how to achieve customer success and create exceptional...

How to Achieve Customer Success andCreate Exceptional CX

ISABELLA VILLANI

CUSTOMEREXPERIENCE

TRANSFORM

CUSTOMEREXPERIENCE

TRANSFORM

How to Achieve Customer Success andCreate Exceptional CX

ISABELLA VILLANI

CUSTOMEREXPERIENCE

TRANSFORM

First published in 2019 by John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd 42 McDougall St, Milton Qld 4064

Office also in Melbourne

Typeset in 11/13.5pt Palatino LT Std Light

© John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd 2019

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the Australian Copyright Act 1968 (for example, a fair dealing for the purposes of study, research, criticism or review), no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, communicated or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written permission. All inquiries should be made to the publisher at the address above.

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DisclaimerThe material in this publication is of the nature of general comment only, and does not represent professional advice. It is not intended to provide specific guidance for particular circumstances and it should not be relied on as the basis for any decision to take action or not take action on any matter which it covers. Readers should obtain professional advice where appropriate, before making any such decision. To the maximum extent permitted by law, the author and publisher disclaim all responsibility and liability to any person, arising directly or indirectly from any person taking or not taking action based on the information in this publication.

ContentsForeword by Don Peppers vii

About the author xi

Acknowledgements xiii

Introduction xv

1. Customer experience today 12. Your CX strategy 253. Building a CX culture 474. Personalising the experience 675. Customer journey mapping 836. Omnichannel CX 1157. Customer success metrics 1458. Insights into action 1759. Stories from CX experts 19510. The future of CX 209

Appendix I: A few general notes 231

Appendix II: Abbreviations 235

Endnotes 237

Glossary 245

References 253

Index 259

Foreword by don PePPers

There’s an evolutionary feature known to biologists as ‘the Red Queen effect’ based on a tale in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There. Alice meets a chess piece — the Red Queen — who explains that in Looking-Glass Land, everyone has to keep running ever faster, but they never seem to get very far because the landscape is moving with them: ‘Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.’

In the natural world, biologists have found that species must continually adapt and evolve just to keep in the same place, both with respect to other species competing with them for food and to avoid predators. Every time squirrels get quicker, foxes need to develop faster reflexes, because only the fastest foxes will catch enough prey, which means the squirrels have to become a little bit quicker still, because only the quickest squirrels will live long enough to pass on their own genes.

The Red Queen effect also applies to the business world, and to the customer experience space. Companies work hard to deliver a better experience so they can prosper by winning more customers, keeping them longer, and growing them bigger than their competitors. But their competitors are also innovating and evolving, so every successful CX initiative is soon replicated by other companies, which means that to be competitively successful, a company has to differentiate its own CX even more effectively.

We can call it ‘creative destruction’ or ‘survival of the fittest’, but innovation is a constant business process, and it is especially pronounced in areas characterised by technological disruption or rapid change, such as the customer experience space. Three fundamental technological developments explain why ‘customer experience’

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continues to be such a topic of discussion in business strategy sessions, leadership meetings and corporate boardrooms around the world:

1. Cost-efficient interactivity. Companies can now interact with individual customers, one at a time, and they can scale these personalised interactions across millions of customers cost-efficiently.

2. Customer demand. Today’s customers can easily find detailed information online, check social connections for reviews or references, and use self-service apps to complete transactions, with the result that they have not only taken charge of the buying process, but have developed ever higher expectations with respect to what an acceptable customer experience consists of.

3. Commoditisation of products. Automation and globalisation have undermined nearly all proprietary product features, dramatically increasing the competitive importance of strong customer relationships and trust.

Today, of course, we would take each of these three technological developments for granted; they’re obvious, and each points to a greater need for a business to be capable of delivering a competitively successful customer experience. But as focused as business leaders have now become on the customer experience, many senior executives still don’t fully understand the magnitude of the task in front of them. Nor do they appreciate the rate at which this task is evolving, as ever more companies embrace the idea themselves and work hard to win the competitive battle.

And who is their adversary? Who are businesses trying to triumph over in this competitive struggle? You, that’s who. Your business and every other business in the world.

That’s why you should read Isabella Villani’s book, Transform Customer Experience. It is absolutely jam-packed with the latest thinking, the most competitively successful ideas and practical case studies from around the world. You’ll find checklists of everything from channels and metrics to dealing with customer expectations and preparing for emerging technologies.

Isabella Villani’s many insights are smart, well informed, up to date and helpful. She draws freely from a wealth of personal experience

FOREWORD BY DON PEPPERS ix

in the discipline, as well as from a voluminous assortment of expert opinions and judgements offered by other authorities on the subject.

It’s difficult enough just to keep up with what’s going on in the fast-changing CX world. But read this book and you might be able to get a little bit ahead of your own competitors, at least for the time being …

Don Peppers is the author of more than a dozen books on aspects of customer experience. He co-founded the Peppers & Rogers Group as well as CX Speakers and is based in San Francisco, USA.

About the AuthorIsabella Villani is a thought leader in customer experience (CX) strategy and transformation. Renowned for leading high-performing teams, she is greatly sought after as a speaker at industry forums and events around the world.

As the founder and Chief Customer Officer of Exceed Global, Isabella has earned an international reputation for her infectious passion. With more than 20 years of experience at the forefront of CX, she provides consultancy services to companies in banking and finance, telecommunications, health, utilities, as well as government and not-for-profit organisations.

She is certified in Six Sigma (Black Belt), Kaizen, Systems Thinking Design, Agile and CompTIA Project Management; has a bachelor’s degree in Speech Pathology from La Trobe University; is a graduate member of the Australian Institute of Company Directors (GAICD); and holds several board positions, including as a retail advisory board member for Save the Children Australia.

Isabella is based in Melbourne, Victoria. On weekdays she can often be seen at the airport, heading for her next exciting CX engagement, and on weekends she enjoys spending time at the beach with her dog.

AcknowledgementsI would like to express my gratitude to the many people — family, friends, customers, business partners and colleagues — who participated in the journey of writing this book, and especially to all those who provided support, completed my CX survey and questionnaire, allowed me to quote their remarks and assisted in the editing and proofreading.

Special thanks to Don Peppers for writing the foreword and sharing his reflections on his CX experiences. I’m also grateful to the other CX experts who contributed to this book: Anthony Aboud, Stacey Allinson, Ian Bailey, Fergus Bugg, Michael Clark, Steve Collier, Jane King, Cassie McInnes, Rowena Morrow, John Nagle and Sharife Rahmani. You are all talented individuals with amazing stories to tell. I am also grateful to Alok Kulkarni and his team at Cyara, and to Nicole Stirling and the Acquia team for the insightful case studies they have offered.

Lucy Raymond and the team at Wiley have my thanks for helping share my story for a global audience. Jenny Lee helped me write, edit and shape my story. Simon Bennett was a fabulous sounding board and shared his acute insights along the way.

I am extremely fortunate to work with my team at Exceed Global, who are an amazing group of creative, smart and authentic people. Your integrity and passion for our customers and their customers have made Exceed Global what it is today.

My advisory board members Joh Barker and Benjamin Meek have provided mentorship and friendship. Wherever we are in the world, they always make time to connect and are only ever a phone call away.

My parents, Nola Spicer and Michael Villani, brought me up to believe I could achieve anything I set my mind to. They were both successful in their own business careers, and I have learned a lot from them by osmosis. I appreciate the positive influence they have had on my life.

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Keeping it in the family, my brother Tony Villani has been closely involved in my life on both a professional and personal basis. His sound financial advice is invaluable.

Carlo Giuliani’s wise counsel on my health and wellbeing has enabled me to stay strong and focused.

My close friends Nadia Giuliani, Linda Kerton, Rebecca Morris, Jillian Olarenshaw, Kevin St Mart, Murray Parker and Evica Vukasinovic have been there to support me throughout this journey.

Finally, I would like to thank all my customers, the clients who have given me the opportunity to spend many of my waking hours doing what I love. You have shaped my career and the person I am today, and I am forever grateful.

IntroductIonA chance encounter in January 2001 changed my life. As fate would have it, meeting a guy at a party sent me in a new and exciting direction. Sounds like a romance novel, doesn’t it? It’s not, obviously, but this meeting is where my love for customer experience began.

It was a hot Sunday afternoon, and I’d arranged to pick up a friend at her family barbecue to go shopping. When I arrived, she wasn’t ready (of course), so I took refuge from the heat with her family. I’d been listening to their banter for a while, enjoying their animated stories, when her uncle asked me what I did for a living.

I explained I was a speech pathologist working with people with disabilities to improve their communication and swallowing. When I told him a little more about my area of specialisation, namely speech recognition, he offered me a job on the spot. He said, ‘Our clients want more customers to conduct business over the phone. We need your help to work out how that can happen.’ He said his company was building internal capability to help clients do this, as well as designing speech recognition applications for businesses. He gave me his card and told me to send my résumé.

At that stage, nobody was talking about customer experience. The focus was on doing business in lower-cost channels. Contact centres, then referred to as call centres, were seen as cost centres in the organisation, so it was a priority to keep costs down, even in that channel. The management world had set out to streamline dealing with their customers by establishing these centres, and my skills were in demand. Organisations saw the importance of working out how to make customers feel comfortable interacting with them over the phone, whether it be with a person or with an automated system using speech recognition technology.

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I found myself having lots of conversations with clients about this. The discussions were similar to those I had in my days as a speech pathologist. I would stress how important it was to show empathy, provide information in a meaningful manner, paraphrase what the person was saying, and use other counselling skills I was taught in psychology at university. Now these attributes, which are referred to as ‘soft skills’, are standard in most training programs.

Speech recognition technology wasn’t very sophisticated in those days. It was a balancing act to design systems that wouldn’t put customers off, but fell within the constraints of a relatively immature technology.

My first ‘voice user interface’ design project was a payment application that allowed customers of a large national organisation to pay bills by phone. From my training in speech pathology, I knew that people couldn’t handle a lot of information presented verbally, especially over the phone, where they couldn’t get extra clues from looking at a person’s face. The technical term for this form of auditory comprehension is ‘cognitive load’. If you offered a customer a menu, it couldn’t have 20 options (or five options with several sub-options), because people would get confused, forget the first few and choose the wrong option, or simply hang up.

Similarly, when designing applications to capture a person’s address, converting a customer’s words into an accurate suburb or street name was a major challenge. Factoring in the system limitations back then, we used a reverse look-up format, where people were asked to give their postcodes as a preliminary filter. I wrote prompts to explain why they needed to do that, then produced phonetic transcriptions of the suburb and street names so they could be linked correctly. I knew that if the speech recognition system could offer the correct option quickly, people wouldn’t hang up.

I spent most of the next 12 years working for large organisations, watching as the fascinating field of customer experience (CX) grew and diversified. My work included improving the effectiveness of all customer contact channels, integrating customer engagement across digital channels, and encouraging staff involvement to foster strategic and cultural change. At the end of that time, I decided to branch out on my own and establish a CX management consultancy. I called it Villani Consulting, but it quickly outgrew that name and I rebranded it as Exceed Global.

INTRODUCTION xvii

I knew I wanted to work with organisations to develop leading- and bleeding-edge CX transformation strategies and programs, and I decided that the only way I could do it was to start my own business. I changed my LinkedIn profile to reflect that, and my business was born. The phone began ringing immediately; before I even had business cards or a website, I was busy doing what I loved.

I had already seen huge changes since I began working in this field. When I started, the phone and face-to-face channels overwhelmingly dominated customers’ engagement with large organisations. Staff in call centres handled queries in specialised workplaces where customers communicated almost exclusively over the phone, sometimes supplemented by faxes (remember them?).

Email was a relatively new channel. Customers were keen to use it, but it was time-consuming to administer. At first, unanswered emails simply piled up in staff members’ inboxes, and customers’ email communications were lost. The situation improved after email management systems became readily available, allowing staff to deal with the most common enquiries from a prepared script, forward complex enquiries to the most skilled consultants, and record email exchanges in a customer relationship management (CRM) system.

Within just a few years, call centres had evolved to offer a wider menu of communication channels. The name had changed to ‘contact centres’, the new terminology signalling a qualitative shift. Although many customers still relied on contact by phone, a growing number preferred to use other channels, or at least began in them. They used search engines to locate suppliers and follow them up on the internet, made enquiries through online chat and posted questions and comments on social media. There was also much stronger demand for information to be incorporated into apps that could be accessed on mobile phones and tablets.

Customers now order and pay for goods, solve problems, acquire new services or discontinue old ones, all without directly interacting with another person. They are increasingly inclined to resolve issues themselves by exploring options on the internet, and will pick up the phone only if their attempts at self-service fail.

What this implies, though, is that when a customer does pick up the phone, it’s likely that their problem is one they have already tried to solve without success. While the number of phone calls to contact centres has

xviii TRANSFORM CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE

fallen, the individual calls are more complex, demanding higher-level skills of staff and taking longer to resolve. As online communication proliferates, there has been a steady growth of digital. Online contact is superseding the voice channel in many instances, particularly with the advances in artificial intelligence, robotics and process automation. The practices developed in contact centres are now being absorbed by other business units, including those formulating approaches adapted to remote working. Contact centres are becoming relics of the past as customer experience is managed in functional areas within the business.

This is occurring against a background of sharper competition in almost every industry. Organisations today have realised the importance of retaining their existing customers as well as acquiring new ones. A robust customer experience strategy is required to ensure that services are consistent and actively designed to meet customers’ and organisations’ needs. Measures of customer satisfaction and customer effort are now performance metrics across organisations, cascading from the top down. Improved operating practices and rapid advances in technology are changing the corporate landscape.

This book shows you how to manage customer interaction in this omnichannel environment, placing customers at the centre of your organisation, where they belong. I’ve based parts of the book on case studies of my work with various organisations, but I’ve changed details such as the industry, the organisation size and any metrics that might reveal my clients’ identities.

I have also sought commentary from thought leaders in customer experience, as I felt they deserve recognition as some of the key figures in the industry who have made a difference to customer experience. No matter the industry or size of company, these people are doing their very best to drive CX innovation and delight their customers.

If you’re reading this book, you’re keen to explore new ways of having a positive impact on people’s lives by improving their customer experience. As a bonus, you can improve your organisation’s efficiency and profitability while making it a better place to work.

Customer experience is something I’m passionate about, and I hope this book empowers you to transform the world around you. I don’t want the customer experience you offer to be just good — I want it to be great.

Chapter 1Customer

experienCe today

Many of the world’s great organisations have won customers’ loyalty in a highly contested global marketplace. The Apples, Amazons and Facebooks of this world have put their creativity into forging brands that offer customers a consistent, distinctive experience with a clear value proposition they can respond to. These are also companies that make it a point of pride to nurture, train and retain their staff.

Meanwhile, other organisations that were once everywhere are now nowhere. An instructive example is Blockbuster Video. The company rode the video boom into the late 1990s, when it started making most of its money out of charging very high fees to customers who were late returning their videos. One of those customers was a youngish man called Reed Hastings, who was trying to work out what to do with the money he’d made from selling a software start-up. He was so irritated when Blockbuster charged him a $40 late fee that he went away and founded his own company, which he called Netflix. By mid 2018, Netflix was riding the digital wave with 125 million subscribers, and Blockbuster was down to just one store in the USA.1

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Creating delighted customers has never been more important than it is today. With globalisation, the impact of digital technology and the emergence of an ever-increasing number of channels, customers have access to a vast range of choice, and they are quick to drop organisations who rub them up the wrong way. In the words of the Forrester research company, the period since 2010 can be seen as the ‘Age of the Customer’, a time when digital technologies and economic changes have combined to put customers in charge of their dealings with all kinds of organisations.

meet the new customer Customer experience has evolved rapidly since 1994, when the World Wide Web burst on the scene, backed by a ready-made communication channel in the internet. This led to a very rapid growth of commercial activity. Entrepreneurs rushed to build a digital presence, and customers were quick to embrace this new technology.

Organisations were just starting to get used to the web when mobile phone networks began to reach into the digital data space. Mobile payments became possible in 1998, and in the same year mobile users were offered the first downloadable content, which was a ringtone. Since then, mobile phones with fast data access have become part of daily life.

As computers and then smartphones became ubiquitous, they offered a platform for social media to emerge as a channel for direct peer-to-peer communication. Mark Zuckerberg launched ‘the facebook’ for his fellow students at Harvard in February 2004, and 1200 students signed up on the first day. Facebook went national later that year and began to expand across the globe in 2005, spearheading a new wave of online platforms where people could record the delights and frustrations of daily life and upload images and links for their friends to view. As of mid 2018, Facebook had 2.23 billion active users, defined by their having logged in to Facebook during the last 30 days.2

All these developments have produced a customer who’s better informed than ever before and far more difficult to retain.

CUStOMer eXperIeNCe tODaY 3

The informed customerConventional bricks-and-mortar retailers are among those most seriously affected by digital disruption. To get a sense of the scale of the recent changes, it’s worth remembering what customers encountered when they could only shop face-to-face:

• The choice of suppliers was limited, with most having only local reach.

• There were information barriers because would-be purchasers had to travel to the store.

• Information provided inside the store depended largely on staff knowledge and in-store promotions.

• Information provided outside the store depended largely on published advertisements. Consumer associations sought to evaluate rival products, but most of their information was available only to subscribers and they had trouble keeping up with changing markets. Customers’ own views had little reach unless a TV show or newspaper decided they had a newsworthy complaint.

Contrast this with a customer who researches products over the internet before making a purchasing decision:

• The choice of suppliers is huge — at least national, often global, with even small, specialised suppliers being able to reach global markets.

• There is far greater transparency — product information is supplied instantaneously in flexible forms, from many-to-many to one-on-one.

• Social media, online reviews and comparison websites give swift access to information about products and services, drawing on other customers’ experiences. Any given product will have an army of vocal advocates and critics, especially online.

• Customers can make contact at a time of their choice. They can send an online query at any time of day, and they expect to be able to call on the phone outside traditional working hours.

• Anonymity allows customers to research competing products without being pressured into a sale.


Even if customers go to a bricks-and-mortar store, they’re likely to arrive equipped with knowledge gained from multiple channels, and they expect staff to acknowledge it.

One customer practice that has received a lot of attention is known as ‘showrooming’, where intending purchasers visit a physical store to inspect the floor stock. If they’re attracted to a particular item, they use their smartphones to look it up on the internet. Some will even scan the item’s barcode or quick response (QR) tag and search to see if other suppliers are selling the item more cheaply. If so, they buy the item online.3

The opposite of showrooming is ‘webrooming’, where a customer uses the internet to research a product or service, but then buys through a conventional retail outlet. Here, consumers use the internet to supplement physical stores, not to supplant them.

An early study of showrooming predicted it would spell the death of conventional stores, estimating that only 7 per cent of customer visits resulted in a sale. This produced a panic among bricks-and-mortar retailers, but later studies have suggested that the figure was misleading because it didn’t examine customers’ practices closely enough. A Nielsen survey of just under 2000 US shoppers in 2017 found that showrooming and webrooming were counterbalancing each other. Of the customers surveyed, 27 per cent said they regularly looked at goods in physical stores before buying online, but 35 per cent regularly researched online before buying in a physical store. On the other hand, there was a widespread decline in the frequency with which customers visited stores in person, while online visits had risen by 8 per cent in just 12 months.4

Whichever way you look at it, though, the online experience is now an integral part of customers’ interactions with suppliers of all kinds, and practically everyone has to adapt to the digital marketplace. Customers who visit a store or phone up to ask about a product have almost certainly researched it online first — perhaps on the company’s website, perhaps on a competitor’s, through a comparison website, on social media or all of the above. By the time they reach the store, they may know more about the product than the staff do.

When customers are dealing with an organisation, they’re not only comparing it with its direct competitors; they’re comparing it to every


other interaction they’ve had with any other organisation they’ve dealt with. In a world where practically everyone has had some kind of contact with the new breed of companies that take pride in looking after their customers, every organisation is being compared with the leaders in the global field — not just in their back yard.

The flighty customerCustomers have also become less attached to particular service providers. There are several reasons for this:

• The wider availability of information means that customers are more likely to be aware of competing offers, either through competitors’ online activity or through social media.

• New suppliers in many fields are less burdened by the cost of running bricks-and-mortar services. They can undercut incumbent providers and differentiate themselves by bundling products to appeal to different segments of the market.

• Tighter regulation of consumer contracts has given customers more control by setting out cooling-off periods and limiting the use of ‘lock-in’ clauses to penalise those who switch.

• The availability of online sales and service has made it easier to switch providers and has even created an opening for specialised agencies who will do the job for you. Easy switching dramatically weakens what researchers call ‘mooring’ — the inertia that keeps customers loyal to a particular company.5

The end result is that customers are far more likely to dump a provider if their expectations aren’t met. Banks, retailers and internet service providers are all feeling the shift. Customer loyalty today cannot be taken for granted. It’s something that has to be won.

The connected customerInternet access is now almost universal in developed countries. In Australia, recent Sensis Social Media Reports have found that all but 1 per cent or less of households are connected to the internet. The average consumer in 2018 owned 3.5 internet-enabled devices, and 60 per cent used the internet at least five times a day.6


Devices are also becoming lighter and more portable. Ownership of smartphones outstripped laptop computers for the first time in 2016 and has continued to rise since then (see figure 1.1). The number of internet-enabled TVs has also risen markedly, and 2018 saw a sharp surge in the ownership of wearable devices such as Apple Watches and Fitbits, which had now reached more than 20 per cent of the population. Meanwhile, the ownership of laptops and desktop computers remained pretty constant.

Smartphone

Laptop

Tablet

Desktop

Internet TV

iPod Touch

Wearable

None

0 20 40 60 80 100

2015

2018

Figure 1.1: ownership of internet devices, % of population, 2015–18Source: Sensis Social Media report, 2015; Yellow Social Media report, 2018.

There were differences among people of different ages. The survey found that smartphone ownership was almost universal (over 92 per cent) among adults under the age of 50 but fell off in older age groups. The gap was closing fast, though. Among those aged over 65, 70 per cent owned smartphones in 2018, where two years earlier the figure was only 40 per cent.7

People’s reasons for using the internet also differ with age, although some of the differences have been ironed out as older people have become more active in the digital space. These are the people author Anders Sörman-Nilsson calls ‘digital immigrants’: unlike the younger generations, they grew up without the internet but have adopted aspects of digital media later in life. They speak digital, but ‘with an accent’, as he puts it.8


When the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) surveyed Australian households about their use of information technology in 2016–17, the results showed some striking trends. In previous surveys, banking and paying bills online had consistently been the most widespread internet-based activities, but social networking and internet-based entertainment had now closed the gap. The proportions using the internet for banking, social media and entertainment were about 80 per cent in each case. The proportion buying goods over the internet had also risen from 61 to 73 per cent in two years, and online access to health services had more than doubled to 46 per cent.

More than 90 per cent of respondents under 25 used social media, but the growth in social media use was mainly concentrated in the older age groups. Among people aged 50–64, 65 per cent were on social media (up from 51 per cent previously), as were 51 per cent of those aged 65 or more (42 per cent in 2014–15). There had also been an increase in the use of social media by those born in non-English-speaking countries; at just over 82 per cent, their participation in social media was now higher than that of people born in Australia.9

So how are all these changes influencing the expectations customers are bringing to their relationships with the organisations they deal with?

Customer expectationsThe factors that drive customer expectations are constantly changing, but there are some points that turn up whenever customers are asked what matters to them. Here are some of those themes:

• Personalisation. If I’ve already communicated with your organisation, you know a lot about me, so use that information to personalise or even individualise how you do business with me.

• Mobility. I’m mobile, and I want to be able to deal with you while I’m on the move and on mobile devices. If you don’t keep up, I’ll leave you behind. Given I’m in motion, it’s best you don’t assume you have my undivided attention.


• Sociability. I’m on social media and I expect you to be there too.

• Self-care. Let me do it myself and let me choose the channel to do it in. Don’t force me to switch to another channel just because it’s easier for you.

• Ease. I shouldn’t have to spend time trying to work out what you need me to do. Make it easy for me to do business with you.

• Consistency. No matter how I’m interacting with you, make sure it’s the same and if I am speaking to staff, make sure they are saying the same thing.

• Timeliness. I’m time-poor, so don’t make me wait for you. If you put me in a phone queue, I’ll use the time to check out your competitors on the internet — that is, if I wait at all.

• Empowerment. I want to feel empowered and make my own decisions. Give me the knowledge I need to make the right ones.

• Empathy. I am a human with feelings and needs, so make sure you understand me. Show me that you care and get where I’m coming from.

• Help. If I choose to interact with someone about an enquiry, make sure they can answer my questions. I don’t want to be bounced around your organisation.

• Complaints. If you make life hard or do wrong by me, I’ll complain. I might complain to you (if you’re lucky), I might complain to my family and colleagues, or I might get busy on social media and tell the world. I might tell people if you do the right thing too, but only if you do something that ‘wows’ me.

Let’s have a closer look at what we know about these drivers and the issues they raise.

PersonalisationOver time, organisations collect a lot of data about their customers — their preferences, habits, buying patterns and so on. There is also a lot of data commercially available in the marketplace. When customers deal with an organisation, they expect a personalised customer experience, one that is individualised, based on all the information


the organisation has about them. This rich data should guide their interaction with the organisation, forming part of a personalised package of information that includes their previous experience (their story), which can be passed on to any staff member they deal with.

When a customer makes a phone call to an organisation, for example, the interaction that follows should ideally be informed by the staff member’s knowledge of the customer’s previous experience, including:

• their contact details, including their mobile number

• their preferred channel of communication (for example, mobile, chat, landline, SMS, email)

• the nature of their question or problem if they’ve raised it before

• what they have done to try to address it and in what channels

• their previous history with the organisation

• what the organisation has done so far to address their current problem.

Computer telephony integration (CTI) technology has improved this experience for customers in the voice channel. For example, a contact centre consultant can receive useful information about a customer before they begin speaking if ‘screen pop’ functionality is installed. This is where a window pops up on the consultant’s desktop showing information such as the customer’s number, often their name, and any information they have already communicated via the interactive voice response (IVR) system or another channel.

In an omnichannel environment, where customer interactions occur within and across multiple channels and touchpoints — the points where a customer comes into contact with an organisation — extra effort is required to ensure that the flow of information is seamless and the experience is consistent. Contact centre technology, for example, can be integrated with customer relationship management (CRM) systems or service management platforms that provide current information from the help desk/service desk if the customer already has a query in progress. Or they can draw on records of the customer’s past dealings with the organisation to give a more detailed background to the current call, allowing a much higher level of personalisation.

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