CEM Asia... the conference proper

I am attending the CEM Asia which was kick started by Dr. Brendan French introducing speakers during the event.  Andrew Sidwell of DBS improvement team talked about putting people first. The DBS journey started in 2010 changing the culture of 18000 people to focus on customer value.  The journey is expected to be completed in 2020 that will put DBS in the forefront of customer centricity evolving from a product centric organization with the objective of being the Asian bank of choice for the new Asia. The keys of their improvement program are the Big 6, Process, Sponsor and Skill sets.

Michel Mucci presented an eBay case study on how to leverage Social Media to enhance customer experience. He highlighted the importance of moving from traditional to social customer experiences embracing 1 to many and as a company have a purpose why use social media. And to suceed with a social media strategy companies should  consider people, process and technology.

Michael Van Woudenberg of Oracle talks about focusing on customer journey and life cycle to drive better customer experiences. The strategy on customer experience are influenced by the movement of consumers to mobile and social while at the same time wanting consistent experiences on various channels.

Dr. Brendan French presented  a case study from last to best bank in Australia through customer surveys using CSI. He presented the importance of executive ownership, singularity,  service recovery, re branding, leadership focus as the key factors in taking the  Commonwealth Bank of Australia to be the best bank in Australia in its 101st year of existence.

Categorizing customers is the key for Dubai airport on embarking on a customer centric transformation.  Having no ownership of its customers have the challenge to have a common denominator and not individual brands.

Louise Long talked about delivering consistency across multiple channels.  Their Cx program is driven all the way from the CEO. Brand management is all about what it does not what it says, the brand is defined by the customer experience. The experience is all about architecture and design.

Effectively Monitoring Customer Experiences

Customer Experience Management  is one of the hottest items in telecoms today where there are solutions popping up everywhere evangelizing that theirs is the best CEM solution around. Is there a single product out there that can truly claim a complete CEM solution? Looking at various solutions they can be grouped in 5 categories

• Sales focused solutions. This are sales point and web content solutions that are geared towards improving customers experiences while buying products and services. Such solution includes WebCRM, SAP, TeaLeaf, SugarCRM, Connectiva and others

• Social listening solutions. This includes web crawlers and text based analysis solutions that mine social network for conversations such as Respontek, Opentext, Satmetrix, Oracle and others

• Human agent based solutions that captures customers experiences while interacting with customer care agents such as the ones provided by Amdocs, Avaya, Zendesk, Pega, Marketforce and other similar solutions

• Network based solutions such as interfaced probes, DPIs and network traces where there are several providers of such solution including system vendors like NSN and Huawei

• Device based solutions that captures actual experiences, usage, behavior and interaction that customers have in using their devices when accessing services. Such solutions are provided by DingLi and other companies such as Carrier IQ

To fully monitor and measure customer experiences it must be done on all touch points from customers perception of a particular brand to the products and services they desired to buy to their interaction with customer service representatives and to their actual experiences in using such products and services.

Customer Experience Touch Points

All this touch points enable service providers and operators to determine how customers perceived your brand, it helps in determining what products and services are desired by consumers and which ones will they actually buy and use. Most important of touch point is knowing how satisfied consumers are on the products purchased and services used, including what phone applications they used. In terms of applications it is good to know how OTT applications or WiFi usage affect revenue generation and  profitability but most importantly how can service providers adapt to the age of AppEconomy. Social networks is of course a very important touch point nowadays especially what customers talk about you as a service providers and what they tell their friends.