Care - An increasingly Strategic Role in the Enterprise

For far too long the customer care operation has been treated as an isolated function. Technology investments have been focused on the goal of reducing costs and if possible, reducing direct involvement with the customer. In a Care 2.0 world, successful companies will be those that recognize the care operation as central to the company’s business strategy and vital to maintaining the customer ties that are key to long-term growth.

Nuance sees three new and emerging solution areas that will help spur this transition. The first is the area of Care Analytics. When you consider the frequency of contact a company has with its customers through the contact center you begin to appreciate the wealth of knowledge that lies within. However, to date, this knowledge generally doesn’t make its way back into the enterprise and to decision makers that could leverage it to drive the overall business. Through solutions such as Nuance Consumer Insights and speech analytics, Nuance is helping company’s to better understand its customers and helping company’s better leverage this information across the enterprise. Through Care Analytics, the contact center becomes the center of the enterprise.

The second area of opportunity is what we have defined as the Mobile Enterprise. Our Mobile Enterprise solutions leverage the exciting emergence of speech-based search and network dictation capabilities to enable the care operation that is in the field. By bringing a new voice to solutions already existing in the field e.g. field force automation, sales force automation, inventory management systems, and knowledge bases we are helping companies to improve operational efficiency, provide immediate information to and from the field, and add incremental value to existing solutions. Those in the field become an active and dynamic extension to the contact center and care operation. The contact center and the enterprise have no boundaries.

And finally, multi-modal care will transition the contact center into a whole new platform for business. When you think of the opportunity of combining the convenience of voice for access and visible data on the handset, it doesn’t take long to imagine what the customer experience can be. The mobile platform in Care will go beyond simply managing a customer’s service needs, to being a platform for so much more e.g. company advertising, sales promotions, community building, corporate outreach etc. This will start in the form of voice and data (SMS/MMS) but as sophistication in mobile technologies advance, there is an opportunity to truly create new lifestyle experiences for customers combing voice with rich media content from the web. In either case, the contact center, as the main point of contact for the customer, will emerge as a primary vehicle for the enterprise to conduct business.

The care operation and contact center will emerge in the Care 2.0 world as an organization considered vital to meeting long term business objectives.