The Consumer Revolution

By João Batista Ferreira

Companies that believe in CRM as the utmost in customer service should get ready to be surprised by the arrival of new demands from the market, such as Customer Experience Management. In this new model, synchrony is the catchword.

What do traffic, a volleyball match, contact centers and a typewriter repair company have in common? This may seem like an unequal set, but these and other elements and situations of my and your daily lives would certainly not be the same without one given characteristic: synchrony. The term “synchronize” comes from the Latin synchronus, a word whose etymology describes a state of perception of actions occurring at the same time. Synchronizing is, in fact, a social need, an element that pervades all social facts.

To prove this thesis, all it takes is a look around. Without synchrony in traffic lights and traffic control and operation systems, traveling on the streets would be a chaotic challenge. The same thing happens, for example, in volleyball, where the major intent is to desynchronize the adversary’s synchrony until the ball is “grounded” on the opponent’s court. In corporate life, synchrony emerges not only as another activity-coordination element, but also as a preliminary condition for preventing production bottlenecks and obtaining results. An obsession of business planning is to achieve synchrony between each team member’s individual actions so as to converge into gains for the company.

If we think about companies as organisms that work to sell a product or service, we will reach the other end of the production process: the consumer, an individual who finds himself bombarded with thousands of pieces of information about services and products offered by institutions that are thirsty for his purchasing power. This consumer is faced with a world of options. And, in this war, the winner is almost always he who can add the most value to the product or service being offered. The gain lies in relationships – bargains – with prospects, in being able to capture these individuals’ subjective attributes and establishing real relationships that are based on affinity rather than persuasion and that must function at all times, especially in the event of any difficulties.

These concepts may sound very familiar, especially after the underlying principles of CRM – Customer Relationship Management, a market that grows 8% per year –became widely disseminated. However, what I propose is to broaden the boundaries of CRM and take the step forward that is required by evolution to arrive at CEM – Customer Experience Management. CEM arises from excellence and from the reengineering of people, processes and technology in consumer service. Patricia Seybold, the author of Customers.com (How to Create a Profitable Business Strategy for the Internet and Beyond), states that “we’re in the midst of a profound revolution. And it’s bigger than an Internet revolution or a mobile wireless revolution. It’s a customer revolution.” Being in the CEM era means understanding that customers are becoming increasingly more sophisticated and demanding, and that companies need to be prepared to serve them in the most diverse ways, at their various contact points.

But where does synchrony fit in the new customer relationship model? Everywhere. Establishing an experience-based relationship with your customer requires not only having several contact channels, but also knowing how to synchronize them in such a way that all information pertaining to one customer and coming in through these channels does not turn against the company. Let’s illustrate this with a practical example. These days, most banking institutions have several contact channels: telephone, fax, e-mail, chat and live, i.e. a customer visiting a branch. A common bottleneck for these companies occurs when a customer has a problem and finds out that his branch does not have his information in a unified form, nor even does it rank him according to the volume of his investments.

The challenge for companies is to seek via CEM a holistic view of all these contact points, i.e. to synchronize them in such a manner that they are all available at one single point at the same time, even if they proceed from different data bases. Once this impasse has been broken, it is necessary to establish hierarchies, so that the customer is handled by the person who is the most in tune with him. But that requires the ability to find the service agent anywhere, be it the office, home, a helicopter, etc. Therefore, there is no other solution but to once again resort to that amazing tool called the Internet: all interactions must be available on the Web and capable of being displayed on one single desktop – a laptop screen, for example.

And you, with the look of disbelief on your face, you’d better update yourself. Rather than a utopia, this is an urgent demand from the market. In a world of global communications – where technologies surpass one another by the minute and become available to the consumer masses at ever shrinking prices –, ignoring this new prospect profile is tantamount to shooting one’s own foot. Today, technology and training are what it takes to solve customer relationship issues, and those companies that are not prepared for this new reality will end up like a company that surprised me the other day as I was walking on the street, whose business used to be fixing typewriters. It stood still in time.