CEM Gets a Complement

No, customer experience management isn’t being told it’s pretty; it’s being told it needs help. And the well-intentioned technology designed to help service providers better understand how their products, services and brands are being perceived may get that complement in the form of another type of management: enterprise feedback management.

Being technology-oriented, service providers have looked to data capture and analytics companies to scour billing, performance and usage data to help determine the customer experience with their services.

But the holistic, or 360-degree, view of the customer remains elusive said Sheryl Kingstone, director at Yankee Group. This is despite the development of many new key performance indicators to define it.

Despite the real-time aspect of these new KPIs and technologies for analytics, there is one thing missing, said Gary Schwartz, senior vice president of marketing at Confirmit: a dialogue with the customer.

Confirmit is a provider of software for market research and enterprise feedback management (EFM.) It recently landed its first big telecom provider in the U.K. and says it now has the multi-channel data collection chops to seriously address this vertical.

“For telcos, our multi-channel offering is important. They can now use their own network to reach out to customers,” Schwartz said. He believes that actionable insight provided by soliciting customer feedback is the only way to guarantee that customers feel valued and that problems are resolved quickly.

Earlier this year, the Norwegian company launched Confirmit Horizons, its first integrated product since its merger with a company called Pulse Train in 2007. The new product allows companies to create tailored, multi-channel surveys quickly; collect feedback via the Web, telephone, paper, offline or face-to-face interviewing; manage market research panels efficiently; and conduct sophisticated analysis and reporting on all data collected.

The big difference, Schwartz said, between CEM as it is today and CFM, is that the analysis of KPIs from network performance, usage and billing data only provides an inference of the experience. CFM provides something more.

“In a lot of cases, [service providers] are inferring an experience based on some metric they can measure without ever having talked to the customer,” Schwartz said. “We aren’t looking to replace those metrics because they are important, but we think we can augment them with attitudinal metrics that really give them what they need.”