The “Relationship Revolution” is upon us. Customers are longer content to just come through the front door of the business with a phone call using the means that companies have provided them for years. In “the old days,” (yes, I really said that) companies controlled the conversation. A radical change is upon us where the traditional contact center can no longer simply use old methods to satisfy a new generation of customers. Since the early 2000s and the burst bubble of the so-called dot.com boom, the possibilities of the Internet and alternative contact channels have caused customers themselves to change how they view their choices of communication, and indeed, critically, the businesses with which they will continue to interact!
Doc Searls may have been referring to this in his book The Intention Economy when he said, “…customers will run their own loyalty programs – ones in which vendors will be the members.” Customer’s own loyalty programs are not within the swell of big data (not entirely yet!) or any of our CRM systems. No, they are in their heads, their thoughts, okay, sometimes their Twitter, Facebook and blogs too, but they are more intangible and the place where we get most exposure to them is at our point of sales or service. The change that is upon us has truly become a “relationship revolution” as customers now control the conversation, so much so that it has created one of the biggest challenges for business in the last twenty years. What is the challenge? It’s actually simple: “how does my business stay in the conversation with these newly empowered customers and provide the right experience for each channel without being overwhelmed?”
In many cases that change has been uncontrollable, even exponential, as the contact center and marketing organizations swim hard to keep afloat; they simply try to meet the needs of managing the new channels. In her article 216 Social Media and Internet Statistics (September 2012), Cara Pring points out that “91% of online adults use social media.” Imagine the implications as social media proceeds to get more personalized and the sheer number of social media sites continues to grow! Businesses are recognizing that the much publicized “voice of the customer,” has been spread wider in the business and sometimes lacks clarity due to this dilution, resulting in an inability to consistently provide a competitive customer experience matched to the channel. Consider the last ten years, there was email, then chat, and now with greater immediacy than ever before, social media and the increasing numbers of customer forums. All this is on top of an often over-loaded, outsourced and expensive phone-based contact center. Each new channel does not replace the other, it becomes yet another background routine (that was for all you UNIX nerds out there) that needs to be managed and brought into perspective for the customer experience.
It becomes critical for customer experience leaders to consider how they are responding to the waves of requests from their customer channels and to act proactively to ensure that those channels deliver the experience that meets their customers’ expectations in a cost-effective manner.
For vendors, it’s not enough to simply extend what you have, or had. You can’t take decades-old technology and just tag onto its complex CTI engines the new pieces and say, “there you are, off you go, it all works.” It is simply not true. It’s a stop gap, a bridge across which the customer experience must be managed, a bridge to next generation customer contact.
What if you could pass seamlessly from where you are now, with isolated silos of service delivery directly to that next generation customer contact experience? Wouldn’t that make much more sense and allow you greater flexibility and fewer projects to get to superior customer satisfaction?
Of course it would, that’s why Aspect has adopted a different approach. It’s not simply an “add it on and continue with old methods” approach but a fresh, new look at the customer experience, from the customer’s perspective, giving you the advantage over your competitors, and giving your customers the experience they want in the channel of communication of their choice.
Aspect gives you the power to engage whenever, however your customer chooses, even across channels in the same conversation and at the same time enables you to put the right number of agents in the right place at the right time!
Long live the relationship revolution!
The post How Can You Be at the Center of Your Customer’s Own Loyalty Program? appeared first on Aspect Blogs.