Customer Interaction Management is a type of software used for managing the interactions between an organization and its customers. More specifically, the purpose of Customer Interaction Management is to give value to all such interactions, making each and every one of them count. Its essential elements include understanding what it is that the customers need and how they behave in various situations and improving the experience for them in all areas in which they have direct intercourse. In this article we will explore some Customer Interaction Management tools that every savvy businessman must have.
Voice of the Customer
Number one on everybody’s list of Customer Interact Management tools goes by the most appropriate name of Voice of the Customer, which—like the ones in the sections immediately following—can be gotten from NICE. Voice of the Customer (VoC) will help you to understand things from the perspective of the customer and act upon that understanding. It is one element in a whole package of things. When you bring it up, you see a chart with the categories “Contact Center,” “Back Office,” “Branch & Retail” and “Self Service” stacked in a row of gray boxes on the left side of the screen, and the following things arranged from left to right in the following order, with their symbols given in parentheses and a description of what they do:
- Compliance & Risk (pencil and paper)—minimizing the risks that inevitably occur as a part of interaction with customers; preventing “contact center fraud” and seeing that the business complies with the Dodd-Frank Act (a law passed in 2010 to provide for greater “financial stability”)
- Workforce Optimization (three people)—motivating employees to behave in the optimum manner when dealing with customers; fostering “performance-driven operations”
- Operational Efficiency (gear wheels)—ensuring customer satisfaction by solving problems on first contact, leveraging “unique real-time capabilities”
- Voice of the Customer (person with sound waves)—solutions that ensure
- Sales & Retention (bar graph with arrow leading upwards)
At the bottom is a large gray box with the words “NICE Customer Interactive Hub.”
Retail Customer Experience
NICE has also provided the retail customers directly with the tools necessary to improve their experience. These people can interact with retail brands across a wide range of channels and expect the same results. Performance management capabilities are also included in the package.
Appointment Booking Software
Customer Interaction Management also makes it easier to deal with such problems as customers who make an appointment and then forget either to show up or to reschedule if the time turns out not to be convenient for them—or are not home when a field resource is delivered to them, so that the company is faced with the expense of another visit. Appointment booking software, is designed to give the customer more control over the booking process. The preferences of both the customer and the person making the appointment, as well as the route from the customer’s home to the headquarters, are all taken into account. The software can even re-optimize existing appointments when subsequent ones are made, so that everyone can be satisfied. The customer can also be notified of any changes over the browser.
Conclusion
Business people have always been fond of repeating the old adage, “The customer is always right.” But this saying has recently become more true than ever before. Today’s customers are much more influential and know much more than those in the past did, owing in large part to the proliferation of smartphones and tablets as well as of the Web itself. The need to not only provide the customers with what they want, but also to make their visits as pleasant as possible, is therefore correspondingly greater. That is where Customer Interaction Management tools such as the ones described above can be of tremendous value to the company that uses them.
Author Bio
Callie Cohane works with customer interaction management from nice.com to ensure that business is always running smoothly for everyone invloved!