Frost & Sullivan Advises Companies to Adopt Customer Dynamics Optimization

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., Dec. 22, 2010 /PRNewswire/ -- Despite commitments by companies to put "customers first," most organizations find it challenging to reconcile the needs of the customer with the demands of the business.  Customer Dynamics is defined as the ongoing exchange of information, opinions, and commerce that occurs between businesses and their customers.  It is complex, and the expanding universe of options that customers have when they want to make contact—from Web to chat to social media and beyond—raises the challenge of delivering service and increases the cost.

To implement change, businesses must:

• Recognize the customer's intent;
• Understand what is actually going on inside customer interactions; and
• Implement best practices that improve every interaction to the mutual benefit of the customer and the business.

This approach is referred to as Customer Dynamics Optimization. It is a way of understanding customer relationships as a series of interactions, and managing the interactions to improve customer experience and business results. Achieving either of these goals alone is not difficult. Many companies find it easy to delight customers -- if they give everything away for free and provide 24x7 personal attention. Companies also find it easy to reduce costs by cutting contact center staff and pushing customers to self-service. Neither approach alone, however, is sustainable.

Frost & Sullivan's new whitepaper, You Can Have It All:  Satisfied Customers AND Profitable Operations, considers the challenges organizations face when aligning their business goals with customer intent.

"Several leading companies are optimizing Customer Dynamics," explains Frost & Sullivan principal analyst Keith Dawson, and author of the whitepaper.  "The key characteristic they exhibit is that they have focus and clarity into how their high-level strategies relate to and intersect with specific, day-to-day operations."

However, only a fraction of companies achieves this today. The problem for most is not a lack of ability (or even lack of vision), but limited access to technology that allows them to implement a fully-rounded service vision. The complexity of today's Customer Dynamics has exceeded the capability for even the most committed organizations to turn interactions into value.  They must have the proper tools to get control of the overload of customer and interaction data, analyze it, and pinpoint how and where to apply the insight that flows from it. These tools include cross-channel analytics, including speech analytics, web analytics, and text mining.

When properly implemented, companies with this holistic view of service delivery can have it all: outstanding service, high customer retention rates, and lower costs. It is achievable for every business that is willing to look at service delivery as a dynamic process in which individual interactions and contacts combine to paint a vivid, actionable picture of customer intent.

If you are interested in receiving a copy of You Can Have It All:  Satisfied Customers AND Profitable Operations, please send an e-mail to Jake Wengroff, Global Director, Corporate Communications, at [email protected] with the following information: your full name, company name, title, company telephone number, company e-mail address, city, state, and country.

About Frost & Sullivan

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SOURCE Frost & Sullivan