CRM - November 2007 - (Page 10)

CUSTOMER CENTRICITY BY DONNA FLUSS Contact Center Surveying Is Essential The surveying market may be fragmented, but that doesn’t diminish its importance Contact Center Surveying and Analytics Offerings The contact center surveying market includes offerings packaged as either products or services. (See Figure 1.) The earliest market entrants provided surveying services and used technology to enable their offerings. Professional services are an essential element and are expected, if not demanded, by organizations without internal resources to implement a surveying program on their own. Competitive Landscape Contact center surveying vendors have had to balance The survey market is highly fragmented and consists of: 1. Basic survey tools: Inexpensive and easy-to-use customer needs with their own profitability requireproducts that create, issue, and collect survey results. ments. These vendors have been under tremendous Most of these products include basic reporting, but do pressure to keep pricing down to compete with inexpennot include sophisticated reporting capabilities, real- sive products such as SurveyMonkey.com or internal time functionality, or analytics. These vendors include initiatives. This has limited the research and developSurveyMonkey, Zoomerang, SurveyGold, Survey Crafter, ment investments by these companies, although many vendors have long lists of future product deliverables Survey Said, SurveyView, and SuperSurvey. 2. Contact center surveying and analytics offerings: that are prioritized based on customer requirements. Customer service and contact center expertise are critOptions that handle both interactive voice response (IVR) and Web-based surveys, have real-time alerting ical success factors for selling into the service segment of and reporting, and provide analytics. These vendors the surveying market. Three vendors in this report— include Autonomy etalk, Customer Relationship Metrics, Autonomy etalk, RightNow Technologies, and Verint CustomerSat, Mindshare, Ransys, RightNow Technolo- Witness Actionable Solutions—added surveying functionality to their respective broader, but related, contact gies, UCN, and Verint Witness Actionable Solutions. 3. Market research organizations with surveying capabilities: center product suites. UCN started as a reseller of teleGroups—including The Gallup Organization, J.D. com services, but for the last few years has been selling Power and Associates, and The Nielsen Company—that a hosted contact center suite. Customer Relationship Metrics and CustomerSat each started with an emphaare primarily firms that sell services, not products. 4. Other tools: Products, services, and companies— sis on customer service metrics. More recently, noncontact-center survey-services specialists—such FIGURE 1: CONTACT CENTER SURVEYING AND ANALYTICS OFFERINGS as Mindshare, Ransys, and SPSS—have been Standalone # of Surveying Suite Product entering this market segment. Vendor Product / Offering Products Module Type of Suite or Service Change will only come when organizations— Autonomy etalk Yes Two; Yes Workforce Optimization Product IVR and Web enterprises large and small; federal, state, and local Customer Relationship Yes One No N/A Service government agencies; educational institutions Metrics and not-for-profits—act on the information conCustomerSat Yes One No N/A Service Mindshare Yes One No N/A Service tained in survey responses, actually demonstratRansys Yes One Yes Enterprise Feedback Product ing to constituents and customers that their input Management is valued. Customers want to know that someone Two; Yes Customer Relationship Product RightNow No, but can IVR and Web Management Technologies be used on a in the company is listening. UCN Verint Witness Actionable Solutions standalone basis Yes Yes One One Yes Yes Hosted Contact Center Workforce Optimization Service Product T H E B E S T WAY to determine if customers are satisfied with your products and services is to ask them. This may seem obvious, but it is often overlooked amid the many demands of day-to-day operations. Systematically collecting and taking action on customer opinions should be a priority for all enterprises, as it’s an important indicator of whether customers will remain loyal and whether they will recommend a company’s products or services. such as SPSS, a predictive analytics firm—that do not fit into other categories. Donna Fluss is founder and president of DMG Consulting LLC, a firm specializing in customer-focused business strategy, operations, and technology services. Contact her at donna.fluss@dmgconsult.com. SOURCE: DMG CONSULTING LLC, JUNE 2007 10 CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT | NOVEMBER 2007 www.destinationCRM.com http://SurveyMonkey.com http://www.destinationCRM.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of CRM - November 2007

CRM - November 2007 Contents Front Office Reality Check Customer Centricity Have You Caught It? The Mother of Enterprise Information Market Focus: Technology: The Simple Truth about Complex Manufacturing Q&A: Gianforte Talks CRM Required Reading Predicting Profitability Checking the Pulse of the Contact Center Cast a Narrow Net Modern Times, Modern Methods Primos Hunting Calls Snares Efficiency Nailing It Down Moving in on Mortgage Delinquencies RDS Delivery Delivers on Service Secret of My Success Re:Tooling The Tipping Point Pint of View

CRM - November 2007

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