Customer Experience, Needs, and Requirements Analysis

Listening to the customer: not a radical concept, but one few practice. In the era of dynamic markets and constantly changing channel relationships, not having a systematic program in place for listening to the customer voice is a recipe for disaster. The importance of listening to the customer is magnified as the customer interaction models change from being uni-channel to multi-channel.

Our Customer Experience consulting services are useful in four scenarios:

Customer Voice Capture and Analysis. Determining customers’ (and employees’) needs and wants means uncovering the factors that are important to them and designing processes that keep your company ahead of the competition. We’ll help organizations better listen to their customers to understand their pressure points that cause frustration, anger, and switching. We often leverage emerging techniques like Web-based surveys to capture and record the voice of the customer.

Online Customer Experience. A B2B or B2C portal with few users is an unfortunate but common occurrence. The main reason for this is that e-business portals were moved from concept to design with extremely limited business requirements gathering phases. In particular, very little attention was paid to understanding the current customer experience and what the online experience should be. Today, many first-generation portals are being gutted and redesigned to improve the customer experience. Uncovering the user needs is known to be the one variable that has the most impact on adoption and usage of the portal.

Self-Service Portal Requirements Analysis. Every portal is a window into a network of business processes. Understanding how to take the requirements of customers, their expectations, and the experiences they are looking for and map them into a variety of CRM, ERP, SCM, and HCM enterprise applications that encapsulate a variety of business processes is painstaking work. We’ll use our process mapping and analysis expertise to review and validate the different portal processes. First, we walk in the shoes of the customer to experience the frustration and gaps from existing processes. We carefully document the entire process flows in a business requirements document (BRD). The BRD serves as input for the design effort.

Multi-Channel Process Design. The design of processes that span multiple channels (Web, tele, retail, and mobile phones) is a new field. Consider this example, which is now commonplace in a variety of industries: A customer begins the chain of events by taking a picture with her mobile phone. She then goes home and transfers the pictures from mobile phone to her PC. She decides to print the pictures by sending them to a local retailer for processing. This scenario is very interesting as it crosses three different channels (mobile, Web, and retail). In other words, brick, click, and flick. At ebs, we have developed unique expertise in multi-channel process design. Our research on mobile business process is unparalleled.

How Does ebs Do This?
Everything is seen from the eyes of the customer. ebs’ Customer Needs and Requirements service is an outside-in process for gauging user perspective and requirements. We will develop a customized survey instrument, identify the target sample, conduct interviews, analyze the feedback, and make recommendations to your management. The methodology consists of five high-level steps:

• Verify
• Organize
• Conduct
• Analyze
• Leverage

Why ebs?
Unlike market research, which only gives a generic understanding of high-level issues, ebs’ Customer and Market Requirements service focuses on the end-to-end processes and helps your company factor the Voice of the Customer into critical initiatives such as business process design from the customer perspective, portal versioning, sales execution, and accelerating adoption and usage.

ebs’ Customer and Market Requirements will help your company develop a sound execution plan, build better relationships with your customers, understand the issues of customer development and how to respond to them, and integrate customer concerns into core operating strategies.