In this ‘Age of the Customer’, the importance of customer experience is continually emphasized in the data we read. Consider this for example; a slight improvement in the customer experience at a typical $1 billion company can produce an additional $262 million to $272 million in revenues over three years, according to the Temkin Group report “ROI of Customer Experience, 2014.”1
Conversely, research by CX cloud provider SDL reveals that, in the year following customers having a negative experience, brands can expect to lose 65% of the previous revenue from those customers. What’s more, 64% of those customers will stop recommending a brand, leave, or give negative reviews.2
No wonder more and more organizations are bending over backwards to create compelling customer experiences—and, in response, the market for customer experience management tools is predicted to swell from $3.77 billion last year to an anticipated $8.39 billion in 2019, according to RNR Market Research.3
Recently almost 90% of the Cyara team gathered in Melbourne, Australia for Kickoff 2016. This was the first time for so many of the Cyara team to gather in one place, and several key customers were invited to speak to us. These customers had a lot to say about improving the customer experience. And, regardless of the industry they represented, telecommunications, financial services, or broadband communications, they are all dealing with the same major challenge—how to stitch together moments in time to get a comprehensive view of the entire customer journey.
Moments in Time
In today’s complex contact centers, the number of communications channels has increased rapidly, and today’s customers are likely to use multiple channels to conduct business. With a bank, for example, to get detailed information on a transaction, a customer may start with a mobile phone, move to a web chat session, call back and interact with an IVR before jumping to an agent-assisted interaction. Regardless of the number of channels used, the customer expects the bank to know who they are and their transaction history. In many organizations, the interaction on each communications channel is treated as a separate “moment in time” and not as a part of an end-to-end customer journey.
Multiple channels are not the only factor that adds complexity to getting an answer for the customer. It is likely that information is also needed from a CRM database or other back-end systems. To get this information may require multiple database dips. All of these activities are part of the overall customer experience, and it’s the overall customer experience that builds customer loyalty.
Finding Value in the Moments in Time
According to “Connect Business Moments, Personas and Journey Maps to Boost Customer Experience Outcomes”, a research paper published by Gartner in May 2015, “Responding appropriately to business moments can enrich, or degrade, customer experience accordingly.“4 The research goes on to say that business moments in time can and will trigger responses, and the value of the responses will improve as these moments are better understood and organizations will find themselves rethinking:
- All value chains — within and outside of their industry
- All interactions — two-way interactions with customers, including “external
factors” that are a part of these interactions - Currently understood ecosystems
Gartner recommends that organizations can understand and better respond to these moments in time by mapping them to customer journeys, which provides deeper insight.
Piecing Together the Moments in Time
At kickoff, several Cyara customers referred to moments in time, but one customer, who is responsible for the customer experience at a top-four bank in Australia said, “The next step in our journey is to piece together moments in time from various channels to get an overarching view of what’s happened. How hard was it for the customer, and what were the friction points? This will give us real data to go back to product managers to say fix this.”
Well, said. That’s our mission at Cyara.
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