The Six Steps to Effective Customer Engagement: Step 3, Deliver Seamless Experiences for Delighted Customers

(Part of an ongoing series of articles about Customer Engagement strategies.)

Automating processes and empowering customer self-service by offering rich multichannel points of engagement can result in operations cost savings of 33% or more.

Market leadership requires delighting customers every time over a sustained period. Each interaction should be direct and personalized: from empowering new customers to on-board themselves, to delivering compelling and personalized offers and providing consistent experiences across the lifespan of the relationship, to giving today’s customers the ability to self-help that they are demanding. These personalized interactions can result from previous purchasing history, channel preference, and up-to-date transaction information from inside the company or across affiliate organizations. And, when the situation calls for it, a specific customer engagement needs to flow across departments and across channels without making the customer feel like they are doing all the work.

The reality is that companies often fail to delight their customers, not because they don’t want to do so, but because they simply don’t have the technology required to make it possible. Companies can’t provide the information necessary to meet the customer’s expectations, and they can’t offer the same level of service across different channels. Customers can do one thing via a web portal, another via an IVR system, and yet another only if they call and speak to a live representative – and information does not flow freely between the various systems and departments.

Agile, enabling technologies must be brought to bear to expose the right data and provide access to features at the right time, ensuring the customer only has to answer questions a single time whether they are sitting in their office or using their cell phone on vacation.

The Six Steps to Effective Customer Engagement: Step 2, Have Smarter Conversations

(Part of an ongoing series of articles about Customer Engagement strategies.)

Companies must be prepared to engage ‘anytime and anywhere’ with their prospects, customers and partners. However, critical data and the customer-oriented information required for smart conversations is scattered across back-office systems and repositories, each with unique data structures and dedicated interfaces that are typically not designed to engage directly with customers. This makes it difficult to access, collect, and present relevant information in a meaningful way, limiting the ways that companies can reach out to customers and vice versa. Customers demand rich conversations and interactions that draw upon the information and functionality of this conglomeration of business systems, and they want those conversations to happen across the entire spectrum of communication channels.

Smart conversations should be customer-focused, direct, informed and personalized. Relevant data should be seamlessly collected from across the company to deliver real-time historical context; and the entry of new transaction information must be coordinated across processes that flow throughout the enterprise. Siloed systems make this a near impossibility, so enabling technology must be applied to draw upon the power and previous investment in legacy systems and synchronize real-time data prior to either reaching out to the customer or enabling self-service capabilities.

Smart conversations can be automated and allow customer or partner self-help; they can be two-party with an internal knowledge expert providing guidance to a customer; or they can be multi-part and collaborative. But, in all cases, the right information has to be provided at the right time and delivered effectively – which is only possible when a company is aware of the information and functionality they already possess. What’s more, that information and functionality must then be accessible by relevant parties in an effortless and transparent manner.

By breaking down technology barriers and exposing the richness of existing investments, companies can provide customers with positive engagement each and every time they interact.

Human-Facing BPM

For the last couple of years, the Gartners and Forresters of the world have been pointing out that traditional BPM offerings don't handle people nearly as well as they handle systems. This is generically called "the people problem" for BPM. And, one way the analysts described this was by saying that the BPM offerings weren't "human-centric" enough.

Lo and behold, what do all the traditional BPM players start doing? Saying their products are, in fact, "human-centric." Then they point to all the ways you can depict human involvement in processes, etc. In this manner, they basically took ownership of the analysts' own way to describe their shortcoming to hide the fact that they still have that very same shortcoming. Nice trick.

So, what I'd like to do is talk about Human-Facing BPM instead of human-centric BPM...since the industry has pretty much obliterated the meaning of human-centric. But, that begs the question, "What exactly do you mean by Human-Facing BPM?" Well, I'm glad you (I) asked...

Human-Facing means exactly that: the part of a process that actually faces the person or people engaged with a process, and including the very interfaces they use to accomplish their tasks. This is vastly different from human-centric which essentially defines the fact that there needs to be a person or people involved -- and to be fair, sometimes even includes the characteristics of that involvement -- but doesn't actually contain fully functional ways for people to accomplish the involvement.

For a BPM tool to be truly holistic, it really needs to go that next step and provide appropriate user interfaces -- in multiple channels of communication, not just a proprietary web portal -- based off the definition of the step that requires human involvement. And, in order to do that, it almost certainly requires a fundamental re-architecting for any BPM tool that wasn't built with that in mind in the first place, because it involves state management, session management (which some do) and also flexible and abstractable interface generation (or "rendering") which almost no viable commercial offerings can do.

So, when thinking about which BPM tool might be right for what you or your company is trying to do, make sure you think about the real human-facing aspects of your processes and see if the tool(s) being considered really can give you a leg up by automatically providing a wide range of rich, consistent, and user-friendly interfaces in all the different channels people are using these days: web pages, VXML/IVR systems, mobile devices, social media, and beyond.