Customer experience transformation is rapidly becoming a key business differentiator in the battle to retain customers and grow revenues and wallet share. But many businesses have yet to rise to this challenge, due to constraints imposed by their legacy Customer Relationship Management (CRM  ) platforms. As a result, they continue to focus on routine operational savings rather than dramatically improving their customers' experience and net promoter scores. These are among the main findings of a major global survey of international businesses across the UK, mainland Europe and the U.S. undertaken by Pegasystems (NASDAQ:PEGA), the industry leader in business process-driven customer experience transformation.
"Overall, 62% of respondents saw differentiating their value proposition by customer service rather than by product as essential or very important," says Amy Bethke, senior director of customer process management solutions at Pegasystems. "And this was reinforced by the fact that, as customers or consumers, an overwhelming 74% were very likely or likely to buy more from a company as a result of service excellence that goes beyond expectations."
"But this does not mean that they have been able to achieve these goals within their own business," Bethke adds. "While they aspire to transform their customers' experience, they often prioritize reductions in operational spend (seen to be the main challenge by 34% of respondents) over improvements to the customer experience. And only just more than half of the businesses questioned have a CRM solution that actually extends beyond the contact center and even fewer – just 43% – provide a consistent customer experience across all delivery channels. Perhaps most tellingly of all, only two in five have customer service represented at the board level. Clearly, traditional CRM approaches are not enough to enable these critical business goals."
An Intent-Driven Approach
As the broader economy shows signs of an upturn and spending plans on CRM increases, the survey also reflects businesses continuing to achieve 'more with less'. In addition, respondents typically believed that their existing CRM systems could perform better and do more. This reflects the fact that for most call centers the goal is limited by the technology approach to building up as much customer data as possible.
"However, all the data in the world can't help you at the point of call resolution," says Bethke. "It is becoming clear that customer data by itself is not enough As soon as the customer requires something, you typically need to involve other departments and systems beyond the call center. It is here that an intelligent, intent-driven CRM approach, exemplified by Pegasystems, takes customer service one critical step further – by allowing the business to actually look across the whole organization as part of a fully joined-up, end-to-end process, in dealing seamlessly with the customer's issue." (continued...)
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