Customers increasingly make choices once left up to businesses. They choose the type, amount and channel of information they prefer for interacting with the organization, as opposed to being told what to use. They look for speed of response, speed in processing transactions and the speed at which organizations can update their interaction methods. For many organizations, meeting these challenges means adapting to a new customer service framework — revamping call centers and contact centers, embracing e-service and self-service, and integrating the customer service organization with other departments via a customer interaction hub (CIH).
Call centers and contact centers usually provide an acceptable level of service when handling simple interactions in low quantities, but not in handling the likely growth in demand. The number of interactions between a typical business-to-consumer organization and its customers is growing at a rate of 15 percent each year. The number of customer-service-related e-mails an organization receives is growing at a rate of 20 percent every year. The number of self-service transactions that an organization carries out with its customers is growing 25 percent per year. Traditional customer service systems are incapable of sustaining this rapid growth while simultaneously revamping their operations to become more customer-centric. By using a CIH to support assisted and unassisted interactions across all channels, you can leverage customer service functionality across other business functions, and at the same time, maintain a focus on your client and keep up with massive growth.
A practical problem is that the CIH is a combination of specific business applications (for example, sales, marketing, service or resource planning), general-purpose information systems and communication technologies. The information systems and communication technologies are general-purpose and thus lack the intelligence or knowledge about the customer that is built into marketing, customer service or sales applications. Through 2008, the CIH will not emerge as a standard product suite, leaving users the task of assembling a CIH using multiple vendors (0.8 probability).
In "How the Customer Interaction Hub Will Improve CRM," we explain what, exactly, the CIH means in business terms. The CIH must be thought of as a framework (rather than a product for purchase) for customer interaction across sales, service, marketing, field service, logistics and other departments for assisted and unassisted interactions. It provides a means for bringing the customer service organization closer to the rest of the business, and for managing the increasingly strategic role that customer service plays in building better businesses.
"A Functional Analysis of a Customer Interaction Hub" covers the CIH from a technical perspective — how it works, its critical components, which components can be shared across functions and processes, and what organizations should do to understand and implement a CIH. Specifically, we discuss leveraging established components using an open standards architecture, and creating a common, channel-independent customer experience.
Business-to-consumer (B2C) organizations are the strongest candidates for adopting a CIH model, as the majority of interactions in those organizations occur in customer service, the volume of transactions is higher and the need for collaboration between marketing and customer service is more pressing. In "CIH Migration Is Best-Suited to B2C Businesses," we discuss the likelihood of your organization adopting a CIH framework and help you determine whether your organization is ready to move to a CIH.
Gartner analysts have done extensive work regarding the consolidation of content management, search, information retrieval, collaboration and community development technologies into the smart enterprise suite (SES). "Plumb the Smart Enterprise Suite for CIH Components" looks into the relationship between the CIH and the SES, and provides some practical advice about which elements of an SES will be most beneficial to reuse as components when your organization builds a CIH.
Finding the right information for each interaction is what makes the CIH powerful — from thousands of sources, one right answer. "Select the Right Search Method for the Job" outlines the four types of search tools used most often by customer service organizations, and provides guidance for developing the optimal solution most likely to meet your company's needs.
The power of analyzing information collected in interactions, and mining it for content and trends, has proven invaluable in business over the years — and the CIH will be no exception. However, as the framework comes together, organizations will realize they have overlapping analytical tools and methods. In "Prepare to Put the Analytics Into Customer Interaction Hubs," we discuss the first three steps to take in migrating analytical tools to the CIH, and how to get more benefits from the work done.
Naturally, not all enterprises will benefit from implementing a CIH today. The CIH is an immature model that will develop during the next three to five years. At this time, only Type A (technology-aggressive) organizations are developing hubs. However, some industries, such as retail banking, stand to gain significant short-term benefits while undergoing longer-term change as they catch the CIH wave. Four financial services processes, in particular, will significantly change through the adoption of CIH (see "The CIH Will Change How FSPs Do Business").
