New Customer Interaction Report

There is a new report out by cScape about the challenges of customer interaction management. Company respondents said that the five "greatest barriers” to delivering the best possible customer experience were: 1) Lack of resources / time (regarded as a “great barrier” by 66% of company respondents) 2) Disconnected systems & technologies (50%) 3) Lack of skills and training (38%) 4) Lack of finances (37%) 5) Lack of regular processes and / or suitable methodology (36%) Appetite for “Web 2.0 technologies”: - 42% are planning to apply user-generated content (UGC) to their websites in the next 12 months; 23% are using it already. - 35% are planning to use corporate blogs in the next 12 months; 17% are using them already. - 33% are planning to use podcasting in the next 12 months; 18% using it already. - 35% planning to use videocasting in the next 12 month; 17% using it already. Gap between aspirations and reality: - Almost two thirds of company respondents (64%) believe that joined-up online and offline experiences are essential for engaging with their audience, but 60% of companies are either not very advanced at mapping customer experiences and identifying touch-points (36%), or admit they have to start looking at this because they are not doing it all (24%). - Half of respondents (51%) believe that personalised experiences are essential for audience engagement, with a further 44% believing they are useful. But despite the perceived importance of personalisation, 37% of company respondents are not providing it at all. What I find interesting about this is that as always getting the basics right goes a long way to making an impact on the quality of your customer interaction. Do you capture all the relevant customer information "upfront" in the process? can you see all your customer data when serving the customer? did you close out the call at the first touch? etc. etc. If you are not the kind of company that gets this basic stuff right, you are (in my opinion) unlikely to get any of the 2.0 stuff right either.

technorati tags: customer, interaction, voice, messaging, customer, contact