When approaching customer experience management, companies traditionally focus on the CRM-based cycle, which is reasonable since no software knows customers better than CRM. In our practice, we also see CRM as the core of the 4-step approach to managing customer experience that includes data collection, analysis, targeted actions and result re-evaluation. However, the CXM chain has one more important component, and this is collaboration of CXM participants that ensures success of the entire cycle.
This is exactly where SharePoint comes up to the stage to take up the collaboration challenge and make the complex customer experience management process more dynamic, facilitate stakeholders’ communication and minimize their efforts.
CXM-related collaboration is painful but vital
To show how important collaboration is in the CXM cycle, let’s start with an example straight away.
A US retailer with 1,000+ stores in 7 states registered a significant decrease of customer satisfaction in 17 stores. The investigation showed that this negative trend was caused by long queues at peak hours in 15 of 17 stores. CX managers developed a plan to change the situation. However, as soon as they initiated corrective actions, they got involved into intense negotiations with operational and HR departments. Moreover, CX experts met a strong resistance from store managers who weren’t ready for additional expenses without being sure that the measures would prove successful. This led to pretty modest results since real actions were approved only for 5 of 17 stores.
This short example shows that CXM-related collaboration can become a mammoth-heavy task, since it involves employees from absolutely different departments and of different hierarchical levels. To make things even worse, CXM collaboration can be painful and often leads to the conflict of interest, since CX-managers’ initiatives usually require quite deep changes to the established operational approach with no benefits guaranteed (in our case, improvements were eventually registered in 4 of 5 stores).
Full of human-related pitfalls, CXM collaboration cannot be left as it is, scattered and uncontrollable, since it engenders a whole range of negative consequences.
Unmanaged collaboration ruptures the CX cycle. Without efficient collaboration and all the stakeholders being involved into the discussion on an improvement plan, CX managers risk to get stuck at the stage of data analysis, unable to transform their insights into real actions.
Sluggish collaboration slows down the CXM cycle. When it comes to enhancing customer experience, every day counts, and delays are inacceptable as they can make situation even worse and ruin a brand’s reputation. Dedicated collaboration tools should be adopted to ensure more effective and quick decision-making based on the strategy elaborated by all the parties and not exclusively on arrangements made during face-to-face meetings.
Collaboration gaps bring inappropriate results. As CXM collaboration involves employees of different hierarchical levels, CX managers should coordinate their actions with all of them. Not approved by all stakeholders, CX managers’ initiatives can cause not only conflicts between the CXM cycle participants but also lead to significant financial losses.
Managing CXM-related collaboration in SharePoint
Since CXM-related collaboration is often unpleasant and hides a whole range of pitfalls, the task is to facilitate it and make it more effective, dynamic and streamlined. Trying to adapt CRM software for these purposes may have a not-so-happy ending, since a company will have to venture quite a deep customization and face heavy license costs to provide access to all the stakeholders (who may simply reject working in a CRM).
Not to make the collaboration challenge even more problematic, it’s reasonable to delegate it to a dedicated platform with collaboration at its heart, such as SharePoint. Companies can both implement SharePoint for CXM needs as a stand-alone tool or integrate it with the corporate CRM. In any case, SharePoint offers large capabilities of transforming CXM collaboration into a well-managed and effective process.
Fine-tuning cross-department collaboration
SharePoint is a proven platform in terms of cross-department collaboration, thus it can successfully unite participants of the CXM cycle. There are several opportunities for this. For example, a company can develop a fully functional CXM collaboration site for stakeholders to work on each particular CXM case, discuss problematic issues and take decisions. Another feasible solution is to integrate a SharePoint-based collaboration solution with a CRM. This will allow CX managers to create independent collaboration boards linked with CX cases and subcases.
Transforming unmanaged collaboration into formalized CXM workflows
The biggest challenge of any collaboration is to evolve from spontaneous communication to a managed process with precise stages to complete. To structure CXM collaboration, companies can transform it into a traditional workflow that will include the following sequence of steps: discussion, decision-making, actions (started, delayed or ended), progress review, escalation and final result.
The workflow can be coupled with task management features for every workflow participant to see the to-do activities along with their precise deadlines.
Facilitating document management
To take the burden off a CRM, CXM-related document management can be organized within SharePoint. This way, all documents will be centralized in a general storage classified by customers, cases and CXM techniques. Documents will be easy to find, read, edit and shared with colleagues at any moment.
Creating CX knowledge base
SharePoint not only gives the opportunity to manage CXM-related collaboration and CXM tasks but also assists companies in creating their unique knowledge base for corporate CXM expertise. This would provide CX managers with the possibility to review older cases, study their details and apply more effective measures for new cases. It would also help onboarding CX managers to quicker adapt and understand the CX methodology of a particular company by studying corporate CX archives.
How to make it work?
Making such a CRM-SharePoint tandem work effectively is a challenging task that can be fulfilled only by the experts with a deep understanding of both customer experience management principles and SharePoint development to align a company’s CXM needs with the software capabilities.
It’s also crucial to define a precise scope of the future CXM-related collaboration. This will help to design a tool that will help stakeholders to solve CXM issues easier and less painfully, along with making collaboration more result-oriented and controllable with customer experience improvement as a priority.
by Sergei Golubenko via Everyone's Blog Posts - SharePoint Community
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