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The Fundamentals of Customer Journey Analytics

Customer Journey Analytics (CJA) is an enterprise application that provides a 360-degree view of a customer’s interactions with an organization and evaluates their experience every step of the way, from the customer’s perspective. CJA solutions are intended to give enterprises a method for tracking, capturing and evaluating how their customers feel throughout their journey. Although CJA solutions identify high-level servicing trends and opportunities for the enterprise, they should also enable companies to understand their customers on an individual basis, and help to deliver a consistent, frictionless and personalized omni-channel experience. These solutions should make it easy, advantageous and desirable for customers to do business with them.

CJA Defined

DMG Consulting defines customer journey analytics as “an analytical solution that captures, measures, analyzes and evaluates the quality and outcome of the customer experience throughout all phases and interactions for all customer-facing touch points, channels and activities. This includes IVR and Web self-service, live-agent and back-office interactions, fulfillment or follow-up activities, and all actions initiated by the customer or agent on the customer’s behalf.” This is a broad definition that addresses all aspects of the customer relationship; CJA solutions are intended to help organizations view the customer experience from the customer/member/constituent perspective.

How CJA Works

Customer journey analytics solutions provide a map that depicts each customer’s interaction with an organization, from the first to the last touch. CJA solutions capture, analyze and deliver findings to managers so that they can use the information about a customer to identify areas of opportunity to improve and optimize each contact in order to deliver an outstanding experience.

Customer journey analytics solutions capture customer profile data from the customer relationship management (CRM) system, also known as the customer system of record. A CRM system tracks each customer’s relationship and history with a business. The CRM system is a repository for important information about the customer, including demographics, tenure, lifetime value, preferences, buying behaviors and patterns, etc. A CRM suite should be used to track all sales, marketing and servicing interactions, transactions and activities throughout all channels and touch points, including, calls, interactive voice response (IVR), emails, chat sessions, short message service (SMS), social media, as well as the Web, storefronts, branches, back-office, partners, etc.

Customer journey analytics solutions must be able to address structured and unstructured feedback from all customer-facing applications. Besides the data from the CRM solution, speech and text analytics solutions are an important source of direct customer feedback. Feedback actively collected from customer surveys, as well as passively collected from social media posts, should also be incorporated into the analysis. Although contact center quality assurance (QA) programs typically take an internal view of the customer experience, this information should also be fed into the CJA application, as it’s helpful to know if the organization and agent did what they were supposed to do at each touch point. It’s also a good idea to include data from the desktop analytics application to obtain a more complete view of how a customer was treated.

Final Thoughts

The benefits of CJA will be great, but the effort required to collect and process the data, as well as the more important task of adapting corporate culture, will be substantial and will take many years. CJA solutions will provide the transparency and visibility that will allow companies to put their customers’ needs first, facilitating an essential change of perspective and priorities for most organizations.

Ask the Experts

Question:
Can you give us some suggestions on how to enhance the agent interviewing process in our contact center so that it encompasses the multi-channel nature of the job?

Answer:
Hiring remains a critical and challenging task for contact centers. Everything works better with the right people. While it’s fine to intensively train new employees, it’s a lot easier if they come in with the right attitude and aptitude. Contact center managers should work with human resources to create detailed job descriptions (JDs) that specify daily responsibilities, educational background and prior experience. They should also develop a two-step interview process. The first phase is to interview people, using the channels in which they are going to be working. If you’re hiring people who are going to be asked to handle phone, email, chat and SMS, create a process that tests their skills interacting in each of these channels. If they pass the initial screening, invite them in for an interview. If they are virtual agents, conduct the “in-person” portion using Skype, WebEx or another video-type product. It is important for the candidate to be personable, professional and clearly interested in the job.

For the recruitment effort to be successful, contact center managers and HR should create an interview process that incorporates an initial test, a “channel” interview and an “in-person” follow-up. If designed properly, one person can handle all aspects of the interview, instead of involving many managers, which is more time-consuming and complicated… Read More

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DMG Consulting LLC is a leading independent research, advisory and consulting firm specializing in unified communications, contact centers, back-office and real-time analytics. Learn more at www.dmgconsult.com.