B/OSS World: CEM Must Be Driven From Top Down, Experts Say

Owens St. Julian said what constitutes a good customer experience also varies by segment, e.g. consumer or business. Sobers added that the perception also is altered by their buyer profile, e.g. are they a price shopper or technophile.

Understanding how customers perceive their experience also is critical, panelists said. Raj noted that you must be willing to listen, measure and test. He said one service provider tried a customer forum and closed it down quickly when customer complaints surfaced. Instead, service providers must not only receive data but seek it out.

McGloin agreed, noting that just because people aren’t lighting the phones at the call center doesn’t mean there are no problems.

Of course, call center data is a great indicator of issues, but it also provides a decidedly negative view. So, said Owens St. Julian, it must be supplemented with surveys and also check in the blogosphere.

Sobers added that social networks are a great place to listen to the marketplace and find out what customers are not telling you directly.

Balancing Cost and Outcomes

Determining how to implement a CEM plan must be balanced with the cost. McGloin advised a Six Sigma approach where you look to solve the problems that impact the greatest number of customers.

Owens St. Julian said to use the 80/20 rule and touch those customers who are most at risk.

Sobers added that with customer profile data, you can assign values to customers so that you can predict patterns of experience and target problems down to an individual level, ensuring that the effort you are making to shore up a customer relationship is the most cost-effective, e.g. if the customer has a huge social network, the fallout of a bad customer experience could be spread across a larger sphere of influence.

Sobers added that it’s also useful to come up with a few immediate objectives that you can prove. That will show that your efforts on a larger scale will have measurable impacts. These smaller projects enable proliferation of CEM more broadly across the organization.

Controlling the Customer Experience

One of the issues that’s complicating CEM is that service providers no longer work in a vacuum.

“The big issue is ownership of the brand,” said Sobers, explaining that with the iPhone, it’s difficult to know who owns the customer experience. Is it Apple, the device maker? Is it AT&T, the service provider? Is it any one of a number of application developers?

McGloin said developing a customer experience plan begins with the service provider understanding that it doesn’t control the end-to-end process but will be blamed for it. That understanding must drive the focus on customer experience from the top of the company down.

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