How to keep up with customers as they now have better technology than you

Transcription

1 Innovation Guide ebook How to keep up with customers as they now have better technology than you T

2 Introduction Your customers now have better technology than you do. Innovation is now the battlefield of customer experience and engagement. It is playing an increasingly important role in how your customers think about you and is creating huge opportunities and challenges that simply didn t exist 2 or 3 years ago. The key IT and operational agenda for the past 15 years has been around business as usual stability. This has changed, making the most of consumer technology and responding to changing consumer behavior is now mission critical. This guide helps you to understand some of the key challenges and opportunities you face. Your customers now have better technology than you do. Most customer relationship processing is soon going to move out of the enterprise and on to the consumer s device. This will be especially so for simpler, routine tasks such as service complaints, account balances and delivery scheduling, all soon to be completed directly from the device. The customer device provides more functionality at a much lower cost. Businesses can exploit this, to achieve high value customer contact with minimal investment in infrastructure. Consumer devices are evolving rapidly. Their use is changing even faster. Delivering insight into what this innovation means for your business, and how to create a culture that makes the most of rapid technological change, is viewed by many senior teams as one of the key challenges over the next few years. This phenomenon is called Customer Power. Customers Device 2

3 What are the key points of Customer Power? Customer Power For the first time consumers now are better informed, have better tools more choice and are more adaptive than the enterprises that serve them. There is a huge gap in investment between consumer and enterprise technology. More significantly customers are adapting to this change much more quickly than organizations are. Consumers expect to be able to communicate in the way they want, where they want and when they want. Trusted Sources of Information YOU MEDIA CUSTOMERS REGULATORS COMPARATORS COMPETITORS Morris Pentel Put simply Customers are better at doing business with you, than you are at doing business with them! 3

4 These are the key things that anyone can see: Better Informed Web reviews, comparison sites, and even regulators are publishing league tables etc. You are now in a competition to be the most informative source about you and the market You are now one of many sources of information about your products & services Information is now more up to date and more detailed Better Tools We are all using Consumer Technology from smart phones and tablets to intranets and Geo-location. We have more choices of platforms and devices (phone tablet, games console) We are all using Consumer Technology... Pace of Investment & Innovation in Consumer Technology outstripping business technology Innovation is now flowing economically through consumer technology BYOD is also diverting investment into consumer technology Consumer technology is dictating experience and channels More for less Margins are falling so new technologies and services are being offered in free adoption models Increasing pace of innovation Reducing lifecycle of innovation Tools are delivering a Blended Experience (single part of my digital experience) More channels available Device & channel independent (Laptop, phone, tablet, games console & fridge) Changing the focus, cost and value of investment Channel of adoption shaping market (App Stores etc.) More things connected through the IOT (Internet of Things) 4

5 More Choice Behavior Choice of Technology (end point device such as phone or tablet) is no longer a barrier to experience or functionality Services that were once exclusive to technology suppliers are becoming less valuable than the overall experience Blackberry s dominance with Corporate and services like BBM and Apples stranglehold on music downloads have both disappeared in less than 5 years Most services / functionalities are being delivered in most formats such as IOS, Android & Windows and across most platforms (laptop phone and tablet) or they cannot reach a tipping point of acceptance Experience & Customer Journey Investigate through one supplier buy from the best offer and terms Click and Collect, Scan and Take, Visit and Deliver Move supplier easily Choose your own multiple channel of communications Web and Call Centre Visual IVR & Chat Choice of technology is no longer a barrier... More Adaptive More use of multiple channel / device experience New Apex Predator behavior by consumers that is less tolerant of failure who will use social media to complain (See Social Me below) Larger expectation of same SLA across Channels Using more channels better than you can Average digitally connected person will use 6 channels of communication and 3 devices socially and for work Most organizations now offer 4 channels and consumers adapt to innovations such as Augmented Reality and QR codes etc. but because different organizations use different things consumers are getting better at switching than organizations 5x more people video conference outside work Average adoption timescale for consumers massively faster than organization 5

6 The rapid change in customer behavior, and the sheer volume of technological innovation that is appearing from smart TVs to digital currency, is forcing businesses to develop a clear strategy for coping with innovation. This strategy will need to consider how you identify important innovations and new trends, that will affect your business, and how you take advantage of specific innovations to keep pace with the competition and to provide differentiation. The rapid change in customer behavior... In the United States, 30% of all data used at primetime was Netflix 18 months after its national launch. Almost everything that existed 12 years ago in terms of our interactive technology has changed dramatically, including the emergence of Facebook, YouTube and LinkedIn. Tesco have announced job cuts and store closures in early 2015 because of Customer Behavior changes that started months before. The move to cheaper retailers and the reduction in the number of families that stopped doing the weekly out of town shop took over a year to react to and 18 months before a strategy was in place. UK Banks are reported to have seen a 60% drop in customers walking into their branches over the last 2 years. Basically customers all arrive at opening time or lunch hours creating peaks and then the staff sees little activity for most of the day. This is why Banks have plans to move from the High Street and in a recent Forrester Report there was speculation that there would be 200 million mobile banking customers in Europe by Lloyds Bank has already announced branch closures and job shedding in an effort to adapt to this new behavior. Other Banks will follow and the impact on High Streets everywhere is likely to be significant. Some gurus think that Forrester have actually underestimated that pace of change. These are just a few examples of the real changes that are going on right now. 6

7 This means that you must consider that there are increasing impacts on major projects, such as system upgrades and migration to new platforms. The evolving role of the connected consumer device can change the sizing, design and implementation criteria of any major contact center programme. It also changes the nature of service assurance and monitoring, which is something that most organizations have not even started to plan for yet.... do business anytime, anywhere, on any device Customer expectations now include the ability to do business anytime, anywhere, on any device. A joined-up customer experience across multiple channels is becoming the norm, at least in the customer s eye. If you don t meet these expectations, customers can now find someone who will. There are still issues with consumer products, and with meeting customer expectations. Many of these new functionalities are peer to peer based and this is a serious limitation today: you cannot yet interact with your bank or your doctor via Facebook or Twitter except in rare cases. However, with a market of billions of consumers and tens of billions of devices, this will soon change. If consumers demand a solution, technology will provide one. The challenge here is clear. It is a conflict between the BAU need to deliver projects on time, in budget and deliver the agreed outcomes, against the innovative need to experiment, push the boundaries and of course sometimes fail. Creating an environment that supports both of these very different cultural strands also creates the need to budget for innovation. There are a few related strategies that organizations will struggle with in this new climate. Maximising the value of your existing systems, deciding when and how to transition or upgrade, and of course the question of on-premise systems versus cloud-based offerings, are all issues which have become urgent because of the need to keep up with the customer. How do you address all of these at once? 7

8 Transition & Upgrading You don t want to find yourself in an arms race with the customer. If you can t match the customer spending power in terms of hardware and functionality (and you can t), you may have to set a different goal for some of your core platforms. We may be reaching the peak in terms of any additional value that manufacturers can add to core platforms, as more and more functionality moves off these platforms and onto consumer devices. You don t want to find yourself in an arms race with the customer. Your business needs stable systems that allow you to plug in innovations rather than constantly trying to upgrade. For manufacturers and suppliers who have used expensive upgrades as a way of locking customers in for the long term, the old way of selling technology on a three-year or five-year cycle will rapidly become unrealistic. Successful platforms will allow you to add on innovations as required, rather than upgrading everything every time. We have already seen the big players in technology open up their platforms to connect to other systems, but this will go further. Extending the life of functioning multimedia routing platforms that support chat and social interaction may become the only effective way to satisfy customers in the short term. In the longer term, reducing the costs of running existing systems by moving to 3rd party support, and focusing spend on innovation, could be a differentiator. Current estimates suggest that 70% of IT budgets are spent on maintaining existing systems. The pressure to focus more spend on innovation, combined with the way that manufacturers drive upgrade revenue, are opposing forces that businesses will need to reconcile. Ironically, this may mean that the best way to be more innovative will be to keep old platforms running, and only transition to new systems when they provide a step change in functionality. With the increased pace of change, organizations will also need to learn to work with innovators. You will need to be among the early adopters of successful technology. Supply chain issues and mission critical testing protocols will need to adapt to meet this requirement. In fact the role of innovation will increase in importance, as will that of the Customer Experience Model. 8

9 The Role of the Cloud It s a mathematical certainty that at some point in the near future Moore s Law combined with the economic impact of Customer Power means that cloud based services will be so much cheaper and effective than owning your own storage and processing capacity. This certainty in the growth of cloud hosting has created an oversupply of capacity, which is likely to soften margins in the short term, creating opportunities for more competitive deals. Hosted services have to be part of your customer relationship strategy any integrated services that link to consumer platforms and social networks will necessarily have a hosted element, so some of the processing in your customer experience is probably already in the cloud. However there is a 3rd factor that should be considered. This blended experience is about delivering however, moving the right things, in the right way for your own organization, and at the right time, will still be a challenge. There is a large cloud of marketing bumf and nebulous offers to wade through before you decide on your strategy. There is a large cloud of marketing bumf and nebulous offers to wade through before you decide on your strategy. 9

10 Innovation s Impact on Customer Experience Today s customers expect change Innovation in consumer electronics and software is changing the customer experience faster than at any other time in history. It is impacting the dynamics of customer relationships and forcing the redesign of traditional operating models. The arrival of blended channels, augmented experiences and improved self-service are all external visible indicators of this change. Today s customers expect change. They expect innovation, without disruption to the customer experience. Understanding how to build a culture of innovation without losing stability is a vital skill. We help our customers find the dividing line between the bleeding edge and market winning differentiation. 10

11 Multi-Channel and Omni-Channel Many organizations are struggling to come to terms with Multi-Channel and Omni- Channel customer contact. Many organizations are struggling to come to terms with Multi-Channel and Omni-Channel customer contact. In fact, many of the people that we speak to are struggling to understand the difference between these two terms. There is a simple reason for this. Multi-Channel was the best available solution for a long time, and Omni-Channel was an unattainable goal. However, the ability to deliver Omni-Channel, providing a single joined-up experience across multiple channels, has become relatively easy to achieve in a very short period of time. Multi-Channel operations was basically having a call center and a web site, so the customer could choose how to contact your business. This has been fundamentally changed by better agent desktops, back-room links between your web servers and call center, and a number of other innovations that have made it possible for your contact center agent to support chat, and other channels as well as traditional phone calls. Most organizations are already providing some form of Omni-Channel service today, even if it s only the ability for telephone agents to view a caller s web interaction history. Platform Optimisation Seamless Experience Brick-and-Mortar Customer Service Social Media Moving towards a truly integrated Omni-Channel strategy that provides a single blended experience across the customer s choice of channels and devices can dramatically reduce the cost of contact center operations. Any innovation strategy should also take account of this. Integration can help you resolve existing problems around disjointed service, where each new channel simply adds another way to get a bad experience. Instead, an Omni-Channel strategy will allow you to join the dots, to get a complete picture of the customer. Direct Mail Apps 24/7 Online E-Commerce Multi-Channel thinking has often meant just ticking the box for , chat, social media or other new channels. Adding another channel as a separate experience effectively increases the number of ways that you can disappoint the customer. Omni-Channel focuses on blending together these channels, reducing duplication of effort, allowing more flexible resourcing and improving the customer experience by ensuring that a customer who has failed on one channel is helped to succeed on the next. Omnichannel 11

12 Resources Sometimes organizations need skilled people or a skilled team not the technology. Sometimes organizations need skilled people or a skilled team not the technology. Trying to maintain current platforms, managing minor upgrades, switching to new solutions including the Cloud or wondering how to be innovative by further optimizing current solutions is a huge challenge. The 2015 IT report in Computer Weekly states 96.4% of European organizations will not have an increased budget for the coming year. Resource costs are a significant part of those budgets. The challenge of getting the right level of resources available at the right time as well as finding specialist resources to deal with one off events in a project can be the difference between meeting targets and overshooting budgets. As a leading of supplier of resources we frequently hear that projects are significantly hampered or unable to start because they do not have resources at all. One of the reasons for this scarcity of expert resources is the pace of innovation. At PSS our clients tell us that the #1 problem is that a shortage in skills is the major roadblock in moving forward with innovation and delivering projects on time and in budget. 12

13 How Can PSS Help With functionality moving from enterprise to consumer devices, businesses need stable systems to plug in more and more innovations. As a result, many organizations want to extend the life of their existing investment and add these innovations. PSS has world class 3rd party support and transition capabilities. We also have a range of innovations that integrate with existing technology to more efficiently manage your business and the improve the customer experience. Resources - Whether you need a single specialist for a day or team for a year read more Third Party Support - A wide range of flexible solutions to extend the life of existing infrastructure read more Transition - Helping you understand the role of innovation and its impact on migration projects read more Desktop - Developing and delivering Agent desktops and increasing their functionality read more Visual IVR - As part of your Multi-Channel/Omni-Channel strategy Visual IVR is one of the new ways to link your contact to your web and apps creating a seamless Omni-Channel experience read more Monitoring - Setting your goal to having a single pane of glass view to measure the customer experience across disparate systems read more Reporting - Develop an approach to be able to quickly and easily view end to end reporting across the whole contact center infrastructure read more Call Recording Compliance - Developing an approach to strategies and technologies to stay one step ahead of the regulatory compliance risk read more Customer Experience - Practical services to help understand, manage and improve your customer experience, specially designed to build the bridge between Customer Experience, business process and technology read more 13

14 More about PSS Talk to our Experts PSS do everything from delivering complete multi-channel contact center solutions to providing support for individual contact center platforms, applications and projects. Providing competencies around Genesys, Aspect, Nortel, Avaya, Convergys, Nuance, Cisco, NICE, Acme Packet and many other major contact center technologies. We deliver world-class third party support and BAU services to keep the lights on, through to the transition of existing architecture, harnessing innovation in the design and deployment of new solutions. Talk to our Experts If you want to talk about the impact of Innovation on your technology or Customer Experience Call in US: Call in UK: Visit: Creative: 15_0007