Fit CEM tools to customers' digital habits

Thompson's message and the advice of other analysts and several C-level executives is don't worry about the seemingly endless proliferation of CEM technologies touted to improve the customer experience. Instead, stick to a simple plan: Use only the technology that works best for you and your customer base. Sometimes, as seen with AvePoint and TransPerfect, it's simply a matter of using what you already have.

Denis Pombriant

Organizations should "slow down and answer the question we assume has been answered, but in reality, is only answered about half of the time," said Denis Pombriant, managing principal of Beagle Research Group. "The question is 'What's the plan?'"

Pombriant added, "'What do you want to do with your business? What do you want to improve and by how much?' Answering that will give direction and purpose to your digital strategy and keep you from lunging after the bright and shiny object."

Sharing data with customers

Mark Hagerty

TransPerfect translates any kind of content into any kind of digital or printed format, according to its CTO Mark Hagerty. The company also offers marketing, consulting and other types of services and is working to streamline its many product portals into one so that customers will see every service offering and hopefully use TransPerfect for more than one purpose, he said.

But Hagerty seemed more excited to talk about how data analytics is transforming the way TransPerfect relates to its customer base, particularly with its translation services. "Computers are good at translation, but not as good as people," he said. Still, the promise of artificial intelligence has nudged the company into using machine learning programs to help perform translations. Automated work is compared to human-produced work. Sometimes the machine translates better than a human, sometimes not.

Human translators aren't being shown the door, but TransPerfect has an obligation to try technologies to improve the company's customer experience strategy, enhance its customers' end products and let it enter new markets, he said. "We're a services company. Without our customers, we don't have a company," Hagerty said.

That's why TransPerfect will next year start sharing data on the efficiency of translation projects. Customers will see how well an individual editor translates languages. "We can take all of the data from every sentence that's translated to show how it's changed throughout the process," Hagerty said. "A customer can assess if this editor is 10 times more efficient than that one."

Sharing the metrics answers a "huge drive" in the industry to reduce project completion timelines, according to Haggerty. "If I was a customer using five different translator services, and I'm seeing a lot of mistakes that are subjective, I can drop that service," he said. "They can hold their vendors accountable. This data matters."

Improving customer experience strategy with SaaS

Cesar Coba

AvePoint makes compliance and governance software for companies in financial services, retail, health care and other verticals. As little as five years ago, AvePoint offered "traditional" products that had perpetual usage licenses and maintenance agreements, said Cesar Coba, the company's vice president of customer success.

"But as customers started transitioning to cloud solutions, we saw their behavior was changing. Customers wanted to be more self-reliant; that's why organizations are moving to the cloud. They want to be more efficient as a business and that's how they wanted to communicate with their vendors."

At a foundational level, AvePoint went where its customers were heading: It flipped from an on-premises product to a SaaS offering. Not only could AvePoint now deliver its service through a popular format, but it is also allows Coba and his colleagues to see in real time how customers use the product.

"In that transformation, we built into our system an ability to identify if there's a problem with a service level," Coba said. "Instead of hearing from them first, we're able to monitor the service level and address issues before the customer notices."

Certainly, countless other companies have improved product oversight by shifting to the cloud, but AvePoint used the opportunity to step back and review how it handled CEM as a whole.

"We unpacked the customer experience," Coba said. "We asked what things we would want to focus on to improve the customer experience. What are the points for that? One was knowledge management and how we deliver information to our customers."

That led to the realization that the case management files stored in the company's CRM platform should be made available to customers, through blog posts, FAQ sheets and videos. "They're rich with information and provide answers to the issues customers face," Coba said.