Responsiveness and the Customer Experience: Business Events

I recently did a webinar, Responding to Business Events as they Happen, where I discussed the relationship between business events and the customer experience. The catalyst came from a few of our customers where they’re definitely getting the benefit of bridging customer events with customer transactions. In most cases, they recognized that there are specific measures (or KPIs) that suddenly become more powerful if they can be transitioned into real-time instead of past-tense values. Finding out tomorrow how you did yesterday is too late for many customer experience “episodes.”

Today’s customer experience lifecycle can be pretty complicated. You’ve bred in multiple touch points to the lifecycle where a customer can enter and exit anywhere and at will. What’s lost is the common thread of control of a managed lifecycle. That makes sense for today’s business climate, but you’re left with business systems and infrastructure from an era that doesn’t fit the requirements of the new lifecycle. If you enable your customers to “serve themselves” then you need to develop your experience strategies to meet their expectations—oh, and you have to do it with what you’ve got since there’s no way you can replace your existing systems. No problem.

It’s all about events and your ability to sense and respond. The customer experience lifecycle is affected by customer events—throughout the lifecycle from prospect to on-going service and support. The customer can enter and exit anywhere, anyplace and at anytime. In this case, the customer experience cannot simply be managed from a single, siloed point such as customer service or a website. You need visibility into all potential entry/exit points where a customer may interact with your enterprise. How they interact with you is just as important as how they use your products. Much can be gained by correlating their interactions and usage.  And if you can manage all of this in real-time, you can be proactive in your response—before it’s too late. Business Event Processing (BEP) allows you to capture utilization and interaction events across the customer experience lifecycle. You can then turn those events into something that is meaningful and actionable. So not only can you get broad visibility, you can do something about it.

In a world where churn is costly, you can’t afford to let someone click somewhere else.

Next up: The Customer Experience: Use Cases and Examples