order.

By the way, you can get access to the recording by registering here.

Now let’s connect the dots. All kinds of good things can happen when you implement knowledge management. Aberdeen Group research shows that potential benefits include customer satisfaction going up, service levels getting better, complaints going down, and agents becoming more productive.

Knowledge management has proven its mettle for those who want to be “fast and not furious.” Done well, it delivers better outcomes with less effort for customers and employees.

Here’s how you can learn more about making it work for you:

Register for the Knowledge Is Power 4-part webinar series.

The post When Seconds Count and Accuracy Matters appeared first on Customer Experience Management Blog.

As we swing into the autumn/fall in the northern hemisphere, I have some upcoming events and activities that I hope you will find interesting and thought-provoking.

Let’s start with something a bit out-of-the-ordinary.

Verint will be participating in (and sponsoring) a series of “Conversations Workshops” that are being organised by Citizen 2020—a virtual community that aims to providing a sharp focus on digital government and citizen engagement, allowing government service practitioners to share ideas, converse and get inspired.

The “Conversations” events will take place over the next 12 months in the United Kingdom as well as North America and are designed to encourage digital government professionals, academics, politicians and civil servants to engage with each other and explore how government is (or should be) transforming itself to better engage with the citizens it serves.

The first workshop took place in the Malmaison hotel, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne on September 29 and focused on how cities need to embrace a ‘digital first’ approach to be ready for the future. It brought together thinkers, city strategists, thought leaders and technologists with an interest in how public services might embrace new opportunities to forge better relationships with citizens and business. The speakers, including Sam Markey from Future Cities Catapult, Dr Yvonne Hübner of Newcastle University and Conn Crawford, Sunderland City Council, discussed how cities are turning into “datavores,” policy and service innovations driven by analysis of a range of different data types, and the challenges posed by identity verification in a digital world. The “conversations” that take place during each event are recorded on video and will be featured on the Citizen2020 website. Some of this content will only be made available to registered members of Citizen2020—so I strongly encourage you to register. It’s completely free!

The second workshop will take place in San Francisco November 17, 2016. It will focus on how the cities of the future might emerge as they clamour for more power and self-determination—and the challenges that will arise as cities assume more responsibilities and become more dependent on technology to be able to function. Focus will also be put on sensor-driven cities that collect data about the city environment, traffic flows, and citizen demands being made on resources. Participants will also discuss the challenges of delivering service better, embracing new, emerging technologies and ensuring that the city thrives.

Speakers include Giovanni Rodriguez, co-founder of StoryLabs and an advisor to several global city hubs, who recently launched a project to help promote social cohesion as a first  step toward developing smart cities. Other speakers are being finalised and up-to-date details will be posted on the Citizen 2020 website. Check it out and consider joining us.

Finally, Engage UK Customer Conference 2016 is coming to the iconic Savoy Hotel in London on December 1. This year’s conference will be hosted by well-known UK television presenter and newsreader, Natasha Kaplinksy and features a keynote address from Jamie Anderson, who was named as one of the world’s top 25 management thinkers by the Business Strategy Review.

Attendees will be able to engage with industry colleagues, take part in breakout sessions, learn from industry visionaries and product experts in the Technology Showcase, and share best practices with peers.

Engage UK Customer Conference 2016 is a not-to-be-missed opportunity which is consistently highly rated by those who attend—I encourage you to attend if you can. To find out more about the conference and to book your place, visit the conference website.

The post Upcoming UK and U.S. Events Put Spotlight on Citizens and Customers appeared first on Customer Experience Management Blog.

Not surprisingly, governments today are challenged with juggling resources and demand.

As you may have read in part one of this blog series, Contact Solutions recently commissioned the Governing Institute and the Center for Digital Government to survey state government leaders to answer this question: How are government agencies prioritizing the modernization of contact center technologies to enhance service delivery, as well as identify focuses, needs and gaps?

The first blog examined how research results identified methods to improve the citizen experience. Part two discusses how research results identify back-end modernization needs that address outdated technology, inefficient processes, and staffing and operational burdens to improve state worker productivity.

The research finds that government contact centers face a variety of operational challenges that impact citizen engagement. The need for modernized contact centers is stronger than ever—this research helps put it all in context.

Read more.

The post Modernized Contact Centers Can Help Citizen Engagement—Part Two appeared first on Customer Experience Management Blog.

Never before has the voice of the customer been more important—and surveys are at the core of our feedback efforts. They provide a great opportunity to discover what our customers think of what we do—and what their expectations are.

Surveys offer the facts on which we build our CX efforts. What we learn from our surveys lays the foundation for the roadmap that tells us where to take our programs—all  while providing us with the benchmarks needed to gauge our progress along the way.

In my latest CustomerThink blog, I offer CX professionals a few fundamentals for designing and building great surveys.

Read more for the details.

The post How to Design and Build a Great Survey: 10 Lessons Learned from Voice of the Customer Trenches appeared first on Customer Experience Management Blog.

Governments around the world are increasingly realizing the impact outdated technology and poor processes can have on citizen engagement and operational burdens.

In a nutshell? A critical impact.

Contact Solutions recently commissioned the Governing Institute and the Center for Digital Government to survey state government leaders to answer the following question: How are government agencies prioritizing the modernization of contact center technologies to enhance service delivery, as well as identify focuses, needs and gaps?

To learn about the research conducted and the findings discovered, read more.

The post Modernized Contact Centers Can Help Citizen Engagement appeared first on Customer Experience Management Blog.

As you may have read in part one of this blog series, one of the primary objectives of the Customer Response Summit in Austin, Texas last month was to “identify best practices and discuss innovative ideas on how to serve customers through emerging channels.”

Verint hosted an interactive general session at the conference called “Customer Engagement LIVE!” where we grouped executives into discussion groups of seven or eight participants.

The executive breakout groups engaged in conversations around the strategies and execution steps that can help define how customer-centric organizations can enrich interactions, improve business processes, and optimize the workforce. Additional conference goals included:

• Leaders learning from leaders—tackling the evolving challenges and opportunities that customer professionals face

• Staying on top of the latest industry trends and taking back actionable ideas that will energize and strengthen customer experience operations.

As part of our conference follow-up, we also recently created an executive summary document that aligns with the goals above. We collected all the input and feedback from the executive breakout groups and organized it into categories. See this September 29 Execs in the Know – Guest Blog Post for the executive summary file, as well as some session highlights.

What were the primary topics that the executives discussed?  Here is the summary of the most common categories that the creative ideas fell into:

• Omni channel, Digital – 6 ideas
  

• Optimize Systems, Processes, Benchmarking – 7
  

• Analytics, Big Data – 6
  

• Mobile – 5+
  

• Customer Experience, Loyalty – 11
  

• Employee Engagement and Development – 4
  

Some of my favorite ideas were leveraging Ted Talks for onsite employee engagement, the “Three Cs” strategy, and several of the mobile-related ideas. Take a look when you have a chance and let us know your favorites by commenting on them through the comments section at the bottom of this blog. Here is the complete summary: Executive Discussion Group – All Notes.

Do you have some creative or best practices ideas to add?  We’d love to hear those, too. We’ll update the file with your submissions—help us continue the conversations!

The post Highlights from Customer Engagement LIVE! Part Two appeared first on Customer Experience Management Blog.

As we celebrate CX Day and National Customer Service Week (NCSW), I thought it would be a good time to share some secrets of the trade and build on the great insights from Ryan Hollenbeck’s blog yesterday.

First, let’s talk about the definition of Customer Experience Management. According to Paul Greenberg, Managing Principal, The 56 Group, LLC, Customer Experience Management is a business science that has the purpose of determining the strategy and programs that can make the customer feel good enough about the company to want to continue to do business with the company.

Paul says it can be phrased even simpler: If a customer likes you and continues to like you, they will do business with you. If they don’t, they won’t.

Doesn’t sound so hard, does it?

Evidently, it’s harder than it looks.

80% of companies say they deliver “superior” customer service—but only 8% of people think these same companies deliver “superior” customer service!

Still wondering if a great customer experience is worth it? We at Verint think it is. Here are 3 things you may not have known about Customer Experience—and what they mean to the Verint CX team as we help develop loyal customers for life.

1. By 2020, customer experience will overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator. (Customers 2020 Report)

Takeaway: While customers are demanding more and more when it comes to doing business with a company, they value the experience above everything else. In fact, most customers will pay more for a product when the company has a strong reputation for great customer experience. The trick is to anticipate customer needs and meet those needs with each interaction.

Action: At Verint, we’ve been gathering customer feedback for 3 years and sharing insights to improve interactions. While we are still striving to improve, we’ve been making steady improvement in customer satisfaction—and have received awards for our CX program!

2. For every customer who bothers to complain, 26 other dissatisfied customers stay silent.(Esteban Kolsky)

Takeaway: Customer feedback is gold!

Action: We have internal processes to follow up on survey feedback—whether it has to do with a single customer or changing a process that affects many customers. Also, we do everything in our power to make it really easy for customers to give feedback and tell us about problems they are having.

3. 98% agree with the statement “Customer experience is a great profession to be in.” (Temkin Group: State of CX Profession)

We agree that this is a great profession! When customers share their story, they’re not just sharing pain points—they’re actually teaching us how to make our products, services and businesses better. The impact that this can have on an organization is what makes us excited to be part of this discipline!

Happy CX Day to all the CX professionals out there!

The post 3 Things You Didn’t Know About Customer Experience appeared first on Customer Experience Management Blog.

We have been hearing a lot about the impending “Age of the Customer” and how critical our employees are to enabling this new age. In fact, some would argue that this new age is already here and if you haven’t prepared your staff, then you will be left behind.

That’s because great customer engagement starts with your team (the employees themselves)! Many times employees need training on systems and processes that can enable them to maximize customer engagement.

Here at Verint we are committed to improving customer engagement—what you might call “smart engagement”—across many industries. What we are referring to is the right combination of solutions that can connect every channel to create complete, consistent and contextual experiences that count—every time customers engage.

As a result, you can deploy the right solutions to empower employees and achieve continuous performance improvement at every interaction point.

You can analyze customer and employee experience data in real time to design and implement customer-centric business strategies that help unite the organization.  As a result, you have better alignment across the people and processes within your organization and can move much more quickly to take precise action to deliver differentiated and personalized experiences that count.

This improved alignment leads to more engaged employees who are spurred on by solutions that capture and manage information about customers and performance, then use it to help predict measurable, sustainable business results.

Bottom line: More engaged employees produce happier, more satisfied customers. You already know that a company’s success is built on the foundation of good employees, more so than ever! National Customer Service Week is a great opportunity to stop and thank employees who are on the front lines with customers. Day in and day out, they put customers first.

Customers first, and employees always. I said this last year and it’s more true than it has ever been, because your competitors are only a click away.  We suggest you take the time to slow down this week and say thank you to your employees. This is powerful and demonstrates an attitude of gratitude and affirms the value of their commitment to your customers.

We “practice what we preach” when it comes to customer and employee engagement. Here at Verint, we regularly discuss developing “Customers for Life” as a cultural evolution. We know that we enjoy a relationship with our customers because of our employees! In fact, our own customer experience team here at Verint, led by Nancy Porte, brings the customer voice into the organization.

As a result, many areas are working on how they can change systems and processes to serve the customer better and make their lives easier. We believe that customer loyalty is built on employees being empowered to do the right thing for the customer.

When you build your business on your employees and empower them to serve your customers well, everyone wins. And your customers of today can likely become your customers of tomorrow. Then they become champions and recommend you to others—and so it goes!

Tomorrow you will hear from Nancy about CX Day and why working hard to provide a great customer experience is always worth the effort.

The post Customers First, Employees Always—Celebrating National Customer Service Week appeared first on Customer Experience Management Blog.

CRM Magazine Roundtable

October 5; Webinar

Verint’s Daniel Ziv, vice president, customer analytics, will present “Optimize Customer Experiences with Actionable Data” at 2 p.m. ET. Customer service departments and entire enterprises need to deliver more personalized and proactive engagements. Attendees will learn how to quickly discover customer issues and behavior trends through analytics to make informed decisions, proactively drive companywide actions that increase revenue and customer loyalty, and help reduce cost and risk.

The Insider’s Guide to Customer Experience

October 6; Loyalty 360 Webinar

Verint’s Brian Koma, vice president and CX practice leader, and Sean Mahoney, CCXP, director, solutions consulting, will present “How Effectively Are You Delivering Value to Customers?” at 1 p.m. ET.  A key indicator of customer loyalty is the effectiveness in delivering value to customers. Too often organizations measure against internal metrics, such as customer satisfaction—an inaccurate predictor of customer loyalty. These customer experience experts will demonstrate new approaches for measuring the effectiveness of value delivery to customers, help diagnose the current state of a CX program, identify strategies to measure the effectiveness of value delivery, and offer practical—and tactical—actions to make a difference quickly.

Govware 2016

October 10-12; Suntec City, Singapore

Verint’s Dr. Benson Wu, general manager, Verint Taiwan, will present “Accelerating the Path to Breach Detection & Response Through Automated Investigations” on October 12 at 11:45 a.m. SGT. Overwhelmed by thousands of daily alerts from disconnected security products, security operation teams rarely discover true attacks. However, better insights into threat data lead to better decisions. Dr. Wu will discuss how to stay one step ahead of ever-growing cyber threats by discovering how to enhance your detection and response using a comprehensive intelligence-driven approach, alleviate alert overload, boost analyst productivity and accelerate response through automated investigations, and equip your security operations with better information—rather than just more.

Knowledge Is Power: Arm Your Next-Generation Workforce

October 13; Webinar

Verint’s Scott Hays, vice president, global solutions marketing, and guest presenter Ian Jacobs, senior analyst, Forrester Research, will present “How Can I Provide More Context and Consistency in My Contact Center Interactions?” at 2 p.m. ET.  Today almost every organization wants to improve the speed, quality and consistency of customer service interactions. A critical component to customer service success, Knowledge Management helps improve the speed, accuracy, quality and consistency of information provided to customers. Hays and Jacobs will address how to encourage knowledge adoption, share and collaborate among customer service employees, and help ensure that consistent, contextual knowledge is accessible to agents across channels.

CRMXchange Roundtable Webinar

October 18; Webinar

Hays will also participate in a roundtable webinar called “Best Practices to Enhance Customer Loyalty and Employee Engagement” at 2 p.m. ET. This panel will focus on the positive impact that customer loyalty and employee engagement can have on corporate performance—and help attendees understand which techniques and technologies can prove to be most effective.

Insurance Data and Technology Asia

October 18; Hong Kong

Ziv will present “Transforming Digital Engagement Through Smart Analytics to Counter Industry Threats from Fintech” at 8:30 a.m. HKT. As digital transformation and personalized customer data gains more traction in Asia, insurers can help improve their sales and retention rates by investing in technology and data analysis that gives their customers more control across every channel. This Hong Kong breakfast briefing will bring together senior insurance leaders to discuss excellence in customer engagement making the best use of data, technology and analytics.

Customer Experience Management (CEM) in Telecoms World Summit 2016

October 21; Singapore

Moving through Asia, Ziv will present “Achieving End-to-End Customer Engagement Optimization Powered by Analytics” at 12 p.m. SGT. Understanding customers by leveraging the most powerful customer analytics tools available today is critical for staying ahead of the competition—however, translating insight into action is where the true differentiation and return on investment are achieved. Ziv will share customer case studies from telecom companies around the world who have successfully achieved both insight and action with significant ROI.

Knowledge Is Power: Arm Your Next-Generation Workforce

October 27; Webinar

The second in the Knowledge Is Power series will take place with Verint’s Kelly Koelliker, director of solutions marketing, presenting “How Do I Improve Customer Service Efficiency and Productivity?” at 2 p.m. ET. Koelliker will discuss how knowledge management greatly improves access to information during a service interaction, how best practices in a knowledge management implementation can help ensure success, and how to measure and track efficiency and productivity gains.

CRMXchange WFM/PM Virtual Conference

October 31; Webinar

Verint’s Craig Seebach, vice president, business strategy, enterprise WFO, will present “Effective Scheduling for the Back Office and Blended Environment” at  2 p.m. Forecasting and scheduling in customer support centers have grown more complicated with the merger of phone and multiple channels—and the increasing volumes of back-end processing work. Seebach will discuss new approaches to accurately determine capacity requirements, including capturing accurate handle times for the various work types, factoring backlog or carry-over work into workloads, updating skill profiles for multi-skilled customer service reps, and making dynamic, intraday reassignments of activity types to help ensure service level agreements are met.

The post Verint Speakers: Customer Loyalty and Cyber Threats Take Center Stage Worldwide appeared first on Customer Experience Management Blog.

Improving customer experiences is a top-ranking priority for almost all businesses. However, many organizations haven’t found ways to accomplish this goal.

In fact, a common misconception is that simply adopting new technology or processes is enough to ensure customer satisfaction and loyalty. This couldn’t be further from the truth.

Customer experiences are shaped by what organizations do—and don’t do—to help address buyer needs. For example, a business that hasn’t introduced any new products over the past 10 years shouldn’t be surprised in loss of market share when competitors are regularly introducing new products to address evolving buyer expectations.

Whether it be new product development, marketing or customer service, it is the employees who are behind executing these activities. In fact, even activities such as automation require employees to design, execute and update how certain aspects of customer conversations will be automated.

In other words, it is ultimately your employees that determine your success in creating happy customers.

Companies that survive and thrive in today’s market are the ones that understand the importance of employee empowerment. These are businesses that provide their employees with the insights and technology they need to do their jobs—serve customers. To this point, findings from Aberdeen Group’s Smart Customer Service: Four Steps to Long-Lasting Customer Bonds with Omni-Channelstudy shows that on average, employees must use three different applications to find content they need to do their jobs.

This content will vary in shape and form across the business where, for example, a contact center agent might need to find a relevant knowledge base article, whereas a marketer might need web visitation data. Ultimately, Aberdeen research shows that, on average, employees spend 11% of their time seeking information.

The unnecessary time employees spend looking for information costs businesses. This cost comes in the form of unnecessary labor costs resulting from paying employees to look for information, rather than helping customers. It also comes in the form of lost clients and sales opportunities as employees spending time to find insights lengthens handle times, frustrating customers and negatively impacting their satisfaction rates.

The good news, however, is Aberdeen research found that companies using knowledge management to help employees get in the know of vital insights minimize such challenges while maximizing their performance—see Figure 1.

The findings in the above figure validate that knowledge is power, but that power only manifests itself when employees can access the right knowledge at the right time. Knowledge management systems aim to solve this challenge for organizations that implement them well.

Specifically, this technology refers to companies using a centralized repository enabling organizations to identify, capture, access and share numerous types of content (e.g., documents, images, videos and call recordings).

Companies use knowledge management for different purposes, including R&D activities, HR management, and contact-center agent empowerment. In the case of the latter, it helps contact centers capture best practices in resolving specific client issues, provide agents with relevant articles to do their jobs, as well as enhance skills through learning articles available in the knowledge management system.

If you’re not currently using knowledge management within your business activities, you’re likely missing out on opportunities to deliver better customer experiences, reduce costs, and grow revenue. As such, we recommend evaluating if your employees are really ‘in the know’ and consider utilizing knowledge management to empower them in order to ultimately help your business accomplish its goals.

Omer Minkara

Research Director

Contact Center & Customer Experience Management, Aberdeen Group

Follow: @omerminkara

Learn more on Verint’s 4-part webinar series, “Knowledge is Power” which kicks off on Oct. 13. Register now to secure your spot for all 4 webinars.

The post Knowledge Management: How Getting Your Employees to Become in the Know Helps Your Business appeared first on Customer Experience Management Blog.

Some of today’s financial institutions are changing from a traditional staffing model—based on tellers and transactions—to a universal banker model.

This is a direct response to consumers’ increasing adoption of digital channels and their desire for advanced advisory services when visiting the branch.

This staffing transformation has a wide impact on many aspects of business operations and involves a renovation to everything from job design, recruitment, training and staffing levels to internal processes.

It may also require employees to perform unfamiliar activities or even learn new skills.

Regardless of the specific approach financial institutions take to change their staffing models, there is one fundamental truth to keep in mind: Successful transformation takes place only when the impacted employees truly understand and embrace the new way of working.

So how can organizations minimize disruption to daily operations, maintain service to customers, and provide a positive experience that encourages employees to embrace change?

Look Inside First

Many organizations make a critical misstep when launching into a change initiative. They fail to take the time to conduct a thorough assessment of the organization’s current state and its capacity to change.

A successful transformational strategy certainly needs to align with the organization’s business goals and customer demands. However, it also must reflect the cultural qualities, characteristics, perceptions, experience and capabilities unique to its employees.

It’s tempting to launch right into making changes without taking the time to truly understand the gap between your current state and your desired future state—and to identify and mitigate any potential obstacles that may impede the transformation.

Quite a few companies are good at assessing the technology and process-related impacts of change but don’t spend a lot of time planning to address the people impacts of change. Taking the time to really understand the employee culture, appetite for change, stakeholder needs, and potential resistance points will help provide insight needed to help ensure the change strategy is well received across the organization.

Let Employees Co-Create Change

Financial institutions are responding to the voice of the customer—why wouldn’t they also respond to the voice of the employee?

Numerous studies reveal a strong correlation between high employee engagement and an increase in organizational productivity, performance and profitability. So how can financial institutions promote employee engagement as part of their transformation to a universal banker model?

Share the transformation strategy with your employees. Ask for their input and test ideas through surveys, focus groups and other feedback methods. Gathering employee input increases the likelihood of a successful outcome by driving their engagement and helping create shared ownership.

Knowledge Is Power

Make sure you empower employees with both education and training. You may be wondering—what exactly is the difference?

Education is focused on why the change is important to the company and what the impact will be on employees—the traditional “What’s in it for me?” Training is focused on developing the skills and abilities that will be needed to perform successfully in the new environment.

When it comes to developing successful training programs, use the 70:20:10 rule.

This rule states that employees glean 70% of their knowledge from job-related or experiential learning, 20% from interpersonal interactions or social learning, and only 10% from traditional training, coursework or instruction at formal educational events.

Keeping a focus on employees and what they can contribute to a successful branch transformation can potentially lead to big rewards. By conducting a robust current state discovery, co-creating change with employees and empowering them with knowledge and training, financial institutions can increase the likelihood of successful and sustainable transformation.

Learn more about how Verint can help your transformation succeed.

The post Employees: The Key to Successful Branch Transformation appeared first on Customer Experience Management Blog.

When people think about measuring customer satisfaction, they naturally assume a corollary is customer loyalty.

Unfortunately, customer satisfaction can only be a reliable predictor of customer behavior, and by extension loyalty, when evaluated within the context of the customer journey.

At what point is the customer satisfied—at the purchase, when help is needed, or when perceived value is achieved?

A colleague recently experienced a great example of measuring customer satisfaction throughout the customer journey when he received a survey for a hotel for a recent stay. He was asked to rate his satisfaction about booking his reservation, the quality of his arrival, the cleanliness of the room, the ease of checkout and overall satisfaction. He gave top marks, including commenting on a friendly employee who provided a recommendation for a great restaurant.

What about you? Are you measuring satisfaction throughout the customer journey? Are you receiving feedback results that help you tie customer loyalty to operational measurements such as customer satisfaction? If not, join us for an upcoming webinar that provides practical, tactical actions you can take to make a difference quickly.

Learn More from Verint Customer Experience Experts

A key indicator of customer loyalty is a company’s effectiveness in delivering value to customers. Too often organizations get distracted by measuring against internal metrics, such as customer satisfaction, which is not an accurate predictor of customer loyalty.

Join Verint and Loyalty 360 to learn interesting new approaches for measuring the effectiveness of your efforts to deliver value to customers:

Date: October 6, 2016

Time: 1 – 2 p.m. ET

Presenters: Brian Koma, Vice President & CX Practice Leader, Verint Systems and Sean Mahoney, CCXP, Director, Solutions Consulting, Verint Systems

The post Measuring Loyalty: The Insider’s Guide to Customer Experience appeared first on Customer Experience Management Blog.

Earlier this week Verint took part in the Customer Response Summit in Austin Texas—a forum for customer service and customer experience executives. One of the primary objectives of the conference was to “identify best practices and discuss innovative ideas on how to serve customers through emerging channels.”

Verint’s contribution to this theme was an interactive general session called“Customer Engagement LIVE!” where we grouped executives into discussion groups of seven or eight participants.

These groups engaged in conversations around the strategies and execution steps that can help define how customer-centric organizations can enrich interactions, improve business processes, and optimize the workforce.

One of the questions included on the breakout group handout was the following: “If you could provide your peers with one piece of advice as they create and execute their customer experience strategy and program, what would it be?” 

Here are some of the highlights we heard during the breakout group read-back presentations:

We want to integrate more digital themes and engagement into our traditional customer service environment. We have started to use gamification in our customer service group. As part of the program, we are identifying customer “brand ambassadors” who will serve as fans of our organization and our customer service mission. We are tying these fans into our CRM system and gamification solution foundation. We think these ambassadors will help us differentiate our brand—as well as the customer experience we provide to our customers.

We are trying to drive customer experience excellence while also handling call types that are more and more complex. One thing we are doing is leveraging contact recording and speech analytics to determine the reason for calls falling into the highest 10^th percentile of average handle time, which are the longest calls. We can’t solve everything, but we believe that if we can “fix” the issue(s) that cause the top three to four call types, we can free up resources and focus that will help us enhance the customer experience.

We want to hire and retain the best contact center agents that we can. So, we want to make sure we have a variety of internal programs around employee engagement as well as all our focus on customer engagement. One thing we started was Ted Talks Tuesdays where we find creative and inspirational Ted Talks videos that have themes around creativity, innovation and customers. We then have a discussion group after the video.  Our executives, managers and agents love all the interactions we all have—and we are learning new ideas and ways of thinking at the same time!

As the interconnectedness of customer touch points evolves (the emergence of omni channel), we think this could increase pain points and complexity around the accessibility of data needed to help customers. We believe that if we better empower agents with information to help customers, we will provide customers with an experience that feels more like concierge service than a transactional interaction. Better knowledge management technology and content could help us provide information faster and more accurately, increase first contact resolution—and help us come across to customers more as “customer advocates” than “contact center agents.”

Stayed tuned for part two of this Customer Engagement LIVE! series, where we’ll share more ideas on customer experience and customer engagement. Do you have a creative idea you’d like to share? Please submit it as a comment below, and we’ll try to include some of the ideas submitted in part two of this series.

The post Highlights from Customer Engagement LIVE! Part One appeared first on Customer Experience Management Blog.

Trust is an under-rated value in many organizations, but research shows it has significant impact on business performance. And, according to the 2015 Employee Engagement Benchmark Study by Temkin Group, companies with highly engaged employees have stronger financial results and above-average customer experience than other companies in their industry.

So how do you foster trust and respect in the workplace? 

One way is to use a single, trusted source of performance data to demonstrate to employees that they are being treated fairly and equitably when compared to their peers. Verint’s Performance Management and Gamification solutions can create a standardized framework for employee performance measurement across the enterprise. Using system-derived source data helps eliminate subjective disparities in manager perceptions of employee contributions.

Managers can use the data objectively to drive performance discussions and level the playing field across their teams. The system also automates much of the data collection, workflows and reporting related to performance management, coaching and elearning, enabling managers to spend more time on value-added mentoring and employee development—all factors that contribute to stronger leadership skills.

The solutions also help create transparency for the employee, so they know how their performance is measured, what the expectations and goals are for them regarding key performance indicators (KPIs), and lets them see how they are performing against their peers. Gamification builds on this peer to peer transparency and creates opportunities for employees to challenge themselves to improve their skills in comparison to their peers. The solution presents learning activities to help improve the skills that drive KPIs, and employees can track their progress within an engaging, game-themed narrative and interface.

Also an advantage of the solution is using it to encourage collaboration across teams and geographies. As employees compete against each other and give kudos and shout-outs to one another for achieving milestones, receiving badges and advancing levels, they build rapport.

Gamification can also be linked to online communities where employees post and answer each other’s questions and receive rewards and recognition for their participation, further encouraging and increasing collaboration.

Trusting that you are equitably treated is a major factor in employee satisfaction and engagement.  To learn more read the ebook, “Leveling the Playing Field:  Cornerstone to Employee Engagement.”

What other ways can you help build trust in the workplace? Share your ideas below.

The post Drive Employee Engagement by Fostering Trust in the Workplace appeared first on Customer Experience Management Blog.

Leadership support is needed for a customer experience program to succeed—we can all agree on that. The challenge is those executives live in the real world of organizational changes, competing priorities and shifting economic landscapes.

In my last CustomerThink column, I looked at how to build a compelling business case for your CX program.

Now let’s walk through the next step in the process, which is gaining a broad-based support system across the enterprise. I’ll show you how to apply some relationship-building techniques you already use with a few new ones.

In my latest blog, I recommend five techniques for developing the support CX programs need to survive and even thrive.

Read more.

The post 5 Ways to Cultivate Leadership Support for Customer Experience appeared first on Customer Experience Management Blog.

Quality Monitoring has been a staple of service organizations for decades now. How many times have we heard, “This call is being monitored for quality assurance,” when calling into a company? But this capability and focus on quality has mostly been limited to the contact center.

Why? The customer journey often times does not start and end in the contact center.

The back office in many organizations is responsible for the delivery of the goods and services promised to the customer. But while the contact center has had sophisticated tools for years, the back-office has mostly had to make do with homegrown solutions or souped up Excel^®spreadsheets.

But that’s all changing. As organizations attempt to understand the entire customer journey, they are realizing the role the back office plays and are looking for ways to help ensure their focus on quality, accuracy and speed to service extends across the organization. Quality management has expanded from the traditional approach of randomly sampling transactions and performing post-process quality reviews or audits, to providing real-time, in-process guidance.

Quality audits are still needed, but automated workflows and the ability to label and categorize transactions for targeted retrieval and review—capabilities available in today’s solutions—have increased the frequency and efficiency of the process. To provide in process guidance, organizations will need the means to program automated, contextual pop up screens that remind the employee of the next step based on the transaction or customer type, such as Verint Process Assistant.

To achieve the holy grail of an enterprise, a continuous loop quality management program, a broader suite of solutions is needed to address the many factors impacting quality, such as employee skills and knowledge, process efficiencies and workflow, and customer feedback. Read the new ebook, Delivering Five-Star Service with Back-Office Quality Management, to learn more about the ingredients needed for a continuous loop quality management program and how you can deliver the five-star service that cultivates customers for life.

The post Create a Continuous Improvement Quality Program Enterprise-Wide appeared first on Customer Experience Management Blog.

Robots seem to be everywhere these days—on the big screen in popular science fiction movies, in books and in toy stores, and also in a real way improving our workplaces and other aspects of our daily lives.

Primitive robots were machines designed to automatically perform a specific task. Around 3,000 B.C., Egyptian water clocks used human figures to strike bells on the hour. Another inventor, Archytas of Tarentum, was reported to have created a wooden pigeon that could fly in 400 B.C.

Robots have become significantly more sophisticated in modern times.

The first industrial robot was introduced in 1961 by General Motors in an automobile factory. Since then, many manufacturing industries have designed robots to do work that is too dangerous for humans or that can be done more quickly and consistently by machines.

Today, robots have evolved beyond physical motors and mechanical arms and manipulators to include software robots that can assist consumers and employees, helping them to do more tasks more easily. These robots can perform pre-programmed tasks or even leverage artificial intelligence to help them think and learn.

It’s a way to combine the convenience of automation with the work of today using computers and software programs. Here are some examples:

• Virtual agents, virtual assistants and chat bots: These non-human software programs “live” on websites or within mobile apps, leveraging interactive, context-aware knowledge bases to answer questions from humans. Virtual agents are often used to extend and enhance self-service options for customers, answering basic questions and helping people find additional information for a particular need. Often these functions are visually represented as an avatar to make them more “friendly” and to reinforce the company’s brand identity.
• Desktop automation: This software automates tasks to help improve employee productivity, completing steps more quickly and performing data reentry across systems. Some versions of the software can also help guide employees through tasks, displaying dialogue boxes providing instructions, presenting scripts to be read to customers and other important information.
• Robotic process automation: This software completes end-to-end processes or tasks within longer processes that don’t need to be performed by a human employee. Typically these are high volume, repetitive tasks involving data entry or re-entry across systems based on specific decision criteria and logic.

Why robots? Because just as we continue to invent cool new gadgets and technology that make our lives easier, better or more fun, software robots can be used to handle work previously done by humans to help us get it done faster, less expensively, and more consistently and accurately.

This applies to customer service chat bots, desktop automation and robotic process automation. And, there’s an even bigger benefit in most cases—human employees can shift from the more boring and repetitive tasks to more value-added customer-facing work, continuing to learn new skills as the knowledge workers of the future.

The post Robots in the Workplace—Helping Employees and Improving Work appeared first on Customer Experience Management Blog.

Getting It Going

In part one of this blog series, we shared some insights from our experiences about why executive sponsorship of a customer experience program is so important, the significance of executive support, getting employees onboard, and infrastructure considerations.

For those of you just getting started in a CX role, here are some tips for establishing a program based on what we learned a few years ago when we began our CX journey:

• Establish a clear governance structure with a dedicated project owner.
• Conduct executive interviews across the business, in advance, to establish understanding and to gain a baseline of where they think the company is in terms of how it rates with customers. It’s helpful to compare that to what your customers tell you. You’ll find discrepancies and key initial areas of focus simply by doing that!
• Communicate. Communicate. Communicate!  (And not just via e-mail; be sure to convene your sub-committees regularly and open discussion.)
• Stick with it, be patient, and persevere even when it’s frustrating. Building long-term customers is not a short-term process.

Some of you may wonder how this fits with your primary role. For some of us, this has become a big and strategic part of our primary role. We have a strong, established team with good leadership around the functions we own: customer experience, marketing and sales enablement—and that helps build traction and active participation in the program.

Using What We Learn to Make Other Areas Successful

In fact, a lot of what we’ve learned has helped strengthen our marketing efforts, the work we do with our customer advisory councils, our approach to customer advocacy, and our customer reference program.

Further, we use it to help other areas drive CX for their functions, which in turn makes the overall program more successful.

Here at Verint, we have great executive support for CX. It is a privilege for me to represent our customers when we meet as an executive team regularly. Our president and our general manager are supportive advocates of the customer experience program. We needed our president’s sponsorship when we convened the CX executive sponsorship committee, which was the group responsible for strategy development and monitoring of program progress. With those two already on board, others had incentive to attend and get onboard as well.

In fact, we continue to lean on that support as we launch new initiatives. Our CX Program VP Nancy Porte is well-known in the customer experience world and shares her experiences and findings with others. Read her blog for CustomerThink on why executive understanding of—and support for—such a program is so important.

Make the Data Meaningful to Executives

It’s also key to share customer feedback that’s tailored to executives’ needs to help make it more actionable to them. As we’ve done this, we’ve been able to provide great insights to individual departments. Not surprisingly, that has helped create demand for it. They’re now hungry for this data and seek it to help make their functions even more effective.

To keep the program highly visible in the organization, we include CX as part of our weekly updates and proactively involve our executives for support on specific projects. As part of our monthly CX executive steering committee, the team as a whole provides great insight and direction for continued growth and progress.

A final suggestion: Create a strategy around how the entire organization can embrace this new understanding of the customer. When each employee understands his or her impact on the customer and is empowered to do what is necessary to develop that relationship, the program really hits its stride.

We have launched a cultural evolution called developing Customer 4Life. Having a theme like this truly matters—it has become part of many formal and informal discussions each day. At the same time, it’s important to make sure it’s about culture and not just a catchy slogan:

• A theme makes it clear to the employee—what do I personally do to develop customers for life? Training can be developed once you define the attributes of your theme.
• A theme helps create culture change by creating a common language.
• It also empowers employees to prioritize their work and make decisions that put the customer first.

We hope you have found these two blogs helpful and actionable for your organization. Feel free to leave me a comment on what has worked well in your efforts—I’d love to hear from you.

The post Executive Sponsorship—Key to Effective Customer Experience Programs: Part Two appeared first on Customer Experience Management Blog.

As a marketer, you’ve likely heard the term “gamification” thrown around a lot and perhaps wondered what it really means within a community.

In order to be successful, businesses need to engage their community members in a way that matches their business objectives, whether that is by increasing engagement with employees and customers, reducing support costs or promoting a greater sense of community and recognition.

Start with online communities

Online communities are purpose-driven whether for customer support or being solely relationship-driven. Customer communities are used by customers, employees and partners as they work through various decisions or processes, such as purchasing new products or getting support for existing products.

Gamification is used to augment and reward those interactions.

Reward with Pixels not Pennies

Badges in the community can be created by community managers to correspond to specific achievements. Badges also allow community managers to recognize and reward top contributors and promote participation with pixels not pennies.

Building an engaged workforce or customer audience is a common goal of gamification; badging gets companies well on their way to achieving this goal. For example, as a way to get members engaged, Microsoft Dynamics awards every new member with a welcome badge for joining the community. This allows members to immediately feel involved in the community and promote participation from the get-go. Microsoft Dynamics even takes it a step further and lets members showcase their competitive spirit by allowing members to compete with one another.

Identify Leaders

In addition to badges, members enjoy collecting points—think about how well airlines and other travel services have executed this concept. Community managers reward members with points for facilitating and participating in conversations within the online community, which can help decrease support costs, because members are able to look to the community for help and get answers.

Communicate with community members

In order to keep members engaged and encourage participation, community managers need to communicate with their members—and thus track and monitor where their members stand. It’s also a good idea for companies to recognize their top users on leaderboards and at company events. This not only encourages those top contributors to keep up their activity, but also encourages other members to reach that same status.

Conclusion

In order for gamification to be most effective in a company community, end goals should be well understood and tactics built around those objectives. In order to win the game, businesses need to focus on the objective at hand, encourage employees and customers to step up to the plate and reward those that hit it out of the park.

The post Game On! How to Make Gamification Work for Your Community appeared first on Customer Experience Management Blog.

Customer experience requires funding and funding requires a strong business case. So how do you draw a direct connection between your efforts and the business resources needed to sustain them?

Whether you are a seasoned practitioner or a relative newcomer, just beginning a new program, or refining the next level of organizational improvement, chances are that you’ve been asked to demonstrate the business impact of the customer experience program.

First you spent a lot of time masterfully outlining how industry-leading customer satisfaction would be achieved by drawing on the latest research and best practices. This impressive plan will ensure the support of the executive team, you told yourself.

After all, asking for funding is merely a formality, right? Who wouldn’t support an investment in happier and more loyal customers? And your executive sponsor supports your ideas about the importance of building a customer-centric culture—until now. Your plan came back with some encouraging comments, but without the requested funding.

When I talk with other CX practitioners about challenges they are facing, the above scenario is not unusual. In fact, I experienced this early in my career and learned some basics that I still use today.

I had just been asked to lead my first customer experience program and was familiar with putting together a business case. When I managed customer service, I went through the same exercise and knew that I would probably receive 90-95% of requested funding. So, when I received no funding for the CX program, I was mystified and decided to find out why.

My first stop was my direct manager, the CEO. I asked him a couple of questions that focused on whether the business case was complete enough. He assured me that it was technically well-written but that it was competing with a lot of other requests from other departments. So far, I had not learned anything new. But, then, he said something that captured my attention. He said that other proposals included a shorter term return on investment. While my business case showed the benefits of increased customer satisfaction over the next 3 years, other plans demonstrated ROI in a much shorter time frame.

My next stop was the chief financial officer. Already aware that the financial section needed to include not only long-term, but also short-term benefits, I asked him if there was anything else that led to the decision not to fund the program. He said that while he supported an increase in customer satisfaction, he didn’t understand the difference between customer experience and customer service. Wasn’t he already funding customer service, and wasn’t that enough to increase customer satisfaction?

The alarm bells went off in my head and I realized that I had not spent enough time educating each member of the executive team about the unique value an enterprise customer experience program delivers.

I learned so much from those two meetings that I set up meetings with each member of the executive team and received valuable feedback that influenced how I construct a business case. We all know that a strong business case is, and should be, considered mandatory. You can find a lot of information online about which sections to include, but I found that, besides the standard sections on financial metrics, goals and milestones, there is much more that goes into writing a plan that secures funding for customer experience.

So how do you do it? By asking a few pivotal questions and remembering several key points, you can build a business case that is effective and convincing. Just follow the steps below:

Build an Effective Business Case

• Pinpoint the pain. Do your proposed efforts complement the priorities of the business? The CEO or senior executives who ultimately provide you with funding have their own worries, which you must keep in mind. Before presenting any CX initiatives, ask yourself some basic questions. What’s keeping my CEO and board up at night? Are the initiatives I’m proposing relevant, and if not overtly so, can I effectively show a direct correlation? In the absence of this relevancy, you will lose busy executives’ attention.
• Include the Right Information. Corporate leaders receive a steady stream of proposals, but you can stand out from the crowd by including the right information in an easily digestible format. Include, in clear terms, the problem the CX initiative aims to address, the benefits and/or results it will deliver, the resources required, and the return on investment (ROI) expected. Short- and long-term ROI is key. The business case should also show why the CX initiative is needed now. Senior executives can be tempted to postpone efforts that lack an element of urgency.
• Be prepared to measure your effectiveness. You probably won’t have metrics to draw on at the start, but be prepared to let executives know in advance what metrics you plan to use, including some that can be tracked long term, while also explaining why having them will be a benefit in and of itself. Whenever possible, also note why and how CSAT correlates to business success.
• Don’t overpromise. The setting of unrealistic expectations can quickly poison even the best CX plans and it’s one of the most common mistakes CX practitioners make. Executives need to be reminded that it took years to get to the current state, and you can’t undo longstanding systems, processes or an established company culture overnight.
• If you are turned down, ask why, then ask why again. Executives understandably often give the most expedient answer. For example, “it’s not in the budget” doesn’t necessarily mean funding is lacking. Often times it’s simply the easiest way to say no without giving details. You need to find out what really is behind their decision. The real answer might be something you can help address with alternative CX initiatives and plans.

My first lesson was a tough one. I didn’t receive any funding that first year but the work still had to be done to mature the program and demonstrate its value. The following year my learning points were put into action and I developed a compelling business case. I’d like to say that I received 100% of requested funding but it was significantly less. It took about 4 years before the funding was at the level that I had originally requested.

Some might say that making appointments with each executive to educate and inform, developing a meticulous business plan with both short and long term benefits—all while building an enterprise wide customer experience program—is more than other, more traditional areas of the business would be required to do.

But consider that, for many organizations, customer experience is a new initiative. While head-nodding occurs when the benefits of customer loyalty are discussed, only well understood and supported programs receive funding.

The good news is that if you keep these straightforward ideas in mind, your business plan will secure the required resources.

This article original appeared in Customer Think on August 3, 2016.

The post What You Can Do When the CEO Says “No” to Your CX Business Case appeared first on Customer Experience Management Blog.

With the speed of doing business increasing at a pace unheard of just five years ago, today’s organizations want to do some things in real time.

While speech analytics has become widely used across a wide variety of industries, customers who rely on the insights to stay competitive don’t want to wait in certain situations—they want them in real time.

There’s good news on that front. Recently enhancements have been made to Verint Real-Time Speech Analytics, which leverages conversational indicators and analyzes customer calls as they happen—helping organizations to proactively identify opportunities to guide customer conversations to benefit both parties.

This sophisticated analytics solution can help contact centers guide interactions toward positive outcomes by offering contextual guidance at just the right time. So your agents get what they need—when they need it.

Notably, organizations can enhance the value of Verint Real-Time Speech Analytics by using it as an extension of Verint Speech Analytics and Verint Desktop and Process Analytics. Customers can take advantage of the advanced capabilities in Verint Speech Analytics by first identifying and understanding patterns of behavior and improvement opportunities, then prioritizing what needs to happen next, and finally leveraging that knowledge to quickly create guidance rules for real-time speech analytics.

And, the addition of Verint Desktop and Process Analytics provides contextual awareness through a combination of desktop activity and transaction-related information in order to enhance rules, thereby increasing relevance and accuracy.

As many of you already know, speech analytics is a powerful solution that can help uncover trends and causes by determining the correct terms, phrases and conditions that need tracking in real time. It offers focus and execute-ability while helping to improve accuracy—importantly, it also helps minimize the bombardment of real-time alerts, which can dilute organizational processes.

The judicious use of real-time analytics should be an important consideration. Overt reliance only on real-time may force the organization into an implosive, constant fire-fighting mode without really addressing the root cause of issues and process inefficiencies unearthed by regular speech analytics.

With real-time speech, customer service professionals can leverage real-time insight as interactions unfold and tap into the intelligence they need to drive them toward successful outcomes. The sophisticated rules engine in Verint Real-Time Speech Analytics can identify the presence or absence of words and phrases—as well as the sentiment expressed.

With rules functionality that supports a wide variety of word sequences—and conditions that can identify situations in which a phrase is said at a certain point in the call or not recited when it should have been—the software can provide the right contextual help and guidance when it’s needed most.

While many of your customer service agents may not need assistance, the ones who do need it in real time. The answer to this may well be selectively focusing on specific call types (compliance, churn, product complaints, etc.) and specific agents who need the real-time intervention for short time periods.

With all this in your arsenal, your customer service professionals can keep their focus on your customers—where it belongs.

The post How Best to Deploy and Use Real-Time Speech Analytics appeared first on Customer Experience Management Blog.

A Look at What Works and Why

Wisdom gained from customer experience (CX) programs tells us that organizations have to earn the right to do business with each of their customers. No longer can it be assumed that today’s customers will be tomorrow’s customers. Competition is fierce—and customer service expectations are high.

Recognizing this, many organizations have established formal customer experience programs to create a systematic approach for gathering and analyzing customer insights, and then using that intelligence to inform business decisions and to take action. Here at Verint, with our Actionable Intelligence vision, we take this to heart.

While Verint has always been a customer-centric organization, we knew that a dedicated program would help us maintain that focus and take a proactive approach to rapidly changing requirements and expectations. We believed so strongly in the value of capturing, analyzing and taking action on customer insights that we custom-built a function around it, which is driving a cultural evolution toward developing customers for life.

We know that no one department owns and drives the CX. In essence every person in every department and every function plays a role. That said, we find that the most effective CX programs have executive sponsors, backed by key advocates from across the business.

As one of the executive sponsors of the Verint CX program, following are some insights I’d like to share into the findings, approaches and interesting discoveries we’ve made along the way—as well as some perspectives on the importance of executive support and involvement across the business.

Gaining Broad-Based Executive Support

CX executive sponsors must open doors and leverage strong relationships across the management team. We already have established relationships through regular meetings and collaboration with our company’s top executives; so, when we initiated the program, we quickly started socializing the customer experience program with them and their direct reports.

We were able to build the business case, establish the value that CX brings, and reinforce how the CX can be a significant competitive differentiator. With management helping to champion this mindset and business approach, we’ve been able to continue establishing throughout the business that the CX is everyone’s job.

We all make an impact, regardless of our function and whether or not our roles are customer-facing. For example, when we asked the leader of Finance to join the customer experience efforts, he wondered if it was a place he could make a meaningful contribution. He took a leap of faith and has been a valuable member of the CX Executive Council with program guidance and—as we establish program ROI—helping to correlate overall satisfaction with purchasing behavior.

Converting Skeptics

To be sure, not everyone understood the CX program, its charter and the impact it could have immediately. At first, some viewed customer centricity more tangibly than others. Our job as executive sponsors has been  to show them this is real—and share how customer insights are driving positive changes and advancements, as well as spotlight results and where/how it’s making a difference.

By bringing the voice of the customer into executive, departmental and employee discussions and decision making, we’re taking advantage of vital feedback and applying it in meaningful ways.

Supporting CX Program Tools and Infrastructure

Initially, one of the biggest challenges to overcome was demonstrating that the CX program is not a project or a department. Instead, it’s a mindset and culture shift. We’re changing the mindset of the company to focus outside-in first—and that’s what we believe today’s great companies are doing.

A helpful resource for this transformation is a journey map. This shows employees where their departments fit into the overall customer experience journey. Customers see a company as one entity, and journey mapping helps departments and their staff see that everyone plays a role and adds tangible value. We’ve seen this change how employees approach their work, collaboration and engagement.

Mindset shifts don’t happen overnight, we know. What companies may run into at the onset of their CX programs are initial questions about whether the time and effort required pay off. Here’s what our executive sponsors have seen: Collecting, analyzing and sharing customer intelligence wins over employees and customers alike.

When you make findings and feedback available to executives, managers and employees overall—and when they understand how that input ties into their functions—it becomes real and tangible, and then the ownership paradigm starts to shift.

Finally, a governance structure is key. This helps people understand the processes of decision making, policy development and the implementation and monitoring of those decisions and policies. It spells out exactly what we are going to do as an organization to put the customer first.

In an upcoming part two of this blog series, I’ll offer some perspective on establishing an executive sponsorship function and some of the program’s benefits we’ve experienced.

The post Executive Sponsorship—Key to Effective Customer Experience Programs: Part One appeared first on Customer Experience Management Blog.

Personalization has become a cornerstone for building brand loyalty today.  Customers are demanding a much more individualized approach to customer service than ever before—and they want it fast.

Dick Bucci of Pelorus Associates explores how Verint’s acquisition of Contact Solutions advances the Verint portfolio with the addition of cloud-based solutions that enhance voice and mobile self-service through automation and personalization—driven by analytics.

Read his blog.

The post It’s OK to Get Personal with Your Customers appeared first on Customer Experience Management Blog.

Squiz Summit

September 8; Sydney, Australia

Verint’s David Moody, vice president and global practice leader, government and public sector, will present “1+1=WOW: The Benefits of Bringing Together Technologies That Were Made for Each Other” at 2:15 p.m. AEST.

Web content management systems, enterprise search and CRM are most often purchased by different departments—such as communications and customer service—which inevitably shapes the market and often limits integration. This session will discuss the benefits that can be delivered to customers if all these disparate technologies are brought together into one seamlessly integrated solution.

ISS World Washington 2016

September 13-15; Bethesda, Maryland  

Three Verint Communications & Cyber Intelligence Solutions experts will present at this conference:

Darren MacLeod, head of product marketing, will speak in Track 2: ISS for Cyber Threat Detection, Deep and Dark Web Monitoring:

• September 14 at 11:15 a.m. ET: “Putting the Wow into Intelligence”

Alexander Aronovich, senior analyst, will speak in Track 5: Social Network Monitoring and Big Data Analytics Product Demonstrations:

• September 14 at 3 p.m. ET: “Web Intelligence – The Next Generation”

Gary Woods, director of cyber security solutions, North America, will speak in Track 2: ISS for Cyber Threat Detection, Deep and Dark Web Monitoring:

• September 15 at 9 a.m. ET: “Disruptive Technology that Reduces Cyber Defense Complexity and Accelerates Investigation”

Top Strategies for Customer Service Optimization

September 14; Webinar

Verint’s Peter Whibley, solutions marketing manager, will participate in this roundtable discussion on how intelligent contact centers ideally automatically route, allocate and prioritize omnichannel interactions to the right agent for best results. Attendees of this 2 p.m. ET session will explore that all customers, channels and employees are not identical and have different SLAs and skills—and why proper prioritization is thus so important to meet the needs of today’s highly demanding customer interactions.

SOCAP Chicago Chapter

September 15; Arlington, Illinois

Verint’s Cameron Hissey, senior manager, global business strategy, engagement management, will present “Omni-channel Challenges in the Contact Center” at 1:30 CT as part of a speaker panel. This session will address a holistic approach to channels, being channel agnostic, and providing a consistent, complete and contextual experience regardless of channel used. Covered will be knowledge management, employee experience, channel handling, process handling and fundamental tools that provide analysis and insight into all channels.

Customer Response Summit, Austin

September 19; Austin, Texas

Verint’s Greg Sherry, vice president marketing, will lead an interactive general session with conference executives called “Customer Engagement LIVE!” at 2 p.m. CT.  Discussions will include how customer-centric organizations can enrich interactions, improve business processes, and optimize the workforce.  Participants will meet and exchange ideas with executives from other leading companies and industries around customer engagement and business optimization strategies.

QATC

September 20; Nashville, Tennessee

Verint’s Rajeev Venkat, senior director, solutions marketing, will introduce Joe Bechtel, frontline leader for workforce management, Humana RightSourceRx, to discuss “Evolving QM to Support Modern Customer Engagement” at 1:15 p.m. CT. While quality monitoring has been around for decades, the practices and technologies associated with QM have not evolved much to match the needs of modern customer engagement. Session attendees will learn how a leading health and well-being company has disrupted its QM practices and adopted newer technologies such as desktop and process analytics, speech analytics and performance management—in addition to traditional QM—to transform how it engages with its customers.

Mindthesec

September 20; Sao Paulo, Brazil

Verint’s Rafael Da Rosa Righi, solutions manager, will present “Response to Avalanche Alerts Through Cybersecurity Automation” at 5:10 p.m. BRT. Overwhelmed by thousands of daily alerts from disconnected security products, security operations center (SOC) teams rarely discover true attacks. Session attendees will learn how to automate the investigation process to help alleviate alert overload and accelerate incident response.

Tech Security Strategies Conference

September 22; Milwaukee, Wisconsin

Verint’s Gary Woods, director of cyber security solutions, North America, will present “Disruptive Technology that Reduces Cyber Defense Complexity & Accelerates Investigation” at 12:00 p.m. CT. This session will cover the challenges involved with responding to cyber alerts, skill gaps in cyber security, and what can be done to address these and other challenges. Functional areas to include when building a SOC will also be addressed.

The post Strengthening Customer Engagement and Reducing Cyber Complexity appeared first on Customer Experience Management Blog.

As I discussed  in last month’s blog Creating a Customer-Centric Culture, the president of a division of a Fortune 500 utility company drives her organization’s customer engagement optimization strategy by incorporating a combination of business and workforce optimization initiatives.

I met with the president again a couple weeks ago, and we discussed some additional areas around her strategy including workforce optimization and customer focus. 

The executive strongly believes that customer experience and customer focus go hand in hand. At the forefront of her strategy is a belief that motivated and driven employees who deliver an excellent customer experience are core to her organization’s success. One interesting concept she discussed was a focus on contact center “first person” resolution. The organization extended the usual definition of first contact resolution to first person resolution, where not only is the goal to resolve the customer’s issue on the customer’s first call to the organization, but the issue is also resolved by the first person who receives the call.

How do they do this? Agents are empowered to help customers and have the ability to handle whatever is needed on a call. Almost every question on the organization’s quality monitoring evaluation form has the word “customer” in it—including questions on listening ability, problem resolution, professionalism, empathy and appreciation.

Screen capture records the agent’s use and proficiency with systems, so managers can use the recorded agent-screen interactions to develop agents and increase workflow efficiencies through agent coaching and process improvement projects. Best practice examples of issue resolution,  customer saves, agent selling techniques and other types of service excellence are also archived and used to train other agents.

From a contact center systems perspective, the organization consolidated 13 different systems to a single employee desktop, so the need to transfer calls, put customers on hold, or call customers back was dramatically reduced. Customer experience was optimized through reduced average handle time (AHT), plus guided call flow that helped agents collect data from customers much faster than before. Efficiencies increased and training time was significantly reduced: Because one employee desktop replaced 13 systems, there was a leap in agent workflow efficiencies and a 50% reduction in agent training time.

Employee scorecards drive further excellence. In addition to recurring coaching sessions and twice a year performance reviews, the organization was able to put primary ownership of performance improvement in the hands of the agents, enabling them to drive their own success.

In total, the scorecard KPIs—including Sales Conversions, Quality Assurance Score, Schedule Adherence, Availability and Save Rate—drive customer excellence, customer retention and an increase in the frequency and results around cross sell/upsell.

The executive’s philosophy is that customers are the center of their business. So, if the organization takes care of customers, they’ll stay with the organization, and also buy more.

Your organization’s customers are a click away from the competition. How does your customer engagement optimization strategy compare to your competitors? What are you doing to make service faster, easier and more personalized? Leverage insight derived from business and workforce optimization initiatives, and start helping advance your organization’s customer engagement strategy—and business results.

The post Customer Engagement Optimization: Enabling “First Person” Issue Resolution appeared first on Customer Experience Management Blog.

We are pleased to announce that Kevin Wine, Vice President of Marketing for Verint Video and Situation Intelligence, and Matt Tengwall, Vice President and General Manager of Security and Cyber Solutions for Banking and Retail Markets for Verint, are nominees for the 2016 Physical Security Industry Influencers Award.

Presented by Security.World, the award honors the top influencers in the industry based on the insight they provide to the security intelligence and video surveillance markets.

We would appreciate your vote!

Kevin Wine has worked in the security industry for more than 20 years. “I feel honored and privileged to be a part of such an important industry,” he says. “Everything we do is directly tied to the core needs of people, and entities being secure and safe.”

Kevin says the evolution of technology has been the most significant development of the industry. “A perfect example of this is Verint Situational Intelligence Solutions. Here the advancements in data capture, processing, analysis and visualization technology help enable a new generation of command and control capabilities—helping improve security and efficiencies, and helping deliver long-term value and ROI for customers.”

Matt regularly provides perspective on emerging trends such as the connection between physical and cyber security. “In today’s market, there is a tendency toward collaboration between physical security, IT, and cyber security within organizations,” he says. “We see this most in the financial sector, where C-level executives focus on protecting corporate assets, client data and personnel.”

This convergence, Matt says, drives a stronger alignment of security resources and leadership—now working in a cohesive manner to help ensure business continuity. “Modern companies need a comprehensive approach to security that takes into account risks from every facet of business.”

So join the conversation and cast your vote today.  Don’t forget to submit your selection—voting ends August 31, 2016.

The post Verint Executives Nominated for Security Industry Leadership Award appeared first on Customer Experience Management Blog.

Does it feel like déjà vu every time you read another article predicting the death of the bank branch?

There’s no denying that smartphone apps and online banking have had an effect on the bank branch—and yes, consumers are moving to digital channels. But while the number of brick and mortar locations may decline—and how consumers use the branch is indeed changing—is it really the end of the branch?

In today’s highly competitive marketplace, successful organizations can set themselves apart by addressing consumer needs—online via digital channels and in person at the branch.

As the overall number of bank branches is expected to decline, physical presence still has resonance among consumers today. Branches will continue to be an important part of an omnichannel strategy for financial services organizations. Even as many financial institutions decrease the overall number of branches in their network, research shows consumers are still visiting the bank branch.

In a recent consumer survey, 43 percent of customers report 10 visits or more per year to the branch. ¹

With all of this opportunity, it’s important to help ensure that your branch is meeting—or better yet exceeding—the expectations of your customers. So, what can financial institutions do to enhance their customers’ experience?

It’s not a one size fits all strategy. Some branch types will work within one financial institution’s culture and specific customer needs, while another organization’s requirements could vary from that.

Try to avoid the temptation of the next fad. Instead, enhance your branch design, appearance and technology to fit your customers’ needs and expectations.

Once you’ve made changes to help your branches be more visually appealing, focus on what the customer needs from your employees: expertise. The future of the branch employee is having the skills and knowledge to provide advisory and consultative services, helping support the customer and generate revenue versus handling traditional teller transactions.

There is a clear need for help with 78 percent of consumers reporting they come into the branch specifically to meet with a financial specialist. And, this human interaction component isn’t going away—57 percent of consumers surveyed say they would like to interact with their bank in person at the branch. ¹

Your employees need to capitalize on every customer visit to the branch and deliver an outstanding customer experience each and every time. Given they are the front line of your organization, be sure you have empowered your employees with the right tools and data to deliver an ‘in branch experience’ that is as meaningful and efficient as possible.

Read our new eBook—Evolving Bank Branches for the Future—to learn four strategies to help you evolve, not dissolve, your bank branches.

You can also learn more about Verint’s vision on the evolving branch by joining us at Future Branches, November 29 – December 1 in San Diego, California.

¹ The State of Retail Banking: Consumer Survey 2016.

The post The Branch Is Evolving—Not Dissolving appeared first on Customer Experience Management Blog.

We all want to see constant improvement, but what do you do when customer satisfaction flat lines?

The dreaded customer satisfaction (CSAT) plateau. It happens to every organization. After beginning our customer experience program, we enjoyed watching the satisfaction metric rise. And rise it did. I couldn’t wait to see the quarterly results to see how much we had improved. And then it happened. Customer satisfaction levels plateaued, and not just for one quarter.

Ah, there must be something wrong with the analysis.

Ran it twice; it appears to be right.

What now?

Plateaus are beautiful in nature and elicit “oohs” and “aahs” from those who view them. In contrast, plateaus viewed in customer satisfaction bar charts conjure up silence or at best a deep “hmmm” from disappointed executives.

We looked for reasons, explanations, and universal truths – anything that might explain why our progress leveled off. What made our plateau particularly distressing was that we were sharing customer feedback and insights throughout the organization. A virtual plethora of improvement projects were complete or in progress. And we finished our first customer journey map and complemented it with a future, desired customer journey map. Our internal effort was at an all-time high, but the metrics told a different story.

I turned to numerous sources to research potential reasons for plateauing – and how to get the momentum moving in the right direction again. While there was a lot of information available about how to set up a new CX program and get executive sponsorship, there were few places to turn to for content about real-life, day-to-day issues that CX leaders encounter.

Over the years, CustomerThink proved to be one of the best treasure troves, which ultimately led to my desire to provide “in the trenches” experiences and support in this column. While I know I don’t have all of the answers, I think we have quite a few of the questions – ones which I look forward to exploring with the readers of CustomerThink.

Now back to the plateau. What did we do? And what did we learn about busting through a customer satisfaction plateau?

1. Review CSAT by Segment

We took a detailed look at the data, segmenting it in new ways to get a clearer picture of what was under the top number. We learned that, in some segments, satisfaction was indeed plateauing.

However, we also found that satisfaction was rising in two very important customer segments for our business. We continued looking at the details to understand why those satisfaction metrics were higher, and how that journey differed from the other segments.

2. Balance Project Portfolio

Next, our team took a look at recently completed projects and those in progress. We classified each by its “Level of Impact to Customer Satisfaction” and “Length of Time for Impact to the Customer Experience.” What we found is that most of the projects we’d recently completed were important to our customers, yet, wouldn’t substantially impact customer satisfaction for more than 12 months.

For example, we were re-designing an onboarding program that would affect only new customers, so, while we were improving the experience, the survey data wouldn’t reflect that until those customers had the chance to go through the new and improved process. In response, we plotted all current projects on a grid and initiated some we knew would have a shorter term impact. By maintaining a balanced portfolio of projects, we could create more consistency in improving the customer experience.

When we reviewed our project portfolio we noticed one other item. We were working on improving the rational side of the customer experience. Specifically, we were improving the product and services but not addressing the emotional component. As Colin Shaw notes in his 2016 predictions, emotions account for more than 50 percent of the customer experience! We identified a huge opportunity to understand how emotions impacted our customer experience and how we could use that to improve the experience.

3. Tell Stories

We went to the Customer Experience Executive Sponsorship Committee and told two stories. We used the personas we had developed for customer journey mapping and walked our team through the experience of the type of customer who still had increasing satisfaction, and compared it to another group whose satisfaction was decreasing. We also proved the importance of emotion in the design and improvement of the customer journey.

We also made recommendations about how we could use what we learned about one customer journey to improve the others, how to balance our project portfolio to make both short and long-term improvements and, finally, steps we would implement to understand the emotional component of the journey. The resulting discussion was lively and, at the end of the meeting, we had a renewed commitment from the board to support our efforts!

Plateaus are Opportunities, Not Roadblocks

In retrospect, I think we were looking at the plateau in the wrong way. Rather than viewing the flattening of the curve as a roadblock, it demonstrated that we were making progress. It was a perfect time to look back and see how much progress had been made. But it also indicated that we were moving to a more mature stage of customer experience and needed to add more refined techniques to our customer experience toolkit.

The good news is that we are, once again, on an upward trajectory with our customer satisfaction results! But, next time we reach a plateau, we will embrace it as a challenge and opportunity to reach the next level of customer experience management.

To recap, here’s what to do when your organization hits a CSAT plateau.

• Understand your data. Go deep into the data to determine if the results have stabilized in all customer segments or just a few. Use text analytics to determine reasons for the differences.
• Balance your project portfolio. Align your improvement projects for both short-term and long-term impacts. Include projects that address the emotional, as well as the rational side of the customer experience.
• Improve your storytelling skills. Stories are powerful ways to describe the customer experience and help secure the institutional support required to change and improve an organization in order to increase CSAT.

If you or your team have encountered a CSAT plateau and overcome it, we’d love to hear how in the comments below.

This article originally appeared in CustomerThink on July 7, 2016

The post Busting Through a Customer Satisfaction Plateau: 3 Ways appeared first on Customer Experience Management Blog.