Customers Determine the Value of a Process
by Mike Garner, Chief Customer Officer, Cicero Inc. -
May 26, 2015
Customers Determine the Value of a Process
By Mike Garner, Chief Customer Officer, Cicero Inc.
As our team wraps up another month of client, partner and prospect meetings, some common themes continue to emerge. First, there is a fast growing realization that the everyday conversations between businesses and their customers have the most direct impact on perceived brand quality and thus customer lifetime value - more so than product or service features. Second, the technology now exists such that customer-centric companies can actually design optimal processes and have information and applications support those processes – versus being forced to create costly manual workarounds throughout the enterprise.
So…on to the common themes of our discussions…
You need to view service delivery from both the inside out, and the outside in. Most organizations that we meet with today start with this key question …what is the experience that we’re driving? Are we really hitting on the Know me, know your stuff, keep me informed, respect me and my time key components that make up an excellent experience? Because there’s this realization that the everyday conversations our CSRs have with customers, x1000 per month, times 12 months, times the 3 year average life of a CSR - start to really add up in terms of making one of the more powerful marketing engines of the entire organization - so this is where brand promises are met or not met. The importance of the interaction, the importance of the experience is taking on serious meaning and significance relative to lowering the cost to add a new customer. And if you’ve got raving fans, if you’ve got net promoters, whatever you want to call them, we’ve all seen the evidence, and the math suggests that great experiences demonstrably accelerate profitable growth. And it also has that double whammy effect, it also significantly reduces the cost of support for each customer, because I think we all know that the happier I am as a customer, the less I am going to call you, or email you, or get into a chat session with you about something other than what might be a possible revenue opportunity for you. There’s less issue, there’s less question, there’s less complaint, and there’s more how do I use, how do I get value, what plan should I be on? So those are the types of things that organizations are starting to look at. They are taking this approach and are now trying to drive customer interactions, and
They are starting to take a much deeper dive into how work is performed in the customer-facing operations within the enterprise and using this information to drive customer interaction.
Companies are starting to shift the focus from how do I wrap process and people around the technology I have, to how do I wrap technology, around great process and around great people.
2010 is NOT the year for process improvement; but the year for customer felt process improvement. It really doesn’t matter that I believe I have a ‘process advantage’ if the customer doesn’t feel the difference. Dr. Gerald Zaltman - one of the leading authorities in science-based marketing at Harvard states: “Customers are driven more by the subconscious sensory and emotional elements derived from the total experience surrounding a transaction than by the tangible attributes of a product or service”. Think about that - sustainable competitive advantage is created at the point of interaction, and the interaction is the experience.
I wouldn’t run another customer-facing organization without a technical capability to design and deliver a smart desktop - one that can automate repetitive workflows, guide employees and customers through their work, present relevant information in an intuitive fashion and give me objective insight into the conversations and the work performed to support them. Customer interactions and conversations determine market share - and now that companies know they can ensure the conversation goes well consistently, there is a responsibility to find an enterprise desktop solution that can pay for itself in-year and provide a competitive advantage millions of times over going forward.
Mr. Garner brings over 15 years of customer contact operations and technology leadership to Cicero, where he leads worldwide sales. Cicero Inc., founded in 1988, provides solutions that enable business transformation of enterprise interactions across companies and government organizations. Cicero XM technology delivers this capability via an innovative combination of desktop integration, automation, presentation and analytics capabilities, built to transform customer interaction into the most powerful marketing and branding asset a company can own.
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