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Tuesday, September 6, 2011
Software That Manages the Customer Experience. REALLY?
Sometimes there’s not much more that you can
do than laugh. I read an interview recently with the head of a software firm that claims to specialize
in Customer Experience. The CEO opened by taking a shot at his competition: the CRM software providers. He claimed that CRM software
has historically been about sales force automation and contact center or marketing automation. He referred to it as “an
inward-facing business application primarily focused on making company employees more efficient” but “not something
that improves customer satisfaction”.
The CEO then went on to explain how his firm has the core intellectual property that allows
it to anticipate and predict what questions people are going to ask, and how it provides the self-service capability that
allowed people to get immediate answers so they can buy more and so they are more satisfied. If they did need to do an escalation,
he continued, they also provide the agent desktop in the call center. He concluded by explaining that their contact center
solution raises agent productivity by 15%.
If it
weren’t a major corporation presented through a respected website, I would have thought he was joking. Not
that he’s wrong about the CRM software companies, but rather that he is guilty of a similar crime. He’s taken
another popular concept, “Customer Experience”, and force fit it to the software he has to sell. It’s
not that answering customer questions, and providing an escalation process it’s important, but it certainly is far from
the total interactions and experiences that a customer has with a brand.
8:54 am edt
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