Customer Experience: Caring across multi-channels

TM Forum, August 2012, Pages: 30

Success in providing good customer experience is about profitability and sustainability – but doing it well has become even harder as the channels of communication with customers have multiplied.

In the longer term, a flexible, integrated customer service platform is the ultimate goal and becoming customer-centric needs to make it onto every service provider’s core business strategy. However, our research suggests that perhaps the biggest challenge in achieving this goal is not the technology and investment required so much as cultural issues and intra-departmental conflicts. Many service providers lack end-to-end visibility on all of a customer’s dealings with their company and inconsistent approaches across channels lead to dissatisfaction.

So how are customers choosing to engage with their service providers and what are the developing trends? What can we learn from our experiences of providing web-based self-service so far? This report sets out to answer these and other questions and helps your organization make informed decisions about providing multi-channel customer care.

Providing good customer service affordably can present many challenges – we make recommendations about how to rise to these challenges, investigating ideas such as incentivizing customers to use channels that are more convenient and suitable for them and present a lower cost for you. Inevitably, the customers’ preference will determine which channels succeed. Read about how analytics and policies will be key to gaining a real understanding of just what those preferences are and how best to deploy them.

We conclude that to be truly successful customer experience needs to be at the heart of all operations, personnel, processes and systems. If service providers can accept that delivering good customer experience involves a constant cycle of improvement then the good news is that providing multi-channel customer care presents a great opportunity to stand out as competition and tough economic conditions continue to bite.

Please note: This report is free to TM Forum members.

Executive summary

Section 1
The business case for good customer experience across all channels

Section 2
Where are we now with customer interaction?

Section 3
Hurdles to implementing good customer experience operations and practices

Section 4
Recommendations and the rewards of getting it right

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