In the Beginning

After many years as an employee and consultant with large multinational companies, one of the most surprising things I found was the complete lack of visibility executives had into the quality of their company’s customer-facing operations, and the experiences of their customers.

In an era when technology had transformed most corporate functions, enabling real-time transactional feedback, I was amazed that information about a company’s most important asset – the customer base – was collected and shared on an annual, quarterly, or (at best) monthly basis.  

As I met and spoke with senior executives and front-line employees at some of North America’s most successful companies, I found a common thread; both groups were passionate about delivering great experiences, and both groups had very little access to timely information that would help them identify problems early, and drive change.

The corporate world had evolved in such a way that market research data had become their only access point to the customer experience. The problem with market research? It was still “old economy”, in that information about the customer experience was statistically valid, but periodic and not linked to action on the front lines.

A Better Way

There had to be a better way of connecting companies and their employees to customers…and vice-versa. I knew that information from customers about their experiences would only be valuable if it could be delivered to key stakeholders in a timely fashion, and made actionable. Even better, I wondered what would happen if a company could engage customers in such a manner that they would talk to you every day about things they love and hate about the business. This would allow organizations to use the voice of the customer – the voice of the market – to help drive business improvements and innovation. Grass roots, pulse of the customer, market-driven change, in real-time.  

I knew there was a huge opportunity to operationalize the voice of the customer for my clients, many of them large, enterprise-scale organizations. But I couldn’t find one. So I decided to create my own.

Based on principles like closed-loop feedback, total quality management, market research , short-interval control and business intelligence, the ResponseTek team set out to develop a software solution that would connect companies to their customers in real-time, with action management and issue resolution as the end objective. There were no existing software applications or solutions to base ours on in 1999, and we needed a name for the category.  We decided to call it “Customer Experience Management” software, or CEM; today, CEM is a widely-used term for many types of customer management solutions.

Our Passion

We started small, with a passion for helping companies connect to the voice of their customers, in order to deliver consistent, quality experiences.  Today, we are proud to say we are still industry leaders, helping companies understand the value of customer experiences, and how to operationlize their CEM programs to transform the voice of the customer into actionable business intelligence. Our software solutions are used by some of the world’s largest, most progressive organizations.

We believe we are still at the beginning of the customer experience revolution, and that most corporations are still paying lip-service to the customer, by relying on market research and marketing to understand and improve customer satisfaction.  The difference with ResponseTek? Whether our clients are based in North America, Europe, Australia or Africa, they all share a belief in using the voice of their customers to drive improvements every day, through every employee, and every customer touch point. 

This passion for customer experience – and action – is what sets our clients apart from the rest.

The Future

In the future, CEM solutions will become standard-issue enterprise software for most corporations, and voice of the customer information will be recognized in much the same way that financial data is today – as high-value, high-impact, predictive and strategic.

At ResponseTek, CEM is the practice of helping companies continuously close the gap between the customer promise and delivered customer experiences, in the quest to create dependable populations of customer advocates. I welcome you to contact me directly to find out what CEM can mean for your organization.

Syed Hasan - CEO

Syed@ResponseTek.com