sustainable service

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SUSTAINABLE SERVICE BUILDING SUCCESSFUL CUSTOMER JOURNEYS

Executive Summary

When it comes to sales and service delivery, most companies have a tendency to

focus on discrete elements and ignore the relationship of those elements to the larger

experience their customers are having when they go in search of a solution. This

myopic approach is focused on the micro view of a single interaction rather than the

macro view of the problem/resolution and lifetime journey, resulting in high levels of

effort and expense for everyone involved and missing broader opportunities along

the way.

Consider the following examples. Are consumers:

• Shopping for a mortgage—or—buying a home?

• Comparing airfares—or—taking a trip?

• Making a doctor’s appointment —or—managing a chronic illness?

In most cases, customers are in fact on a million different journeys – a collection of

complex and compound events undertaken to resolve a perceived need. If you

understand how the customer’s needs align to what you offer, you can proactively

lead (nudge) customers in a compelling, dynamic, personalized direction. Ultimately

every company needs to clearly answer one question: What Customer Experience

(CX) do you want to deliver?

The Service Process

At the most basic level, every sales and service organization considers three things

each time they interact with a customer.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Executive Summary .................. 1

The Service Process .................. 1

Streamlining the Journey ......... 6

Use Case Scenario: Buying a

Home........................................ 7

Journey Map ..................... 10

Stakeholder Map .............. 10

Analytics and Customer

Effort ................................. 13

Conclusion .............................. 14

Solution Components ............. 14

About Genesys ....................... 15

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1. What did they/we want? Most interactions are

initiated by the customer, looking for a solution to their

problem. Any real action first depends on identifying the

customer and their specific need. Because there are at

least two parties to every transaction, it’s important to

acknowledge that the company providing goods and

services has an interest as well. How well are these mutual

interests aligned?

2. What did we do? Once the customer and their need

have been identified, the company formulates a response.

Accurate and relevant responses drive a continued,

mutually beneficial relationship. How do you compile the

right response?

3. What was the result? After all is said and done, the

most important thing to assess is whether the objectives

of the customer and the company have been met. Was the

outcome delivered in the most effective and efficient way

possible?

Once these have been established, things start to get interesting. Leading companies

got that way by using customer interactions as part of their research and

development efforts. One way they do this is by examining the outcome of each

interaction to determine:

1. Was it desirable? Did both parties get something meaningful from the

interaction? Will it cause them to have a positive memory and share that with

others?

2. What causes desirable results? When we unpack the traits of top performers,

we often find that they do certain things in a predicable way. Top salespeople

are able to identify prospects that have a high likelihood of converting, and

quickly move on when they sense there is no upside potential. Some service

agents get consistently high customer satisfaction scores. In both cases, the

behaviors can be identified if desired.

3. Can we anticipate, nudge and make outcomes repeatable? Ultimately the

ideal sales and service process all comes down to helping everyone involved

make better choices. This requires an ability to quickly put a value on one

choice over another based on information available, which in turn helps us

understand what information is necessary to make good choices. In a digital

age of empowered consumers with unlimited access to information, speed

matters. Helping customers make informed decisions, creating awareness of


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a need the customer hasn’t yet even defined, and pointing customers in the

best direction is at the core of sustainable service delivery.

These individual steps can be turned into a repeatable process for every single

interaction customers have with the company, making it easy to drill down and ask

much deeper questions. It’s not just enough to know what the customer wanted, we

need to understand how they ended up in this specific interaction channel. What was

there about how they identified their need that made them think this was the right

place to solve the problem? Was this the first channel of choice, or did they start out

somewhere else, meet a new challenge or fail altogether, and then end up here? Path

analytics can be leveraged to improve individual channels so that they help the

customer resolve their need at the first point of contact. In many situations that first

point will be self-service, which is also the lowest cost place to meet their needs.

FIGURE 1: SERVICE PROCESS

Next we can unpack the ‘What did we do?’ question to understand the real intent of

sales and service delivery by asking ‘What should we do?’ This is what fuels Next Best

Offer (NBO) or Next Best Action (NBA), the holy grail of any company—particularly

when the action is highly tailored to meet the needs of both parties.


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Chief Marketing Officers (CMO) own the relationship between brand, marketing, and

customer experience. The offer management process (NBO) relies on three basic

elements to identify targets and match opportunities at the right moment. Each are

treated as distinct disciplines that are fluid in nature.

1. Offer Inventory is developed and catalogued by the marketing department.

Among other things, it can be designed to focus on new products and

services, introduce a sense of urgency, highlight competitive differentiation,

and ultimately increase wallet share.

2. Personalized Customer Segmentation is the practice of dividing a customer

base into groups of individuals that are similar in specific ways relevant to

marketing, such as age, gender, interests and spending habits. It can be a

powerful means to identify unmet customer needs. Companies that identify

underserved segments can then outperform the competition by developing

uniquely appealing products and services. Customer Segmentation is most

effective when a company tailors offerings to segments that are the most

profitable and serves them with distinct competitive advantages. The best

models are based on value because they determine the profit potential of

each segment by analyzing the revenue and cost impacts of serving each

segment, and then target segments according to their profit potential and the

company's ability to serve them in a proprietary way.

3. Customer Life-Cycle at the most basic levels can be deconstructed into four

distinct phases: the Awareness phase when the customer first realizes they

have a need or problem; the Selection phase when they identify potential

solutions, compare and evaluate features and benefits, and eventually decide

on the solution that will most closely meet their needs; the Use phase when

the selection made is employed for its intended purpose; and ultimately a

decision by the customer to either Grow with the provider by consuming

more offerings, or to Leave in search of better solutions elsewhere.

FIGURE 2: CUSTOMER LIFE-CYCLE

Awareness Selection Use

Grow

Leave


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Next Best Offer aims to assist customers in the Selection and Grow phases by making

them aware of offerings, and benefits that can be derived from building a relationship

over time—Customer Lifetime Value. For a financial services company, this typically

begins when a Direct Deposit (savings/checking) account is opened. From there, most

customers will add a credit card and set up bill pay services. There could be an

opportunity to create a vehicle for investing and retirement account management. In

time, some customers will also need a mortgage when they buy a home, and establish

custodial accounts for the children. This lifetime journey may span twenty years, but

it’s clear how the collective share of wallet increases over that period.

FIGURE 3: CUSTOMER LIFETIME VALUE

This is where the ability to assign a value becomes pivotal because it helps the

company determine if, when and how to engage with customers. For example, if a

customer visits a banking website and authenticates, it reveals the customer’s core

banking information such as accounts held, balances and payment history. If the

customer browses for loan rates or a new credit card, the bank can leverage the

known information to decide whether they want to extend an offer for products to

the customer—or not, as the case may be.


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FIGURE 4: ENHANCED SERVICE PROCESS

If the outcome was not desirable, what steps can be taken to recover? If we have a

solid understanding of what the customer wanted and why we were not able to meet

that need, it’s much easier to formulate a response. Getting the facts straight is critical

for addressing the failure from a position of confidence.

And finally, as we develop a deeper understanding of what it is that causes desirable

results we discover the elements of sales and service that are truly responsible for

driving a given outcome. That in turn can be mined to create a repeatable process

that is focused on efficiency, simultaneously eliminating the multitude of things that

simply waste time. That profile is then the yardstick by which the sales and service

delivery team is measured to gain real insight into how employees are spending their

time.

Streamlining the Journey

Understanding customer journeys is a prerequisite to managing those journeys. There

are many ways this can be done: directly through surveys, or inferred through

interaction analytics and leveraging big data. Regardless of the method, core

elements for consideration involve:


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• What the customer wants. It’s critical to stay focused on the brand promise

of core offerings when addressing this issue. The BMW brand is all about “The

Ultimate Driving Machine,” not low prices. If the customer wants low prices,

they’re looking in the wrong place.

• How the customer feels. Daniel Kahneman has written extensively about

research in this area that looks at peak points of pleasure and pain that

people experience on life’s journeys, and the relationship of these points to

how each journey ends. Even journeys that have significant pain points can

endow the person with a better memory if things end well.

When these concepts are fairly well understood, opportunities to streamline and

build successful journeys begin to arise. A set of principles collectively known as

design thinking is the best tool we have for creating meaningful interactions and

developing a responsive, flexible organizational culture.

David Edelman and Marc Singer of McKinsey outline the new customer journey and

four distinct but interconnected capabilities companies must have to respond to

disruption and deliver both a consistent and personalized customer experience:

automation, to smoothly carry customers through each step of their online path;

personalization, to create a customized experience for each individual; contextual

Interaction, to engage customers and appropriately sequence the steps they take;

and journey innovation, to add improvements that enhance and extend the journey

and foster customer loyalty.

The service design goals should be clear:

• Point customers to the best path for prescriptive resolution: based on your

need, we recommend you do the following. Based on what we know about

others who have had a similar need in the past, this is the best channel and

path to success.

• Decide dynamically if you want to engage, and how best to do it.

• Identify discrete actions that produce optimal, repeatable results.

How exactly do we make all of this work – individually and collectively? Let’s take a

look at some use case examples to find out.

Use Case Scenario: Buying a Home

When someone decides to buy a home, they embark on a long—and often painful—

journey. First, getting pre-qualified for a loan and enlisting the services of a real estate


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agent to help find the right home. During the initial stages, the agent will determine

how much home the buyer can afford, and narrow the search of available properties

accordingly. Once the ideal home is found, a contract is negotiated. On completion, a

series of tasks are spawned to obtain a loan, secure a clear title, perform inspections

and repairs, and satisfy insurance requirements.

On their own, each of these are handled by different companies with their own set of

requirements and procedures that exist in a vacuum, with little awareness of other

parts simultaneously Taken together, all of these help move the customer from

‘prospect’ to ‘homeowner.’

The most important element of buying a home is the mortgage. There are many ways

customers can do this, but many will ask the realtor for recommendations on loan

brokers, shop online for mortgage offerings between well-known banks, or visit their

existing bank. Regardless of the option taken, both the prospective lender and the

prospective buyer have an interest in a successful outcome. The prospective buyer

wants a favorable mortgage rate; the prospective lender wants loans that are likely

to be repaid. Using service design guidelines, what sort of a journey can we imagine

that meets the needs of both parties to the deal? Let’s examine the five-step

mortgage portion of the home buying process using service design goals of

automation, personalization, contextual interaction and journey innovation so that

we can see how to point customers in the right direction, decide if there is a reason

to engage, and identify discrete actions that produce optimal, repeatable results.

FIGURE 5: MORTGAGE PROCESS

Get Mortgage Pre-Approved

Search for Homes

Write Offers & Negotiate

Preliminary Loan

Processing

Preliminary Underwriting

Final Processing

Final Underwriting

Closing, Funding,

Recording

Possession


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1. Prequalification: During the initial consultation, the loan officer reviews

various loan products with the prospective buyer to determine which will be

most appropriate.

2. Application: The buyer completes and submits a loan application that

specifies the property address, the borrower’s employment history, current

debts and current assets. This loan officer uses this information to obtain a

report on the borrower’s financial status with a credit reporting agency.

3. Processing: Disclosure notices are issued, and the borrower’s employment,

income and assets are verified. Loan processing specialists work with

underwriters to perform a property title search, obtain appraisal, inspection

and proof of insurance.

4. Underwriting: The underwriter may develop loan stipulations that need

further clarification or proof in order to clear the loan to close.

5. Closing: The loan is approved and closing attorney or escrow agents are

advised. At closing, all final documents are signed, witnessed and/or

notarized. The loan is funded and recorded with the relevant government

office.

For this example, we will use:

Persona:

• Brian is a 35-year old architect, married with no children.

Stakeholders:

• Kathi is the realtor helping Brian find a home and mortgage

• Joanne is selling her home to Brian

• Jacob is the loan officer

• Karen is the loan processor

• Sara is the loan underwriter

• Stephen is the escrow agent

The Chief Customer Officer or Journey Prediction Manager would create a map of

these stages using service design principles that will help illustrate the journey and

calculate journey return-on-investment, provide a storyboard and description of

events, and show the interaction channels, customer emotions and level of

engagement. Much like the research of Kahneman, mapping the emotional journey

makes it easy to understand how the customer feels at any given moment. More

importantly, it helps align the customer emotion to the brand promise and identify

areas where budgets should be allocated for improvement.


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Journey Map

FIGURE 6: CUSTOMER JOURNEY MAP

Stakeholder Map

In addition, we can create a stakeholder map depicting the relationship of all key

players in this transactions. In this example Brian is shown in the center of the map in

the innermost circle. In the next ring we find four key players to this transaction: the

seller, the realtor, the escrow agent and the loan officer.


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FIGURE 7: CUSTOMER STAKEHOLDER MAP

In the outer circle we find supporting players for the loan origination process,

including the loan processer and the loan underwriter.

Collectively, these tools show a given process and participants end-to-end.

Our objective is to apply automation, personalization, contextual interaction and

journey innovation to this process. Let’s take a closer look at each.

• Automation streamlines journey steps. If we start from a premise that the

shortest path from an inquiry to a funded mortgage involves electronic

document submission and storage, and utilize digital signatures where

required, we eliminate the need for all forms of paper documentation. This

saves time, postage, and storage costs and makes retrieval and sharing easy.

It also allows us to apply business rules to the process around filtering, sorting

and prioritizing work. For example, an electronic loan application could only

be submitted when required fields were complete. Addresses supplied could

be checked against postal databases to validate accuracy prior to submission.

Employment history would need rational dates. The math would need to

work for loan amount requested, salary and other sources of income, and

debts. The application would remain in the applicants control until these

were completed. The same automation process provides a chain of custody


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on the application so that it makes it easy to know exactly where one might

be at any moment—much like ordering a pizza online and knowing when it

went into the oven and was out for delivery.

• Personalization uses information about a customer—either based on past

interactions or collected from external sources—to instantaneously

customize the experience. Initially this would include basic profile elements

like preferred language and communication channels. Once this information

is known, the customer no longer needs to provide it in order to obtain

service or updates.

• Contextual Interaction uses knowledge about where a customer is in a

journey to deliver them to the next set of interactions. No sense in asking the

customer to repeat or go back, and instead keep things moving forward at

each step of the way. If the customer begins something in one channel and

subsequently spawns a new interaction in the same or different channel, the

first prompt should be to ask if the customer wants to resume where they left

off. This includes proactively reaching out to the customer with status

updates and reminders when due dates are coming up.

• Journey innovation extends the interaction to new sources of value, such as

new services, for both the customer and the brand. Analytics can prove

invaluable here to identify new opportunities and needs. Surveys can validate

historical outcomes as a way of providing permission to renew or offer

related products and services, and capture service failures so that they can

be resolved in a timely manner.

This approach is more holistic, and helps to understand both sides of the equation:

what the customer wants, and what the company wants. Designing a triage process

that asks the right questions up front creates a low barrier to entry for the customer

and makes access easy; at the same time, it positions the company early on to make

an informed decision about whether they want to engage. For example, assume that

our borrower, Brian, started this journey online by checking mortgage rates. He’s

asked to provide information to a few basic questions: name and contact, down

payment and desired loan amount (to determine loan to value (LTV) amount),

employment status and postal code of the home covered by the loan. With just a few

questions the bank can immediately decide to engage; selectively asking the

borrower a few extra questions could even help qualify them for a more attractive

rate.


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Once the decision has been made to engage, the bank has an opportunity to

proactively lead (nudge) customers in a compelling, dynamic, personalized direction.

They might offer a chat session to the borrower to discuss various rate plans because

analytics has shown this to be the most effective path to conversion. If the discussion

migrates to the phone, all relevant information is passed so that the customer does

not need to ‘start over’ with facts that have already been established.

Similarly, the existing customer that visits the bank’s website to check current

mortgage rates should present a huge red flag! The customer is clearly looking to

make a move from their current mortgage and the bank only has a matter of seconds

to engage. Using known information about the customer, payment history, property,

and other accounts held at the bank, a decision can be made in an instant to probe

deeper (“Are you looking to refinance?”) and retain the customer. The same

information may also point to an opportunity to not engage if the customer has a

poor track record, in which case the opportunity will—thankfully—shift to another

lender.

Analytics and Customer Effort

Analytics plays another key role in helping to evaluate the level of effort experienced

by the customer during the process. Extensive research by Matthew Dixon, Nick

Toman and Rick Delisi of the Corporate Executive Board, has proven time and again

that effort is the single biggest factor to customer loyalty. Measuring effort can be

done in several ways:

• Evaluating task completion rates in self-service (online and voice) to establish

how far customers can get before they need assistance.

• Examining opt-out points in voice self-service, especially when changes are

made to the options.

• Directly asking customers with a survey question: “The company made it

easy for me to handle my issue.” The customer is asked to answer (on a

common 1-7 scale used in most customer service surveys) whether they

agree or disagree with the statement.

At the same time, analytics can play an important role for the corporate marketing

leaders by helping them evaluate the overall effectiveness of their initiatives in real-

time. The merchant John Wanamaker is often quoted as saying: "Half the money I

spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half." The right

framework for analysis enables continuous improvement in both promotional


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activities and customer acquisition by providing insights into resource, process and

management outcomes and limitations.

Conclusion

Taken together, these concepts provide insight every company needs to clearly

answer one question: What Customer Experience (CX) do you want to deliver? We’ve

examined the service delivery process, the role of Next Best Offer and Next Best

Action, applied service design principles to a standard experience many people have

every day, and outlined various methods of streamlining the journey.

One thing should be clear: continual application of these principles will shorten the

distance between the customer’s identified need and a branded solution offered by

the company. The nimble company that delivers smarter results faster will attract and

retain the most loyal customers, and do so at the lowest cost.

Solution Components

Genesys Customer Interaction Management (CIM) and Genesys Voice Platform

(GVP) is the framework used for routing and reporting on customer interactions.

Genesys Workload Management consists of four main components:

• intelligent Workload Distribution (iWD) - Supports customer service delivery

beyond the contact center by tracking, prioritizing and routing tasks or work

items.

• Workforce Optimization - Reduces staffing costs, improves productivity and

protects service levels with accurate forecasting and scheduling for all

interaction channels.

• Skills Management - Proactively assesses and maintains employee skills so

they have the right skill sets to handle work streams across all interaction

channels.

• Interactive Insights – Historical reporting that delivers a complete picture of

employee performance and work streams across multiple operations and

channels.

These components work together to provide visibility to all customer interactions,

which can then be tracked and used for forecasting and scheduling resources.


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Genesys Interaction Analytics refers to the analysis of all interactions between

contact centers and customers, including telephone, email, a web chat session, and

social media.

Genesys CX Analytics gives business-centric analysis of contact center data to provide

increased insight into the customer experience. Detailed reporting of application

performance includes call data, Voice User Interface elements, agent performance,

SLAs and more. Supervisors have everything they need to optimize efficiency and

performance, from a mobile-accessible supervisor desktop to real-time metrics,

reporting and call monitoring.

About Genesys

Genesys is driven by our cause to save the world from bad customer service. We do

it by applying a relentless focus on the consumer perspective of the customer

experience — and the impact it has on your business. Genesys works with its

customers and partners world-wide to deliver the experience that today’s digital

consumers want. It all adds up to one seamless customer conversation.

Great customer service extends beyond the contact center to the processes and work

streams involved in meeting your commitments. Genesys products give you insight

into and control over these processes, so you can truly track the customer experience

from end to end.


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Corporate Headquarters

Genesys

2001 Junipero Serra Blvd.

Daly City, CA 94014

USA

Worldwide Inquiries:

Tel: +1 650 466 1100

Fax: +1 650 466 1260

E-mail: [email protected]

www.genesyslab.com

Genesys is a leading provider of contact center and customer service software — with more than 2,200 customers in

80 countries. With over 20 years of contact center innovation and experience, Genesys software directs more than

100 million interactions every day, maximizing the value of customer engagement and differentiating the experience

by driving personalization and multichannel customer service — as well as extending customer service across the

enterprise to optimize processes and the performance of customer-facing employees.

For more information visit: www.genesyslab.com, or call +1 888 GENESYS.

Genesys and the Genesys logo are registered trademarks of Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories, Inc. All other

company names and logos may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders. © 2013 Genesys

Telecommunications Laboratories, Inc. All rights reserved.

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