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.