August 24, 2012
By Tim Moynihan,

Increase Customer Quality of Experience While Achieving ROI

To succeed in this competitive business landscape, providing a continuously positive customer experience is critical. In fact, your customers' satisfaction and loyalty depend on the quality of their experience.

Unhappy customers have no problem taking their business elsewhere at the first sign of a glitch. Glitches will occasionally happen with any business communications system, but most issues do not get resolved quickly enough to avoid both the heavy burden of lost customers and the operational expense of scrambling to resolve these problems. This makes it more important than ever for businesses to proactively address customer experience and risks inherent in these complex environments—a challenge made more difficult by the finger pointing that often occurs when problems arise. Poor customer experience should be the exception, not the rule, and it should not be a contributor to revenue loss.

Businesses that strive to differentiate themselves on Quality of Experience (QoE) often recognize a strong return on investment (ROI) from increased customer retention and lower revenue leakage rates. Smart businesses know that in order to continuously assure customer satisfaction, they need to implement end-to-end performance monitoring to preempt the risks that typically affect customer experience and increase operational costs. Some of these risks include:

Improper call routing
Dropped calls
Poor voice quality
Improper data and/or slow data arrival
Reduced application performance
Project delays
Undiscovered issues
Call abandon rates that are higher than goal
Necessary rollback
Idle people/agents
Customer impact and churn

Before committing the funds to move forward with a performance monitoring implementation, executives need to understand the potential financial return. It's easy to simply say that a breakdown in a business communication system can result in lost customers, but many organizations require a more concrete analysis.

To illustrate just how quickly the costs associated with technology failures can add up, consider the quick computations associated with interactive voice response (IVR) failures or poor voice quality (as highlighted in the accompanying chart). By going through this exercise, organizations can obtain more tangible proof and understanding of just how big of an issue this is.

Successful Implementations

Here is how several smart businesses were able to increase their QoE while improving their bottom line.

A major financial services corporation saved $3 million by reducing voice quality issues and improving its automated response system, resulting in the generation of tremendous returns for both customers and the bottom line.
An insurance company generated $1.5 million in savings after monitoring its network and responding to glitches affecting customer service.
A major transportation company saved $4 million by addressing service issues with its automated response and call routing systems, after an end-to-end monitoring solution isolated the source of the issues.

Leveraging advancements in communication and enterprise technologies will give organizations an edge in streamlining processes and providing the best possible customer experience; eliminating the inconvenience of dropped calls, long wait times, or voice quality problems. An end-to-end monitoring solution provides organizations with deep visibility into their complex environments, enabling businesses to reduce the time it takes to understand the source of a problem—and fix it—before customers even notice the glitch.

Tim Moynihan is vice president of marketing at Empirix, where he is responsible for strategic business planning and product revenue growth.