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Transform The Contact Center For Customer Service Excellenceby Kate leggett, June 22, 2012

FOR: Application Development & Delivery professionals

key TakeaWays

Customer service: easy To Talk about; hard To DeliverOutstanding customer service should be a cornerstone of a company’s customer experience strategy. However, few companies can deliver due to the increasing complexity of the technology ecosystem, changing customer demands, new technology deployment methods, and vendor mergers and acquisitions.

Delivering Good Customer service requires a Disciplined approachTh e four critical steps in transforming customer service processes to deliver the distinctive customer experiences that will set your company apart in the marketplace are: 1) discover: establish the value of customer service; 2) plan: set the right strategy; 3) act: execute the strategy with precision; and 4) optimize: run and improve operations.

Focus on business and Customer ValueBetter customer experiences drive customer loyalty and increased spending. Customer service is a cornerstone of a company’s customer experience strategy. Th e potential of good customer service lies not in technology itself but in the process of using technology alongside an in-depth understanding of the customer to drive unique, valuable customer interactions.

Defi ne The Customer service road Map To strengthen business CapabilitiesTh e customer service road map for contact centers is the high-level defi nition of a set of initiatives to be implemented over time, gradually enabling business tactics, implementing strategies, and building customer service capabilities.

© 2012, Forrester Research, Inc. All rights reserved. Unauthorized reproduction is strictly prohibited. Information is based on best available resources. Opinions reflect judgment at the time and are subject to change. Forrester®, Technographics®, Forrester Wave, RoleView, TechRadar, and Total Economic Impact are trademarks of Forrester Research, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective companies. To purchase reprints of this document, please email [email protected]. For additional information, go to www.forrester.com.

FOR ApplIcATIOn DEVElOpmEnT & DElIVERy pROFEssIOnAls

Why Use This Playbook

Customers increasingly demand experiences that include self-service options, real-time responses, mobile capabilities, and social interactions. But customer service executives face the constant challenge of responding effectively to rapidly changing customer expectations at a cost that makes sense for the business. Forrester’s customer service playbook outlines four steps for AD&D professionals who want to optimize and innovate with customer service operations: 1) discover: establish the value of customer service; 2) plan: set the right strategy; 3) act: execute the strategy with precision; and 4) optimize: measure and improve operations.

Table Of contents

Transform Customer service To Deliver Great experiences

Discover: establish Customer service Value

Plan: set The Customer service strategy

act: execute The Customer service operations strategy

optimize: Measure and improve Customer service

supplemental Material

notes & Resources

We reviewed Forrester’s most recent research on changing customer behaviors, customer service solution trends, and best practices. We also analyzed our most recent interviews and inquiries with contact center buyers and users, vendors, industry analysts, and the media.

Related Research Documents

navigate The Future Of customer serviceJanuary 30, 2012

contact center purchase plans 2011October 27, 2011

TechRadar™ For Business process professionals: contact center solutions, Q3 2011August 29, 2011

Transform The Contact Center For Customer service excellenceExecutive Overview: The customer service playbookby Kate leggettwith William Band, Art schoeller, and Rowan curran

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Transform The contact center For customer service Excellence 2

© 2012, Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction prohibited June 22, 2012

TransForM CUsToMer serViCe To DeliVer GreaT exPerienCes

Customer experience is the sum of all the experiences a customer has with a company over the duration of the relationship — including awareness, discovery, attraction, interaction, purchase, use, customer service, and advocacy. Though most Forrester clients tell us that customer experience is a top priority, the reality is that many companies still struggle to optimize the service experience.1 They still focus primarily on cost control measures, and only 30% of companies have dedicated budget for customer experience initiatives.

Customer service has a Direct impact on a Company’s bottom line

Customer service, a cornerstone of an organization’s customer experience strategy, is the ability to provision service to customers — either via self-service or via an interaction with a contact center agent — before, during, and after a purchase. Organizations must pay attention to their customer service strategy because:

■ Good customer service experiences boost repurchase probability and long-term loyalty. Customer loyalty has economic benefits as measured over three dimensions: willingness to consider another purchase, likelihood to switch business to a competitor, and likelihood to recommend to a friend or colleague.2 The revenue impact from a 10-percentage-point improvement in a company’s customer experience score can translate into more than $1 billion.3

■ Poor customer service experiences lead to increased service costs. The cost of failing to meet these expectations is high: 75% of consumers move to another channel when online customer service fails, and Forrester estimates that unnecessary service costs to online retailers due to channel escalation are $22 million on average.4

■ Poor customer service experiences risk customer defection and revenue losses. Forrester survey data shows that approximately 30% of a company’s customers (or more) have poor experiences.5 That represents 1,200,000 customers, and typically only about 2% of them complain to the contact center. That leaves 98% who don’t complain, or a total of 1,176,000 customers at risk to defect. At a $100 apiece, this represents a $117,600,000 loss in revenue annually.

Complex Technologies hamper Customer service strategies

The customer service technology ecosystem has grown more complex over time due to new communication channels, deployment methods such as cloud-based solutions, and vendor mergers and acquisitions. As a result, customer service leaders struggle to enforce a consistent process and experience across their workforce.6 Specific challenges include the need to:




■ Use a consolidated customer service tool set. Transactional data and customer history are often neither consistent nor consistently available across communication channels. Eighty percent of companies have nonintegrated communication channels: phone, email, chat, and web self-service.7 This leads to customers receiving inconsistent service, which increases costs and decreases customer satisfaction.

■ Follow consistent processes. Customer service agents often use multiple disconnected applications when resolving a single customer issue. This lack of a standardized discovery process negatively affects agent consistency and productivity, increases agent training times, and leads to a higher level of agent turnover due to frustration with the tool set.8

■ Comply with policy. Regulations in industries such as financial services and healthcare are becoming increasingly complex. Few real-time processes in customer service organizations audit agent actions against policy requirements, leading to higher service costs due to incurred penalties.

■ Provide cross-channel customer service in the way that customers want to receive it. In the 12 months prior to our recent survey, 68% of customers used the phone, 60% used help or frequently asked questions (FAQs), 54% used email, 37% used chat, 20% used SMS, and 19% used Twitter.9 Customer service agents supporting these media types need access to the same information in order to ensure consistent service (see Figure 1).

Forrester’s playbook for customer service excellence helps AD&D pros transform customer service via four critical steps: 1) discover: articulate the value of customer service in business terms; 2) plan: set the strategy for customer service operations; 3) act: execute the strategy; and 4) optimize: measure and improve customer service operations (see Figure 2).




Figure 1 Customers Drive The Adoption Of New Communication Channels

Source: Forrester Research, Inc.75001

68%69%

60%55%

54%55%

37%19%

27%0%

27%7%

25%0%

24%

0%20%

0%

19%1%

Telephoning a company and speaking to an agent

Help or frequently asked questions (FAQs)on a company’s website

Sending an email to customer service

Instant messaging/online chat with a live person

Click-to-call

Online forum or community with other customers

Screen sharing

Virtual agent

Sending a mobile/SMS message tothe company requesting assistance

Contacting a company using Twitter

Base: 7,638 US online adults who have used any customer service method in the past 12 months*Base: 3,639 US online adults who have used any customer service method in the past 12 months

(multiple responses accepted)

Source: North American Technographics® Customer Experience Online Survey, Q4 2011 (US)*Source: North American Technographics® Customer Experience Online Survey, Q4 2009 (US)

20112009*




Figure 2 The Customer Service Playbook


PerformanceManagement

BusinessPlan

Skills And Sta�ngFuture Look

Strategic Plan

Policy AndProcedures BenchmarksBusiness

Impact

Road Map Build/Buy Capabilities

Change Management

AssessmentFramework

DISCOVER PLAN ACT OPTIMIZE

DisCoVer: esTablish CUsToMer serViCe ValUe

To realize the business value of customer service strategies and technologies, AD&D pros need to understand: the key customer and technology trends; how to quantify the business impact of these trends; and how to assess their organization’s business capabilities to optimize customer service.

Future look: navigate The Future of Customer service

Forrester clients ask: Why is customer service important our business? What business and IT trends do we have to understand in order to succeed?

Organizations strive to deliver a differentiated service experience for their customers, adding value to commoditized products and services. Future trends in customer service fall into three categories:

■ Leaders empower their agents to deliver optimal service. Organizations increasingly provide agents with the full history of a customer’s prior interactions over all communication channels so agents can add value to the service interaction. They are extending business process management to customer service so that agents can be led through predefined resolution paths with increased efficiency. They are adopting best practices for knowledge management and adding next best action capabilities for increased cross-sell, upsell, and satisfaction results. They are also simplifying the agent workspace and making it more usable.




■ Customer centricity fuels improvements to customer service. Customers expect service to cross touchpoints — that is, they expect to be able to start an interaction in one communication channel and complete it in another (see Figure 3). Companies are putting end-to-end feedback processes in place so that they can better listen to customers, and they are also deploying the right mobile usage scenarios to leverage the native capabilities of these devices.

■ Customer service technologies evolve. Organizations are deploying customer service suite solutions from a single vendor instead of employing best-of-breed point solutions. Software-as-a-service (SaaS) deployment and outsourcing options reduce costs and increase consistency across communication channels, and service-oriented architecture (SOA) adoption continues its forward momentum, helping customer service organizations easily integrate disparate systems as they look for solutions that will allow them to rapidly change business processes and logic to compete in the marketplace.

Figure 3 Customers Expect Cross-Touchpoint Service


Social

Web

In person

Contactcenter

Mobile

TweetBrowse

a companywebsite

Browsecommunity

forum

Navigate anIVR via a

smartphone

Receiveinformation

via SMS

Transferto a service

agent

Visit anin-store

sales agent

BrowseFacebook

page

Emaila service

agent

Source: Adapted from the January 30, 2012, “Navigate The Future Of Customer Service” Forrester report




business impact: Quantify The business impact of Customer service

Forrester clients ask: What’s the benefit of customer service excellence to the business and to IT? What’s the impact in financial terms?

Investing in customer service has real value: Better customer experiences drive improvement in three types of customer loyalty: willingness to consider another purchase, likelihood to switch business to a competitor, and likelihood to recommend to a friend or colleague. Our models estimate that the revenue impact from a 10-percentage-point improvement in a company’s performance, as measured by Forrester’s Customer Experience Index score (CxPi), can reach more than $1 billion.10

However, in a survey of 75 customer service business and IT executives, 47% report that they struggle to quantify results and gain support for customer service initiatives.11 Use the Forrester’s Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) framework to define the value of a technology project through defining the four components of the business case:12

■ Benefits. These include improvements in revenue, cost savings from process improvements, increased regulatory compliance, reduced customer service solution customization costs and operational expenditures, and averted support fees.13

■ Costs. Costs include planning, technology infrastructure, implementation, maintenance, and the associated costs attributable to an enterprise’s own staff, such as training.

■ Risks. These are the environmental and technical uncertainties that temper initial benefit and cost estimates.

■ Flexibility. This is the estimated value of future options created that often results from infrastructure, application architectures, excess capacity, and similar “platform” investments.

The business case should outline why the project is important, define the scope of the project, outline success metrics, and document the business value in financial terms.

assessment Framework: assess Customer service To Pinpoint opportunities

Forrester clients ask: How do we assess our current contact center capabilities for delivering customer service? Are we prepared to tackle this initiative?

In our survey of 75 customer service decision-makers, 65% report that they struggle to tame the cost of their existing operations; 51% are challenged to create customer insight to drive decision-making; 48% are challenged to create a single view of customer data and information; 47% report that quantifying results and gaining support for customer service initiatives is difficult; and 40% struggle to deploy the right business processes for their organization.14




Forrester’s customer service innovation framework defines the critical capabilities necessary for building high-quality customer service experiences. The framework includes 150 best practices to assess your organization against in order to identify opportunities for quick wins.15 This self-assessment of business capabilities addresses four critical topics:

■ Strategy. The strength of the customer service strategy that identifies the customers a firm intends to serve and articulates the desired customer service experience to be delivered.

■ Process. The effectiveness of the business processes associated with serving customers across the supported communication channels, which include case management, multichannel communication, and field service processes.

■ Technology. The technology environment comprised of customer analytics, customer data management, and technology infrastructure that supports customer service business processes.

■ People. How people are organized and led, including corporate culture, leadership practices, collaboration methods, training programs, and performance measurement approaches.

The Forrester’s best practices framework for customer service is also available as an online self-diagnostic tool.16 In addition to assessing the overall maturity of customer operations and identifying areas for improvement, you can use Forrester’s assessment frameworks that pinpoint specific customer capabilities — for example: knowledge management, chat, email, contact centers, communities, etc. — in order to optimize their operations.17

Plan: seT The CUsToMer serViCe sTraTeGy

To plan for transforming their approach to customer service and contact center operations, our clients ask Forrester to help with building a strategic plan for customer service, setting business and technology priorities, and creating the customer service road map.

business Plan: set bT Priorities For Customer service

Forrester clients ask: What should we include in our customer service business technologies plan? How should we develop the plan, and who should be involved?

Customer service initiatives require significant funding, so companies must develop a customer service technologies strategy in conjunction with the business strategy. Follow six steps to build a solid business plan for customer service projects:

■ Define the business vision and goals. Business goals inevitably break down into a number of interim objectives, such as annual growth targets.




■ Define high-level business capability maps. Business capabilities are core business competencies that differentiate the organization from competitors — the basic business building blocks the leadership team believes will sustain competitive advantage over the long term.

■ Develop future-state strategies. Envision what the business capability will look like in five years, defining the top two or three scenarios, and explore how technology options might support these alternate strategy scenarios.

■ Develop budgets for each strategic option. This includes technology required for each strategic option and potential costs and business impact relative to business goals and metrics.

■ Focus technology investments on core competencies. Investments should focus on the underlying business processes, business functions, and related technology capabilities required to maintain market leadership in these competencies.

■ Ensure that customer service agent skill sets are part of the mix. Technology alone can’t drive innovation and customer experience improvements. Investing in agent training to improve skills such as problem solving, problem routing, collaboration, and empathy have a major impact on customer satisfaction.

strategic Plan: Define The Customer experience strategy

Forrester clients ask: What’s the vision of customer service excellence? How do we develop our customer service strategy?

Customer service decision-makers must formulate a detailed strategy that includes specifics such as the desired customer result, the required employee and partner involvement, and the biggest opportunities for improvement.18 Forrester recommends a four-step approach:

■ Establish the right governance structure to drive the strategy. Today many enterprises do not provide the right oversight of all customer touchpoints. For example, companies manage web self-service separately from the contact center, thereby losing the ability to link the strategy, investments, and evaluation of the two together. A governance model must link all customer touchpoints and coordinate planning, execution, and evaluation.

■ Define business and brand objectives. Companies must build customer experience strategies on a foundation of the overall business objectives and brand attributes. The customer service experience strategy must be aligned with the overall customer experience strategy.

■ Develop a deep and shared understanding of target users. Companies must prioritize the communication channels that they use to deliver customer service based on an understanding of customers’ key goals, how they accomplish those goals, and their expectations of the brand.




road Map: Draw The road Map For Customer service

Forrester clients ask: What does the future state of our contact center look like? What’s the road map for getting there?

Use Forrester’s TechRadar™ evaluating contact center solutions to understand the maturity of contact center technologies for customer service over four dimensions: 1) the current state of the technology; 2) the technology’s potential impact on customers’ businesses; 3) the time experts think the technology will need to reach the next stage of maturity; and 4) the technology’s overall trajectory — from minimal success to significant success.19 Technologies included in this assessment include technologies for:

■ Multichannel communication. Technologies that support interactions across a variety of media types include ACD, CTI, IVR, speech recognition, predictive dialing, email response management, chat, co-browse, virtual assistants, social media adapters, proactive outbound notification, and mobile customer service applications.

■ Knowledge management. This category comprises technologies to manage a variety of content types, enable customer service agents to answer customers’ questions, and enable customers to find answers to their questions via a web self-service portal.

■ Agent desktop solutions. These technologies include case management, process guidance, unified agent workspaces, quality monitoring, and workforce management.

■ Customer service analytics. Organizations can use real-time analytics to deliver the optimal service interaction by targeting the persona of the customer and the issue at hand. Technologies include next best action and interaction analytics.

■ Voice of the customer. Customers today want to interact with peers to share opinions, advice, best practices, and how-to information. Voice of the customer technologies include customer community platforms, enterprise feedback management systems, and social listening platforms.

■ Workforce optimization. Workforce management systems provide forecasting and scheduling tools that allow organizations to match staffing to demand. Quality monitoring systems allow organizations to evaluate agent performance and capture customer interactions to surface rectifiable problems.

Once you have assessed the technology landscape, Forrester recommends a three-step process to create an actionable road map: 1) conduct a gap analysis; 2) prioritize investments required to close experience gaps; and 3) plan an implementation timeline and coordinate supporting activities. Forrester recommends managing these projects within a program governance structure to ensure communication and alignment throughout the implementation process.




aCT: exeCUTe The CUsToMer serViCe oPeraTions sTraTeGy

Forrester clients ask for help formulating plans for staffing and management of customer service operations, strengthening governance practices, and selecting the most appropriate technology solutions — whether in house or outsourced.

skills and staffing: address staffing, skills, and Training

Forrester clients ask: How should we organize our agents for optimal productivity? What are best practices in hiring, training, and employee retention?

Consumers report low satisfaction for conversations with call center agents. Survey results show that customers prefer online and in-person interactions to conversations with agents, and customer satisfaction ratings for agent-assisted interactions vary widely by industry and by customer demographic and have dropped in the past five years, partly due to changing consumer expectations (see Figure 4).20 Customer service professionals are partly to blame for this situation, as only 32% of customer service decision-makers have initiatives in place to improve interactions with contact center agents.21 In order to improve the quality of interactions with service customer service agents, customer service decision-makers need to:

■ Focus on solid hiring and training practices. Companies should offer industry-specific technical knowledge as well as soft-skill training focused on enhancing conversational and active listening skills during the onboarding process. In addition, candidates should run through simulated calls as well as and conversations assessed for accuracy, empathy, and cultural fit prior to hire.

■ Enable agents to collaborate. Firms typically organize customer service into rigid tiers and product areas. Issues escalated from lower-tiered agents often lose context. Companies should empower agents to collaborate and connect with more-skilled agents and subject-matter experts in real time to enable lower-tiered agents to resolve issues on first contact.

■ Use the right metrics to motivate the right behavior in agents. Cost-driven organizations focus on agent productivity and efficiency and track metrics such as average speed to answer or handle times that incentivize agents to quickly wrap up calls. However, they fail to correlate productivity measures to customer satisfaction.22 More-effective metrics first measure contact resolution and quality of service, using automated escalation paths to control costs.

■ Motivate agents with meaningful incentives. Companies must provide agents with continued career development opportunities and management training paths. They should also develop programs to reduce attrition, such as paid vacation, the option to work from home, and sabbaticals after several years of service.




Figure 4 Satisfaction Rates For Interactions With Call Center Agents Trail Those For Other Channels


Compared with otherchannels, satisfactionwith phoneinteractions is mostproblematic forretailers, parcelshippers, PCmanufacturers, andInternet serviceproviders.

Percentage of consumers who were satisfied with their mostrecent interactions with companies in each channel

(4 or 5 on a scale of 1 [not at all satisfied] to 5 [very satisfied])

Retailer

Bank

Investment firm

Credit card provider

Hotel

Parcel shipping

87%86%

73%

84%86%

74%

82%87%

84%

82%75%

71%

82%86%

78%

80%79%

66%Website (N = 21,274)Branch/store (N = 7,326)Phone conversationwith agent (N = 18,967)

Base: US consumers who have interacted with firms in these channels

Source: North American Technographics® Customer Experience Online Survey, Q4 2010 (US)

79%82%

79%

78%77%

69%

75%70%

65%

74%78%

54%

67%67%

56%

66%65%

52%

Insurance provider

Airline

Wireless serviceprovider

PC manufacturer

TV service provider

Internet serviceprovider




Policy and Procedures: Put in Place The right Governance Practices

Forrester clients ask: How do I implement the right governance, policies, and processes?

Successful project execution typically requires managing complex sets of business activities that cross multiple departments and that require diverse data inputs, which is often hard to do. Fifty-three percent of respondents to a recent survey cite immature management practices and have not moved from isolated, tactical projects focused on cost reduction toward a more holistic, strategically aligned business process management (BPM) program.23

The BPM governance process for customer management defines the roles, responsibilities, and formal relationships required for a customer service program to succeed. Specific stakeholder groups have distinct responsibilities for effective program governance: the steering committee; change agents or business architects; and process owners. Senior business process executives must pay close attention to three fundamentals: 1) communicating the program strategy; 2) mandating and taking ownership of the business architecture function; and 3) implementing a self-regulating performance management system with metrics that encourage the participation of stakeholders in the governance process.24

build/buy Capabilities: Choose The best Customer service solutions For your Firm

Forrester clients ask: How should I procure new solutions? Should we buy a commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) solution, build the software ourselves, or outsource our contact center?

Achieving customer service goals is difficult. Customer service decision-makers struggle to tame costs for new investments and choose the right business processes to adopt and don’t know what technologies to invest in or vendors to partner with.25 Building software applications can be labor-intensive during both the implementation and maintenance phases. Packaged applications may result in fewer technical challenges and lower costs, but they may not be perfectly suited for a company’s exact usage scenario. Use the Forrester TEI approach and the Forrester Wave™ evaluating CRM suites customer service solutions to help you decide whether to build or buy the business applications you need.26

Nearly 20% of surveyed organizations in Forrester’s recent survey of 304 North American and European network and telecommunications decision-makers outsource some or all of their customer service operations to a third-party organization or are very interested in doing so.27 They may do this to fill gaps in language skills and seasonal capacity or to outsource non-mission-critical customer service processes. Use Forrester’s “Decide Whether To Build Or Source Your Customer Service Operations” report to understand if outsourcing operations is the best option for you as well as how to partner with an outsourcer and understand its capabilities.28




oPTiMize: MeasUre anD iMProVe CUsToMer serViCe

To measure and improve the performance of customer service organizations, our clients ask Forrester to help them: understand and apply effective metrics to track progress, use best practices to optimize performance, and develop communication and training approaches to increase adoption.

Performance Measurement: Define The right Metrics For Customer service

Forrester clients ask: What are the correct metrics for customer service? How do I collect and report them?

Companies should measure the success of customer service operations using metrics including customer satisfaction, cost, revenue generated, and compliance measures. They should also choose metrics based on the needs of stakeholders who demand insight into the performance of customer service operations.29

Companies should take a two-step approach in selecting the right metrics to create a Balanced Scorecard so that operations aren’t based solely on single dimension, such as cost. First, companies should choose the high-level key performance indicators (KPIs) that support goals, such as agent productivity, efficiency, cost, and satisfaction measures for contact centers and self-service operational, cost, and satisfaction metrics for customer self-service. Second, they must choose the operational activity metrics that map to these KPIs and that the customer service manager will use on a daily basis to manage operations.

benchmarks: Use best Practices To optimize Performance

Forrester clients ask: How do I optimize my staffing and resourcing to ensure optimal performance?

The International Customer Management Institute says that “the optimization of customer service operations is the art of having the right number of properly skilled people and supporting resources in place at the right times to handle an accurately forecasted workload, at service level and with quality.”30 This entails a seven-step process: 1) establishing service levels and response types by contact type, which then dictates staffing, network requirements, and costs; 2) measuring a customer service organization’s ability to meet these performance goals; 3) accurately forecasting the future contact load across all communication channels, factoring in talk/work time, after-call wrap up, and contact volume; 4) calculating the base agent staffing levels using queuing algorithms; 5) calculating system resources needed to carry the forecasted traffic; 6) augmenting base staffing predictions to compensate for shrinkage due to breaks, training, vacations, etc.; and 7) calculating costs for the forecast.




Forecasts are not a one-time event. Instead, every forecast should be repeated for higher and lower levels of service in order to understand cost and service-level tradeoffs. The best contact center managers take planning and forecasting activities very seriously, as they know that they enable the delivery of services and the creation of substantial value. They also monitor intra-day activities and have the experience and processes to adjust staffing for any traffic differences that occur.

Change Management: support Communications and Continuous improvement

Forrester clients ask: How do I communicate the strategy and results, and to which stakeholders? How do I lead employees to adopt new work practices and attitudes? How do I provide the right training?

When planning a major change to customer service operations, it’s also time to plan a change management initiative so that impacted employees understand the value of the change and how the change will directly affect them. Companies should become familiar with change management best practices from professional organizations such as the Program Management Institute, which outline steps to follow to communicate changes in governance structure, detailed change plans, execution plans, continuous assessments, and performance incentives in order to move the company toward the new behaviors, work practices, and organizational culture.31

Once they roll out new customer service initiatives, firms must measure the initial value of these initiatives to sustain support for their funding. Organizations should avoid measures that are IT- or software-centric, as business leaders find it hard to connect those to real business value, and the business is paying for the change. It’s also best to capture measures transparently from tools people use to do their jobs rather than asking them to report the measures as a separate activity, as reported measures are often inaccurate. Use these measures as input for further initiatives in order to optimize the service experience delivered to your customers.

sUPPleMenTal MaTerial

Methodology

For the North American Technographics® Customer Experience Online Survey, Q4 2011 (US), Forrester conducted an online survey fielded in October 2011 of 7,638 US individuals ages 18 to 88. For results based on a randomly chosen sample of this size (N = 7,638), there is 95% confidence that the results have a statistical precision of plus or minus 1.12% of what they would be if the entire population of US online individuals ages 18 and older had been surveyed. Forrester weighted the data by age, gender, income, broadband adoption, and region to demographically represent the adult US online population. The survey sample size, when weighted, was 7,637.

For the North American Technographics® Customer Experience Online Survey, Q4 2010 (US), Forrester conducted an online survey fielded in November 2010 of 7,728 US individuals ages 18 to 88. For results based on a randomly chosen sample of this size (N = 7,728), there is 95% confidence that the results have a statistical precision of plus or minus 1.4% of what they would be if the entire




population of US online individuals ages 18 and older had been surveyed. Forrester weighted the data by age, gender, income, broadband adoption, and region to demographically represent the adult US online population. The survey sample size, when weighted, was 7,717.

For the North American Technographics® Customer Experience Online Survey, Q4 2009 (US), Forrester conducted an online survey fielded in October 2009 of 4,653 US individuals ages 18 to 88. For results based on a randomly chosen sample of this size (N = 4,653), there is 95% confidence that the results have a statistical precision of plus or minus 1.4% of what they would be if the entire population of US online individuals ages 18 and older had been surveyed. Forrester weighted the data by age, gender, income, broadband adoption, and region to demographically represent the adult US online population. The survey sample size, when weighted, was 4,623.

(Note: Weighted sample sizes can be different from the actual number of respondents to account for individuals generally underrepresented in online panels.) Please note that these were online surveys. Respondents who participate in online surveys have in general more experience with the Internet and feel more comfortable transacting online. The data are weighted to be representative for the total online population on the weighting targets mentioned, but this sample bias may produce results that differ from Forrester’s offline benchmark survey. The sample was drawn from members of MarketTools’ online panel, and respondents were motivated by receiving points that could be redeemed for a reward. The sample provided by MarketTools is not a random sample. While individuals have been randomly sampled from MarketTools’ panel for this particular survey, they have previously chosen to take part in the MarketTools online panel.

For Technographics Clients

how To Get More Technographics Data insights

Forrester’s North American Technographics® Customer Experience Online Surveys include many additional questions and parameters by which you can analyze the data contained in this report. If you wish to subscribe to Forrester’s Consumer Technographics services, please contact your account manager or [email protected]. If you are an existing Technographics client, please contact your data advisor at [email protected].

enDnoTes1 Forrester surveyed 118 customer experience decision-makers from large North American firms to gauge the

importance of focusing on a customer experience strategy as well as the types of customer experience projects undertaken. Eighty-six percent of customer experience decision-makers tell Forrester that a good customer experience is one of their top strategic priorities. Sixty-three percent say that they want their customer experience to be the best in their industry, and 13% say that they want to be a leader in customer experience across all industries. See the February 17, 2011, “The State Of Customer Experience, 2011” report.





2 Forrester data confirms the strong relationship between the quality of a firm’s customer experience (as measured by Forrester’s Customer Experience Index [CxPi]) and loyalty measures such as willingness to consider the company for another purchase, likelihood to switch business, and likelihood to recommend. See the July 7, 2011, “The Business Impact Of Customer Experience, 2011” report.

3 To help customer experience professionals prove the business value of a better enterprise customer experience, we built simple models that show how revenue increases when a company’s Customer Experience Index (CxPi) score goes up. Our models show that the benefits are significant across all 11 industries we looked at. Wireless carriers and hotels have the largest potential upside: more than $1 billion. Customer experience professionals should use the interactive models in this report to estimate the range of benefits their firm might see. That data — combined with customers’ verbatim comments and customer experience stories — will help customer experience leaders make a powerful case for change. See the July 7, 2011, “The Business Impact Of Customer Experience, 2011” report.

4 When consumers switch from the Web to the phone, email, or chat, a company’s cost to serve them goes up dramatically. Forrester built models to add up the unnecessary cost that a retailer might incur as a result of missed self-service opportunities. Calculations showed an extra $22,567,967 in sales and service costs that could have been avoided if the website had enabled users to complete their goals. See the January 13, 2011,

“2011 Will Challenge The Status Quo Of eBusiness Online Customer Service” report.

5 For the fifth consecutive year, Forrester asked more than 7,600 consumers to rate the experiences they had with 160 brands across 13 industries. One-third of the brands we asked about earned scores in the “poor” or

“very poor” categories. See the January 23, 2012, “The Customer Experience Index, 2012” report.

6 Customer service decision-makers understand the discovery process that they would like their agents to follow when resolving an issue for a customer. However, customer service organizations often lack the ability to enforce consistent discovery processes across disconnected sources of information and knowledge. See the October 5, 2010, “Extend Business Process Management To The Front Office To Transform Customer Service” report.

7 Forrester surveyed 304 contact center decision-makers in North America and European enterprises about trends in their contact centers and found that multichannel integration is anticipated in 21% of contact centers. See the October 27, 2011, “Contact Center Purchase Plans 2011” report.

8 Today, user-centered design isn’t widely used to improve call center interactions. That needs to change. When applied in the call center, the core activities of a user-centered design process — research, ideation, prototyping, and testing — can help customer experience professionals identify and fix problems that frustrate agents and lead to poor customer experiences. See the April 6, 2011, “Why Your Call Center Needs User-Centered Design” report.

9 This data was derived from the North American Technographics® Customer Experience Online Survey, Q4 2011 (US), which asked 7,638 US customers what communication channels they had used to receive customer service in the past 12 months.

10 For details of our models that estimate the impact of good and poor customer experiences on company revenues, see the July 7, 2011, “The Business Impact Of Customer Experience, 2011” report.














11 The Forrester/CustomerThink May 2011 Global Customer Service TechRadar Online Survey was fielded to 75 customer service professionals from Forrester’s ongoing CRM research panel as well as to readers of CustomerThink, a global online community of business leaders striving to create profitable customer-centric enterprises. See the November 7, 2011, “Craft Your Contact Center Investment Plans In Light Of Technology Adoption Patterns” report.

12 Forrester’s TEI methodology quantifiably measures the business value of an IT project or decision. See the August 4, 2008, “The Total Economic Impact™ Methodology: A Foundation For Sound Technology Investments” report.

13 Measuring the actual cost of customer service operations over the supported communication channels is difficult at best. To gain value from a cost analysis, managers should focus on parameters that they can control and look for ways to optimize them. See the September 12, 2011, “How To Calculate The Cost Of Customer Service To Drive Improvements” report.

14 Source: The Forrester/CustomerThink May 2011 Global Customer Service TechRadar Online Survey. For more information, see the November 7, 2011, “Craft Your Contact Center Investment Plans In Light Of Technology Adoption Patterns” report.

15 Smart companies are selective about how and where they invest resources. How can you make sure your company gets the best return from its investment in customer service? Forrester developed a framework that includes more than 150 best practice customer service capabilities, organized into four categories: strategy, process, technology, and people. See the May 26, 2011, “Forrester’s Best Practices Framework For Customer Service” report.

16 Use Forrester’s online tool to assess the strength of your current capabilities. See the May 25, 2011, “Forrester’s Best Practices Framework For Customer Service Self-Assessment” report.

17 Forrester defines six key knowledge management strategies for customer service and describes more than 40 best practice tactics to make them stick. See the March 25, 2011, “Best Practices: Knowledge Management For Customer Service” report.

Forrester lays out 30 best practices for online chat. See the March 9, 2009, “Best Practices: Implementing Online Chat” report.

eBusiness professionals must re-address how their customer service email strategies can keep consumers satisfied by re-engaging them with online content, facilitating online purchases, and providing seamless cross-channel customer service. See the November 24, 2009, “Using Email Customer Service To Keep Customers On Your Web Site” report.

Forrester published a report mapping out a comprehensive approach to review a contact center’s organizational, process, and technology elements in order to move forward into the world of customer experience. See the June 1, 2012, “Update 2012: Self-Assessment For Contact Centers” report.

To ensure a successful community launch, interactive marketers should follow Forrester’s checklist, which comprises the four phases of community creation and management: planning, alignment, launch, and maintenance. See the June 29, 2010, “Community Management Checklist” report























18 Well-intentioned customer relationship management (CRM) efforts that focus on internal processes and objectives have largely failed to serve the most important stakeholder: the customer. Customer experience leaders need to drive an outside-in focus into these efforts by defining the desired experience, understanding customers’ behaviors and needs, focusing on data rather than systems, and building a customer-centric culture. See the April 29, 2011, “Beyond CRM: Manage Customer Experiences” report.

19 Navigating the complex contact center solution landscape continues to be challenging, particularly in light of the rapid rise of social computing, mobility, and voice of the customer initiatives. By selecting the right technologies to invest in, customer service professionals can take the right steps to balance customer satisfaction at a cost that makes sense, without taking unnecessary risk. Forrester’s TechRadar™ report evaluates 24 contact center technologies and defines which ones are on the rise and which are losing favor. See the August 29, 2011, “TechRadar™ For Business Process Professionals: Contact Center Solutions, Q3 2011” report.

For further details on the TechRadar™ methodology, check out our report introducing this new type of research. See the August 1, 2007, “Introducing Forrester’s TechRadar™ Research” report

20 Agent satisfaction rates have been on the decline since 2007. See the April 6, 2011, “Why Your Call Center Needs User-Centered Design” report.

21 Forrester surveyed 113 customer experience professionals and found that only 32% say that they’ll focus on improving interactions with call center agents. Contrast that with the whopping 76% of respondents who say that they’ll be improving the online customer experience. Meanwhile, 46% say that they’ll be focusing on mobile interactions and social computing — gravitating toward the latest hot topics while practicing benign neglect for one of their oldest and most impactful channels. See the February 23, 2011, “Reinvent Your Call Center Culture To Create Amazing Customer Experiences” report.

22 Call center execs have long relied on metrics that roll off the automated call distributor that routes calls to agents such as average handle time (AHT). Measurement of AHT can incite poor agent behavior; agents bumping up against their target time will do just about anything to end the call — regardless of whether the customer’s problem was resolved. See the February 23, 2011, “Reinvent Your Call Center Culture To Create Amazing Customer Experiences” report.

23 Forrester conducted this online survey of 428 business process professionals from a broad spectrum of industries and organization sizes in May and June 2011. The survey was fielded in association with the Process Excellence Network run by IQPC. See the August 30, 2011, “Focus On Customers And Business Architecture For Greater Business Process Maturity” report.

24 Large, cross-functional business process management (BPM) programs cannot function without well-designed governance undertaken with substantial involvement from business stakeholders and process owners. See the October 20, 2011, “Three Fundamentals Of BPM Governance” report.

25 Forrester published a report that spotlights the state of adoption of key contact center technology solution categories, pinpoints the significant challenges to delivering exceptional customer service, and highlights the important purchasing considerations that customer service leaders have when seeking cost-effective solutions. See the November 7, 2011, “Craft Your Contact Center Investment Plans In Light Of Technology Adoption Patterns” report.



















26 Forrester evaluated the customer service and support capabilities of 19 leading CRM suite solutions against 196 criteria. See the July 19, 2010, “The Forrester Wave™: CRM Suites Customer Service Solutions, Q3 2010” report.

Forrester has developed a framework for deciding between custom development and packages. See the August 8, 2011, “Forrester’s Custom Versus Packaged Apps Opportunity Assessment” report.

27 Source: Forrester’s Forrsights Network And Telecommunications Survey, Q1 2011. This number is not larger because contact center outsourcing requires the alignment of not only people skills but also business processes and technology infrastructure between the provider and the enterprise. See the October 27, 2011

“Contact Center Purchase Plans 2011” report.

28 There are many outsourcers that offer a range of services in many languages and geographic locations and specializing in various industry verticals. Forrester published a report that spotlights the capabilities of eight leading outsourcing vendors and offers actionable recommendations for how to successfully partner with an outsourcer. See the February 28, 2012, “Decide Whether To Build Or Source Your Customer Service Operations” report.

29 Today’s managers must go beyond call-handling skills and direct their attention to the customer experience in order to increase customer loyalty and grow revenues. You should also collaborate with business unit managers on which measurements are needed to reflect the strategic goals of your company. Metrics based on customer experience reveal product problems and competitive threats as well as customer acceptance of new marketing initiatives. It is also important to turn real-time customer metrics into actionable insight to modify current operations and alert senior management to the current state of the business. See the September 2, 2007, “Contact Center Metrics Redefined” report.

30 Source: International Customer Management Institute (ICMI) (http://www.icmi.com/).

31 Source: Project Management Institute (http://www.pmi.org/).







Forrester Research, Inc. (nasdaq: FORR) is an independent research company that provides pragmatic and forward-thinking advice to global leaders in business and technology. Forrester works with professionals in 19 key roles at major companies providing proprietary research, customer insight, consulting, events, and peer-to-peer executive programs. For more than 28 years, Forrester has been making IT, marketing, and technology industry leaders successful every day. For more information, visit www.forrester.com. 75001

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