Inside this Issue:

• Viewpoint:  First Contact Sets the Stage for Successful Customer Relationships

• Turning Real-time Customer Feedback into Revenue and Profit

• CustomerSat Releases eCEM™ 4.2

Customer relationships don’t begin when the sales contract is signed.  They begin at the first contact with your future customers.  Perhaps you met them at a trade show.   Or, they may have responded to a direct mail campaign or print advertisement.  Perhaps they found you through you partner or distribution network.  No matter what channel your prospects use to enter your organization’s sales funnel, that contact sets the stage for your continuing relationship. 

Connecting with your prospect in a meaningful, personalized manner immediately after first contact reaps double rewards.  First, you can quickly identify their exact needs and intent to purchase.  Second, and equally important, is the opportunity to demonstrate that your company is both proactive and responsive.  Automating this important communication process requires advanced technology that empowers seamless, unobtrusive, and personalized lead qualification.  At CustomerSat, we are committed to delivering meaningful solutions to maximize connections between company and customer, beginning with first contact. 

SalesConnect, the newest solution within CustomerSat’s Enterprise Customer Experience (eCEM™) system, uses the power of the Internet to deliver focused, customized questionnaires to all prospects on a continuous basis.  Real-time feedback is then used to arm the sales representative with critical data such as:

• exact product needs

• budget allocations

• immediacy of needs

• “hot” issues and concerns

• competitive awareness

• upcoming RFP closing dates

Personalization and customization are standard. They not only increase response rates but also reinforce that your organization treats customers as individuals.  All online communications – from email invitation to final thank-you notices – are personalized with the prospect’s name and other information about the prospect.  More advanced customization lets you further personalize survey questions.  If prospects indicate an urgent need for your technology or service but are looking at your competitors, specific questions can be presented that define your product vs. the competition.  And it doesn’t stop there.  After submitting the feedback form, a customized thank-you message is delivered, giving a link to more information about the competitive strengths of your product. 

Equipped with details about the prospect’s situation, your sales team can take fast, informed action to follow-through and drive the sale forward.  All data collected through SalesConnect is available for comprehensive, real-time analysis.  Strategic analysis allows companies to continuously build the effectiveness of:

• lead-generation

• marketing messages

• product information

Following each opportunity comes the task of gathering valuable information from both your wins and losses.  For each successful sale, SalesConnect—Win/Loss will answer key question: Why did they choose you?  Will they serve as a reference?  What were the critical factors that closed the deal? Pinpointing what went right lets you reinforce these winning strategies.

But lost customers are valuable, too.  SalesConnect—Win/Loss tells you why the sale was lost.  What competitive differentiators worked against you?  Are there other opportunities to explore?  How do you compare to competitors on the dimensions most important to prospects?  These insights let you refocus your strategies and win future deals that would otherwise be lost.

Building any customer relationship begins with first contact.  How you manage the early steps in the relationship, quickly contacting the prospect with swift follow-though, begins the process with a positive light for all parties concerned.

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Scientists tell us that the human brain has thousands as many times inputs as outputs.  Optic and auditory nerves and spinal cord are among the high-bandwidth inputs; speech and motor control are among the relatively few low-bandwidth outputs.  Few would dispute the effectiveness of the resulting human design.

Similarly, highly effective enterprises have many more inputs than outputs.  All individuals and organizations that touch or are touched by an enterprise – customers, prospects, suppliers, employees, shareholders, partners (in our parlance, all “customers”) – have knowledge that can benefit enterprises. Some of this valuable knowledge is reflected in, or can be inferred from, customer purchases and support transactions.  But the vast majority of it – future intentions, perceptions, competitive knowledge, willingness to recommend, satisfaction and other attitudes – cannot.  Enterprises that systematically gather and channel these “inputs” to the employees who can act on them enjoy tremendous advantages in competitiveness and profitability.

Enterprise Sensory Nervous System
Customer Experience Management (CEM) systems serve large organizations in the same way that optic, auditory, and other nerves serve the brain.  CEM systems enable enterprises to fully tap the knowledge of customers in real time, so employees can act intelligently, and immediately. 

As illustrated in Figure 1, effective CEM systems gathers feedback from every key point of contact between enterprises and their customers – from call centers to web sites, from bill presentment to trade shows – and deliver that feedback in forms actionable by potentially any and every employee in the enterprise.  Rating scores, tables, trend lines, statistics, suggestions, complaints and praise are presented graphically and can be analyzed by product, region, sales or service rep, or any other way desired, enabling employees to pinpoint concerns, opportunities, and responsive action, as shown in Figure 2. 

CEM systems deliver feedback intelligently, without swamping employees with irrelevant data or barraging customers with unreasonable requests.

CustomerSat, Inc. has designed and implemented online feedback systems since 1997, with our comprehensive eCEM™ (Enterprise Customer Experience Management) system.  We have discovered that the effectiveness and productivity of every employee, from CEO to service rep, can be enhanced by the right stream of real-time customer feedback.  Regional sales directors use feedback from customers in their regions to make staffing and resource decisions. Product line managers use feedback from users of their products to prioritize new features and plan marketing campaigns.  Customer service reps are empowered to improve their skills and work habits by responding to feedback from customers they have served.  Web operations uses feedback to enhance web site effectiveness; manufacturing uses feedback to enhance product reliability.  CustomerSat’s eCEM “data marts” – central repositories of customer feedback easily accessible to authorized users throughout the enterprise – enable managers at all levels to monitor and manage performance in real time.  eCEM real-time alerts drive workflow and enable immediate responses to customer concerns and opportunities. 

In general, CEM systems, such as CustomerSat’s eCEM, provide a better, common understanding of the external world throughout the enterprise, helping align objectives and priorities of people across all departments, divisions, and business units.

CustomerSat’s eCEM extends a CRM at Leading Healthcare Services Company
CustomerSat’s eCEM system integrates with and complements enterprise applications, in particular Customer Relationship Management systems (Figure 4). While CRM systems track behavior (which customers purchased how much of what and visited which areas of a web site), our eCEM system tracks attitudes and intentions (e.g., satisfaction, future purchase intentions, likelihood to recommend).  As a result, eCEM shows why particular results occurred that were reported by CRM. 

For example, CRM systems may indicate that financial services customers in the northeast region bought 10% less of product X last week than they did in an earlier week.  eCEM indicates that that drop in sales was due to dissatisfaction with reliability of product X; a lack of technical skills in the representative serving those customers; the introduction of a superior product from a competitor in that region; or a combination of the above factors. 

By integrating with a CRM system, CustomerSat’s eCEM solution extends a major healthcare service provider’s PeopleSoft CRM system.  Each night, the PeopleSoft system sends a data file containing records of customer cases closed the previous day to CustomerSat’s eCEM hosting center. After business rules are applied, email invitations are sent to customers who have not previously been surveyed in the last 45 days.  The invitation leading the customer to an online survey is personalized with the customer name and case data provided by the CRM system.  This level of personalization and ease of accessing the survey have helped this client enjoy a response rate of nearly 60%.

As soon as customers submits their feedback, online reports and analytics are updated for, and alerts emailed to, the appropriate employees throughout the enterprise in real time.  Authorized employees can use information from the CRM system to analyze data to pinpoint responsive action, for example, case type, severity, sales region, customer size or type, product type, service rep, day of week, or time of day.  Later, selected customer feedback can then be sent from the eCEM to the CRM system to become part of the customer record. Such “360-degree” integration enables a support rep contacting a customer to be particularly sensitive to satisfaction drivers, such as technical skills, promptness, or courtesy, with which the customer may not have been fully satisfied on the last interaction. 

CustomerSat’s eCEM system also integrates with e-commerce web sites to enable all web operations, online marketing, product management, online fulfillment, and business development, etc. – to act immediately on real-time feedback from online customers and prospects.  Web site visitors can be surveyed as soon as they complete a transaction or as they exit a site from any page (Figure 5). 

CustomerSat’s “smart” technology creates questionnaires that reflect customers’ purchase histories or sections of the site visited.  According to this company’s manager of business development and planning,  As a CustomerSat eCEM eCommerce customer explains, “Real-time reporting is an invaluable resource to quickly turn data into actionable information."

Global eCEM at a Telecommunications Company

CustomerSat’s eCEM system integrates with all enterprise databases, not just CRM systems.  Integrating with Supply Chain Management systems provides real-time feedback from suppliers; with HR systems, from employees; and with Enterprise Resource Planning systems, from internal customers of finance and operations. 

A major telecommunications company uses CustomerSat’s eCEM solution to gather detailed feedback on products and services from key customers worldwide. Over fifty different fields describing the customers and their purchases are transferred from various corporate enterprise databases to into their eCEM user account allowing extensive personalization of invitations and questionnaires (including language), and precision in pinpointing issues and follow-on actions. The system is highly visible, as customer feedback drives incentive compensation for executives and managers throughout the company.  

“CustomerSat’s eCEM system enables us to very quickly deploy a complex feedback program to our worldwide customer base in 15 different languages, ranging from French and Spanish, to different Chinese dialects.  We continually access and review the ongoing stream of customer data through eCEM’s online reporting, so we can proactively address our customers' needs and drive improved satisfaction and retention.”  Telecommunications Company’s VP Marketing.

eCEM ROI in E-commerce
Another eCEM user is a leader in providing e-commerce infrastructure solutions, and has experienced a one hundred percent return on its eCEM investment.  Multiple factors contribute to this strong ROI, including:

1. Increased revenue and profit resulting from enhanced customer retention and advocacy
2. New processes built around the ECEM system streamline operations 
3. Continuous improvements of all processes based on eCEM feedback 
4. Positive feedback drives rewards, recognition, and improved employee morale and retention
5. Product-related feedback enables delivery of new products/services more quickly. 

The largest contributor is increased revenue resulting from enhanced customer retention and advocacy.  By deploying an eCEM system within technical support, employees can address customer concerns and opportunities immediately. Very often, customers are more satisfied and loyal if concerns are dealt with swiftly – demonstrating a supplier’s responsiveness – than if concerns never arise in the first place.  Keeping just one customer from defecting to a competitor, or winning one new customer through word-of-mouth, will often more than pay for an eCEM solution.   

Other factors contribute to strong eCEM returns as well.  This company puts new processes in place around their eCEM system that streamlined operations.  For example, technical support reps now provide immediate follow up on real-time alerts, thus avoiding less efficient responses. Ariba has also continuously improved all of its processes based on eCEM feedback.  For example, support reps now use a customer-preferred contact method for communications, speeding problem resolution time. 

By making positive feedback very visible, eCEM has improved employee morale and retention.  Managers pro-actively disseminate positive feedback and use it to drive rewards and recognition.  Finally, product-related feedback has enabled Ariba to deliver new products/services more quickly.  As a result of these and other actions, overall satisfaction improved by a full half-point in six months.  “Online customer feedback helps us retain valued customers and build life-long relationships.”  Chairman & CEO. 

Predicting the Future with ECEM  
After gathering feedback for only a few months, eCEM solutions become strategic data repositories that can help enterprises prioritize investments and predict their effect on the bottom line.  Enterprise modeling uses eCEM data to determine the impacts on business goals, such as revenue and profitability, of changes in performance metrics such as product reliability, ease of use, service promptness and technical skills (Figure 6).

These models let managers predict, for example:

• ROI by customer, product, channel, region, department, supplier, or employee 

• Areas in which to invest or de-invest to increase revenues and ROI 

• Expected financial impacts of improvements in performance.

 Enterprise modeling with eCEM can show, for example, that “improving satisfaction with technical skills by 10% this year can be expected to yield an additional $5.5 million in revenues next year.”  Such models help ensure that enterprises apply capital and people most effectively.  They are also powerful tools that help executives justify and attract internal funding for operations, service and support.

Like the human sensory nervous system, ECEM systems enable enterprises to keep in touch with the outside world.  ECEM systems are truly the eyes, ears, and fingertips of healthy, growing enterprises.

 On September 7, CustomerSat released its latest version of Enterprise Customer Experience Management (eCEM) system, with more powerful enterprise-wide reporting and analysis capabilities.  Here are just a few of the new features in eCEM 4.2:

• Enhanced Interactive Dashboards:  New personalized Dashboards provide eCEM users extended access to user-specific reports and analytics.  Master Users define the filtered views of the data accessible to people across the enterprise, including individual service reps, regional sales directors, or even the CEO.  The new, user-friendly interface allows fast access to pre-define charts and reports, as well as the ability to create real-time charts from filtered data.

• ID Code Summary Report:  This feature allows instant access to a summary of all rating scores by a Code ID, which could represent all support representatives, products, employees, or regions.  This single, quickly generated report computes the mean scores for all rating questions by the Code ID.  For example, this new feature automatically provides a “report card” for all service representatives in a call center.

• Pre-Computed Rating Scores:  Master Users can now have rating scores and other statistics automatically pre-computed nightly.  This option means that survey results based on even hundreds of thousands of responses are available instantly – no waiting!

• New Respondent Opt-Out Option:  To provide your customers the most flexibility, a new URL can now be added to the email invitation to allow respondents to remove them from the list.

For a demonstration of our system and its capabilities call us at 1-800-372-7772 opt. 2.
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Mail to: expert@CustomerSat.com
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