NICE Systems' Corporate Vice President and General Manager of CEM Product Division, Lior Arussy, Explains Customer Experience Management
Barry Jacobs: What is CEM?
Lior Arussy: CEM stands for customer experience management. To understand CEM, let's step back and look at the problem it's trying to solve — minimizing the cost of the call center while maintaining customer loyalty.
When we approach companies, they all say "customers are important to us." But when I recently audited one of the largest airline's call center and went to the "platinum club line," which is for the most profitable customers who fly more than 75,000 miles per year, I found out that if you are on hold there for more than 59 minutes — not seconds, minutes — youll be hung up on automatically. My first inclination was "no way, people are not going to wait around for 59 minutes. Wrong — there were more than 400 of these calls every week! So I approached the call center manager with my finding and I said "You've got an error here — you hang up on people automatically." He said "It's not an error — it's how I configured the system."
"Let me explain it to you," he said. "I'm measured, and my compensation is tied to the average handling time, which consists of talk time plus waiting time on hold. If I'm going to answer all of these calls — 400 people times 59 minutes of wait time — I can kiss my kids' college funds goodbye. So I have to do what I have to do in order to work the system."
I said, "Wait a second — what about the fact that these are the most profitable customers of the company?" He said, "I don't know — it's not in my agenda."
When we approach companies they all brag about how the customer is very important to them. Then I ask them a simple question: "What did you learn from the customer?" At best, the answer is a subjective short description by the agent of what he thought happened with the customer — that's it. If you are really focused on the customer, when you hang up the phone, you should know what happened.
CEM is exactly about what happens after you hung up the phone: what you learned. CEM allows companies to capture those interactions, be it voice, voice-over IP, email, chat, and then evaluate them. It's about bringing the voice of the customer — the evaluations coming from the customer's perspective about the company — analyzing the questions and the results, and this feeds it back to the corporation. This feeds the product management department, IT, etc. information that will be valuable to improving the customer focus of the organization. So in a sense, CEM is a strategy to capture the customer voice and bring it to the center of an organization's decision process, which doesn't happen with the current technologies available.
Today's brand makers are the call center reps. The CSRs have the opportunities to build a better brand through better experiences. |
BJ: So is CEM based on communicating mainly over the phone?
LA: Phone lines still represent 80 to 85 percent of the interactions, but we're already capturing chats, emails, Web interactions — so we're looking at multiple types of interactions. The whole sense of the relationship between customers and corporations has changed dramatically, and a lot of companies just didn't realize that.
Three or four years ago, companies were playing a very shrewd statistical game. They said, "Five to 10 percent of customers are upset. That's OK with us." Why? Because they'll share their opinions with five or 10 other people, and those people will forget after a week, so the damage isn't serious. Customers today can compare prices and compare information about a product so they have gained a lot more power. So, when a customer has a grievance, millions of people will know about it. Dissatisfied customers are going to Epinions, PlanetFeedback.com, or even creating their own sites to post their grievances against companies. If you do a search, for example, on Procter & Gamble, not only will the company's official Web site come up, but the complaints are going to show up as well. And those are not erasable. Customers are saying, "Sorry guys. We're now on the same level. We can reach millions through advertising our complaints on the Web. So now youre going to have to pay better attention to us." The contact center has become the core of the organization, facilitating information, and creating loyalty as a result.
Today's brand makers are the call center reps. The CSRs have the opportunities to build a better brand through better experiences. Let's think about what loyalty means, since we're all customers. Why are we loyal to one company versus another? Because we have consistent, positive experiences that ultimately lead to that loyalty. And if a company has strong loyalty, then it has a strong brand. So all of a sudden, the CSRs — the least paid and typically the least motivated in the organization — are responsible for the most import task in the company, which is building the brand.
BJ: Looking at CRM and the whole front-end of the enterprise, how will CEM fit in with off-the-shelf software and current CRM methodologies?
LA: For those companies who made the strategic investment in CRM, it's a perfect complementary solution. Because CRM takes them up to a certain point, which is identifying the key customers, managing them well, etc. CEM will integrate with the CRM data and will feed the voice of the customers through those mechanisms. Any field in a CRM application can trigger a recording and it can be done from the screen that the salesman sees, so they don't have to open another application, and then CEM systems will be archiving the interactions in association with that specific file.
Let's assume that a CEO is getting a phone call from a customer who's very upset. He's going through the customer's file through the CRM application and he doesn't understand why the customer's upset. The interaction was closed by the CSR as "fine." But with a click of the button the CEO can call up all of this customer's interactions from the last six months — calls, Web site queries, and emails. What CEM is pinpointing is that the customer said the word "fine," but he did so in an ironic tone. CEM gives dimension that CRM implementations do not have, so it's a good complementary piece.
One of the hot items today is customer defections. Companies are focused more and more on minimizing defections, as opposed to acquiring new customers. The CEM analysis tools allow you to drill down to the calls and identify all the calls that came in today that had a high-stress level and used negative words, like "cancel." You identify all of those calls and actively work to do something about defections.
Imagine I'm a large financial institution and I'd like to know all of the calls today that mentioned my competitors because mentioning the competition is a possible signal for customer defection. So that's a great example of how a CRM strategy can utilize CEM to understand customer experiences, and identify from them specific action items for the enterprise, with regard to customer defections.
The technologies today are integrated. So CEM hooks up to platforms to make sure that it's one seamless screen from a salesman's standpoint. For companies who did not make the leap to CRM yet, CEM is relatively lower cost with a higher ROI where they can start with it and then make the much bigger investment into a CRM system. Our average customers are seeing a full ROI in six to nine months, in regards to reducing average handling time, improving agent morale and productivity, and coaching them to deliver better service faster. There's a whole host of metrics that come with CEM that allows them to deliver better experiences.
BJ: NICE Systems was already known for digital recording technology. Are you also moving towards other points of contact with the customer, like cell phones or call centers or other places where we hear the customer?
LA: CEM, from a strategy standpoint, exists everywhere that there's an interaction with the customer — it's what we call "interaction anywhere." CEM can be a distributor, it can be a service center, it can be anywhere that a customer resides. A CEM learning process of capture, evaluate, analyze, and improve needs to be applied, because at the end of the day, you can reach a customer well at one touch point, but you'll lose him at another. And you can't afford that. You create confusion and inconsistency. Were working on solutions to prevent these problems and that's where we see the future.
BJ: What are some of the expectations about implementation time, and data storage capacity?
LA: Several of our competitors can't handle 100 percent recording because its way too capacity-intensive. But since our legacy is recording, we're strong in this area. we're providing customers today with a variety of storage capabilities, from no tapes at all, to ones that go to an EMC or Hitachi storage system through a product called StorageCenter, all the way up to the highest capacity that we have — a pair of logging systems that last 77,000 hours and can be stored in one system. You can store the data on DVD, on a DAT drive, or through Storage Center — any way that works for you.
Data storage is a serious issue because every interaction is important, and if you want to analyze emotion, do word-spotting, or check screen activity for performance, total recording capabilities are required to grab the maximum exposures of experiences, and not just a three percent sampling as some of our competitors do today. So data is one of the critical parts of CEM, capacity is another, and we are working on more and more improvements to our infrastructure because the demands for the analysis tools are quite substantial.
