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Choose The Right Customer Service Solution For Your BusinessTools And Technology: The Contact Centers For Customer Service Playbook

by Ian Jacobs and Kate LeggettSeptember 19, 2017

FOR APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT & DELIVERY PROFESSIONALS

FORRESTER.COM

Key TakeawaysExcellent Customer Service: Easy To Talk About, Hard To DeliverOutstanding customer service must become a cornerstone of a company’s CX strategy. However, few companies can deliver due to the increasing complexity of the technology ecosystem, changing customer demands, new technology deployment methods, and vendor mergers and acquisitions.

Choosing The Right Customer Service Solution Should Follow A Methodical ProcessWhen sourcing customer service solutions, look first to see whether similar technologies exist within the enterprise that customer service can leverage. If there aren’t suitable solutions, consider outsourcing options, customer relationship management (CRM) suites, or specialty customer service point-solutions and emerging omnichannel vendors. You should only build customer service solutions as a last resort.

Use Forrester Reports To Expedite The Selection ProcessSelection processes for effective customer service solutions favor scripted demonstration scenarios and, better yet, proof-of-concept trials or pilots. Leverage Forrester’s research, including Forrester Wave™ evaluations, market overviews, and Forrester TechRadar™ reports, to narrow the field and build selection criteria.

Why Read This ReportDelivering a differentiated customer experience (CX) requires the right technologies, processes, and organizational structures. Therefore, application development and delivery (AD&D) professionals should move away from a build-first mentality and should instead consider whether those customer service technologies already exist within the enterprise. This report provides an overview of options to consider when sourcing these technologies.

This is an update of a previously published report; Forrester reviews and updates it periodically for continued relevance and accuracy. For this version, we’ve added new data, customer examples, and new technology categories.

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© 2017 Forrester Research, Inc. Opinions reflect judgment at the time and are subject to change. Forrester®, Technographics®, Forrester Wave, TechRadar, and Total Economic Impact are trademarks of Forrester Research, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective companies. Unauthorized copying or distributing is a violation of copyright law. [email protected] or +1 866-367-7378

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Table Of Contents

Customer Obsession Drives The Customer Service Solution Landscape

Customer Service Technology Evolves In Line With Consumer Demands

Five Technology Areas Highlight Customer Service’s Role In The BT Agenda

Repurpose, Outsource, Buy, Or Build Customer Service Solutions

Audit Your Company’s Technology Stack And Leverage What You Can

Consider Outsourcing If You Can’t Leverage Existing Technology

Outsourcers Do Not Provide Monolithic Services

Explore CRM Suite Customer Service Solutions

Evaluate Customer Service Specialty Vendors

Build It Only If The Use Cases Are Unique

Internal Process Issues Can Make Or Break Application Deployments

Recommendations

Narrow Your Choice, And Expedite The Selection Process

Related Research Documents

Brief: Focus On Three New Service Experiences To Thrive In The Age Of The Digital Customer

Implement Effective Customer Service Metrics

Transform The Contact Center For Customer Service Excellence

Use Outsourcers To Build Your Omnichannel Customer Service Future


Choose The Right Customer Service Solution For Your BusinessTools And Technology: The Contact Centers For Customer Service Playbook

by Ian Jacobs and Kate Leggettwith Daniel Hong, Sarah Dawson, and Peter Harrison

September 19, 2017

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Choose The Right Customer Service Solution For Your BusinessSeptember 19, 2017

© 2017 Forrester Research, Inc. Unauthorized copying or distributing is a violation of copyright law. [email protected] or +1 866-367-7378

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Tools And Technology: The Contact Centers For Customer Service Playbook

Customer Obsession Drives The Customer Service Solution Landscape

CX is the sum of all the experiences a customer has with a company over the duration of the relationship — such as awareness, discovery, attraction, interaction, purchase, use, customer service, and advocacy. Though most Forrester clients tell us it is a top priority, only 23% of global business and technology decision makers at firms that want to improve customer experience are creating a dedicated group for user experience or customer experience initiatives.1

Customer service, a cornerstone of CX strategy, is the ability to provision services to customers — via either self service or an interaction with a contact center agent — before, during, or after a purchase. This full life cycle view pays off: JetBlue Airways’ focus on superior CX and understanding the customer’s end-to-end journey, from reservation through deplaning, helped attract more net-new customers who fly more miles and drive its revenues.2 The company — which garnered the highest Forrester’s Customer Experience Index (CX Index™) score of any US airline — saw annual revenue growth that far outstripped its competitor United Airlines, the 10th-highest-rated airline.3

Customer Service Technology Evolves In Line With Consumer Demands

The customer service technology ecosystem has grown more complex over time due to new customer technologies, deployment methods, vendor mergers and acquisitions, and customers’ rising expectations. In just the past five years, companies have had to contend with social customer service, a slew of messaging applications, and the rise of chatbots, machine learning, and natural language understanding technologies.4 As a result, AD&D and customer service application professionals struggle to streamline process and experience across their workforces.5 Specific challenges include the needs to:

› Use a consolidated customer service tool set. Transactional data and customer history are often neither consistent nor consistently available across communication channels. Thus, customers receive erratic service, which increases costs and decreases satisfaction.

› Follow consistent processes. A customer service agent often uses multiple disconnected applications when resolving a single customer issue. This lack of a standardized discovery process affects agent consistency and productivity, increases agent training times, and leads to higher agent turnover due to frustration with the tool sets.6

› Comply with policy. Regulations in industries such as financial services and healthcare are increasingly complex. Few real-time processes in customer service organizations audit agent actions against policy requirements, resulting in higher service costs from incurred penalties. Those penalties can be significant: Ofcom, the authority responsible for regulating Britain’s telecom industry, fined a debt management company £150,000 for violating regulations on repeated and silent calls.7




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› Provide cross-channel customer service the way customers want to receive it. In a Forrester survey, 60% of US online adults indicated that they used help or FAQs on a company’s website; 59% used the phone; 54% used email; 45% used chat; 31% used SMS; and 30% used Twitter in the past 12 months when they required customer service.8 Customer service agents supporting these media types need access to the same information. For example, to ensure cross-channel consistency, Keen IO unified its numerous digital contact channels using Intercom’s centralized support platform.9

Five Technology Areas Highlight Customer Service’s Role In The BT Agenda

To provide frictionless customer service, AD&D pros must tap into technologies that enable communications with customers over voice, digital, and social channels. Ideally, those technologies should also deliver contextual content to employees so they can answer customer questions, deliver proactive and personalized service using analytics-derived insights, and listen and react to the voice of the customer. These technologies fall into five functional areas (see Figure 1):10

› Omnichannel communication. These applications support the business processes for interacting with customers over voice, electronic, and social channels.

› Knowledge management. These applications help you identify, create, review, publish, and maintain multimedia content, including video, which allows customer service agents to answer customers’ questions and enables customers to find answers to their questions via web self-service portals.11

› Agent desktop solutions. This category comprises applications that agents use to create and manage incidents (cases) in response to customer inquiries.

› Customer service analytics. This category comprises analytics that organizations use to deliver an optimal service interaction that targets the persona of the customer and the issue at hand. Technologies include next-best-action and interaction analytics.12

› Voice of the customer. This category comprises applications that organizations use to gather structured and unstructured feedback from social media sites.13




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FIGURE 1 The Five Functional Areas Of Customer Service Technologies

Salestechnology

Omnichannelcommunication

Knowledgemanagement

Agent desktopsolutions

Voiceof the

customer

Marketingtechnology

Business technology

Customer service analytics

Customer service technology

Repurpose, Outsource, Buy, Or Build Customer Service Solutions

Customer service leaders should take a systematic approach to choosing the right technologies. Benchmark your current operations, and pinpoint areas of opportunity for delivering higher-quality customer service experiences. Assess your organization against 150 best practices in Forrester’s Customer Service Innovation Framework to identify opportunities for quick wins.14

Once you have pinpointed capability areas to improve, you need to pragmatically investigate options to source these capabilities. These range from repurposing technologies the enterprise uses elsewhere to outsourcing to purchasing suite or vendor point solutions. Use the following process to step through the decision choices (see Figure 2).




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FIGURE 2 Should You Repurpose, Outsource, Buy, Or Build Customer Service Technologies?

Pinpoint the business need for acustomer service solution.

Do we own an existing capability,and can we leverage it to satisfy

the need?Reuse or adapt existing capability.

NO

NO

NO

NO

YES

Can we outsource this businessfunction? Outsource it.

YES

Can we use a suite solution? Buy it.YES

Do we need a best-in-breed pointsolution? Buy and integrate.

YES

Develop it. Build or source it.YES

Audit Your Company’s Technology Stack And Leverage What You Can

Customer service operations leaders often buy technology. Yet marketing and eBusiness organizations are also often the primary buyers of many technologies that are valuable for customer service, such as social listening solutions, enterprise feedback management solutions, and chat technologies. In most cases, firms implement these technologies in functional and technological silos. Marketing organizations often do not broadly share insights across the enterprise. Also, these tools typically remain disconnected from customer databases or case management systems.

What this means is that customer service application pros should thoroughly audit all similar technologies that the enterprise owns before purchasing any technology for customer service. In many cases, the organization uses viable technologies elsewhere. Specifically, you should:




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› Evaluate similar technologies your enterprise may already be using. Conduct due diligence in assessing capabilities of similar technologies and determine whether they can scale and operate at a level of performance and reliability to support customer service operations. Pay close attention to the reporting and analytics functions of these tools to ensure that their output actually makes sense to contact center pros; the reporting from many marketing-focused tools may as well be in ancient Sumerian from a customer service point of view.

› Decide whether you can leverage technologies across the enterprise. If the technology is sound and meets the needs of the customer service organization, see whether you need a separate deployment instance of it or whether you can share the same deployment instance across organizations. In many cases, it is financially advantageous to expand the existing footprint of current technologies. It also minimizes support costs for technology management.

› Align business processes across organizations. Ensure the technology can provide consistent customer experiences across functional organizations. If you use Twitter for customer service as well as brand management, ensure that the service-level agreements and processes you follow over this channel do not conflict with those you follow over other communication channels. Global travel agency Flight Centre Travel Group, for example, measures case resolution for social posts centrally and consistently, whether those interactions were handled in the contact center or in the retail branches.

› Integrate technologies to extend the value of current customer service operations. Don’t deploy new customer service technologies in silos; ensuring that they are well integrated with other customer service technologies will empower agents to provide efficient and effective customer service.

Consider Outsourcing If You Can’t Leverage Existing Technology

If there aren’t technologies within the enterprise that you can leverage, consider outsourcing this entire capability, or perhaps a portion or all of the customer service operations, to a third-party organization.15 Many companies do not use these services because contact center outsourcing requires the alignment of not only people skills but also business processes and technology infrastructure between the provider and the enterprise. Additionally, many customer service leaders resist ceding control of their customer interactions.

Outsourcers Do Not Provide Monolithic Services

The customer service outsourcer vendor landscape has gone through tremendous merger-and-acquisition activity in the past 15 years to provide global coverage in a breadth of languages, industry focuses, process maturity, and economies of scale. Recently, however, there has been a surge of newer, much smaller outsourcers, often focused on nearshore and onshore delivery; they provide




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differentiated customer experiences at a higher cost compared with global outsourcers. In addition, in every market, many companies use very small regional outsourcers companies to provide support for specific services or business processes (see Figure 3).

Outsourcing does not always cut costs and can carry a significant amount of management overhead. Consider how it can help improve current customer service capabilities and provide more options for quickly rightsizing operations to adjust to business demand. Additionally, as many outsourcers have added omnichannel capabilities, they can provide a quick on-ramp to emerging digital channels, such as social media and chat. Outsourcing contact centers makes sense for:

› Improving the quality of services you deliver. Leading outsourcers adhere to strict quality measures that allow them to support customers more consistently. And they use tools and techniques that promote cost-effective and reliable standards. For example, outsourcer Sitel worked with a large internet and network access provider to improve its customer experience. After a year, the communications company saw customer satisfaction scores jump 11%.16

› Focusing on core business activities. Managing customer service may not be a core competency, and managing customer service representatives can be challenging and costly. Outsourcers take on that responsibility, which allows for more focus on core business activities.

› Delivering a consistent CX. Many companies use inefficient processes that do not deliver the same CX across voice, digital (e.g., email, chat, and SMS), and social (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, WeChat, and Facebook Messenger) channels. Outsourcers can help standardize the information, knowledge, and data you deliver across communication channels, as well as the processes that customer service agents follow.

› Scaling capacity up and down. Outsourcers provide the ability to quickly ramp capacity up or contract it as needed. In addition, they can help a company quickly adjust to seasonal contact peaks, enabling the timely delivery of customer service in accordance with target service levels. In addition, newer work-at-home models allow outsourcers to draw from a wider talent pool.




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FIGURE 3 There Are Three Categories Of Outsourcers

Enterprise development ISV development

Wide spectrum of customer life cycle management services and back-office services

Broad range; examples include technology, communications, financial services, retail, healthcare, travel, and hospitality

Extensive

Broad omnichannel capabilities

Global; often from onshore, offshore, and nearshore

10,000 to 100,000

Greater than 500; the largest deployments are thousands of seats

Convergys, Concentrix,Teleperformance, TeleTech

Dedicated to a specific set of services (e.g., benefits enrollment, campaign management)

Dedicated to a particular industry or level of service (e.g., conciergeservice)

Typically, support for onelanguage or a smallnumber of languages

Select omnichannel capabilities

National; often from onshore and nearshore and sometimes offshore

200 to 10,000

50 to 500

Arise Virtual Solutions,Beliveo, VIPdesk Connect, LiveOps

ISV development

Dedicated to a narrow range of business processes

Commoditized servicesacross a narrow range of industries specific to each outsourcer

Typically, support for only a single language

Typically, voice-only

Very regional; mostly from onshore

Fewer than 200

10 to 50

Numerous; existing in every geography

Core services offered

Industries supported

Breadth of languages

Breadth of omnichannelcustomer service capabilities

Geographic coverage area

Number of agents

Average number of contact center seats

Examples

Explore CRM Suite Customer Service Solutions

If you choose to buy customer service solutions, consider the customer service capabilities of CRM suite solutions first. Over the past few years, these solutions have greatly matured as vendors have focused on solidifying the foundational building blocks of their customer service capabilities. Vendors have folded new technologies such as social computing, business process management (BPM), decisioning, business intelligence, artificial intelligence (AI), and mobility into their solutions to allow enterprises to offer differentiated and personalized customer service experiences using solutions from a single vendor.17 The most commonly adopted CRM suite customer service solutions are:




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› Solutions that offer deep customizations and support for very large enterprises. Services such as SAP CRM provide the ability to scale up to many thousands of users, offer deep customization and integration abilities, and have deep field-service and industry-vertical support.

› SaaS-based solutions for rapid deployments. Services such as Oracle Service Cloud, Salesforce Service Cloud, and SAP Hybris Service Cloud are established software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions that offer highly usable and flexible customer service capabilities that are geared for rapid deployment cycles. Other vendors, such as Infor and SugarCRM, have recrafted their on-premises solutions to be available as SaaS solutions.

› Process guidance solutions for more repeatable service experiences. In some enterprises, agents must follow complex, yet reproducible, processes that offer omnichannel, verticalized solutions and predict and personalize customer interactions across the front and back offices. These enterprises increasingly rely on customer service solutions from vendors such as Pegasystems that have native BPM and case management capabilities that can support process flows to contain the cost of service and compliance with the company policy as well as deliver differentiated experiences.

› Solutions that provide integrated front- and back-office capabilities. The integration of front-office CRM and back-office enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems provides organizations with a unified approach to managing customer interactions across multiple channels, departments, lines of business, and geographies. More importantly, it makes maintaining data quality easier, as data is located in a single repository from which all systems draw. Vendors such as Infor and NetSuite deliver 360-degree views of customer data in a holistic ERP and CRM solution.

› Solutions that offer breadth, but not depth, of customer service capabilities. Vendors such as Maximizer CRM and SugarCRM offer basic customer service capabilities at a lower price point than many of the market leaders that focus primarily on the needs of large enterprises. These solutions have traditionally targeted midsize and small organizations, but vendors are continuing to improve them, and they’re finding homes in smaller divisions of large enterprises.

Evaluate Customer Service Specialty Vendors

In select cases, customer service leaders turn to specialty customer service solution providers that deliver best-in-breed capabilities to strengthen key weaknesses in their current operations.18 The most commonly adopted point solutions are those that:

› Provide consistent CX across communication channels. Vendors such as eGain, Genesys, and Zendesk provide solid solutions for standardizing the customer service experience across digital and social channels. In addition, a growing number of vendors provide best-in-breed capabilities across multiple digital channels. Examples include LivePerson, LogMeIn’s Bold360, and Conversocial.




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› Empower agents and customers with knowledge management tools. Even though many customer service CRM suite solutions have excellent knowledge management capabilities, many customer service leaders purchase standalone knowledge management solutions and integrate them with their existing capabilities. These solutions are available from vendors such as Aptean, IntelliResponse Systems (acquired by [24]7), MindTouch, Oracle, RightAnswers (acquired by Upland Software), and Verint Systems.

› Integrate with customer communities as a natural escalation point to a contact center. Organizations are increasingly including customer communities, ideally with extensions to company employee communities, within their overall customer service offerings.19 Communities provide a real ROI, as they are able to deflect questions that would have been escalated to the contact center and improve customer loyalty. Vendors such as Lithium and Telligent (acquired by Verint Systems) offer solid capabilities and can integrate into current customer service solutions.

› Strengthen customer feedback management. Contact center pros gather customer feedback via multi-touchpoint surveys and tapping the unstructured, unsolicited feedback already present in internal systems and social media conversations. Vendors such as Confirmit and Medallia offer solutions for enterprise feedback management where feedback can be associated with the customer record. Other vendors, such as NICE and Verint Systems, offer solutions that can align feedback with the customer service agent who provided the service.

Build It Only If The Use Cases Are Unique

Today, few businesses build their own customer service platforms and tools, given the very mature customer service solutions and specialty point solutions available commercially. Many customer service vendors have industry solutions that incorporate best practices they’ve leveraged from customer input and insights that they gained during thousands of deployments. Building software applications can be labor-intensive and costly during both the implementation and maintenance phases. Packaged applications may result in fewer technical challenges and lower costs, but they may not be perfectly suited to a company’s exact usage scenario.

Before engaging in a custom-built project, ask yourself what unique needs you have that a vendor solution cannot meet. In many cases, AD&D pros answer that their companies have business processes that packaged applications do not perfectly support. Even if this claim is true, investigate what it would take to align your business processes with the native processes that the vendors’ solutions support.

Internal Process Issues Can Make Or Break Application Deployments

When building customer service software, pay special attention to the following points:




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› Use Agile project management practices.20 The Agile methodology is based on iterative and incremental development in which teams continuously build and test working software to develop high-quality solutions more quickly than with traditional practices. It’s the best way to promote adaptive planning and development, which teams can easily change based on business demand.

› Invest in capabilities that will be competitive differentiators. The less a function differentiates you from your competitors, the greater the argument for optimizing its cost structure. Keep commodity functions healthy enough to survive, but not at the expense of investment in new capabilities that will set you apart from the crowd. Similarly, prioritize features that deliver the most business value.

› Involve your end users from the start. Customer service software must be highly usable to ensure that customer service agents are optimally productive and efficient. Involve end users in all stages of custom software development so that the result meets their needs.

Recommendations

Narrow Your Choice, And Expedite The Selection Process

Customer service leaders have a wealth of options to choose from to fill in the gaps in their current customer service technologies and improve the service they deliver. Choosing the right option starts with doing the proper homework: Understand the evolving needs of your customers, map their most common journeys, pinpoint current pain points, and investigate technologies and business processes that must change to address those pain points.21 AD&D professionals should:

› Create a project team with skills in both technology and business processes. Successful project teams exhibit a blend of technology management skills and business process expertise. The team requires fully dedicated members to avoid conflicts with their normal day-to-day responsibilities. In addition, the project team should have access to external experts and market content to enable rapid identification of the best option.

› Limit choices to three vendors for the detailed evaluation steps. Use a systematic process of elimination to identify the two or three best candidates for the most serious and rigorous consideration. Effective screening hurdles include deployment options, industry or domain experience, technology, and comparable customer experience.

› Leverage Forrester’s published research and advisory resources. Leverage Forrester’s published research on relevant product categories, including Forrester Wave evaluations, market overviews, and Forrester TechRadar reports, to narrow the field of players and build selection criteria. In addition, take advantage of analyst knowledge and experience through inquiry and advisory to help move the process forward.




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Endnotes1 Source: Forrester Data Global Business Technographics® Priorities And Journey Survey, 2017.

2 JetBlue uses a single survey to grade each part of its customers’ end-to-end journeys, starting with the reservation process and continuing through the end of a flight. Customer experiences happen at three levels — the overall relationship, individual interactions, and discrete customer journeys. Firms can — and should — measure all three, but for different reasons: Relationship metrics predict behavior, interactions metrics reveal specific opportunities, and customer journey metrics show how to integrate touchpoints. See the Forrester report “Executive Q&A: The Top Seven Customer Experience Measurement Questions Answered.”

3 For more on the Forrester Customer Experience Index — and individual brands scores — see the Forrester report “The US Customer Experience Index, 2017.”

JetBlue posted year-on-year revenue growth of 3.4% for its last full fiscal year. United Airlines saw a contraction of revenue of 3.5% in its last full fiscal year. Source: “2016 Annual Report,” JetBlue, 2016 (http://blueir.investproductions.com/~/media/Files/J/Jetblue-IR-V2/Annual%20Reports/jblu-2016-ar.pdf) and “United Airlines Reports Full-Year and Fourth-Quarter 2016 Performance,” United Airlines press release, January 17, 2017 (http://newsroom.united.com/2017-01-17-United-Airlines-Reports-Full-Year-and-Fourth-Quarter-2016-Performance).

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4 For more on these emerging touchpoints and technologies, see the Forrester report “Brief: It’s Time To Provide Customer Service Through Facebook Messenger,” see the Forrester report “Brief: Focus On Three New Service Experiences To Thrive In The Age Of The Digital Customer,” and see the Forrester report “The Top 10 Chatbots For Enterprise Customer Service.”

5 Ever-rising expectations of customers; the emergence of social, mobile, and voice of the customer technologies; vendor churn (acquisitions, market exits, and new entrants); and new deployment options make it more challenging for AD&D professionals to deliver good service. See the Forrester report “TechRadar™ For AD&D Pros: Contact Center Solutions For Customer Service, Q1 2015.”

6 For specific recommendations on how to create an environment more conducive to the modern agent, including providing greater systematic guidance, see the Forrester report “How To Measure And Improve The Contact Center Agent Experience.”

7 Source: Samantha Smith, “Silent call company fined £150,000,” Choose, August 21, 2015 (https://www.choose.co.uk/news/ofcom-fines-debt-masters-direct-nuisance-calls.html).

8 Source: Forrester Data Consumer Technographics North American Retail And Travel Customer Life Cycle Survey, Q1 2017 (US).

9 Source: “How Keen IO scaled a personal support experience and increased user engagement,” Intercom (https://www.intercom.com/customers/keen-io).

10 Navigating the complex contact center solution landscape continues to be challenging, particularly in light of the rapid rise of social computing, mobility, and voice-of-the-customer initiatives. By selecting the right technologies to invest in, customer service professionals can take the right steps to balance customer satisfaction at a cost that makes sense. The following Forrester TechRadar report evaluates various contact center technologies and defines which ones are on the rise and which are losing favor. See the Forrester report “TechRadar™ For AD&D Pros: Contact Center Solutions For Customer Service, Q1 2015.”

11 In the age of the customer, trust and transparency are critical for banks, investment management firms, and insurance providers. With the growth of online and mobile banking, online video and video chat are increasingly important tools for banks to convey trust and transparency through digital experiences. This report looks at the adoption and effectiveness of video chat, video kiosk, and online video technologies applied in financial services and how AD&D professionals should support these initiatives. See the Forrester report “Brief: How Financial Services Firms Use Video To Transform Customer Experiences.”

12 Customer service managers can easily become distracted by the sheer volume of metrics available for tracking operational activities and fail to deliver on key business goals. To keep customer service operations focused, managers should develop a Balanced Scorecard of key performance indicators (KPIs). This report defines nearly 40 operational metrics for tracking contact center KPIs to help AD&D professionals focus on the ones that will move the needle. See the Forrester report “Implement Effective Customer Service Metrics.”

13 The modern consumer uses social media to communicate with family, friends, as well as companies. In response, companies have increased their investment in social media as a customer support channel. AD&D pros now have numerous tools at their disposal to help bring contact center processes to social customer care. But those tools only support the social channels directly controlled by brands. There are, however, thousands of other social communities in which customers congregate. This report will help prepare AD&D professionals for the day their companies offer customer service in social communities they do not own. See the Forrester report “Brief: Take Social Customer Service Beyond Your Own Walled Garden.”

14 Smart companies are selective about how and where they invest resources. How can you make sure your company gets the best return from its investment in customer service? Forrester developed a framework that includes more than 150 best practices for customer service capabilities, organized into four categories: strategy, process, technology, and people. See the Forrester report “Assess Customer Service Capabilities To Pinpoint Opportunities For Better Service.”






















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15 Outsourcing has many benefits, and there are a great number of excellent vendors that offer comprehensive technology and management capabilities. See the Forrester report “TechRadar™ For AD&D Pros: Contact Center Solutions For Customer Service, Q1 2015.”

16 Sitel worked closely with the client’s top leadership and its IT and compliance teams to define the right personal profile, processes and systems required to enable workforce planning and talent management processes. Source: “Sitel Intelligent Desktop Case Study,” Sitel, September 2015 (http://www.sitel.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Case-Study-Sitel-Intelligent-Desktop.pdf).

17 In order to assess the state of the customer service CRM suite solutions for midsize and large organizations and see how the vendors stack up against each other, Forrester evaluated the strengths and weaknesses of 20 vendors using the Forrester Wave methodology. See the Forrester report “The Forrester Wave™: CRM Suites For Midsize Organizations, Q4 2016” and see the Forrester report “The Forrester Wave™: CRM Suites For Enterprise Organizations, Q4 2016.”

18 For an overview of the use cases, business value, and outlook for 24 technology categories that comprise the extended contact center technology ecosystem, see the Forrester report “TechRadar™ For AD&D Pros: Contact Center Solutions For Customer Service, Q1 2015.”

19 Social business technology removes barriers between workers and knowledge and between workers themselves, making it easier for employees to access knowledge and people from many sources when and where they need them to make decisions. Forrester believes that a social business and collaboration program is an ambitious technology undertaking and has developed best practices to form a strategic plan for the business to enable it. See the Forrester report “How To Create A Knockout Enterprise Collaboration Strategic Plan.”

20 Agile is the established method for shorter, faster development cycles. There are numerous examples of successful Agile practices, and it’s easy to quantify the business impact of Agile. See the Forrester report “Faster Software Delivery Will Accelerate Digital Transformation.”

21 Forrester provides a framework for selecting and acquiring business application software and related services. See the Forrester report “Choose Your Business Applications Using An Agile Software Selection Approach.”













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