Get innovative with your customer care solutions. CRM magazine is a unique blend of strategic business information, case studies, and in-depth analysis, providing readers with the tools to get innovative with customer solutions and stay up-to-date on the customer service and support industry. Subscribe today and let CRM magazine help you put the pieces together! destinationcrm.com/subscribe ContentsVol. 22, No. 3 21 6 10 17 44 COVER STORY 21 The 2018 CRM Service Awards Customer service today is far different than it was 15 years ago when CRM magazine rolled out its first Service Leader Awards. The number of channels, the amount of customer data, the degree of personalization, and the opportunities for self-service are far greater than ever before. Still, the one thing that hasn’t changed is the need for companies and their customers to stay in contact, and our 2018 Service Award winners are helping them do just that in exemplary ways. Whether they’ve been in business for decades or are just starting out, this year’s winners continue to demonstrate that there is no shortage of innovation in the contact center space. We honor not just the vendors of the technology that has reshaped the contact center over the past decade and a half, but also some of the companies that have put those technologies to good use. COLUMNS/DEPARTMENTS INSIGHT 2 Front Office 42 The Next Step 15 In Customer Service, Being 18 Personalization Efforts To keep customers coming CRM systems are stronger Nice Only Goes So Far Suffer from Data Issues back, businesses today and more packed with Problem solving, rather Companies’ attempts at need to know as much as features than ever, but than relational work, yields personalization might they can about them. users aren’t always higher customer satisfaction. be the ultimate victims BY LEONARD KLIE rushing to use them. of identity fraud. BY DANNY ESTRADA 16 Customers Come 6 Reality Check with Baggage 19 Required Reading Workforce management 44 Pint of View Pre-interaction factors The Geek, Nerd, solutions need a Classic Pint: Customers significantly affect Suit Approach to truly multitenant keep you profitable, customers’ perceptions Customer-Centricity architecture—supporting so show them some of service interactions. Achieving customer-centricity cloud, on-premises, and gratitude. You’ll thank 17 Companies Face a requires a partnership hybrid solutions. yourself for it. between IT, analysts, and BY DONNA FLUSS BY MARSHALL LAGER Consumer Trust Crisis business strategists. As identity fraud hits an 10 Customer Experience all-time high, the burden Being transparent and is shifting to companies to offering authentic experiences protect customer data. can help companies combat the consumer trust crisis. BY RYAN HART www.destinationCRM.com CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT | APRIL 2018 1 FRONT OFFICE Because We Thought You Should Know lthough there is some debate as to its than double, reaching about $1.5 billion in 2022, true origins, the phrase “knowledge growing at a compound annual rate of 15.9 percent. is power” is most often attributed That’s still only a small portion of the total contact to 16th-century English philosopher center software market, which the same firm valued and statesman Sir Francis Bacon, at $13.3 billion last year and projects to reach $29.1 Aalthough it appeared in his work Meditationes Sacrae billion by 2022, but it is quite robust nonetheless. in Latin (“ipsa scientia potestas est”) and translates After all, a billion and a half dollars isn’t exactly more accurately as “knowledge itself is power.” pocket change. The immense power that knowledge brings A major factor driving the growth of contact center comes when we have a closer grasp of the truth and software, MarketsandMarkets maintains, is the need the reality of the world in which we live. Knowledge for companies to deliver enhanced experiences to cus- is power because it helps us to think for ourselves. tomers through multiple channels, including voice, When we know all of the relevant facts about a given video, web, chat, email, and social media. The only subject, we are better able to make our own judg- way for companies to make sense of all of that infor- ments and decisions, without having to rely on oth- mation is with contact center analytics, which today ers to tell us what to think. That is power. includes so much more than the basic speech analytics That’s just as true in business as it is in life. To keep engines that have been in use for decades to pull apart customers coming back, businesses today need to phone conversations. Modern contact center analytics know as much as they can about them— also includes text analytics, desktop analytics, senti- their demographics, their buying pat- ment analysis, social media analytics, predictive and TO KEEP CUSTOMERS terns, their preferences, and their past prescriptive analytics, artificial intelligence, machine COMING BACK, interactions. Basically, companies need learning, and a whole lot more. to know what customers are doing, why But while you’re investigating contact center ana- BUSINESSES TODAY NEED they are doing it, what motivates them, lytics and the other eight contact center technologies TO KNOW AS MUCH AS and how they feel about their products that we highlight in this month’s awards issue, it’s THEY CAN ABOUT THEM. and services. also important that you don’t focus too much on the Much of that knowledge can be data itself; keep your eyes on all of the other things found in the typical contact center that go with it. Not all customers are comfortable interaction, though harnessing it is not always easy. with the amount of information companies have As companies struggle today to keep track of their about them, and their trust in these companies to customer interactions, contact center analytics is keep that information secure and off “the dark web” perhaps one of the most versatile and potentially is diminishing as identity fraud and data breaches valuable, though still largely underused, tools they become more common. The article “Companies can have at their disposal. Face a Consumer Trust Crisis” (page 17) stresses the Contact center analytics has been gaining trac- importance of companies not only doing more to tion in the modern customer service landscape, secure the mountains of customer data that they’ve and that is why we decided to add it as a category gathered and analyzed, but being transparent with in this, our 15th annual installment of the CRM how they obtained it and what they intend to do Customer Service Leader Awards. Our goal in add- with it. ing analytics as a category was to help you make And in their ultimate quest for more knowledge sense of the market and the vendor landscape, so and the power it brings, companies also need to be we did our usual due diligence and followed up mindful of yet another age-old adage: “Power tends with the top analysts and consultants in the field to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” to get their insights—to tap into their knowledge, to quote 19th-century English historian, politician, if you will. and writer Lord John Dalberg-Acton. So just how significant is the market for con- tact center analytics technology? 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