Context

I have been evangelizing non stop for the last two years to my customers and to companies that they need to start thinking about how they can use technology to bring context to situations in service. I have used the tag line, "The right information, in front of the right person, at the right moment in time" as a line that helps me to communicate the importance of information management. In call centers this is especially true, as there are so many ways to get information but not always the right information at the right time.

In one of my earlier posts this year I talked about decision making engines and how they are changing the landscape of how people are treated in service organizations. This is really the new frontier and I wanted to post an article that continue to drive home this message. If you are a customer service leader and are thinking about these ideas and concepts, take a look at this link below:

http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/08/googles-next-big-thing/

Many of the conversations around context today are centered around location information and how that can drive context. But, I think that enterprises have an enormous opportunity to really drive a different type of engagement if they take the information they currently know and gather during an interaction.

How can you use technology to drive context into your customer service experience?

Good Article

As a follow up to my last post a few weeks back, there was a post that was found on the TechCrunch site yesterday that continues to back up my learnings in the comms space. I titled the post Push vs Pull but this link talks about the same concepts.

http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/16/the-future-will-be-personalized/

Well worth a few minutes of time to read and ponder. Personalization or context are the next big thing, not only in consumer services, but also in the enterprise customer service space.

Push vs Pull

As I have been going about my days in the past few months, I have been continuing to hear, at different times, the same idea being talked about. I listened to a speech that Mark Benioff made a month or so ago. I listened to a presentation from TED. I heard an interview with the top guy at IBM for analytics and many more. What they were all talking about in some form though is a very similar thing that I have been talking about in customer service for some time now. It is not about having the data. It is not even about making sure the data is presented nicely against a bunch of other data on a fancy dashboard.

Nope. The real next step in technology that I have been talking about, specifically with comms companies in customer service, is that it is about presenting the data, to the right person, at the right time, IN CONTEXT. And it is this IN CONTEXT piece that is consistently been missing from the conversation in the past. Yeah it's great that my billing system gives me 1000 points of data about the customer in 5 different screens. But can it intelligently give me the 10 pieces of data that are most relevant to me based on what the customer has called in about at that moment in time?

Think about it. In 1999, Amazon was lighting the world on fire and to get information you needed to go to their site and start searching around for the info that you wanted. The experience was you going out and finding what you wanted and then taking action with that information. As we have moved further and further into the future, we have started to expect that information becomes more and more intelligent and starts coming to us. Think how different Facebook is now then Amazon was. We have moved forward in the sense that information is more and more coming to us without us needing to find it, but most of it is still out of context. As an example, my wife today has something like 1300 friends on Facebook. But her challenge is that Facebook is not intelligent enough to know the most common Friends she clicks on or messages or reads info from. If it did, it would likely start to order the info she received in a way that was relevant and important to her instead of just blindly putting up everything that her friends post.

This is the same in the world of customer service. Yes, agents can use Knowledge Management Systems to find info. Yes, the billing system or the CRM system has everything you need to know about the customer in their somewhere. Yes, the notes about the last call live somewhere in a system. But the problem I still am seeing is the lack of context that is being used to deliver THE RIGHT information at a time that is most appropriate for someone to consume and then use. And it is not about putting up more links that seem to be relevant for an agent in a KM portal. It is about making the content come to the agent in a useable and actionable way.

I heard this analogy and thought it was worth passing along. Today we are looking at data as discrete chunks of information, trying to analyze against other discrete pieces and then producing summarized reports/knowledge that will help to make better decisions. What we should be viewing data as is more of a puzzle that we played with as kids. Instead of comparing two pieces of data against each other, lets start using the picture that has already been created as a way of figuring out where the puzzle piece fits. In the context of a call center agent, lets take the burden off of them to understand the whole puzzle and bring to them only the puzzle pieces/data/knowledge that helps them complete the puzzle for the picture the business wants to create. It's about putting the right information, in front of the right person, in context to bring to life a truly authentic customer experience.

What I am Hearing Part 5

So this is the final official post in the series that I had laid out about a month ago and it has to do with social media and what I am hearing in the communication provider space about social media.

Over the last two or three years, social media has been a confusing space for most communications companies but also a space that represents a huge opportunity for them. All of the most popular companies have their LinkedIn sites, their Facebook pages and their Twitter accounts that they use in a variety of different ways. But when you ask an SVP or VP of Strategic IT in a communications company how they are using technology to take advantage of the social space, there is usually a deer in headlights blank stare that shortly follows the question. The reality is that there are so many different ways to use social media today for a company that it has become a challenge for IT groups to get their arms around how they harness technology intelligently to enable the business user groups. It is a bit of the wild west right now in companies and with that confusion and chaos, comes opportunity. The challenge becomes where do you focus that opportunity.

What I am hearing right now is that IT groups are just trying to get their arms around the blocking and tackling bits of social media and lay the foundation for the future. This is incredibly complex for them as they have various groups of business users that are looking at different ideas to leverage social media. Marketing wants to use social media to raise awareness and promote conversations. Customer service wants to use social media to find ways to identify issues with customers and provide solutions to problems. Product teams want to use social media for input into new products or services. And from what I am hearing, executives are trying to figure out a way to promote the use of social media without really understanding it themselves. So, IT execs end up working tirelessly to satisfy the needs of the business while at the same time making sure that the technology fits their roadmap for the future.

So, with that all being said, where does this impact customer service and how are companies starting to use social media in communication companies? Most are starting with basic building blocks that just get them listening as best they can and responding to customers as if social is just another channel of communication for dealing with issues. Comcast does this today, DirecTV does this today, Cox does this and many others. They monitor the conversation and respond to people to make sure their issues are resolved. As they start to grow that part of their communication with customers, there will be a natural extension from the call center business to ensure that these communications are handled in a way that is consistent with the rest of the channels. I am sure many vendors are already addressing this need and we will see more and more products in the near future to help que and order the responses to social media.

Once you have the basics in place, then I think the most interesting thing I am hearing lately is that many companies are searching for a way to help bring the social world into their business. Because social media is changing the way that companies communicate and interact with the customer, companies need to become more of a social organization or social company. That means they need to change the way their processes work, change the way they engage, change the way they escalate and change the SLA's that they manage to for customer issue resolution. The social world is forcing this change and companies are thinking about how they address this with technology. They need to start thinking about how they address the social customer but how they do it within the context of a process so that it becomes integrated tightly into what the core direction of the company is and not just a side project that creates more chaos.

So to wrap up this post for now, social media is being discussed and argued about almost daily at most communications companies. Where I am seeing most companies focus right now is on getting the basics down first and then building their capabilities out from there. Addressing the needs of the social customer is important and integral to companies succeeding going forward. But only if companies integrate it in a way that allows them to become a social business while at the same time putting process around the space to ensure the company is meeting the needs of the customer and not merely encouraging chaos.

What I am Hearing Part 4

Today, we are going to talk about the role of enforcement in the world of customer service and specifically what I am hearing in the communications market place about how they are dealing with enforcement.

Enforcement can mean different things to different people when it comes to customer service. For some people enforcement revolves around the need to enforce certain policies or guidelines in order to meet a legal requirement for the company. For others, the idea of enforcement focuses in on meeting certain handle time metrics or FCR metrics. Still yet for others, the idea of enforcement is really all about the scripting of interactions to ensure proper outcomes.

Recently, I have been hearing from communications companies that they are primarily focused on three things when it comes to enforcement: Credits/Adjustments, Required Call Components and Tech Support Call Flows. Lets tackle each in a bit more depth.

1. CREDITS AND ADJUSTMENTS

A number of companies in the communications space, in particular the wireless companies, are taking extra time to focus on the roles of Credits and Adjustments in their company. The premise behind these credits and adjustments is simple, there are times when companies enable their customer service leaders and team members to compensate a customer for an issue they have had by crediting their bill or making an adjustment to their service in some way. I was talking with a wireless company recently and they told me that they set aside around $100 million dollars a year to allow their teams to make credits and adjustments. So, there is a lot of money at stake.

Now that I have given you a sense for the size of the problem, there seem to be two challenges that companies are facing.

The first is ensuring that customer service personal are making the right decisions about when to give a credit or adjustment. Not everyone will understand or remember the correct process for every type of credit or adjustment that might be faced when talking to a customer. In this case, companies are looking into call flow software that can help enable their representatives to make the right decisions about next steps for a given customer scenario.

The second challenge with credits and adjustments is ensuring that the customer service teams are using the alloted pool of money wisely. In some situations, billing systems are intelligent enough to know what is the correct amount of money to credit or adjust based on rules that are set up in that software. But other times, specifically in cases where the credit is a goodwill credit, a person may not know what the "right" amount of money might be to give away to secure the relationship with the customer. Some companies give maximum flexibility to their customer service teams to make the right call, others restrict their teams to only certain dollar amounts without chain of command stepping in to approve. I am hearing more and more from companies that they would like to solve this problem with some type of enforcement engine that would make suggestions to their teams that take into consideration what is best both for the customer, based on lifetime value etc, and what is best for the company.

2. REQUIRED CALL COMPONENTS

Many companies are trying to understand how to best address the needs of legal, while at the same time not overburdening their customer service teams and customers with paragraphs of disclaimers or legal jargon. A great example of this came from a customer of mine that was struggling with a lawsuit that had been brought against them because a customer had called up complaining about charges they had received at installation of their service. The customer disputed what they had originally signed up for with the agent on the phone and then sued the company because they believed they should not have been charged.

In the case of my customer, they had some recording evidence they could go back to in order to prove that they were not in the wrong and the customer had indeed agreed to the order and installation charges. But, the company still realized that they needed a better way of being able to enforce and reinforce the legal language to ensure that they were protected in cases like this.

Many other companies I have talked to recently are also struggling with this same challenge and are investigating options that will help them better enforce, both timing of and content of, legal disclosures that need to be provided to their end user customers.

3. TECH SUPPORT

As we all know, communications companies are getting more calls than ever for tech support. We addressed this in the first post of this series, but would like to mention here as well as an important dialog that is going on in terms of enforcement.

Probably the biggest single challenge that tech support/oss support faces for communication companies is making sure that folks that are in tech support follow an appropriate process before either making a refund, sending out a refurbished device or rolling a truck to a house. This is always a tricky one to balance because of the typical experience level or tenure of tech support reps. They tend to be longer tenured folks and tend to believe that they have seen most of the problems that come in and know how to deal with them. That may be true, but what companies are still trying to deal with is that you can't depend on that person being their forever and when they go, that knowledge goes with them. So, the question that keeps coming up in my meetings is, how do I make sure that my tech support reps are following a process that is consistent, leads to fewer refunds or truck rolls and allows me to replace service reps relatively painlessly when they decide to leave the company?

Enforcement can be a real challenge for a variety of technology and human reasons. Sometimes it is just a human being wanting to exercise more control of the situation or sometimes it is a matter of the technology not being flexible enough to help create enforcement in the variety of situations that leaders need to address. None the less, these issues around enforcement are top of mind right now with companies in the communications space and they are actively trying to find solutions to the challenges that are presented.

Podcast Interview

I was recently asked to give an interview for a conference I am attending later this month in Orlando. I gave them a few thoughts I have on some of the things that are interesting in the customer service space. Please check it out, but make sure you turn up the volume as they have some recording issues.

http://www.iirusa.com/upload/wysiwyg/2010-M-Div/M2300/RobSader_NACCM.mp3

What I am Hearing Part 3

Ok, so here we are in part three of the series on what I am hearing in the communication service provider space. In the last week and a half, we have talked about how many companies are starting to focus on Offer Management and process enablers in order to make an impact in their service organizations. Today, we are going to tackle the issue of Intelligent Decision Making and it's impact on customer service.

The foundation around this particular post comes from a number of conversations I have been having lately about data and how using data or capturing data can be both a blessing and a curse. It can be a blessing because having boat loads of data can help people make better decisions, no real argument from most on this point. Not rocket science either. But data can also be a curse in the sense that many companies are swimming in data and can be bogged down in making decisions because of the enormous amounts of data in their Enterprise Data Warehouse.

There is also consideration made for data that is real time and data that is static. Companies are trying to understand how both types can be used to further the needs of the business and customers.

Again, after a number of different conversations, it is becoming more and more clear that companies are starting to depend on software to help make decisions for them. I know that it seems all to Tom Cruiseish from Minority Report, but companies are starting depend more and more on new types of software to help them not just make sense of data statically and make forward looking decisions. They are looking to software to help them make real time decisions about servicing their customers.

A great example of this is in the retention space for communications service providers. As we have been going through this downturn in the economy, there obviously becomes a focus on the existing customer base ensuring that churn rates are as low as possible. For years companies and specifically marketing departments have been using data that can be gathered about customers usage patterns, geography, competitive market etc, to create offers and present offers to customers to ensure they stay a customer. The challenge that companies have had in this regard is that they are using very static information to make offers or to try to save customers, they aren't using dynamic real time information to make the best offer to that customer. In the case of someone calling to say they are cancelling, their may be three reasons the customer gives the call center agent as to why they are cancelling: a new competitive offer, a service issue they are having currently and the first agent they spoke to was very rude to them. In a large majority of service organizations, that data is not used in an intelligent way to help agents make decisions about how best to care for and save this customer.

So what I see happening in the market is that companies are starting to use Real Time Decisioning engines to help make the most effective pitch or offer to save that customer that we described in the example above. These engines are able to take the static information or data that is available about the customer, combine it with some real time data input about what is happening in the moment with the customer on the phone and help pull together an offer that will be much more specific and thus much more likely for a customer to say yes to.

There seem to be a couple of keys in choosing these types of engines that are important to the people I have been talking with over the last several months:

1. Flexible- The Real Time Decisioning Engine that is selected needs to be flexible in a couple of different ways. First, it needs to be able to accept inputs from a variety of different points in order to make the best decision possible. Not only should it accept inputs from back end systems that will feed it static info about the customer and their history with the company, but it should also be able to accept input from people in real time so that the decision that is made is as accurate as possible. Second, the engine should be flexible in it's deployment model. It should not take you a year and buckets of money to deploy these engines. They are complex, but at the same time they should be flexible enough to start small and grow with the needs of the business. A SaaS solution or Cloud based solution may be a great option here.

2. Dynamic- The engine itself should be easy to use and dynamic enough so that if marketing makes changes to offers or programs, the decision engine can be changed within minutes to reflect the updated inputs from marketing. It should not be a situation where you need to call in the vendor in order to make big, expensive code changes in order to accommodate tweeks in data inputs.

3. Learning- Probably the most important criteria that needs to be considered is the ability for the engine to learn from decisions that are suggested and made. As the business changes, as the customers change, as the macro economic environment changes, you want the engine to be able to learn from what decisions were made and be able to make smarter or more effective decisions next time around. As an example, when a customer calls in and cancels and they happen to be from Chicago, are in a competitive area, have had 4 service calls in the last 2 months, are very upset, are referencing an offer from a competitor and have been loyal to you for 5 years, you want to ensure that the engine learns by making changes to the offer next time they see a customer with the same characteristics as the customer that was just lost. The idea is that the company should be learning every time they lose or win and thus really using the data they have in real time to make better decisions for the business.

There are only one or two companies that I know of right now that have successfully rolled out Real Time Decision Making software to their users. But, I have heard from a number of companies that they are starting to dig deeper and learn more about how it will be useful for them. Some companies see the value by helping to retain more customers. Some see it as a way to help agents make better decisions about who to give credits or adjustments to. Some see it as a way to enable sales agents to close more sales. In the end it is all about taking decision making into real time.

The take home message is that there is software starting to come into the market that can help companies make better real time decisions about their customers and their business. It can help them save more customers, differentiate in the treatment of customers, ensure credit or adjustment policies are adhered to and a variety of other specific customer service issues. The key to success for companies will be in taking baby steps to using this technology, ensuring success through small projects and then growing it to be more useful across the service organization.

Push vs Pull

I am going to be adding one more set of learnings to my series on What I am Hearing. This idea of pushing information versus pulling information. Seems relatively mundane or simple, but there seems to be an interesting dialog happening right now about this concept. Likely coming from the changes in the consumer market, but none the less, still an important dialog that needs to be explored.

Next week will be part 3 and 4 of the series.

What I am Hearing Part 2

So this post starts out with a quick story about what I am hearing in the market from different communications providers.

A few months back I was talking to a communications company and we got on the topic of support, specifically technical support of their customers. He had told me that he had recently fielded a call from the COO of the company who had promptly told him that they needed to find a way to divert some of their strategic planning dollars from revenue generation activities to anything that could help control costs. The executive team had been noticing a slow but steady increase to the overall costs to service their customers and while the COO was at an industry event, he was getting feedback that other execs were seeing the same things. The COO wanted to get out in front of this trend and wanted to do it fast.

This was just the first call that I got that lead to many conversations over the last 9 months where I learned from a number of other Customer Service execs that they too are being asked to find ways to slow the growth in costs in the tech support groups.

When I started to dig into these concerns with these folks, what we started to see was a pretty clear pattern for why costs were starting to increase more consistently than in the past. First, the complexity of the services and devices that companies are supporting for customers has increased 10 times in just the last two years. In particular, wireless companies are seeing an explosion in Smart Devices, in large part due to their own marketing and sales efforts, that are pushing customers into a world in which it is not just about voice calls anymore. In reality, companies are supporting small computers in peoples pockets and with that increase in complexity, a natural increase in calls will come to handle issues.

The second major reason why the costs are on the steady increase is that most major communications companies customer service groups are averaging around 70% turnover in their agent populations per year. This means that a majority of the people that are being hired in a year will not last a year. Couple this relative lack of experience with the more complex nature of calls that are coming in and you can start to see the train wreck awaiting. The result is one of two things, either you continue to send the complex calls to new or mid tier agents and the likelihood of First Call Resolution goes down or you end up employing more and more experienced agents that cost you more to hold on to and employ. Either way, the overall costs to serve the customer will be impacted in a negative way for the business.

What I am hearing more and more is that companies are looking for solutions by first figuring out the correct process for handling the more complex calls and then using software to "Institutionalize" the knowledge in the form of process flows. As I have started to dig into this more with leaders, what I have found is that there are two lessons learned that they have come away with consistently when attacking the problem in this way.

1. The software that you choose to enable the agents needs to be extraordinarily flexible for managers or business analysts to make changes on the fly to the flows. If Network Ops makes a change that will impact how the Whole Home DVR will be troubleshot, then the team in Call Center Ops needs to make sure that they can make the change to their software tool and push out immediately to their agents.

2. Leaders have to think about using flows and software that is truly dynamic in order to get the best adoption from your agents groups. It is not enough to offer an agent a step by step, linear process for getting a resolution to a problem. First of all, customers never take you through a step by step call so expecting an agent to use software that does this is flawed thinking. Second, as an agent gets more experienced over the course of time, they will be less likely to depend on the process flows to resolve issues which could negatively impact the business. So the solution is to find a software tool that will allow for a dynamic and free flow movement through issue resolution. The interface to the agents and the back end logic should be dynamic enough that and agent can move from step one to step seven without impacting the quality of the call, the process or the business's best interests.

To recap, What I Am Hearing Part 2 really is about service providers that are finding ways to reduce costs to serve in their ever more complex world. They are identifying the most frequent complex calls, mapping the best processes, employing dynamic software to empower agents and ensuring that the knowledge of the many is "Institutionalized"to minimize the impact of high attrition rates.

What I am Hearing Part 1

So to kick off my series into what I am hearing from leaders of Customer Service for Communications Service Providers, I thought I would look at the concept and delivery of Offer Management.

Offer Management can take on many forms and ultimately can mean a slightly different thing to different people. Some people see Offer Management as a way to ensure the retention of unhappy customers and some people see it as a way to ensure the right package of service is offered to a potential new customer. Both are valuable uses of Offer Management and both are being actively explored today by Communication Service Providers.

There are really a number of pieces and parts to Offer Management and there are really only a few companies in the market that provide a holistic solution set in this space. IBM, Oracle and Amdocs are some of the big companies that are starting to piece together parts of this solution to round out an entire offering, but there are smaller niche players that are still going strong, such as an Exact Target.

The key to Offer Management, and the part that I am hearing more and more about, is the almost one to one offering that companies are moving to with the offers they give to customers. As companies are able to source more and more information about customer demographics and are able to paint a picture of their target or current customer that is more specific, you will start to see more targeted offerings. I have spoken with one company in the Service Provider space that is ultimately looking to have a One to One relationship with their targets that will create dynamic offers that are specific to that person and dynamic campaigns that will change based on the individual. With that desire, comes a number of challenges and concerns that we won't talk about here in terms of privacy. But, more and more companies will be trying to find ways to make the offers as compelling and complete as they possibly can.

As we start to see this progression and shift away from mass marketing to more of an individual based marketing, companies will need to ensure that they have the technology in place to manage offers based on different preferences as well as different delivery mechanisms to make the offer. This means that companies will need to invest in technology that allows them to make the best decisions about the offers and learn from those decisions that are made. We will talk more about this in another post and dig deeper into the intelligent nature of decisions.

Although this space is still maturing, it really is a core focus of just about every company I have talked with in the last 90 days.

Question is, how are you positioning to take advantage of this need? You don't have to be an IBM or Oracle to offer a solution to the need. You simply have to find a niche that will provide input to a company to help further refine the offer models.

Delivering Happiness

A quick note here to say that I just finished reading the book from Tony Hsieh, the CEO of Zappos about Delivering Happiness. What a great book and challenging at the same time. It really flips the typical model of customer experience and delivery on its head. I think there are others that have come before Zappos in trying to attain the customer experience that they are shooting for, Nordstroms is one that comes to mind. But the part that really differentiates the Nordstroms of the world from Zappos, is the core desire of the team at Zappos to "Deliver Happiness". They have decided that the culture of company dictates the delivery of service to their customers and vendors and don't just use service as a means to make more money. Making more money is a by product of the culture and the belief that making people happy will bring more customers.

Really interesting stuff at the end of the book as well on the Science of Happiness.

Definitely worth the read for the stories and the ideas he lays out in a story telling fashion.

Conversations I Am Having

I realized the other day that it had been some time since I took time out of my day to write down my thoughts on my blog. I also realized that what annoys me most is when I find a blog that I like and the author doesn't write everyday. So, if I ever really want people to visit my blog on a regular basis and engage in conversations about the topics that interest me and others, then I need to make sure that I write much more consistently. Today is a start to that commitment!

Over the next few days and weeks, I am going to write about my experiences in the Service Provider market and where the focus seems to be and maybe where it should be for those companies to start creating a truly authentic customer experience. The first few blogs that I will write will be focused primarily on what business challenges are being addressed most frequently by Service Providers. Then I will try to tackle how they are trying to use technology to enable change and improvement in those core areas.

As a precursor to the next few weeks, here are the areas that I see most Service Providers in the communication market space focusing on:

1. Offer Management- This takes many forms and means slightly different things to different people. But ultimately it comes down to being able to ensure that you put the right offer in front of the right person at the right time to either keep more customers or bring on more new customers.

2. Reducing Cost to Serve- In a nutshell, this is about creating a service organization that is able to meet the needs of customers that are signing up for increasingly more complex devices and services.

3. Intelligent Decision Making- This business need can take many different forms, but ultimately companies are looking at two different models to make better decisions while servicing customers, Static/Historical Decision Making and Real Time Decision Making.

4. Enforcement- Again, different things to different people, but the area I see this most impacting the business is around ensuring people are doing the right things at the right time to meet the customers needs while at the same time doing what is right for the business.

5. Social Media- This is a big one, but from my perspective, not as big as people are making it out to be. I will take a look from a customer perspective on this one and hopefully bring in to the conversation insight that will help drive more dialog.

All of these areas, in relation to the customer experience, could take up many blog posts and fill up many conversations. The key is, this is what customers are talking about right now in their service organizations. This is the meat and what better thing to discuss than the stuff that is making leaders think.

Should be a fun couple of weeks and I look forward to your feedback and comments.

Customer Connection

This blog from the beginning has been all about trying to bring together ideas about what it means to create the authentic customer experience. Truly connecting with people in a way that engenders a sense of loyalty to your brand and your company. So the question that is on my mind today is, does the application of technology in service eliminate the opportunity for connection?

So, the two extremes in this argument are best represented by two stories.

I was working with a mobile service provider about a year ago and they told me something about their service philosophy that was a bit shocking to me and took me off guard. They said that they actually encouraged and pushed their service people to have customers take their issues to their stores so that they could have the chance for the sales people to get them to buy more stuff. I found this strange because it seemed that there was a cost balance that one would want to strike in providing service that ensured you were not eating up peoples time in your stores for things that could be easily dealt with over the phone. The second thing that struck me as odd was that they were going out of their way to ensure that the customer was being serviced the way the company wanted them to be serviced versus the way the customer wanted to be serviced. Again, odd to me, but that was their stated path forward. This to me is an example of an extreme non-use of technology in providing customer service.

The other extreme can be represented by the Netflix story of about a year or so ago when they refused to staff a customer service group and did not publish any kind of customer service number. Another example would be earlier this year when Google came out with their first phone and the customer service that was provided was all forum based online and there was no phone support. Both examples are classic stories of people taking technology too far and creating a poor customer experience by not connecting with their customers.

So what is the right answer? My belief is that, like anything else in the world, it is a nice balance of the two that gets you the connection that you desire without requiring customers to have too much or too little choice around the technology they use to communicate with you. A classic example of this philosophy of balance would be Apple. I am not a Apple fanatic but do have an IPhone and my wife does use a Macbook. So we have had our fair share of experiences with their service groups. The beauty of their philosophy is that they balance somewhere in the middle with providing just enough technology for their technical customers but also plenty of human interaction with their customer service numbers or their stores. This allows them to really connect with their customers in ways that are comfortable and natural for the customer versus what is natural for the company.

Finding that balance can be tricky and can take some time to do when businesses are evolving and changing so quickly. But, I would argue that getting this balance right is the only way that connections can be made and authenticity will be instilled.

Humanity in Service

I have a question for you, How Human is your customer service?

I don't think that we can go around the room and assign a numerical value to the level of humanity that is baked into a companies service organization. But I do think it is a fair question to ask and a question that many customers ask themselves subconsciously when making a choice between doing business with Vendor X or Vendor Y.

I work in the technology industry in customer service, so I am naturally a big fan of using technology for the things that it makes sense to automate. But, I am also a traditionalist in the sense that I believe that there are things that just make it simpler, faster and an overall better customer experience if you handle in a human to human interaction. For example, I was on an airlines voice self service the other day and I was trying to buy a ticket with a voucher. I walked through their prompting and it actually did a pretty nice job of understanding me and putting my trip together. But, at the end of the day, the linear and locked in fashion with which the automated system works is just too slow and too static for my taste and I am sure for many others. I could communicate exactly what I want in about half the time to a live agent and get wrapped quickly.

What the airline is thinking in this case is, "I can really save some money on this transaction because I am using a machine to do the work for me and not paying an agent to take that call." So maybe, by the time all is said and done, it might be a tad cheaper for them to keep me in that automated system. But is that small cost really worth the poor customer experience I had in having to deal with that system instead of talking to a live agent in about half the time to finish the transaction?

Working in the technology industry in service, I see a lot of different applications of technology to save money or to boost productivity. I see a lot of companies trying to find their way through the maze of technology to ensure they are picking the right one for their company. But what I am seeing a lot more of these days is the thoughtful application of that technology versus just falling in love because everyone else is. I am seeing more thought being put into what the customer experience will be instead of just what the cost savings will be.

I wish the airline would have thought about this a bit more before trapping me in the self service path when I knew it was not going to be my final stop.

Doctors and Social Networks

The last few years have been a roller coaster in my house with my wife and my little girl going through some pretty major health issues. That being said, I have had my fair share of interactions with all sorts of different doctors. I have seen at least two of just about any kind of doctor you can imagine at this point, GI specialists, Endocrinologists, Cardiologists, GP's, OB/GYN's and on and on.

Through the years I have had a front row seat to the callous, rude, un-engaged, arrogant and self centered attitudes of the majority of doctors that are in practice today. Medicine seems to be one of the last places where we seem to grin and just accept the unacceptable behavior of someone that we are paying for services. If it were any other service that we were paying for from a professional, we would not take the punishment that we do from doctors. And when I say punishment, I don't mean when they tell us things that we need to hear and yet don't want to hear. I mean mostly the way in which they go about doing their jobs from bedside manner to follow up to even the people that are representing them in the front office of the facility.

Of course their are now a number of websites that are posting info about doctors and helping us to get a better feel for the skill sets and relative success of doctors. But medicine still seems to not have felt the power of social media and social customers. I have a feeling that will be changing soon. Two days ago we went to see a new endocrinologist and felt that we had gotten the wrong info and wrong dosages for some medicine for my wife. After calling back and getting the front desk who tried to dismiss my request, I insisted on speaking with the doctor or at least his Physicians Assistant. The next whole day went by without any conversation or phone call back. My wife and I started chatting about this and talking about what we were going to do in the social world as a response to our poor experience. Using Twitter, Facebook, my blog and email to get the word out that this doctor was not someone that we would recommend.

So that begs the question, when will social media and social customers become in control of the doctor patient relationship and how will that affect the number of doctors that are in practice today? Will doctors have to change their philosophy on how they treat patients? Will doctors adjust to the social customer? If they don't, will they become obsolete?

Filters

I had a conversation with my wife the other day and it got me thinking about filters and technology. She was on her Facebook account, where she has something like 600 friends now and she was saying that it is getting to the point where it is almost not manageable anymore. She said that it is almost a full time job to just ensure that she gets to see the right information from the right person. I am not a Facebook user, so I don't know if there is some type of filtering system that allows people to only see the people they talk to most etc... But it got me thinking....

I have held the belief for some time now that communications technology is only as useful as it is personal. What do I mean by that? I mean, communication and the way in which we communicate most effectively is determined by the medium where we have the fewest unimportant or unwanted interruptions.

For me, everything started with a plain old telephone and answering the telephone was important because there was no such thing as an answering machine or voicemail. So, you really needed to answer the phone because someone really wanted to get a hold of you. There were few unwanted interruptions in that media from the likes of telemarketers so it was valuable.

Then came cell phones. When they first came out, I always answered my phone no matter who was calling. I knew that not many people had the number so when they called, I should for sure answer. I controlled tightly who had the number and it was illegal for any telemarketers or bill collectors to call that number. Then we all got cell phones in the US and so it wasn't so private or exclusive anymore. Everyone had your number and you had their's, but talking on the phone became less and less desirable.

Then email came. Same pattern as before. Then IM came, again same pattern as before. Then in the US, text messaging become a huge craze, 10 years after Europeans had been depending on SMS. But all of these have again become almost burdensome because of the volume of messages or the interruptions with information that we don't deem important.

So we end up back at the first paragraph of the blog. What about Facebook? Twitter? Foursquare? Yelp etc....

Are all of these communications platforms just the next new thing that will someday become more and more burdensome for people to keep up with? Or will they invent ways to stay relevant with their users by helping them find the information that is most important to them.

If they don't, they might find themselves in a heap next to the rotary phone in my basement.

Social Media Revisited

I wonder, will people someday start realizing that they didn't really want all that stuff they posted for the last few years in the public domain for all the world to see?

I was having a beer with a friend a few weeks back and we were talking about all the social outlets that are available to people today, both the more static versions like blogs and Facebook and the more dynamic like Twitter and Foursquare. His comment to me was that he doesn't have an account on Twitter or Facebook or anything else besides LinkedIn because he doesn't want to share all of his world with all of the world. He thinks that someday, people will look back at all the information that they have shared and they will regret sharing so much. They will either have issues that they need to confront of identity theft that are serious and require law enforcement attention. Or he said it might just be the something that could cause real embarrassment for a person or their family.

I know that there are already groups that exist that are trying to become you in the social world. They are linking to your friends, they are telling people that they know you and then before you know it, they are pretending to be you.

Smells like an nice opportunity for someone to help people ensure their identity.

The Phone is Ringing

I read a blog recently from a company that works in the world of social media metrics. What I found particularly fascinating about the post was the way in which they were approaching the concept of social metrics by creating an analogy to the world that all of us know so well, the call center.

The point of the post really was to highlight the fact that all of the conversations that are happening in the social world are like millions of people reaching out to contact your company, sales, service, marketing, and no one picking up the phone to talk to them.

As I have said before in my posts, deep community or social engagement may not be the best first place to start in the social world for some companies. Some companies might be best served by just first tightening up their processes for service and attacking their first contact resolution rates to ensure the customers that are contacting them are happy. Then maybe they can step into the world of social metrics tracking slowly by seeing it as another channel that they need to satisfy their customers in. Then comes the cool stuff where you start anticipating customers needs by what is happening in all your channels.

Whatever companies decide to do, remember that you don't need social metrics or tracking to just get it right for the customer the first time.

Thoughts on Twitter

With the explosion in social media that has led companies to try to define a social strategy and business, I was thinking about how Twitter can be used for service. Of course people are using Twitter today to stay engaged with their community and are using it to help solve problems, but I think there might even be a more fundamental use of the social media platform for Customer Service Execs.

When the topic of social media comes up in conversation around customer service, I tend to share an opinion that I have that people today are using Twitter today more as a "jump to the front of the line" kind of tool versus a true two way conversation. People feel that they can not or know that they will not get their question or issue resolved in a timely fashion in the other channels that are available to them. They have called the call center two times and not been helped in a way that resolved the problem. They have tried emailing but only got canned responses and no personal response for days. But, they know that because so many companies are so intently focused on managing their social presence and brand on social networks, they use those forums to tell the company their problem. Again, because it is such a new channel, the company has dedicated resources that are ensuring timely resolution to problems that arise. So, right now it is not so much that Twitter is where people are living for service, it is that they don't have trust or confidence in the other channels that are offered to them.

Now, someday in the near future, this dynamic may change and Twitter or other social networks may become the place that people go first for answers. But, for the large majority, the social networks for customer service are just the new, best way to get your issue resolved the first time in the fastest way possible.

So, now back to my original discussion point. I think that executives have an opportunity at this point to not only solve the customer problem with their social network strategy, but they have an opportunity to ask for customers feedback on why they chose Twitter instead of the call center. Or why they chose a forum on LinkedIn versus emailing a question to your company.

The feedback that you receive can then be additive to your strategy discussions around how you make engagement with your company easier, more pleasant, faster and successful.

No doubt that today executives are exploring how social networks impact service. I would challenge those executives to make it a point to use the engagement that social media facilitates to understand more about why people don't trust the other channels for support, because they aren't going away!

Not Just Call Center Talk

I tend to focus on customers from the perspective of the service experience in my posts, mostly because that is where my interest professionally sits. But, let me diverge for a short time and talk about the customer experience in a wholly different context.

I was eating lunch today and trying to catch up on a little news on the tube. I flipped over to CNBC to see if there was anything notable happening in the world of business. I just happened to pick up the beginning of a segment around the tensions and rhetoric that is growing between China and our great country. I was very interested to hear what thoughtful, insightful and interesting dialog was about to make it's way from the commentators lips to my ears. I really think this is an interesting discussion to have and am very serious in my desire to learn and hear more on the topic.

Problem was that after the intro to the segment, they brought on two guys that disagreed with each other and showed their class and respect for one another by screaming at each other so no one could hear what the other was saying. Classic cable news TV these days. Bring on two people that will shout at each other and really say nothing of substance. Draw people to the shows through shock and aggressive, 5th grade behavior and the sponsors line up. Or do they?

Here is a link to an article that talks about how CNBC is losing viewers like crazy.

http://www.businessinsider.com/cnbc-ratings-still-inversely-correlated-to-market-performance-2010-2

I wonder if they treated their viewers more like intelligent, thoughtful and interested human beings if they would see a change in their viewing numbers?

Customers are talking with their remotes and it only takes five minutes watching their channel to understand why.

A Story

I was listening to a friend of mine the other day tell a story that made me cringe for the company she was talking about. She had taken the time to purchase services from a mobile service provider and was trying to contact them about a question she had with her bill.

As a background to this story, this service provider, like all others, has built out there service channels to allow people to contact them in any number of different ways. They have a call center, an email support group, a chat team and of course the good old fashioned IVR.

Now, back to the story.....

So my friend had a question about her bill and started out using the email service to see if she could get an answer in that channel. She emailed the company, told them her issue and was expecting to hear back in a "timely" manner as the issue was not incredibly pressing. She got a response, but not a resolution.

So she tried another channel, the chat function on their site. She did not get the answer she needed from that service either.

So she moved to the voice channel because that is the only place where she thought she could trust that she would be heard and get an answer to her question. She finally did get her answer and moved on with her day.

What can we learn from this story that applies to the broader service world?

1. People are trying to use alternate channels to connect with companies but more often than not, these alternate channels are not as responsive as customers would like.

2. When my friend called the call center, they did not know that she had tried to service herself in other channels. So not only did the agent not have all the background, the management was not going to see that my friend didn't get her question answered the first time in the first channel she used.

3. Broadly speaking, people will quickly gravitate to the channel that affords them the quickest resolution to their issue at that moment.

4. This company and others are training their customers to avoid the channels that they have spent so much time and money on creating to try to cut costs.

It is unfortunate in this case that the experience was difficult and cumbersome. The sad part of the story is that this company will likely never know that it took three attempts by my friend to get this single issue resolved, which means they will likely never know how many others are experiencing the same frustration.....

Age Old Argument

Efficiency vs Effectiveness.... Which is more important?

This has been a question in the world of customer service for years and never seems to be fully flushed out with a clear winner. Maybe because, there really is no clear winner and there needs to be a nice balance for a customer service group to be successful in terms of their customer experience and their duty to the company to keep costs in check.

Efficiency metrics have for many years ruled the roost when it comes to measuring the success of a service environment for most any company. How fast did I answer my calls/emails/chats? How fast did my agents handle the calls that they took that day? How fast did my service reps wrap up a call and document the results of the call? How quickly were agents able to roll a truck for service when they found out it was not something they could fix on the phone?

All of these items are important in measuring the costs of your service org, but do they really measure the success of your service org in terms of your customers perception?

The position that I would take in this age old argument is that effectiveness must be the foundation of your service organization and then when that has been put in place, you should move on to creating efficiencies that build on that effectiveness.

I have said this before, but I will say it again. What do customers want when they call your service group? They want their issue resolved then and there. As we all know, that is not always possible, but it becomes much more possible when you start using that metric as your baseline for how you are servicing your customer. If they want their issue resolved the first time they call/email/chat, then shouldn't that be the metric that we are tracking to?

I would never make the case that we should throw efficiencies out the window, but I would say that they only become useful, when we have set in motion with our service reps and our management that we are going to try to solve the problem the first time and then get incrementally better and faster at solving the problem.

The Power of Data

I was thinking about all the data that lives in the world of customer service and how that data is used to manage to the goals of the business. But as I was thinking about how we use all this tactical data to make decisions, I wondered if the data could be used for anything else.

One of the key elements of most customer service groups these days is to try to solve customer issues the first time around and avoid multiple contacts with the customer over the same issue. This is classically called First Contact Resolution. When someone reaches out to my company, in whatever form or channel, they get their issue resolved the first time. That is what customers want and that is what companies want. So if that is what both of the constituents want in the interaction, why aren't companies using that figure or data point to market their company?

We have heard from just about every company in this economic downturn that the lifeblood of their company is the customer and their experience is paramount to keeping that customer happy. So if the data proves that people just want their issues resolved and companies just want to resolve issues to keep their customers happy, why don't companies tell people about their FCR figures? Why don't they shout from the rooftops that if you come and buy my product or service, I will fix your problem the first time 85% of the time.

Obviously, there are better and more marketing friendly ways to say this, but if you are really trying to keep your customers, why not make sure your FCR is the best in your industry and tell your customers this as much as you can?

Valued Customers

Does it really matter if a customer is "Hight Value" or "Low Value"?

This is something that has been on my mind a lot lately. For years there has been a continued effort on the part of most every company to identify who their most "valued" customers are and then treat them with a different level of service. Whether it be being part of an airline club, a credit card brand or a customer on amazon, many companies have segmented their service by who is more "valuable" to them.

My question is whether or not that segmentation in service is still an intelligent strategic practice for a customer service group and ultimately a company.

There is no doubt that there is value in segmenting your customers to learn more about their buying habits or to group customers together based on trends or offers that the company believes will be value to the customers. But with customers becoming more a part of the dialog in how they get serviced and ultimately leading the dialog on how that service made them feel, is it really still smart to give a lower quality of service to the "low value" customer?

Sales Processes Re-Visited for Telecom

In my work with Telcos, we have seen a real need to optimize the sales and customer retention process. Traditionally, sales/retentions focused on gleaning data from customer interactions and providing an optimal offer. Now Telcos are improving the mechanics of the sales process - optimizing applications and processes to deliver effective, efficient and relevant calls that end in a sale. Let's look at three steps in the sales process that result in a successful call, and how they can be improved:

1. Dynamic identification of a relevant offer is problematic, as there is little existing information outside of age range, geography, and other generic demographics. Sales agents are left to ask probing questions at their discretion, or rely on the “Offer of the Month.” This outdated model leads to less than optimal use of the business intelligence systems.
2. The order entry process is ripe for optimization. With the multitude of systems trying to help make the process effective, we see telco sales agents spending more time than ever trying to properly input orders.
3. Closing the call can be time consuming, but very important. There are FCC regulations, company policy, and customer security concerns to consider. Depending on the sales agents' memories to recall every closure item is dangerous at best.

To improve the sales process, I see Telcos focusing their time on the following process improvements:

1. Start the call with automated prompting and call guidance to walk the agent through qualification. The data gathered is fed back to the offer system to return the best offer based on 10-12 variables and not just 3-4.
2. Automate the manual parts of the order entry process to move agents through the process cleaner and faster.
3. Automate and prompt agents through call closing to ensure completion of required tasks and order quality.

Whether it's acquiring new subs, or retaining or up-selling current subs, optimizing the sales order process is a must. Improving order quality, speed and consistency leads to a better customer experience and more sales.

Nexus One and Simplicity

Last week, Google made a splash with their new Google Nexus One phone. Features are said to be out of this world, the open nature of it both with applications and also with the phone network is great for us all.

But when are technology companies going to learn that the magic of Apple is not that they have the best ideas around products or that their CEO is some incredible genius in a black turtleneck.

The magic of Apple since Steve Jobs has been around is that they understand the customer experience. They understand that if they make it easy and they make it enjoyable, then they will have customers for life.

Google is going to learn a hard lesson on this release of the Nexus One that email and community based customer service will only suffice for a small few. If they plan on this phone being something that can appeal to the masses, they will need a real plan for customer service. And a real plan is not email responses in three days or forums where people suggest the best answer to you. It also is not calling one number if it is a hardware problem that goes to HTC. Another number if it is a network problem that goes to Tmobile and then trying to get a hold of Google over email if it is a software problem.

People want simplicity in their lives, not more complexity.

What is your core competency?

Core Competency…. This was a key buzzword for many years and a majority of the reason why the whole industry of outsourcing has gained such momentum over the last 10 years. The key sales message and value proposition for the outsourcers was: “Manufacturing is not your core competency, we can do it cheaper” or “Let us manage your supply chain for you, and cut costs” or “ IT help desk is our bread and butter and not yours, let us take that over for you.”

But here is my question, Is Customer Service your companies Core Competency?

If it isn’t, should it be?

Why did Amazon pay $900 million for Zappos, a website and brand that sells things over the internet that you can get for the same price at your local Target or Walmart?

With the dynamics between companies and customers/prospects changing every day and more power and influence being put squarely in the hands of the customers/prospects, I would submit that every company should make customer service their core competency. No one knows or understands your products/service better than you. So why would you want to outsource one of your most critical points of influence and learning to someone else?

Zappos leadership understood this and are $900 million more secure because of it.