How to Implement a Successful Customer Experience Program
Massive investments are being made to improve overall customer experience, because companies of all sizes are now keenly aware that satisfied customers make it easier to cross-sell and upsell new products and services. The challenge has been finding the customer support software that enables organizations to interact with customers at a time when that customer is engaging with a company using multiple mediums.
To address that issue, Pegasystems this week released a major upgrade to its Pega Customer Service application that adds embedded case management capabilities, which connect customer service representatives to the applications needed to resolve each customer inquiry regardless of the communications medium being used by a customer at any given time.
Steve Kraus, senior director of product marketing for CRM Solutions at Pegasystems, says that depending on the issue and access to devices at hand, customers will shift between phone calls, emails and mobile applications to interact with a company. Regardless of the medium, however, they expect companies to remember their previous interactions. In addition, Kraus notes that they expect the customer service representative to have instant access to all relevant information.
Kraus says achieving that goal requires a new generation of “omni-channel” customer support applications that provide a modern user interface experience, but are also connected to multiple backend systems of customer records. In addition, that customer service application needs to be accessible from mobile computing devices because the customer service representative might not always be tied to a desk in a call center.
In general, organizations are trying to leverage IT to turn call centers into customer service functions that generate revenue by selling customers additional goods and services whenever they interact with them. The challenge, of course, is that those engagements are not likely to prove to be very fruitful if the customer service representative leading that interaction has little to no actual context about the customer in the first place.
