What is customer interaction management?
Simply put, it's providing appropriate capabilities to customers based upon the customer's needs and preferences for interaction with the company. This means managing and optimizing all the different ways customers prefer to interact with your organization to ensure a high standard of service in an integrated, cost-effective manner.
Today's spectrum of customers can and do expect to communicate with your company through many different channels and media – e-mail, phone, Internet chat, online ordering/service systems, traditional mail, catalog, or any combination of these – and you need to provide the flexibility to move between these types of interactions without re-entering information already provided. Integrating these customer touch-points is crucial to enabling companies to better manage the customer experience, maximizing loyalty efforts and retention.
What do you consider to be the main interaction touch points to the customer?
Any time a customer contacts a company's service center – whether via VoIP/IP telephony, IVR technology with speech recognition, intelligent skill-based call routing, e-mail, chat, or video – it's a main interaction point that's critical to ensuring customer satisfaction. Mismanaging these "moments of truth" can impact future revenue, customer loyalty, and your company's reputation.
Each and every customer connection is a test of not only customer service, but the entire organization and the brand as well. The outcome of one customer service experience can leave a lasting imprint – negative or positive – on the entire customer relationship.
Improving customer-centricity and thereby satisfaction and loyalty means committing to improving touch point performance so that customers receive maximum value out of each interaction.
What are the major components of CIM?
As a strategy, CIM is the effective combination of business processes, business intelligence, and technology. These primary components of CIM allow companies to understand their customer base in terms of preferences, profitability, past interaction history, and satisfaction. This in turn allows a company to create contact center solutions to facilitate attracting the best customers and retaining them for a long-term relationship.
By leveraging CIM, companies are able to differentiate themselves from their competitors with higher levels of customer retention, customer satisfaction, economic growth and profitability, largely through the quality and effectiveness of customer interactions.
How critical is CIM in contact center operations?
The understanding and control gained through CIM enables the contact center to maximize the value of the experience to the customer. The bottom line is that being able to provide the most effective and efficient customer interaction experiences are fundamental to economic success and survival in a business environment that is extremely competitive and becoming increasingly commoditized.
How different is CIM technology from other multi-channel technologies such as CTI technologies?
CIM encompasses a broad range of capabilities leveraging many different technologies to support customer preferences. CTI is a specific type of technology that addresses computer-telephony integration to facilitate linking the caller to the information associated with their prior interactions. It is one of many foundational technologies required to provide the most effective CIM capabilities.
Some of the other capabilities and technologies used to support CIM within the contact center to provide a high-quality, efficient and cost-effective customer interaction experience include: customer relationship management (CRM) systems; customer contact center solutions based on an enterprise resource planning (ERP) platform; business intelligence capabilities using data warehousing, data mining and other types of analytical tools and systems; knowledge data bases that provide responses and information to FAQs; and tools and systems that incorporate eLearning/eTraining capabilities.
What three tips can you give for achieving an outstanding customer experience?
The first would be to always provide customer-centric, flexible service offerings that extend and reinforce the brand. For example, leverage best practices in custom training and quality assurance to employ and develop contact center agents that can embody the brand and manage the customer experience to the brand expectations.
Second, provide the right solution for the right customer to resolve their situation with one contact. What I mean is supplying appropriate customer service offerings for a variety of different customer segments based on who they are and their preferences.
The third tip would be to ensure that sound financial analysis is used in providing the full range of CIM capabilities. Unfortunately, many companies pursue a CIM strategy without first understanding the economics of the solutions.
About Steve Boyer:
Steve Boyer, StarTek’s Chief Information Officer, believes that while companies certainly realize that customer service is critical to growth, perfect execution across all areas of customer care channels is a daunting challenge.
Previously a senior executive at American Express, Visa International, ROLM, Bank of America and IBM and founder of a customer information management consultant firm, Boyer understands firsthand what’s necessary to execute a customer interaction management strategy.
About StarTek:
StarTek is a provider of business process outsourced services with 18 operating facilities. StarTek works closely with clients to develop and implement solutions for customer care, technical support, receivables management, complex process management, and packaging and fulfillment. The company serves clients in the telecommunications and computer software fields, as well as numerous other industries such as consumer products, cable TV and entertainment.
