Unified Self-Service

Forrester, a leading independent research company with a business and technology focus, recently published their fifth annual Customer Experience Index (CXi), and the findings should be of interest to anyone seeking to retain their customers in today’s business environment. After polling more than 7,600 customers with regards to large companies in 13 industries, Forrester calculated the companies’ CXi score by subtracting the number of negative experiences from positive experiences to achieve a net score, which could range from excellent to very poor. Consideration was given to how easy a firm was to work with, how enjoyable to work with and how well it met their needs.

Some interesting findings:

• Only four companies received an “Excellent” rating.
• Almost two thirds of companies fell in the range between “Okay” and “Very Poor”. The threshold for “Okay” was set at 75% (equivalent of a “C average”).
• There was both upward and downward movement in the rankings, suggesting that in the last year, some companies focused on improvement while others let their customer service lapse.
• The gaps between “good” and “bad” customer service within some industries, like retail and banking, are widening. However, the gap between various firms actually narrowed in the wireless and internet service provider industries.

For a typical business, the fact that a wide swath of organizations rate “Okay” or worse means there is a significant opportunity to stand out by providing a superior customer service experience. In their whitepaper, Forrester provides a number of suggestions for strategies to improve, emphasizing the importance of finding your customers’ “pain points” – the bottlenecks or otherwise frustrating situations that arise within the customer service process – and streamlining the process accordingly. One recommendation is a customer journey map – a visual illustration of the many points of contact a customer might have with your company and that customer’s needs at that point in the contact process, and additionally, a similar map of the customer-experience ecosystem, including all personnel and technology, that might influence that customer dialogue.

If you’re looking for an improvement to the technical component of your customer service strategy, Voxeo’s unified self-service platform can power inbound and outbound customer service solutions for any industry, including the applications cited earlier like bank and financial IVR and retail IVR. Voxeo makes it simple to analyze call flow and customer dialogues to minimize frustrations and streamline the process, integrates easily with your other business intelligence tools, adapts to your customers’ communication preferences, and unifies customer experience across channels. It’s also backed by our own customer service obsession.