Ventana Research is a fast-rising midsized analyst firm specializing in performance management. In the rapidly consolidating world of industry analyst firms, it's encouraging to see Ventana's growth as an alternative to Gartner and Forrester's dominance. It does a good job at covering CPM/BPM from the perspectives of IT, supply chain, finance, operations, contact center, BI/data warehousing, and sales/marketing. A lot of its research notes and articles are still publicly available - also nice while it lasts.
Ventana's Contact Center practice released some startling findings recently on the state of customer satisfaction in our industry. Of 100 organizations surveyed, 95 percent agreed that improving customer sat is among their company's strategic objectives, but less than 5 percent said they knew what it would take to do it. This is indeed frightening in an industry that invests 6 times more to gain a new customer than to service a current one, and waits 7 years to turn a net profit from the relationship.
Ventana wonders whether this is a problem of culture, a failure of efficiency and effectiveness, broken business processes, or poor information management.
The firm concludes the last problem is the root cause, but I think it's cultural. Even if most IT companies could attain the nirvana of "a single view of the customer", the industry would still suffer from an assembly-line approach to managing customers. Customers are processed and passed off departmentally from Marketing (the lead) to Sales (the close) to Service (the project) to Support (the headache) in an approach that is TOO process-oriented and not PEOPLE-oriented. Ventana calls out the industry's "structural inability to relate to customers" - where support staffs are left to recover the relationship (or ultimately kill it).
So how does this all relate to Brand? Ventana explains that customer sat levels are determined by ALL of the customer's interactions with a vendor organization, and are damaged by broken promises. These leave emotional responses like frustration and disillusionment. If strong brands are promises kept and positive experiences delivered, then an institutional focus on brand-building would foster a culture where customer satisfaction was of paramount importance.
Comments