Olive Huang – iStart keeping business informed on technology

The ten habits of customer-centric digital organisations

Jennene Kelly — Mon, 04 Sep 2017 03:37:05 +0000

Poor customer experiences will destroy 30 percent of digital business projects by 2020. Success hangs on an organisation’s ability to adapt to customer demands and circumstances in real-time and react quickly to unexpected business events.

Application leaders are under pressure to deliver a modern technology portfolio to support a customer-centric business strategy. This is the ability of organisations to understand the unique problems and expectations of their customers; to understand the context of those needs; and to consistently deliver products/services that meet those expectations.

Here are the ten common behaviours exuded by organisations known for advanced levels of customer service.

Continuously listen

Listening is the first step to building a customer-centric culture. Customers are actively and passively giving businesses information that can be used to drive a successful customer experience (CX). Many companies employ a combined social media, web and app analytics-driven approach to data collection on digital channels. External community software can also be used to bring customers together to generate new ideas, insights and additional customer data for future interactions.

Consistently follow up for feedback

Understanding that the customer relationship is about reciprocal value, customer-centric organisations realise that customer feedback is voluntary and customers will stop talking if they don’t feel their feedback is being heard. A two-way dialogue is key to the process. Develop a way to enable continuous, active submission of customer opinions and to ensure the feedback loop works.

Act proactively to anticipate needs

As organisations collect more accurate and relevant information from customers, the data can be used to proactively create a positive CX based on situational needs. It could involve using location awareness, the Internet of Things, wearable computing and a device to create business designs that assemble ‘value on the fly’. It puts people at the centre of all activity and permits customers to get what they need, when, where and how they need it.

Incorporate customer empathy

Customer empathy must be built into processes and policies from the beginning. This focuses on channel convenience; timely response to feedback; deep knowledge of the customer’s problem; proactivity in engagement; being helpful and friendly; fairness and honesty. Although CRM software and processes are critical to success, they’re not by default empathetic toward customers. They must be engineered to increase empathy toward the customer.

Respect customer privacy

Customer-centric organisations make a habit of respecting customer data privacy just as much as they make a habit of using it to anticipate need. Respecting privacy doesn’t just mean being compliant with regulations.

Share knowledge

The best organisations understand that knowledge flows both ways. Knowledge is generated by both organisations and customers and should be shared. Doing so creates a rich knowledge sphere that’s directly available to customers and employees. This improves efficiency, customer satisfaction and revenue growth. Most importantly, customers want information that’s relevant to them.

Motivate employees to stay engaged

High levels of employee engagement contribute to higher levels of customer satisfaction. Engaged employees provide better customer service and brand advocacy. They’re more willing to collaborate and coach and, as a consequence, they help the organisation to be more customer-centric. In many ways, a culture of engaged employees is the essence of a customer-centric organisation.

Act systematically

CX will only improve when an organisation establishes a compelling vision and develops a systematic approach to improvement. In the majority of cases, CX management is an initiative composed of a number of projects. It takes multiple years to get some initiatives right (such as altering compensation plans and corporate metrics), while only a few weeks for others (such as quick fixes to the web-user experience).

Create accountability for improvements

The best CX plan won’t help if nobody is accountable for its execution. Responsibility is often spread among many departments, with marketing, sales, customer service, operations and the strategy and planning department most heavily involved. Choosing a point person for the whole business is the best way to get and keep a plan on track.

Adapt to demands in real-time

More than ever before, digital business means engaging with customers and adapting to demands and circumstances in real-time. It’s important to react quickly to unexpected business events; allow decision makers to instantly understand the state of the business; use unconstrained analytics to make real-time decisions; and use stream analytics to absorb large volumes of data on the move.

Application leaders must be ready to translate these habits of customer centricity into a new set of improved actions to support CRM and customer experience strategies.

ABOUT OLIVE HUANG//

Olive Huang is a research vice president at Gartner. Her focus is on technologies, strategies and best practices for customer services and support, contact centres, mobile customer services, CRM and customer experience strategy.

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The rise of the customer journey map

Jennene Kelly — Tue, 29 Mar 2016 20:04:28 +0000

Gartner’s 2015 CEO survey identified customer experience management as the top priority for technology investments over the next five years. Customer journey mapping is a common approach used today to discover the gaps between customers’ expectations and their perceptions of the actual experience. Gartner believes that 60 percent of large organisations will develop in-house customer journey mapping capabilities by 2018.

By understanding the behaviours, preferences, media consumption habits, technology adoption patterns and detailed day-in-the-life routines of customers, organisations can design a journey map that becomes the backbone of their customer experience strategy. A wide range of styles and tools are used in building journey maps.

In the past, organisations used customer journey maps to describe how they wanted the ideal customer journey to be and the emotions they wanted customers to feel on that journey. But they made limited use of data from sources like customer surveys, focus groups and user groups to understand the journeys that customers actually took. The customer journey maps were often created in workshops and roundtable sessions with flip charts, whiteboards and post-it notes – a very manual approach.

Tools that can help
In the last few years, customer journey modelling and visualisation tools have started to become popular, often used as part of a consulting service from boutique digital agencies.

Only recently have a number of technology vendors started to invest in this space and release software with data gathering, connecting, visualising and acting capabilities to operationalise the customer journey, covering multiple channels and touchpoints.

Today, all three approaches – manual customer journey mapping, customer journey modelling and visualisation tools, and customer journey operationalisation – co-exist in the market. Some large organisations are using all three of them in combination.

Large organisations often begin their first foray into customer journey mapping by engaging digital agencies in a customer experience discovery and design exercise. At this stage, digital agencies are delivering customer journey mapping using a pencil-and-post-it manual approach, but also sometimes via customer journey modelling and visualisation tools.

After the first project, many organisations will start building these journey mapping skills and toolsets in-house using their own resources so that they can be reused on other customer experience projects.

A critical skill that needs to be developed is building customer personas to better understand the variety of experiences that different customers might encounter. It is an outside-in design approach that requires putting yourself in the shoes of a potential customer to understand what his or her experience is when engaging, or not engaging, with organisations.

Only a small number of organisations get to the third step of using technology to automate – and map, track and influence via real-time data – the customer journey.

Technology adoption will increase
Gartner foresees that the maturity level of organisations’ use of customer journey mapping technologies will increase over time. Once they have gone through the initial modelling and design process manually or by using a visualisation tool, the next natural step is to operationalise customer journeys.

In these organisations, customer journey mapping will no longer be limited to a design and discovery exercise, followed by a reporting exercise. It will result in the implementation of an operational technology that delivers a customer experience that is planned and designed, then monitors and triggers responses by the organisation.

Organisations that build customer journey analytics and journey mapping capabilities in-house require a combination of data analytics skills and user experience design skills. These skills exist today in many organisations but in different departments – it’s just a matter of getting them to work together. These resources may be in a central customer experience management team, or in marketing, customer service, operations, sales or the business process competency centre.

The challenge Gartner sees is not obtaining these skills, but the lack of an intuitive and discovery-thinking culture that will make use of the skills.

How to get started
To help an organisation build these capabilities, IT leaders should:

Seek out anyone in the organisation who has internal customer journey mapping skills, then investigate which third parties are doing customer journey mapping on behalf of the organisation.
Discuss with heads of marketing, customer service, operations, sales and business process management to decide which department(s) these resources should belong to.
Start building expertise in customer journey mapping in the IT organisation to match the skills in the enterprise as a whole. Be aware that you may not be able to train these resources from within; instead, you will need to hire at least some from external markets.
Research the appropriate technologies that can be used to operationalise customer journeys and encourage the use of these technologies by those doing customer journey mapping.

ABOUT OLIVE HUANG//

Olive Huang is a research director at Gartner. She is part of the CRM software research team and focuses on customer service and support, contact centres, CRM vendors and service providers, as well as CRM strategy and best practices in Asia Pacific. Olive will be presenting at the Gartner Business Transformation and Process Management Summit in Sydney, 21-22 June 2016.

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