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

When we talk of CEM, we talk of enterprises that have made big investments in their IT systems, ERP, CRM, content management systems, etc. Over time they realize that even with all these investments, they are unable to create an emotional connect with the customer. This is when you get a customer who is not only a passive adopter of your solution, but who is also an active advocate of it. So customer experience is important.

There has been a lot of effort to create solutions for this. But none of them put the customer at the center of it all.

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 are going to be built in the future. The idea is to move customer service from a single interaction to a dialogue that could potentially result in an upsell/cross-sell. For example, self service coupled with assistance through a live chat may be a great experience in a particular situation.

Could you talk about the range of solutions covered under Adobe CEM?

Adobe LiveCycle and Connect deliver the process component of the CEM platform. Adobe LiveCycle, Connect and Day form the social piece, while the analytics and optimization is delivered using Omniture.

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

The ideal stage for most of the companies would be when they have made investments in the enterprise systems and are looking at doing two incremental things: increase their top line, and optimize their cost structure. And at the center of all 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 that they have already built. We keep them as they are and take a platform approach to customer experience management. 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 back-end 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 in terms of having a complete solution and using this as a differentiator for their business.

Does CEM work for company staff as well?

When we talk of customer, we mean people not only outside your organization, but also internal customers. For example, to create a ‘wow’ customer service experience, you need a highly enabled customer contact center representative. So, the contact center 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 enable your customer service executive to have access to all the relevant information he needs quickly, easily, intuitively, you are creating the right steps for CEM. It helps the executive get a 360° view of the customer to be able to serve him better. It gives him tremendous power to deliver better service to the customer.

What kind of CEM deployments are happening in India?

In India, we are seeing traction in the financial services and telecom sectors as they have made significant investments in the back-end systems in the last few years. Now as cost pressures take centerstage 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 a part of CEM to give dashboards for their customers and for their agents.