Content Management Systems – The Secret of Great CustServ
Today’s customer service requirements are getting ever more complicated for businesses. Customers encountering problems increasingly rely on self-help. Customers may start looking for solutions by searching on Google, on community sites, or inside a mobile app. A logical starting point depends on the device and application, as well as personal preferences. The bottom line is: customers want to get to their solution as quickly and easily as possible, and they do not want to change their habits and preferences in order to reach support. Many companies run several customer service applications that support different channels, each with a separate knowledge base (KB) subsystem. These may include a support application for an ecommerce site, some general help pages on the company web site, and FAQs on a mobile application. For internal purposes, there might even be an Enterprise Content Management (ECM) system with information for contact agents to use but that are not published externally. Of course the normal situation for a service agent is to work on more than one channel. This means that depending on the nature of the inquiry, agents need to use and update multiple knowledge bases. This results in additional, redundant work and information. Furthermore, information gets easily out of sync—resulting in confusion. Similarly, customers need to navigate through different knowledge bases and FAQs. Apart from being highly inefficient and ineffective, this has an impact on both employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction. It leads to frustration because customers who do not find their solution need to relay the same information multiple times, and they could be put on hold while the agents research different databases,...
DRU Assist – A Customer Experience
A few weeks ago Domino’s Pizza announced that they introduced conversational AI capabilities in their ordering process to enhance the customer experience. DRU Assist, a Virtual Assistant that is powered by Nuance Technology’s Nina Intelligent Virtual Assistant technology. Of course that caught my interest, looking at AI, chatbots and Virtual Assistants for some time now from a customer experience angle. I believe that there is quite some potential in Virtual Assistants although I saw and still see some risks for customer experience in using them. Used in a wrong way, raising too high expectations that subsequently are not fulfilled, bots can kill the user experience. The doubts I expressed earlier are still there but then I am happy to be convinced otherwise. Domino’s managed a tremendous turnaround after having some serious issues late in the aughties and early tens. Apart from rediscovering quality they implemented a very strong technology strategy that helps them understanding their customers better and helps their customers to a pretty smooth ordering and delivery process. The Intention So, I took the chance to have a conversation with Nuance’s Robert Schwarz about DRU assist, and of course ordered some Pizza using DRU shortly after it came online in New Zealand. Having some Pizza-loving children and a busy lifestyle I am a frequent mobile customer of Domino’s (and no, they didn’t incentivize me for this article in any form). Unluckily I couldn’t get statements from Domino’s, but here we are … Nuance as a vendor has a long history in speech-based interfaces. According to Mr. Schwarz Nina, the Nuance technology behind DRU Assist is really good at...
Customer Service – Hell or Heaven?
Today, customers are communicating with businesses on a variety of channels. One customer calls in, inquiring about the status of an online order. Another sends an email. A third customer may ask for service in-store. If a mobile app is not meeting the customer’s expectation, the customer may prefer self-help and check an FAQ in the app. An alternative is to initiate a chat with an agent, also inside of the app. Or, if someone is really annoyed, that customer may even rant on a social channel such as Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram.Company reality is that there is more than one CRM, and several business systems. All come with with their own backend. One company might be using all of the following, without even realizing how fragmented the experience is: An e-commerce system that comes with its own service subsystem. An order fulfillment system that is not connected to the CRM. Mobile app support that has its own backend. Social Media that is often run by marketing and not customer support. E-mail support that is handled via a joint inbox, which is not integrated into any support system. This is CustServ Hell! In CustServ Hell, customers do not get recognized and often need to repeat the same information over and over, because there is no integrated process. This is a customer experience nightmare. CustServ Hell forces service agents to work with a great number of applications and/or tabs in their browsers. Their work is very cumbersome, inefficient and error prone. In order to be able to satisfy a customer request, agents need to tap into different applications, like CRM...
CXM! What the Heck is That?
In his recent very readable article ‘iCXM Comes of Age – Using AI to Know, Engage, and Server Your Customers Better’, CustomerThink.com founder and chief editor Bob Thompson explored how Artificial Intelligence can improve Customer Experience Management – and with extending CXM to iCXM created a new acronym, jokingly noting that the industry is running short on buzzwords. The opportunities that Bob identifies are Knowing your customer Engaging your customer Serving your customer While this is all true, I contend that none of this is about customer experience management, simply because customer experiences are living in the perception of the customer, and hence are solely managed by the customer, not by any company. I wrote about it earlier in my article There is no customer experience without customer engagement. According to Wikipedia, customer experience ‘is the product of an interaction between an organization and a customer over the duration of their relationship. This interaction is made up of three parts: the customer journey, the brand touchpoints the customer interacts with, and the environments the customer experiences … ‘. Therefore customer experience ‘implies customer involvement at different levels – such as rational, emotional, sensorial, physical, and spiritual. Customers respond diversely to direct and indirect contact with a company.’ Lastly, customer experience ‘can be defined as the internal and personal responses of the customers …”. A company, supported by the software it uses, can engage customers in a way that these customers have a positive – or negative – experience. What now is customer experience management? Friend and CRM Godfather Paul Greenberg, in a seminal article clarified on the definitions of...