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Next frontier for BPM is customer experience

By Marilyn de Villiers
Johannesburg, 20 Feb 2017

Businesses seeking to grow typically use business process management (BPM) to streamline efforts across multiple departments and teams, and ultimately reduce costs or provide a better quality of service to customers.

But now, in what has been dubbed "The Age of the Customer", businesses have to invest in solutions that not only help them streamline processes and increase productivity to facilitate the business as a whole, but also to increase customer service and ultimately reduce customer churn.

That's the view of Nicholas O'Connor, strategic business development consultant at hi.guru, a Cape Town-based customer contact company. He maintains that technology, and BPM, is playing a critical role in this regard.

In its report "Digital Transformation and Customer Experience Frame the new business case for BPM", Forrester Research noted that: "Historically, the business justifications for business process management (BPM) focused on improving business operations; now, the focus has shifted to improving customer engagement across digital channels."

According to Forrester, the reason for this shift is that revenue growth is largely driven by customer experience.

Yet, today's customer service environment is rife with examples of the antithesis of satisfactory customer experiences.

"We have all heard horror stories about customer service environments. Everyone has a tale to tell of their own frustrating call centre experience - holding on forever and then being cut off; being transferred from one agent to another and having to repeat the same story; not having a record of the voice call which later becomes a he said-she said argument... the examples are endless," O'Connor says.

While Webchat has provided a breakthrough in the customer service environment, it has several shortcomings. Not only is it expensive for the service provider as agents have to be on standby 24/7, the interaction has to be concluded in a single real-time session, which might not be convenient for the customer.

The solution, O'Connor says, is an integrated Instant Messaging (IM), platform that can handle all the popular IM apps that consumers use every day such as Facebook Messenger, WeChat, Skype, SnapChat and so on.

This allows customers to use their Instant Messaging channel of choice to request service from their suppliers instead of phoning a call centre, sending an e-mail or posting a comment on a Facebook page and waiting for a response.

"With this type of integrated IM platform, customers don't have to download or learn to operate a new app. They simply contact their supplier and engage in a conversation with an agent using technology they know and understand. Agents then assist and resolve queries from a desktop by using chat and multimedia information from a knowledge portal or Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system.

"The customer - and the supplier - both have a record of the interaction; the customer and the agent can instantly share photographs and videos; and the conversation can be halted and resumed at any time, without either party having to go through the tedious process of recapping previous interactions," he explains.

"By using this technology as part of a business process outsource solution, first call resolution becomes possible, resulting in happier customers."