The Many Shades of CEM: Robots and Voice of Customer

By Brian Strauss, Director of Sales Engineering —

Here's my latest installment in an ongoing series on the importance of and solutions for Business Impact Analysis—the holy grail of Customer Experience Management. A few weeks ago, I wrote on why Business Impact Analysis is so important.

Earlier this week, I started this series on the "Many Shades of CEM" by considering Web Analytics solutions and their ability to perform Business Impact Analysis. Today, I'll shift the focus to two other approaches—The Robots and Voice of Customer solutions.

The Robots

There are a variety of solutions used internally during the development and testing phase of the application lifecycle—as well some that operate external to your production application—in order to run a series of scripts or test cases looking for errors, slow pages, and other "outages." While these tools are very handy for managing to an IT performance SLA, they cannot perform adequate business impact analysis.

Here's why:

• The scripts are robots simulating customer activity, but are not real customers. So while they may find errors and slow pages, they can't say for sure that these problems are obstacles for real customers. Even when a robot encounters problems, the scripting solution cannot tell you how much those problems are costing your business in transactions lost or dollars and cents.
• These scripts travel down pre-determined paths. Meaning that the burden off the solution's effectiveness is your ability to pre-conceive of every use case—a near impossibility as customers will use (or will try to use) your application in ways you never dreamed of. Scripting solutions are a good insurance policy and automated testing tool for IT, and that's about the limit of their CEM capabilities.

The Voice of Customer / Replay Hybrids

Allowing your customers to fill-out a survey is an efficient way to get their feedback without requiring them to call your contact center. This feedback can be strong indicators of obstacles on your site. However, the data gathered from customers is often more emotional than informative ("Your site sucks!") or incomplete ("My cart got emptied and I couldn't check out"). One or two VOC solutions on the market have tried to improve the actionability of their survey results by offering the ability to replay the sessions that gave you feedback. This is handy for reproducing that particular person's problem, perhaps indicating an obvious issue. But this doesn't change the fact that an individual session is an anecdote—not a business case. It's tough to drive site optimization priorities with anecdotes. Also these solutions are limited to replaying only the sessions that gave you feedback, which means that they can't really tell you how often the problem is occurring, nor can they tell how many transactions this problem is preventing, which is the hallmark of business impact analysis.

In my next post on "The Many Shades of CEM," I'll address Usability Solutions and IT Packet Sniffers. Stay tuned. In the meantime, please feel free to share any experiences you have with robots or VoC solutions.