Workshop On Optimizing Your Customer Service Experience Identifies Eight Strategies
At the 2013 Kana Connect event from September 15th to 17th, 2013 in New Orleans, I had the pleasure of co-leading a workshop with Scott Hays a Sr. Director, Product Marketing for KANA Software.  The goal of the session was to explore eight strategies to improve customer experience. 

By now, you are well aware that “experience counts.” Your customers’ loyalty and future purchases hang in the balance. In this session, we’ll explore the key things you can do to make sure their experiences are positive. Ray Wang from Constellation Research and Scott Hays from KANA guide an interactive workshop to invigorate your future initiatives.

Speaker(s): Scott Hays, Ray Wang, Constellation Research

The event began with a overview of  Constellation 9C’s of customer engagement  and then an overview of the eight ways to optimize your customer service experience.  Teams were broken up to documen current state and to rank future state.  Teams were told to identify the top three ways among these eight strategies:

  1. Effortless and personalized
  2. Channel convenience
  3. Channel consistency
  4. Social media
  5. Unified agent desktop
  6. Agent knowledge
  7. Process-driven
  8. Internationalization

Results Show Future Focus on Channel Consistency, Social Media, and Effortless and Personalized

Given the Kana customer base, current state priorities of agent knowledge, process driven, and channel convenience came as little surprise to the participants.  In fact, most workshop attendees have had significant success in adopting these top 3 optimization strategies (see Figure 1).  However, the future state rankings revealed emerging priorities in channel consistency, social media, and effortless and personalized strategies.  Of note, unified agent desktop and channel convenience were not far behind in rankings.

Figure 1. Workshop Results Show Future Focus on Channel Consistency, Social Media, and Effortless and Personalized

AREACURRENT
We’re Already Quite
Good at This
(1, 2 and 3)		FUTURE
Our Focus in the
Next 12 Months
(1, 2 and 3)
Effortless and Personalized2+0+1+3+3+1+0= 10     40+2+2+3+0+2+2=11         3
Channel Convenience2+1+1+1+3+2+1= 11     31+1+0+0+2+3+2 = 9         5
Channel Consistency0+0+1+0+1+0=2             72+1+1+2+2+4+3=15         1
Social Media1+0+1+2+1+3+0=8         52+1+2+0+3+4+1=13         2
Unified Agent Desktop1+1+1+0+0+1+2=6         60+0+2+1+3+4+0=10         4
Agent Knowledge2+3+2+3+4+5+2=21       11+0+2+0+0+0+2=5           7
Process-Driven0+2+1+2+1+4+3=13       22+2+1+0+1+1+0=7           6
Internationalization1+2+1+0+0+0+1=5         82+0+0+2+1+0+1=7           6
   
   
   
   
   

The Bottom Line:  Customer Centricity Is Required For Differentiation In A Digital World

A digital world requires organizations to practice what they preach.  Customer centricity is a state of mind that requires leadership at the top.  Most data on customer experience highlights a need for authenticity and relevancy in dealing with a brand or enterprise.  With trust and transparency an increasing requirement for authentic business, leaders who fail to lead from the top, deliver great customer journeys, and apply the right CRM technologies will continue to fall behind as the digital business divide widens.  Customer centricity is now a strategic imperative and requires first rate orchestration, company wide commitment, and leadership.  A focus on channel consistency, social media, and effortless and personalized are good approaches to achieve customer centricity when designing and delivering customer service experience.

Your POV.

What’s your plan to achieve customer centricity? Are you embarking on a digital business transformation?  Let us know how it’s going!  Add your comments to the blog or reach me via email: R (at) ConstellationR (dot) com or R (at) SoftwareInsider (dot) com.

Please let us know if you need help with your Customer Centricity and Digital Business transformation efforts.  Here’s how we can assist:

  • Assessing customer centricty readiness
  • Developing your digital business strategy
  • Vendor selection
  • Implementation partner selection
  • Connecting with other pioneers
  • Sharing best practices
  • Designing a next gen apps strategy
  • Providing contract negotiations and software licensing support
  • Demystifying software licensing

 

Related Research:

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Business Research Themes

Next-Generation Customer Experience

Roles

Chief Customer Officer, Chief Information Officer, Chief Marketing Officer

Tags

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