Contact Center Solutions Featured Article

February 27, 2009

Forrester: Customer Experience Counts

By Jessica Kostek

TMCnet Channel Editor

Customer satisfaction should be the number one priority in any business. Customer experience is usually measured by whether the company meets a customer's needs, whether the company is easy to work with, and the satisfaction of a consumer's interactions with the company.

Companies especially call or contact centers need to deal with customers on a daily basis, making sure each one hangs up the phone satisfied or at lest close to it. A new report from Forrester (News - Alert) Research shows that customer experience is closely tied to customer loyalty, and that the relationship between the two has increased since last year.

The report measures loyalty by a customer's willingness to repurchase from a company, reluctance to switch and likelihood to recommend.

“It's a no-brainer,” said Bruce Temkin, VP and principal analyst, customer experience at Forrester, author of the report. “Customers will do more business with companies that serve them best, and a good portion of what they evaluate is the experience.”

He added, “The big takeaway is that customer experience is the loyalty magic bullet if there is one. Marketers need to make sure they are building loyalty the old-fashioned way, one interaction at a time. If you aren't delivering good interaction and meeting needs and being easy to work with, then customers will leave you.”

The report includes data between September 2007 and October 2008 explaining the link between customer experience and loyalty has gotten even stronger across all industries. The correlation between experience and repurchasing grew the most for TV service providers and investment firms, while the relationship between reluctance to switch and experience grew the most for investment firms and medical insurers.

Temkin said he was surprised to see the link between experience and loyalty increase across the board, but he takes it as a sign that customer experience has only become more important in this economy.

“The fact that it went up in all industries was a sign that in down times, customers become even more alert to the way they're being treated and get even more sensitive to the experiences they have, so that was the big ‘A-ha!' from the research this year,” Temkin said.

“When times are good, consumers just continue on their merry way, but in this economic environment, every purchase they make, every service interaction they have is a large portion of what they care about,” he continued. “They're more emotional about everything and, therefore, a bad experience resonates even more negatively.”

In the long run, especially during this economic environment as Temkin puts it, many are running on thin ice and this might only be the beginning. These findings go to show that service with a smile can go a long way.

Jessica Kostek is a channel editor for TMCnet, covering VoIP, CRM, call center and wireless technologies. To read more of Jessica’s articles, please visit her columnist page.

Edited by Jessica Kostek

Related Contact Center Solutions Articles

SYNETY Announces Integration of CloudCall with GoldMine CRM

Users of GoldMine CRM will now be able to access telephony functions directly from within GoldMine. To provide this capability, Synety has announced integration of its on-demand business telephony application, CloudCall with GoldMine CRM, which will allow GoldMine users to use CloudCall by doing a regular upgrade of the CRM software. [ Read More ]
05/22/2013

SpeechStorm Unveils Personas in Latest Release of IVR

SpeechStorm's most recent version of its Interactive Voice Response or IVR application is now available. Code-named 'Hitchcock', the latest version unveils SpeechStorm Personas, which allows customers to have varied experiences of call centre IVR and self-service, as per their selected profile, behavior, or liking. [ Read More ]
05/22/2013

Noble Systems Integrates Web Services with Customer Contact Programs

Noble Systems Corporation has unveiled the Noble Web Interfacing Service or WISE, offering versatility to multichannel customer contact programs. Noble facilitates data exchange between applications with the help of web services. Apart from enhancing customer experience, the use of Web services accelerates response times to customer contacts. Online sales organizations will also experience enhanced "Speed to Lead". [ Read More ]
05/22/2013

Interactive Intelligence Collaborates With Kuwait-based FutureTech

Interactive Intelligence Group Inc. has further extended its presence in the Middle East market after it entered into a strategic association with FutureTech, a provider of smart IT infrastructure and IT outsourcing offerings located in Kuwait. [ Read More ]
05/22/2013

[ View all Contact Center Solutions Articles ]

Contact Center Solutions Glossary of Terms

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O

Featured Whitepaper

Microsoft® Lync® in the Contact Center: Integrating with Customer Interaction Center™ to Provide a Barrierâ€free Customer Experience To implement contact center functionality, organizations using Microsoft Lync Server 2010 can follow the unified communications blueprint of open standards interoperability and integrate to a contact center solution of their choice. Customer Interaction Center (CIC) from Interactive Intelligence is a proven best of breed contact center solution that merits consideration ...

Featured Success Story

Interactive Intelligence all-in-one IP communications software suite integrated with Microsoft Lync helps Bentley save $200,000 annually.

Featured Product Demo

Contact Center Solutions Interaction Analyzer™

Interaction Analyzer™
Real-time word and phrase spotting. Alerting. Analytics. Scoring. Coaching. Watch how Interaction Analyzer turns every moment, of every past and present call, into data that lets you deliver an exceptional customer experience.