At a Glance
Maintaining consistent good customer service across channels has become increasingly complex. But companies that want to improve their
customer service levels should focus on strengthening their capabilities by
using best practices and fully exploiting CRM investments.
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The Double-Edged Challenge: Technology
Underutilization and Cultural Resistance
Enhancing Customer Treatment through a Holistic Approach
Accenture Has the Experience to
Help Posted: November 21, 2003
Businesses have long recognized that “customer treatment”
is a primary driver of business success. In short, customer treatment refers to
the manner and consistency with which companies treat their customers across
multiple contact points.
It sounds simple enough: giving customers what they want,
when and how they want it. However, businesses are steadily increasing their
number of customer channels—and the complexity with which they can dialogue
with customers. This makes it increasingly difficult to create consistent
personalized treatment programs that generate lifetime loyalty.
Customer relationship management (CRM) technologies and
best practices can help. Specifically, companies that want to improve their
customer service levels should focus on strengthening their capabilities in:
- Data management and analytics—Storing,
gathering and analyzing information from multiple channels to segment and
analyze customer preferences and responses.
- Insight-driven marketing—Using customer
information to develop valuable insights that can direct more effective
marketing campaigns.
- Marketing automation—Streamlining and
automating the processes associated with campaign management and execution,
enabling more—and more efficient—campaigns.
- Self-service optimization—Enabling
customers to interact with the company freely, from anywhere, at
anytime.
- Workforce effectiveness—Helping
employees adjust to new ways of thinking about customer treatment and providing
them the tools and training they need to deliver better service.
The Double-edged Challenge: Technology Underutilization and Cultural Resistance Despite their efforts to improve these capabilities,
companies investing in CRM are often frustrated by their inability to establish
consistent treatment rules across different technology applications and
channels, such as e-mail, live agents, Internet self-service and interactive
voice response. Typically, they blame their stagnant or deteriorating customer
satisfaction levels on the failures of CRM.
The truth is CRM has not failed. The real culprit, in many
cases, is the misguided belief that CRM technologies alone can transform
customer treatment.
This thinking is particularly evident in the communications
and high tech industries. For example, many companies have invested in
technologies that improve their capacity to gather and store customer
information. They believe, rightly, that better customer treatment is dependent
upon better (and centralized) customer information. Unfortunately, many of
these investments go unutilized. It turns out that C&HT companies’ skills
in gathering information far exceed their ability to use the information in
meaningful ways to generate better customer treatment. The underutilization of
technology can potentially derail an organization’s customer treatment
improvement efforts.
A less appreciated—but equally dangerous—threat lies in
outdated operating models. Many C&HT companies are mature and entrenched in
operating methods that historically served them well. As a result, their
workforces and organization are more likely to be resistant to process changes.
And their leadership teams are more likely to be resistant to applying new
customer-centric technologies. The fear here is that new technologies will
alienate customers and ultimately do more harm than good. The result of this
resistance is a cultural stasis that hinders companies from maximizing the use
CRM technologies and best practices to improve customer service.
Enhancing Customer Treatment through a Holistic Approach At Accenture, we believe that communications & high
tech companies can begin to break the cycle of under-performing CRM initiatives
by assessing their customer treatment objectives in light of their overall
business objectives, their enabling technologies and their ability to change.
This may sound simplistic. It is not. We have repeatedly seen companies try to
improve customer treatment by simply implementing new technologies. They tend
to have little regard for how (or if) the technology will be used to support
larger strategic goals.
Rather than immediately investing in technology, we believe
companies should focus on:
- Making better use of the technology investments they already
have to improve capabilities in data management, analytics, insight-driven
marketing and automated workforce and customer processes.
- Realigning processes and organizational structures to support
a comprehensive CRM effort.
- Helping their people adjust to new ways of thinking and
working.
In short, transforming a customer treatment program is a
comprehensive, complex undertaking that touches many areas of an
organization—from strategy to processes to workforce performance to technology.
Working with a partner that has skills in each of these areas will enable
companies to reshape their customers’ experience and extend superior,
consistent customer treatment practices across all channels and methods of
interaction.
Accenture Has the Experience to Help Accenture has been improving clients’ customer treatment
programs for years. We understand the need for a balanced solution. To that
end, we evaluate all the facets of a business to maximize financial, business
and service performance. We apply our proven experience in designing and
launching effective marketing, product and channel strategies. We help design
organizational roles and workforce behaviors needed to launch and maintain a
transformational customer treatment program. And we deliver customized
treatment solutions that address C&HT industry drivers and maximize the
value of a company’s existing technology portfolio.
Contact us for more
information about Accenture’s customer relationship management solutions.
About the Author: Todd Wagner is a
partner in the Customer Relationship Management capability group deployed to
the Communications and High Tech operating group.
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