Teleperformance, IBM/Concentrix and Convergys make the Winner’s Circle for transforming the customer experience

With the intense proliferation of customer communications channels, there’s a huge strain on CMOs, like never before, to keep up and stay ahead of the competition.

Management of an omni-channel environment that is effective across all customer touch-points is a brutal, but necessary, reality for competitive success in today’s business world.  Leveraging service providers which can deliver the customer-centric marketing savvy, the business processes, global scale and technology capabilities to support these secular changes to the customer environment is critical to the success of so many organization’s today.

We are proud to reveal our first Blueprint report that has gone deep into the innovation and execution capabilities of today’s leading service providers in the customer experience management industry – and many congratulations to Teleperformance, IBM/Concentrix and Convergys for making the inaugural Winner’s Circle:

Here are the top 3 factors necessary to create a valuable customer experience in the future:

*Capabilities to Monitor, Understand and Proactively Serve the Expectations of Customers are the Crucial Ingredients. The elements that touch the customer are increasingly originating from the digital realm. Organizations will need to adapt to this change and develop competencies to understand the expectations of customers and align each touch point with brand expectations. This is critical now, and becoming even more so in the future.

*Understanding the Customer is becoming More Complex, but Creates Competitive Opportunities for Ambitious CMOs. Although more channels need to be developed (social and mobile) if an organization utilizes monitoring technology and builds models around the flow of customer data, more complete pictures of the customer will become available that were not previously available. This can enable organizations to align marketing activities better to customers through more specific segmentation, as well as to understand, and proactively address, customer sentiment and customer trends.

*Customer Experience Alignment Across All Customer Channels is Imperative for many Brands. Aligning expectations to an organization’s brand image across all channels is a make or break proposition. For example, many organizations are fighting to align traditional brick-and-mortar stores with online and mobile experiences. There are increasingly more channels to contend with, including SMS usage in emerging economies such as Africa.

Getting customer experience management right will matter to all organizations, especially larger organizations that have sizable product portfolios across multiple geographies. Organizations will need to monitor, understand, and align their brand to the right customers, at the right time. The three service providers that we found best placed currently to service organizations with customer experience management services are Teleperformance, IBM (whose call center assets have been recently acquired by the Concentrix division of Synnex), and Convergys.

The CEM Blueprint utilizes our Blueprint Methodology (click here to read in detail), which measures both execution and innovation against a set of crowdsourced criteria derived from the State of the Outsourcing Survey 2013. We assessed data from over 130 live multi-process CEM BPO engagements to ascertain provider market shares, depth of client base, breath of execution and geographic scope of delivery. We examined the CEM value chain (consulting, product design, marketing and sales, and service and support) and interlaced what we know will be important to CEM buyers in the radically evolving CEM sector with the capabilities and vision of the service providers in our assessment.

Report Author, Adam Luciano, Principal Analyst, HfS Research (Click for bio)

Our analyst team conducted exhaustive interviews with multiple buyers and market advisors to help score providers against each other across all the sub-categories of the Blueprint using ExpertChoice, an advanced statistical analytics platform. We also received a tremendous amount of cooperation from (almost) all of the providers above, as we went through this exhaustive process to understand their concrete plans for the future, get really deep with their current client relationships, their overall vision and their appetite to evolve and invest into higher-value areas of CEM BPO.

HfS subscribers can access their CEM Blueprint report here

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