The customer fairy tail: driving breakthrough performance in the era ...

Once upon a time, when the shift from a product towards a service and experience oriented economy was made, inevitably customer service became more important. With the rise of new channels, even more ways of interaction have been demanded and created. By driving customers from the desk at the local office towards toll free numbers or @customerservice handles, businesses try to please the customers ever increasing demand of 24/7 contact and interaction. But are they doing any good by opening all those channels?

From Channel to Touch points
Customers are giving businesses a hard time. They are not only talking back via all those channels, even worse, they are talking when nothing has been asked and expect a timely, personal and correct response. The average consumer doesn?t think in channels or ?moments of truth?, but just wants interaction with (a representative of) a company at any time. Forrester outlines this in their ?touchpoints-model?; this model links and mixes diverse ?old? channels such as TV, stores and websites to new interactions via apps or social media in different stages of being a customer. Every phase knows its own touch points.

The challenge for companies is to adapt and optimize their way of working around this new customer behavior on all interactions and touch points, to make each contact with the firm relevant for the customers. And that is easier said than done. A recent study from SAP shows that although businesses confirm that they should use social tools for customer service, they don?t put the money where their mouth is: more than 75% of the surveyed business have invested less than 50K USD in social customer service.

Social as the CRM layer between channels and the company
As long as business are investing in only setting up the channels (let?s do a Facebook page!), I foresee a chaos in customer service and disappointed customers whose expectations are not met. However, Forrester spotted already the first early adaptors to the next stage in which business connect their traditional organization with the customer facing side: ?With customer experience as the competitive differentiator, more firms are moving from isolated business process management (BPM) and customer relationship management (CRM) to cross-functional transformative processes designed to deliver exceptional customer experience? (see article). In some cases this goes as far as giving customers or customer facing employees the option to directly work in the core systems of a company (think End-to-End or Back-to-Front buzz keywords). These firms use this new approach to unleash relevant experiences across all channels and eventually drive breakthrough performance. Due to this continuous quest for companies to reach its customers in the best the current period is even declared as ?The era of relevance?.

In this era of customer relevancy across channels, social gets the lead: from a multichannel environment (in which social media is one of the channels) to a customer service environment where social media is the CRM layer between the channels and organizations. By leveraging the social data of consumers, companies will be able to response in time, personal and correct to customer demands and deliver a better customer service experience.

And the customers and businesses lived long and happily ever after.

  HPMC 2013: driving breakthrough performance in the era of relevance  On January 24 2013, Accenture organizes the 8th High Performance Marketing Conference with the theme: ?Got the R-Factor? Driving breakthrough performance in the era of relevance?. Get up-to-date on the latest innovations in Marketing, Sales, Service and Digital CRM. Broaden your scope by attending presentations and break-out sessions on leading practices by registering at: http://www.accenture.com/Microsites/hpmc/Pages/index.aspx. 

Source: http://www.accenture-blogpodium.nl/marketing/breakthrough-performance/

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