Toward a Customer Experience Management “Ecosystem”

More and more companies today are touting "superior customer experience management" capabilities. Some are talking about new contact center software, others website visitor tracking and analysis software, still others are describing omnichannel delivery platforms, and some are mentioning “CXM” in the contact of development platforms or CRM databases. Clearly they're focused on the customers' experience of THEIR part of the dialogue! What they aren't doing is addressing the entire dialogue that a bank is having with their customers. 

The customer dialogue is composed of much more than just the contact channel touch points – while contact management is in itself a complex challenge (i.e. trying to make a seamless "omnichannel" experience across web, chat, email, text, IVR, letter, dialer and manually-dialed interactions), it doesn’t begin to describe the customer’s full dialogue with the bank. The customer’s experience also includes:

· the content of letters/emails/texts/web pages that they see; 

· the content of offers (whether cross/up-sell or specific collections- or recovery-oriented delinquency resolution programs) and the enrollment/fulfillment management and tracking of programs; 

· the information provided in disclosures that are made by agents and in written materials; 

· the specific tasks that customers encounter when they work through a business process, including questions they are asked to answer for the bank; and 

· the particular handling (sorting into queues, to then be worked by agents) of their questions, requests, and other issues that remain to be resolved.

The complexity of this all-encompassing dialogue speaks to the need for something more than a system that "does it all" (which may never be built/installed in our lifetime). What is needed is a comprehensive customer experience management (CXM) infrastructure that is built, ground up, to accommodate a multitude of potential inputs and outputs. Such a system, to be valuable, would allow the bank to control and monitor/manage all customer-facing elements of their experience -- even if some of the elements were not in-built parts of the CXM, per se. Being able to present a single, unified view of the customer and all their experiences, similarly, would be extremely valuable. Finally, it would be invaluable to have the wherewithal to execute the centrally-controlled strategy from the CXM interface, capturing the data into the unified view and therefore be able to not only prove what was done, to whom/ when/how, but to also prove what could not have been done.

It is possible to build such an ecosystem from the ground up using commercial products tied together with a carefully designed and executed middleware layer, or from a prescriptive starting point such as a BPM infrastructure automation product. It's just much harder to do it that way (and more expensive to build, maintain, and extend/enhance over time) than to buy a CXM execution infrastructure like CredAgilityTM and build the ecosystem around that platform. All of the resources saved by leveraging CMC's platform can then be productively engaged in optimizing the results of the customer-centric strategies over time, which has a much bigger impact to the bank's bottom line.

Compliance "Provability" Achieves a Whole New Level

I was given pause recently when hearing a client tell me that they were ‘throwing bodies at the problem’ of putting the bank into position to be able to withstand upcoming audits. “What are all those people going to be doing?” I asked, naively. Turns out that even when the bank has expensive, high-tech systems in place to manage collections inventory, decisioning, letters, auto-dialing, email, text messaging, and IVR messaging…. they still need to manually reconstruct a view of each customer’s experience with the bank. These hoards of staff he mentioned were taking data from all the disparate systems and sources – they HAVE all the data, he assured me – and creating a normalized data set that then could be combed to find all instances of a particular customer’s experience and “paste them together” in a manner that was responsive to their audit examiner’s request. 

Proving a negative (“show me, by walking us through the experience of at least 100 customers, that your systems and people are consistently executing the policies and practices that you assured us are in place for your bank, 100% of the time”), it turns out, is much harder for the bank than it is for the examiner to find the one exception to the rule. The examiner therefore holds the high ground, until we can IN ONE PLACE, under the control of one system, easily step them through the entire experience of as many customers as they want to see, any time. And if we can also show them the strategy-writing and maintenance process we are following at the same time, in the same system… we win. CMC’s CredAgility offers just such a system, and with it the granularity needed to “provably” report on all activities at the individual account or customer level.

Prospects are always asking us to quantify the value of CMC’s comprehensive customer experience management automation platform. Viewed solely through the lens of staff avoidance, the savings can be very substantial during the peak staffing demands typically associated with an audit, and significant (if lower than at audit times) by making ongoing customer-facing business processes more efficient. There is also the effectiveness gain that occurs when a unified strategy is executed and customers’ experience improves, resulting in more resolutions: higher collections, higher issue resolution rates with less re-work needed, increased pull-through on complex processes like loan modifications. But the greatest value comes in the form of eliminating the dread fear of what an examiner might find and how much the ensuing enforcement action might cost the bank…

What is the impact of mobile on our customer experience management efforts?

I saw it again the other day: another headline for a webinar screaming out “Understand the 5 implications for optimizing collections in a mobile world” or some such thing. As if, by merely “implementing mobile” (whatever they mean by that: is it text messaging? two-way text messaging, the latest hot fad? Two-way email? Web transactions occurring on mobile phones and tablets?) we can fundamentally change the customer equation.

Recently, the CEO of PegaSystems pointed out that “75% of mobile application rollouts are reportedly missing their target expectations” and it was not because they expectations were set too high. He rightly pointed out that mobile is just another touch point for the customer, and if it doesn’t work alongside all the others then it lives on its own gulag – just like text messages and emails and web sites that aren’t fully coordinated with agent dialogue. Forrester and other analyst firms are calling this kind of interaction “omnichannel communications” (one conversation, carried out across a whole range of devices) in contrast with multi-channel (which is having more than one channel engaged to reach a customer, not necessarily coordinated with one another).

What is mobile, if not “just another touch point” with the customer that needs to be seamlessly folded into the overall conversation? The difference between CMC’s approach and that of any of the silo’d communications providers (whether IVR, dialer, or email or text or web) is that CMC is agnostic to the specific channel of communication and entirely focused on the effectiveness of the entire conversation, which includes the offer being made to that individual customer and the content of the disclosure or document as well as any input gathered from the customer (and redecisioning the offer, if appropriate) in order to resolve the situation. Mobile, in that context, is just another piece of the puzzle. The challenge is being able to solve the entire puzzle for the customer as cost-effectively as possible for the bank.