Bad customer service is a huge issue in India, as it is across the world. Can Customer Experience Management help in fixing this?

When we talk of CEM, we talk of enterprises that have made big investments in their IT systems, ERP, CRM and content management systems. Over time they realise that, even with all these investments, they are unable to create an emotional connect with the customer. An emotional connect is when you get a customer who is not only a passive adopter of your solution, but also an active advocate of it. So customer experience is important. There has been a lot of effort to create solutions for this, but until now, none of them has put the customer at the centre.

Adobe’s approach is to look at Customer Experience Management from a customer’s point-of-view. In the process, we have addressed three areas of opportunities around CEM: Customer Acquisition, Customer Service and Customer Correspondence Management. All these areas are critical.

Customer service is an important area around which customer experience solutions will be built in the future. The idea is to move customer service from a single interaction to a dialogue that could result in an upsell or cross-sell. For example, companies could have self service on their website. Couple that with assistance through a live chat, and they would be able to deliver great customer experiences in many situations.

What is the range of solutions covered under Adobe CEM?

Adobe LiveCycle and Connect deliver the process component of the CEM platform. LiveCycle enables developers to build and deploy applications quickly and easily to extend the value of existing back-end systems. Connect is an enterprise web conferencing solution based on Adobe Flash technology and is meant for online meetings, eLearning, and webinars used by leading corporations and government agencies. The social component piece is delivered by Connect and various solutions from Day Software (Which is now part of Adobe). Analytics and optimisation are delivered using Omniture.

When is a good time for a company to start thinking about Customer Experience Management?

The ideal stage for most companies would be when they have already made investments in the enterprise systems and are looking at doing two incremental things: increasing their top line and optimising their cost structure. And at the centre of this is customer experience.

Through CEM, we enable companies to build a layer between their backend systems and their customers. So it’s not about ripping out the enterprise systems they have already built – we keep them as they are and take a platform approach to CEM. The companies are then able to acquire and retain customers in a better manner.

What advice would you give to emerging companies who are just starting to automate processes?

To companies who are building their infrastructure from scratch, my advice would be to use design paradigms keeping the customer in mind. Think of the customer experiences that you want to build and deploy backend systems based on those. Both can happen in parallel.

CEM will not replace the core application. Companies will still need their ERP, and core apps, the billing software, etc. However, when they are deploying for the first time, they have the advantage of building the CEM layer alongside. They will be able to do a great job both in terms of having a complete solution and also using this as a differentiator for their business.

Does CEM work for company staff as well?

When we talk of the customer, we mean people not only outside your organisation, but also internal customers. For example, to create a ‘wow’ customer service experience, you need a highly enabled customer contact centre representative. So the contact centre representative, the client service executive at the branch, the agent who works for you or the agency that is selling on your behalf all come under this universe of ‘customer’.

If you can give your customer service executive access to all relevant information quickly, easily and intuitively, you are creating the right steps for CEM. It helps the executive get a 360° view of the customer and gives him or her tremendous power to deliver better service.

What kind of CEM deployments are happening in India?

In India, we have seen traction in the financial services and telecom sectors as they made significant investments in their backend systems over the past few years. Now as cost pressures take centre stage and customers have more choice, the importance of using CEM is also being felt.

Typically, the solutions are focused on correspondence management: multi-channel delivery, e-statements, etc. Some customers are also adopting the Adobe Flash platform as part of CEM, to provide dashboards to their customers and agents.