Extending enterprise systems
for a more positive customer experience

Pegasystems delivers best-practice rules out of the box, and the rules can be customized. “Pega knows what offers have been made,” says Kraus, “and can incorporate input from social channels, the customer profile, business goals or even the context of that customer’s current interaction, to affect what offer would be made.” For example, Pega can incorporate scores from Klout, a social media management, analytics and marketing tool, to determine what content a customer will receive. “Our analytics can provide predictive insights, such as what will happen with a given customer if the agent remains on the phone for one extra minute—would the customer rate us higher on customer satisfaction?”

The boundaries between different parts of organizations remain a challenge, Kraus acknowledges. “The back-office, marketing and customer service personnel represent different factions,” he says, “but we talk to the business owners in each realm and capture their ideas in the system, to provide guidance on how they can improve.”

Social feedback

Another avenue for gaining insights into customer preferences and behavior is through customer feedback platforms. PayPal is a well-known provider of online payment services through which users can send or receive payments for goods and services. Bought by eBay shortly after it was founded, PayPal quickly scaled up to global levels and wanted to gain a comprehensive understanding of customer perceptions. It began using Medallia to analyze customer feedback about agent performance and to help resolve customer pain points.

“The trouble with survey data alone is that it is often not used effectively to solve the underlying problems,” says Sam Keninger, senior director of product marketing at Medallia. “Sometimes it is just used to prompt a call from a customer service rep, rather than being operationalized.” Another problem is that some organizations provide greater feedback to some channels than others, which results in a distorted view of customer perceptions and experiences.

Medallia aims to get the feedback into the hands of the people who can put the results into action. “Typically Medallia has thousands of users within a company,” continues Keninger, “from executives to salespeople to CSRs. We value the process of bringing all the touch points together, including both quantitative data and text analytics.” Although the original purchasers of Medallia tended to be in market research, usage is now much broader.

Medallia has a symbiotic relationship with CRM systems. “The big criticism of CRM systems was that they did not look at the quality of the relationship,” Keninger says. “They have behavioral data for a subset of customers who are calling about problems.” Medallia’s voice of the customer (VoC) analyses bring together the net promoter score data and analysis of the CRM experiences.

“It’s important to reconcile all of the different measures,” Keninger explains. “For example, it may be that there is no difference on NPS scores if a customer is on hold for the first 30 seconds, but it may drop after that. Good analytics can help balance the cost with service to optimize the experience while minimizing costs.” This process can only occur if the VoC data is being used in conjunction with operational data to provide a full picture of the customer experience. Sidebar follows on next page.