Where's the Vision?

I interact quite a bit with executives in the customer service arena on a daily basis. From the folks that have yearly P&L responsibility for the whole of customer service to the folks that have daily responsibility for operations and with the folks that are becoming more common in organizations in a role that is part IT part Business Operations.

The common trend that I am hearing from them all is that they are more and more being overwhelmed with the volume of requests they get from sales teams about new technology in the market for customer service. But as I dig, they also tell me that they are seeing nothing out there that is making them sit up in their chair and say "wow".

A common theme I hear is that while there are seemingly more and more vendors of "solutions" out in the market, there is less and less true innovation in customer service technology. And I would tend to agree with them. There was the ACD, which revolutionized the way people communicate with companies. Then there was the IVR, which in it's prime was a fantastic innovation. There was Workforce Management technology to free people from the bonds of Excel. There was cloud routing technology that tied together disparate ACD's. There was call recording technology that gave companies a view into the customers world.

Those have been the biggies in the last 20 years. But what do we have to show for the last 5-7 years? Sure, we can say that the whole space around analytics has had a pretty significant impact in some companies, but I don't know that we can really lump it in yet with the likes of the others above. It may get there, but the jury is still out.

Where is the next true innovation in customer service? What is the next frontier that will upend the way we think about deploying customer service? And will it come from someone like Verint, Nice, Interactive Intelligence, Cisco, Avaya, Genesys? Or will it come from the likes of Apple?

Pull My Hair Out

Sometimes I wonder if companies actually use and test the technology they deploy before they deploy it. I called a major airline today to book a flight. I called instead of booking online because it was a multi segment flight and it was just not something I could do online.

So I call in and I get an IVR. It asks me a few annoying questions and then instead of transferring me to an agent to help me and get things taken care of quickly, it promptly dumps me into an IVR flow to try to walk me through the booking.

What a nightmare experience. I promptly hit zero a few times and got to an agent.

How in the world can any sane person believe that an IVR is the right interface to help someone book a ticket. Although it is a linear process that seems logical for a linear tool like an IVR, there is so much variability within each step that it becomes messy quickly. Then layer on top of that the truly inadequate nature of Voice Recognition and it is a disaster.

It is as if someone in the customer service group made a blind decision to help save money without ever trying the experience for themselves. Because I am certain that if they would have, they would have come to the same conclusion that I did.

It is simple, try it yourself first and see if you would use. That should be your litmus test. Not how much money you are going to save.

Sport

99% of the time this blog is dedicated to the ideas, technology and concepts of customer service. Everyone once in a while I just get fed up with something in life that is so obvious and clear to me that I need to say something somewhere and this seems like an ok spot.

So today, I want to say here on my blog what so many Americans and likely Europeans are saying right now in their homes, in their work places and in there local establishments of find beverages. Politics is nothing more than a sport. Simple as that.

What made me come to this conclusion today was watching some morning news while I was eating breakfast and it just hit me, the way they are reporting about the political climate is just like they report about sports. Here in the US, the cable channels, MSNBC, FOXNEWS and CNN are just like ESPN is in the world of sports. They follow politics, watch politics and report on politics like there is a match, game or event happening where the outcome is nothing more than the meaningless win or loss for a free enterprise organization that pays people to entertain.

The sport of politics has teams of people, it has positions on the team, it has coaches, it has managers, it has owners that spend the money, it has interested observers, it has media coverage from all angles, it has controversy, it has the big comebacks and the colossal collapses.

But, in real sports, the winning and losing only really effects the private enterprise of a team of people that are being paid to entertain. I know it, you know it and they know it. It is entertainment that we can either choose to engage in or not.

In the current sport of politics, the winning and losing never really impacts the people that are doing the playing. The unfortunate truth is that treating politics and policy as a sport impacts all of us in ways that we can't always control.

I wish that more people in political life would see this and treat their job with the dignity and respect that the office deserves. And realize that while they are playing a game, real people are the ones that are losing.....

Ok, now off my soap box....

Simplicity

Something that I have come to have new found respect for is the idea of simplicity. Whether it be simplicity of a process. Simplicity of design. Simplicity of a message. Simplicity....

I was reading an article today about a guy that has done research on all the talks that have been given at TED. He broke down the topics and ideas into curious facts about what people seemed to like most in a talk based on traffic to that video. He had some interesting facts that he could not explain, but the one that jumped out to me was the more simple the presentation, the more people viewed it.

It has been proven that the human brain can not focus on a presentation or talk for more than 20 min. After that, the brain starts to shut down on the message and start thinking of other things it can do to keep going.

Keep it simple and short. People will appreciate it.