The following is a guest blog post from Greg Sherry, Vice President Marketing at Verint. For more information about Verint, visit their website. 

Thank you for taking part in Verint’s interactive general session at Customer Response Summit Las Vegas called “Customer Engagement LIVE!”  where we broke into discussion groups for interactive discussions and summary read back presentations. Here are some of the recommendations we heard from the groups as part of the breakout group notes and read backs:

What’s Old Is New Again. When is the last time you received a handwritten note or personal email from a business you engage with? It was memorable, wasn’t it? Think of ways you can incorporate genuine, personalized touches with customers. The strategy can be scalable: one “wow” moment can generate genuine delight and powerful word-of-mouth amplification.

Think Mobile. Do you have a mobile strategy? The need is clear: provide information, customer support, “wow” moments via mobile channels. But be careful: consumers often have limited ability to “digest” content you are sharing with them (because they are at the airport, walking, at home, multi-tasking), so be sure your content and communications are as short and to-the-point as you can.

Establish a common knowledge base across all channels to ensure consistent response. One company recognized the need to consolidate contact center systems to a single agent desktop. Customer service agents had difficulty serving customers in a timely manner and providing accurate information because information resided in 13 disparate systems. By consolidating all the systems into one agent desktop view, the company quickly reduced agent average handle time (AHT) and saw increased customer engagement scores. The unified access to the applications and information also increased employee productivity and helped provide a personalized experience for customers.

Develop a Journey Map as Part of Your Customer Experience Strategy. Our group defined a journey map as a diagram that illustrates the steps your customers go through when they engage with your company, across different channels and touch points. The more touch points you have, the more complicated — but necessary — the journey map becomes. Creating a customer journey map is an investment but is well worth the cost. For some creative ideas on journey maps, check out this recent blog post by Verint’s Nancy Porte – Five Tips for Building a Customer Journey Map.

Millennials/Diverse learners. Move away from phone to proactive chat; offer chat if automated resolution doesn’t work. Find ways to be “proactive” with communications when you anticipate that a customer’s expectations won’t be met.

Develop a Comprehensive Work-From-Home Strategy. One great reason to offer work from home is that you have the ability to recruit some of your organization’s biggest “fans,” regardless of their location. If you offer part time or flex time, you could have highly enthusiastic providers of information – and raving fans – who support your solutions or services. The customer experience these fans deliver could be very meaningful.

Use analytics not just for customer projects, but also for agent performance and metrics. Many companies use in depth analysis for customers, but more straight forward measurements for agents (AHT, quality score, Adherence etc.) Look at ways you can analyze agent performance more to impact customer experience. Identify which associates have the best cross selling abilities? Use their recorded interactions to train others. Who are the agents with best overall cx abilities?  Have “gold” and “platinum” customers (highest value customers) routed to them since they are top in delivery of CX. Drive pilots of business changes based on analysis/date- and “go big” with winning ideas. Also explore further: how can you provide different levels of service based on the “value” of your clients to your business.

Drive customer experience excellence while also handling call-types that are more and more complex. One organization is leveraging contact recording and speech analytics to determine the reason for calls that fall into the highest 10th percentile of average handle time, which are the longest calls. We can’t solve everything, but we believe that if we can “fix” the issue(s) that cause the top three to four call types, we can free up resources and focus that will help us enhance the customer experience.

Build the Feeling of an In-Store Experience Online. Meet customers at the right moment when they are challenged. Know when they are about to defect. Provide the support they need when they need it. (How are you doing in this area? One idea is to implement a journey map project as mentioned above.)

Consider an Automation Pilot. Organizations are under pressure to increase processing efficiency and productivity, reduce errors, cut operational expenses, and maintain security and regulatory compliance. Key advancements in the areas of robots/bots, artificial intelligence, and machine learning are creating opportunities to service and engage with customers like never before.

Organizations should consider automating repetitive and time-consuming processes, allowing employees to focus on more complex tasks, cross-selling and delivering a personalized experience. The net: position automation as beneficial—and not a threat to your employees’ jobs.

Do you have some creative or best practices ideas to add? We’d love to hear those, too! Help us continue the conversation and submit your idea on Twitter by using the hashtag #CustEngLive. You can also follow and tag us on Twitter @ExecsInTheKnow and @Verint.

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Traditionally, user-focused activities have been conducted by specialists who either move from research to design directly themselves, or who pass the baton to others. This is partly a factor of history, but with UX now in the business mainstream it’s increasingly important to bring others closer to customers and their lives. Collaboration with stakeholders is king, but how do you do this smartly when we all have too much to do and too little time to do it in?

Why is collaboration so important?

Often product managers and those responsible for success are primarily understanding their customers via metrics such as CSAT and NPS. These are deliberately simple, but create a challenge in understanding the why behind the what, which is crucial for identifying low-level change that makes a difference.

Involving users is the key to overcoming this, but techniques for doing so owe a huge debt to an academia and rigour in experimental design. Anything involving real users or customers is moderated by specialists, with stakeholders disconnected behind a one-way mirror or getting their understanding from an after-the-fact synthesis. There are very good reasons for this, as anyone who has seen stressed product managers observe their ideas being casually dismissed in a user session can testify.

However as UX moves out of labs and into mainstream business, UX activities can’t be solely conducted on this basis. There are too few UX professionals, who are in evermore demand as it becomes a mainstream concern. Also, an increasingly multi-touchpoint world means that knowledge needed to make products more effective for their users becomes increasingly diffuse.

So why doesn’t it happen more?

Most product owners I’ve met are smart and keen to understand their audiences as much as possible, but commitment is variable. Making time is the key challenge. But there are a number of ways to bring them close to users and it’s important to offer options that are easy to access and calibrated to the time available.

Some suggested activities

Smart observation of user sessions

User research is often conducted in viewing facilities designed to make observation simple and comfortable. However, stakeholders often don’t have the time to watch them all.

You can help those dropping in by using post-it notes to construct a running analysis on the walls so anyone dipping in and out of sessions can get a concise understanding of what’s been happening.

If stakeholders can’t attend, sessions can be securely video-streamed live, or made available online afterwards. Time is always a pressure, so we’ve found its very useful to provide a one-two sentence summary of each session, pointing users towards key moments.

Attending ethnographic research

It’s becoming ever-more useful to understand user needs by observing them in their own environment. We’ve seen some revelatory moments for clients when they come with us. For example, the moment one client saw users find a helpdesk number via web search, rather than the Help Centre that had been built for them. They’d previously been mystified by CSAT complaints that the number was hard to find (it was on the Help Centre home page), until they saw in real time the many steps needed to reach that content.

Inviting stakeholders can give them a deeper understanding of user needs, but there are practicalities as observers meet them face-to-face. An effective observer briefing is very important in helping observers to attend without unduly influencing whats happening. We’ve also found it’s helpful to give observers a role and reason for being there (from the user perspective). Photos and video are immensely useful artefacts to gather, so giving observers the role of capturing these can be very helpful for all concerned.

Involving stakeholders in user diaries

Online user diaries are an immensely helpful way of capturing relevant user behavior over time. Diaries can be shared with stakeholders, to help them build their understanding, ideally in daily chunks. User photos taken by smartphones can be a particularly interesting and easily digested dip into user lives in unexpected ways. For example, on one project users supplied screenshots from an app which answered a design question we weren’t aware of – should they optimize for landscape or portrait views?

Stakeholders can also be encouraged to join diary studies as participants. While care is required in handling their results, diary participation can help even the most knowledgeable product owners reflect more on use.

Involving stakeholders and users in workshops

User needs and design workshops, synthesizing user experiences and identifying next steps are typically conducted without users being present. This is a missed opportunity. For example, in journey mapping workshops, we’ve seen stakeholders often able to identify customer touchpoints and possible issues, but have a much harder time understanding customer impact and so make changes that will really make a difference.

If you are trying to understand a user challenge, prioritize these, or design solutions, it can be immensely helpful to have real users participating in the exercise. We’ve seen vague design ideas discarded for internal reasons which triumphantly re-emerge and develop after working with customers. It requires careful briefing and facilitation, but it’s rare for participants to come away from these and not be genuinely stimulated by the event, particularly around emotive issues such as complaints handling or anything involving health.

Create informal programmes to understand users

Product managers, IT, Marketing and Operations staff may all be true professionals, but working on products they’ve not directly experienced themselves. Encouraging product use and particularly informally observing real use before a project starts can build invaluable empathy and knowledge.

A great example of informal product observation is the Follow Me Home programme run by Intuit, which has helped them to create industry-leading software. Staff members are encouraged to periodically visit real customers using their products.

Encourage a user-centred culture

Even periodic customer visits require a commitment and desire to understand the customer experience first-hand, so those involved need to perceive a value and make the customer experience the responsibility of all staff.

Internal training, mentoring and skills building workshops can be an important activity for a UX team. It increases commitment and also equips product teams with some basic skills to do some of their own research. While their time and capability to do so may be more limited, the more customer research, the better the product or service will be.

For more on this topic and others like it, join us at Customer Response Summit Las Vegas – February 6-8, 2017 at the ARIA Resort & Casino in Las Vegas, NV.

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