When we talk about the idea of the Customer Experience or the Customer Experience Lifecycle, there is often times a focus on the process that is involved or the touchpoints that are involved to create an expeirence that is unique or shareable. The one thing that we often forget about though is something that really can make or break an experience for any of us with a company we are doing business with, Empowerment.
If you call into a call center because you have been charged by your service provider for something that you did not purchase, what do you hope that they will do?
If you bring back a faulty DVD player to the store because it just stopped working one week after you bought it, but already threw out the receipt, what do you hope that they will do?
If you go to a restaurant and the food that you ordered comes out cold and has a hair in it, what do you hope the restaurant will do?
I am sure that we all have our answer to each of these questions and it probably goes something like, "I hope they would understand the situation and empower the people at the front line to just make the situation right. And treat me the way in which they would want to be treated in the same situation."
But, what happens when companies don't empower their people to make common sense decisions at the front lines? What happens when the people that have the most potential impact on the customer experience in that exact moment are not given authority to make a decision that would make all the difference?
A quick story for you about an experience I had at Target recently. I went in to buy a few assorted items. (As an aside, why is it that I can never get out of Target spending less than $100?) So I was walking through the store, buying a few groceries, some diapers etc. Then I just happened to walk down the vaccum aisle and I saw a new vacumm that we had been wanting to get for some time. It was a Dyson. It was the exact one I had been looking for and it happend to be on sale for something like $150 off the regular price. I snapped it up and went up to pay for all my stuff. The cashier scanned all my items and then got to the Dyson. She scanned it and the price came up with a much higher price than what was shown in the aisle. I told her this and she called someone to go check. Low and behold, the sign on the rack said the sale was good up until a certain date and that date had passed by two days. But the sign was still up. So I looked at her, fully expecting her to charge me the full price. But something awesome happened. She was empowered. I am not clear if she was a manager or not, but she looked at me, said she understood what the issues was, empathized with me about how she would be bummed if that happened to her and then over rid the system to give me the price that was the sale price.
What a fantastic experience that all was enabled by a company giving their people the authority to make common sense decisions that were going to create a very positive customer experience. She didn't think twice. She didn't hem and haw about how she was doing me favor. She didn't have to call anyone over and make some big show out of the issue. She simply put herself in my shoes, applied some common sense, took ownership of the situation and made a call. But it all would not have been possible if Target would not have empowered their front line to make judgement calls like this that will create an experience for their customers that will bring them back over and over again to spend that $100.....
Wednesday, December 11, 2013
Tuesday, September 3, 2013
The Dyson Vaccum Experience
Admittedly, I am not a shopper. I hate shopping and all that goes along with it. Mostly though, I just hate spending money. I am constantly getting jabbed by my wife, sisters, father, mother, in laws etc. for having deep pockets (not a lot of money, just deep pockets) and the ol short alligator arms.
So when we needed a new vacuum cleaner about two months ago, I was thrown into shopping mode. My wife had been looking around for a while at different vacuums because she had sensed that are old Orek was on the way out. She told me about some of the options on the market and as I was going out to run some other errands, she wanted me to take a look at these vacuums.
I ended up at Target that day and was looking around at some other items when I just stopped in front of the vacuum section and the Dyson brand caught my eye. I had heard so much about the company in the past and wanted to get a closer look. Long story short, I found the best Dyson they had, put aside my money issues and bought it. It did happen to be on sale as well, so that helped.
The real story is when I got it home though. Not only was my wife thrilled (brownie points) but I was just blown away by the experience of the new vacuum. I am not talking about the actual functioning vacuum and how much better it was than the other vacuum. But everything was thought thru by Dyson. They thought about the design clearly. They thought about the packaging. They thought about the function. They thought about the assembly. When I tweeted about it, not less than a few minutes later they got back to me.... Everything. I felt as if they put this product experience together with no one else in mind but me. They put the customer at the heart of their entire process.
So, as we bring it all back to customer experience and putting the customer in the center of everything you do as a company, I would ask you.... Do you make your customers feel like you designed the entire experience with them in mind?
So when we needed a new vacuum cleaner about two months ago, I was thrown into shopping mode. My wife had been looking around for a while at different vacuums because she had sensed that are old Orek was on the way out. She told me about some of the options on the market and as I was going out to run some other errands, she wanted me to take a look at these vacuums.
I ended up at Target that day and was looking around at some other items when I just stopped in front of the vacuum section and the Dyson brand caught my eye. I had heard so much about the company in the past and wanted to get a closer look. Long story short, I found the best Dyson they had, put aside my money issues and bought it. It did happen to be on sale as well, so that helped.
The real story is when I got it home though. Not only was my wife thrilled (brownie points) but I was just blown away by the experience of the new vacuum. I am not talking about the actual functioning vacuum and how much better it was than the other vacuum. But everything was thought thru by Dyson. They thought about the design clearly. They thought about the packaging. They thought about the function. They thought about the assembly. When I tweeted about it, not less than a few minutes later they got back to me.... Everything. I felt as if they put this product experience together with no one else in mind but me. They put the customer at the heart of their entire process.
So, as we bring it all back to customer experience and putting the customer in the center of everything you do as a company, I would ask you.... Do you make your customers feel like you designed the entire experience with them in mind?
Friday, August 30, 2013
Best Buy and How They Can Be Saved
An Open Letter to Best Buy Executives:
I am writing this note to you as a native Minnesotan, who lives in Chicago but still loves the Vikings, Twins, Gophers etc. A loyal Best Buy customer, who bought my wife a Nikon 5100 DSLR camera from the Geneva IL Best Buy Store this past year for Christmas and an Insignia TV. A technology advocate and a business person who works with companies everyday to try to solve problems.
It saddens me everyday that I continue to hear about the demise of a great Minnesota company that employs so many great people. I still remember going into MusicLand stores to buy music back in the day with my sisters and how much I loved that store. I am tired of hearing about how Best Buy is just becoming Amazon’s showroom or how people are “showrooming” at Best Buy. I can only imagine how tired you and the exec team are of hearing about this concept.
To get right to the point, I think there is a better way forward and I wanted to take a few min to layout a quick vision for your business that I think would strengthen your position going forward. But, it takes a very different view of the customer journey/experience than the team at Best Buy may be used to.
I will do my best to keep it simple for the purposes of this open letter and if you would like me to go into more detail, maybe we can set up a time to talk over the phone or in person next time I am in Minnesota.
The fundamental problem that Best Buy has right now, in my mind, is not price or cost or inventory or layout of stores. The fundamental problem that you have right now is that you have no idea when your customers are actually in your stores, unless they buy something. This one fundamental problem creates a series of subsequent issues for you as a business. But, it also represents your greatest opportunity. Think of the in store experience right now being similar to an e-commerce experience online in 1999 or 2000, before we had tracking tools like Omniture or Google Analytics to know when customers were shopping, what they were shopping for and what they were interested in. That is what it is like today in a retail store. I walk in as a customer and you have no idea that I am there, what I am looking for, what I have looked at before and even if I talk to a store rep, they have no way of noting what I was looking for and capturing it so that if I return, someone can help me again. This needs to change.
If Best Buy could just address this one fundamental challenge, it would lead to a number of opportunities for the business and for an incredibly unique customer experience. For example.....If I know that you are outside my store or just walking into my store, I can greet you by name to create a sense of relationship. If I know that you are walking into my store in Geneva IL, I can offer you proactive generic deals that are available in that specific store. (Think of the digital version of the Sunday Circular Ad) If I know that you are in my store, I can ask you what you are looking for today so I can capture all the data I am now losing as customers walk in and walk out without buying. If I ask you what you are looking for, I can pro-actively push you in the store to the right area to browse on your own. If I know what you are browsing for, I can push you information, reviews and tidbits that might be useful in your shopping experience for that product. If I know that you are looking to buy something today because of the convenience of being in the store with the product there, I can push you proactive offers for different products that might fit your need. If I know you are looking at a certain product and I know what Amazon or Walmart are selling it for (which you do know now), I can make you an instant offer to buy the product for a similar price or even a higher price because of the convenience of being in the store and having the product now. If you are unsure and want to talk to someone, I could page a Blue Shirt and give them all your info so they know what you are looking for and why. If I know you want to buy now, I can push an instant coupon to your device so you don’t have to fiddle around with printing something out. If you don’t end up buying, I know who you are and what you were looking for and can re-market to you over email or text message to come back and buy from us.
You see, I actually think that you could use Amazon’s and Walmart’s perceived strengths with their transparency on price and the power of their customer reviews to create an In-Store experience that is incredibly unique for consumers. And on the flip side, you could use your perceived weaknesses with your network of stores, your convenience, your service and your “showroom” to capture customers where they are, when they are ready to buy.
I believe that not only would this combined concept/experience help you win more customers, but you would have a treasure trove of data that you have never been able to collect before which could lead to better inventory stocking, reduced carrying costs, better pricing power, better buying power from manufacturers and you would not have to stoop to winning on price match guarantees. But this requires a whole different way of shaping the customer experience and journey using digital devices and intelligent software platforms that would be a strategic and transformational shift.
More than anything, I want Best Buy to succeed and to thrive. Not only because of my allegiance to Minnesota and Minnesota companies but because of all the people that depend on Best Buy everyday to offer an alternative to where Amazon is taking consumers. I don’t want to live in a world where Amazon is the only place I can go to buy my wife her next camera. I want to go to the Blue Shirts and know they have my back!
Tuesday, May 21, 2013
2013 Trends for Customer Service Part 5: Analytics
So here we are, finally at number five on the list of Top 5 trends in 2013 for Customer Service. It has taken me a while for this to wrap up, but this will be the final topic in the series that I will explore, Analytics. There is a lot to say on this topic, so strap in for a few minutes while I give my view of the world and what I am seeing in my work in the field.
My deep interest in the idea of data and Analytics actually started a few years back now, actually more than 10 years ago now when I took a break from working and went back to school, in Sweden! Back in 2002, my buddy and I were very interested in this new space that was emerging in the US and in other parts of the world called BioInformatics. It was described at the time as Biology meets Computer Science meets Stats. A pretty easy way to describe it back then to people, but they still just gave you a blank look and thought you were over the top smart. If they only knew me they would know that that was far from the case. Computer Science and Stats were never my strong suit in college, in fact the only C I got in college was in my Intro To Computer Science class. Still burns me to this day.....
Anyway, the point is that for many years now, we have been using the idea of data or Analytics to understand more about the world around us. And in particular, Financial Services and Life Sciences companies have been using data and Analytics tools for a number of years to pick up on business trends, spot fraud or to find the needle drug in the haystack that a pharma company would spend $500 million to develop and bring to market.
Fast forward to 2010 or so and the term Big Data entered our lexicon in a big way. Everyone seems to have an answer for Big Data, but the challenge is that no one ever seems to be using the same definition. And then you layer in industry jargon or department specific needs and you end up with a proliferation of companies that all say they do the same thing. That is far from the truth and this post is meant to call out a few questions that you should be asking of yourself and companies before you get too far down the road with investing in Big Data. These questions are not going to be the IT based questions that always come up with Big Data like speed, storage capacity, variability etc. We will assume for the sake of this post that IT has a good handle on all of those important pieces. In this post, we will just focus on the business side.
In the vendor world, there are a number of different types of companies that offer Analytics solutions for service organizations. There are Business Intelligence companies, Customer Experience Analytics companies, Analytics companies, Text Analytics companies, Voice Analytics companies and a whole host of companies that have niche software products that bolt on some form of Analytics like survey companies or Voice of the Customer companies.
Thus, you see one of the biggest challenges of the new world we live in, the increasingly complicated and siloed world of data collection. I remember sitting in front of a VP of Marketing at a Telco a year or so back and she looked at me and said, "I wish that someone would help me bring all of that data together into one spot so I could analyze it." She is spot on and this is the same feeling that many share today across all industries. There are just so many collection points and not one good way for business lines to aggregate all that data into a useable format. This is the first challenge and question that I want to call out to leaders in customer service. How are you thinking about aggregating the data you are collecting to then analyze later?
The second big challenge that many people are dealing with in service orgs today is, how do I work with IT to get the data I want, in the format I want, in a timely fashion. For years, IT has had a strangle hold on the data in a company and has had to set up teams of people to help translate the needs of the business into searches or what are typically called queries, that gets the data that the business people need. Many of the companies in the Analytics space today are making things easier by developing interfaces that actually allow business users/analysts to get the data they need. But most of this is still an effort that needs to be led by a person with special training in the tool and there are not any tools that really cut across the landscape of the silos of data collection. So you still end up needing to learn the Analytics packages from each vendor to bring together the data in a way that makes sense. This interface proliferation and training naturally then cuts down on the numbers and types of people that have access to data to find information. Just like anything else, if I am a busy person in my company, going from meeting to meeting all day long, I am not going to take the time to sit in a training class and learn a new interface to pull info from. It has to be dead simple. So simple that I don't need training. That is when people will actually use it in droves. So before you invest in any Analytics package, ask yourself and your team, is this only going to add another interface to our lives to pull data from?
The third biggest challenge I see all the time and to me the most important, is the idea that no matter how much data you have, it is becoming less important to just be able to run reports easier. It is less important to have a new UI that lets business people create their own dashboards. What is really the next wave of Analytics is the question "What am I not seeing?". Today companies are really good at pulling up dashboards, building reports and finding information when they know they have a problem. VPs of Marketing or Sales are really good at telling the Analytics team or their Ops teams to come up with a report or a dashboard when things are going wrong and they need to tell the CEO why. Orgs are really good at the firedrill mentality. But what they are not generally good at is asking questions of their data to find patterns or correlations that they never knew existed before. This type of work is typically only done in very very large companies with incredibly advanced teams of PhDs working on regression analysis with large, complex statistical analytics packages. Not the norm for most companies and certainly not the norm for most customer service teams. But this is where things are going. So the question needs to be from you the buyer to the vendor of any Analytics system, "How are you going to help me find the things I don't know?".
There are literally dozens upon dozens of new Big Data companies that are coming into the market. It seems like a day does not go by where you don't see a new name pop up on the Start Up news sites. But, before you go investing in point silo solutions from any new little vendor out there for a specific need. Make sure you ask yourself and these vendors the three questions posed above. It will save you time, money and a lot of headaches down the road!
My deep interest in the idea of data and Analytics actually started a few years back now, actually more than 10 years ago now when I took a break from working and went back to school, in Sweden! Back in 2002, my buddy and I were very interested in this new space that was emerging in the US and in other parts of the world called BioInformatics. It was described at the time as Biology meets Computer Science meets Stats. A pretty easy way to describe it back then to people, but they still just gave you a blank look and thought you were over the top smart. If they only knew me they would know that that was far from the case. Computer Science and Stats were never my strong suit in college, in fact the only C I got in college was in my Intro To Computer Science class. Still burns me to this day.....
Anyway, the point is that for many years now, we have been using the idea of data or Analytics to understand more about the world around us. And in particular, Financial Services and Life Sciences companies have been using data and Analytics tools for a number of years to pick up on business trends, spot fraud or to find the needle drug in the haystack that a pharma company would spend $500 million to develop and bring to market.
Fast forward to 2010 or so and the term Big Data entered our lexicon in a big way. Everyone seems to have an answer for Big Data, but the challenge is that no one ever seems to be using the same definition. And then you layer in industry jargon or department specific needs and you end up with a proliferation of companies that all say they do the same thing. That is far from the truth and this post is meant to call out a few questions that you should be asking of yourself and companies before you get too far down the road with investing in Big Data. These questions are not going to be the IT based questions that always come up with Big Data like speed, storage capacity, variability etc. We will assume for the sake of this post that IT has a good handle on all of those important pieces. In this post, we will just focus on the business side.
In the vendor world, there are a number of different types of companies that offer Analytics solutions for service organizations. There are Business Intelligence companies, Customer Experience Analytics companies, Analytics companies, Text Analytics companies, Voice Analytics companies and a whole host of companies that have niche software products that bolt on some form of Analytics like survey companies or Voice of the Customer companies.
Thus, you see one of the biggest challenges of the new world we live in, the increasingly complicated and siloed world of data collection. I remember sitting in front of a VP of Marketing at a Telco a year or so back and she looked at me and said, "I wish that someone would help me bring all of that data together into one spot so I could analyze it." She is spot on and this is the same feeling that many share today across all industries. There are just so many collection points and not one good way for business lines to aggregate all that data into a useable format. This is the first challenge and question that I want to call out to leaders in customer service. How are you thinking about aggregating the data you are collecting to then analyze later?
The second big challenge that many people are dealing with in service orgs today is, how do I work with IT to get the data I want, in the format I want, in a timely fashion. For years, IT has had a strangle hold on the data in a company and has had to set up teams of people to help translate the needs of the business into searches or what are typically called queries, that gets the data that the business people need. Many of the companies in the Analytics space today are making things easier by developing interfaces that actually allow business users/analysts to get the data they need. But most of this is still an effort that needs to be led by a person with special training in the tool and there are not any tools that really cut across the landscape of the silos of data collection. So you still end up needing to learn the Analytics packages from each vendor to bring together the data in a way that makes sense. This interface proliferation and training naturally then cuts down on the numbers and types of people that have access to data to find information. Just like anything else, if I am a busy person in my company, going from meeting to meeting all day long, I am not going to take the time to sit in a training class and learn a new interface to pull info from. It has to be dead simple. So simple that I don't need training. That is when people will actually use it in droves. So before you invest in any Analytics package, ask yourself and your team, is this only going to add another interface to our lives to pull data from?
The third biggest challenge I see all the time and to me the most important, is the idea that no matter how much data you have, it is becoming less important to just be able to run reports easier. It is less important to have a new UI that lets business people create their own dashboards. What is really the next wave of Analytics is the question "What am I not seeing?". Today companies are really good at pulling up dashboards, building reports and finding information when they know they have a problem. VPs of Marketing or Sales are really good at telling the Analytics team or their Ops teams to come up with a report or a dashboard when things are going wrong and they need to tell the CEO why. Orgs are really good at the firedrill mentality. But what they are not generally good at is asking questions of their data to find patterns or correlations that they never knew existed before. This type of work is typically only done in very very large companies with incredibly advanced teams of PhDs working on regression analysis with large, complex statistical analytics packages. Not the norm for most companies and certainly not the norm for most customer service teams. But this is where things are going. So the question needs to be from you the buyer to the vendor of any Analytics system, "How are you going to help me find the things I don't know?".
There are literally dozens upon dozens of new Big Data companies that are coming into the market. It seems like a day does not go by where you don't see a new name pop up on the Start Up news sites. But, before you go investing in point silo solutions from any new little vendor out there for a specific need. Make sure you ask yourself and these vendors the three questions posed above. It will save you time, money and a lot of headaches down the road!
Monday, March 11, 2013
2013 Trends In Customer Service Technology Part 4: Communities and Social Listening
Ok, so I took a bit of hiatus for a few weeks, started a new job, but am back and ready to dig into topic number four on my Top Five Trends for 2013. We have talked about Virtual Assistants, Multi Channel, Mobile and now we are on to Communities and Social Listening.
Many and probably most would actually split these two into separate categories and tackle them independently. But I really see them as tightly linked and therefore I believe you can't really talk about one without talking about the other. The reason: transparency. Both of these technologies bring transparency to the service delivery operation of any company in a way that you just don't get or see with the traditional forms of service delivery. The very public nature of what happens in both community groups and on social media drives a "leveling of the playing field" dynamic that is both interesting and potentially disruptive if handled incorrectly.
Over the last couple of years, I am starting to see more and more leaders in the customer service landscape dig into the idea of social care and communities. I have seen a few companies re-orientate their entire service delivery group to be social and communities first, designing an experience that is very different looking than more traditional approaches. I even worked with one client, a large mobile telco, that designed their web experience entirely around the idea of social and communities and all other communication channels took a back seat. Then, I have seen other companies that have looked at Social and Communities and decided that it just was not worth the investment of time and resources to try to integrate them into their service delivery model. I think like any thing else, these two extremes are not likely the best answer for most companies and the right answer likely falls somewhere in between these two extremes.
At the end of the day, social is critically important to any brand or company and as such should somehow be baked into the service delivery arm of an org. I don't think it is just good enough to think about social as another channel that you have to staff to or another side technology that you can play around with for a while and see how it works. I think that social needs to be at the very core of your service delivery model. I think all service leaders should be thinking strategically about it and how they can incorporate it deep into the processes that are a part of their delivery model. As a first step on this journey, I would suggest and recommend that companies at least start out by investing in a social media monitoring or listening tool to understand what is being said by consumers. I know that some of you might be shaking your head and thinking, "duh, that is so obvious Rob, you are so behind in stating this trend", but you would be surprised how many companies are still not there yet with just the basics of listening.
Some good tools to look into on this front are a number of the social media monitoring tools such as Netbase, Radian6 and the like. But an area that I have been interested in for quite some time now that is starting to really catch on in this space are Text Analytics companies that are starting to build some really compelling and unique products to start to filter the noise. Attensity, Clarabridge and Medallia all offer some interesting products and are worth the time to investigate. The best of the best are using both and getting some really fantastic results. I have one Consumer Products company in mind that is doing some really interesting things that I can share with those that might be interested in learning more.
Now what about communities? As I said before, I think that communities should go hand in hand with social listening for two reasons. First, I think that both social care and communities have a "crowd" like underpinning and so they tend to drive towards the same goal, which is consumers helping consumers. The second reason I think they go together so well is that they both have a component to them that helps companies drive brand advocacy. Because of the very public way in which communities and social care play out, transparency rules. And as I have talked alot about on this blog before, transparency is a key foundation for developing and nurturing brand advocates and loyalty.
Most community companies or "collaboration" companies or "Enterprise Social Networking companies, as they may like to be referred to as, are working to deploy solutions that do add a lot of value. They help to immediately cut back some of the phone calls or emails that end up heading the direction of the company by allowing people to more easily connect with a brand loyalist or advocate that already knows the answer. They also tend to have a softer value proposition that focuses more on customer preference. By providing choices to consumers around the service channel they want to use and when they want to use it, consumers tend to have a more fulfilling and higher quality experience.
Companies that are working this space today as point solutions and have been leading the way are some fairly well known names, Jive, Lithium, Get Satisfaction and a number of others. Also, keep an eye out for the bigger CRM companies and how they are baking the concept of Communities into their service DNA. Salesforce, SAP, Oracle and the like would be names to watch out for here.
As a service VP told me recently, "Rob, I get 20 calls a day from companies that think they have the best next technology that will help me cut my costs by 20% or more. Some of them are really cool and some are just ok. I don't doubt that they can save me money. But my challenge is understanding how that technology fits into my broader strategy and how my customers will want to interact with me 3 years from now."
So true. The technology today is really not the issue. There are so many cool companies doing incredibly interesting things. But how does it fit your plan, that is the question we all need to be asking.
Many and probably most would actually split these two into separate categories and tackle them independently. But I really see them as tightly linked and therefore I believe you can't really talk about one without talking about the other. The reason: transparency. Both of these technologies bring transparency to the service delivery operation of any company in a way that you just don't get or see with the traditional forms of service delivery. The very public nature of what happens in both community groups and on social media drives a "leveling of the playing field" dynamic that is both interesting and potentially disruptive if handled incorrectly.
Over the last couple of years, I am starting to see more and more leaders in the customer service landscape dig into the idea of social care and communities. I have seen a few companies re-orientate their entire service delivery group to be social and communities first, designing an experience that is very different looking than more traditional approaches. I even worked with one client, a large mobile telco, that designed their web experience entirely around the idea of social and communities and all other communication channels took a back seat. Then, I have seen other companies that have looked at Social and Communities and decided that it just was not worth the investment of time and resources to try to integrate them into their service delivery model. I think like any thing else, these two extremes are not likely the best answer for most companies and the right answer likely falls somewhere in between these two extremes.
At the end of the day, social is critically important to any brand or company and as such should somehow be baked into the service delivery arm of an org. I don't think it is just good enough to think about social as another channel that you have to staff to or another side technology that you can play around with for a while and see how it works. I think that social needs to be at the very core of your service delivery model. I think all service leaders should be thinking strategically about it and how they can incorporate it deep into the processes that are a part of their delivery model. As a first step on this journey, I would suggest and recommend that companies at least start out by investing in a social media monitoring or listening tool to understand what is being said by consumers. I know that some of you might be shaking your head and thinking, "duh, that is so obvious Rob, you are so behind in stating this trend", but you would be surprised how many companies are still not there yet with just the basics of listening.
Some good tools to look into on this front are a number of the social media monitoring tools such as Netbase, Radian6 and the like. But an area that I have been interested in for quite some time now that is starting to really catch on in this space are Text Analytics companies that are starting to build some really compelling and unique products to start to filter the noise. Attensity, Clarabridge and Medallia all offer some interesting products and are worth the time to investigate. The best of the best are using both and getting some really fantastic results. I have one Consumer Products company in mind that is doing some really interesting things that I can share with those that might be interested in learning more.
Now what about communities? As I said before, I think that communities should go hand in hand with social listening for two reasons. First, I think that both social care and communities have a "crowd" like underpinning and so they tend to drive towards the same goal, which is consumers helping consumers. The second reason I think they go together so well is that they both have a component to them that helps companies drive brand advocacy. Because of the very public way in which communities and social care play out, transparency rules. And as I have talked alot about on this blog before, transparency is a key foundation for developing and nurturing brand advocates and loyalty.
Most community companies or "collaboration" companies or "Enterprise Social Networking companies, as they may like to be referred to as, are working to deploy solutions that do add a lot of value. They help to immediately cut back some of the phone calls or emails that end up heading the direction of the company by allowing people to more easily connect with a brand loyalist or advocate that already knows the answer. They also tend to have a softer value proposition that focuses more on customer preference. By providing choices to consumers around the service channel they want to use and when they want to use it, consumers tend to have a more fulfilling and higher quality experience.
Companies that are working this space today as point solutions and have been leading the way are some fairly well known names, Jive, Lithium, Get Satisfaction and a number of others. Also, keep an eye out for the bigger CRM companies and how they are baking the concept of Communities into their service DNA. Salesforce, SAP, Oracle and the like would be names to watch out for here.
As a service VP told me recently, "Rob, I get 20 calls a day from companies that think they have the best next technology that will help me cut my costs by 20% or more. Some of them are really cool and some are just ok. I don't doubt that they can save me money. But my challenge is understanding how that technology fits into my broader strategy and how my customers will want to interact with me 3 years from now."
So true. The technology today is really not the issue. There are so many cool companies doing incredibly interesting things. But how does it fit your plan, that is the question we all need to be asking.
Tuesday, February 12, 2013
2013 Technology Trends for Customer Service Part 3
So this is the third part of the five part series on technology trends that I am seeing in the customer service marketplace for 2013. Again, for those that have not read my posts before, the information and data for these types of posts are coming straight from research that I do with leaders of customer service that I am blessed to interact with on a daily basis. I am fortunate to hear many things and so what I try to do is to aggregate it all and semi-intelligently post what I am hearing for others to comment on.
So, part three is really all about Mobile. Day after day we are bombarded in just about every possible medium, about how mobile devices, mobile software and everything mobile is the way of the world. You can read articles on trade sites, expert analysts are talking about it daily and even the newpapers like USA Today are writing weekly about the explosion of Mobile and what it means for our society at large. As always, the place where most companies are attacking the mobile experience is in the sales and marketing channel, as it is here they are trying to drive differentiation and ease of use for their mobile customers. Much has been made of how consumers are using mobile devices to shop at all times of the day, even during their physical shopping experience in a store. Over and over again we hear of consumers that are "showrooming" in stores by looking at a product in a physical store and then pulling open a comparison shopping site on their mobile device and finding the best price online. Again, focused almost exclusively on the acquisition of customers and sale of products or services.
As is always the case though, no one is thinking about how this trend is going to impact the service environment. No one is thinking about the potential unintended consequences of conditioning consumers to use their mobile devices to interact. These consequences are pretty simple: When you push people to interact with you to shop or purchase in the mobile channel, they are eventually and quickly going to come to you in that same channel to get their questions or issues resolved. But, most companies are not even thinking about this, let alone planning for it in the coming year or 18 months. Almost everyone I have talked to, that is a leader in the service space, has told me that mobile service is a second or third priority for them if it even makes the list. The reason for this seems to be two fold, politics and money. Imagine that.....
In terms of technology and where things are going, I think there are a number of niche players right now that are trying to define the way forward for mobile customer service. Some are using the idea of voice to make a call to a call center from a mobile device much easier, smoother and more intelligent. Others are looking at using smart mobile devices to use the tap interface to create what are termed "visual IVR's". And still others are using the screen real estate issues on a mobile device to push the concept of Virtual Assistants onto mobile devices or into mobile apps. I think all of these concepts have merit and have a place in the process of providing a high quality service experience for consumers.
The companies that are likely going to define this space over the next few years will be both the small niche companies and also some of the bigger companies that can either buy their way in or use their marketing muscle to help define the path. The smaller companies that I would keep an eye on are companies like Fonolo, Jacada, MyCyberTwin and NextIT. The bigger companies are the classic names in the space, Nice, Verint, Nuance, Genesys, Avaya and Interactive Intelligence. But I would also keep one eye on the larger technology and CRM companies. With the replacement of older CRM systems picking up pace, mobile CRM/Service, Knowledge and the like will be likely a priority investment area for SFDC, Oracle, SAP and others.
As always, I would suggest that before anyone invests in this area, that service leadership defines the optimal customer experience that aligns with optimal processes so that customers actually feel supported effectively long term.
So, part three is really all about Mobile. Day after day we are bombarded in just about every possible medium, about how mobile devices, mobile software and everything mobile is the way of the world. You can read articles on trade sites, expert analysts are talking about it daily and even the newpapers like USA Today are writing weekly about the explosion of Mobile and what it means for our society at large. As always, the place where most companies are attacking the mobile experience is in the sales and marketing channel, as it is here they are trying to drive differentiation and ease of use for their mobile customers. Much has been made of how consumers are using mobile devices to shop at all times of the day, even during their physical shopping experience in a store. Over and over again we hear of consumers that are "showrooming" in stores by looking at a product in a physical store and then pulling open a comparison shopping site on their mobile device and finding the best price online. Again, focused almost exclusively on the acquisition of customers and sale of products or services.
As is always the case though, no one is thinking about how this trend is going to impact the service environment. No one is thinking about the potential unintended consequences of conditioning consumers to use their mobile devices to interact. These consequences are pretty simple: When you push people to interact with you to shop or purchase in the mobile channel, they are eventually and quickly going to come to you in that same channel to get their questions or issues resolved. But, most companies are not even thinking about this, let alone planning for it in the coming year or 18 months. Almost everyone I have talked to, that is a leader in the service space, has told me that mobile service is a second or third priority for them if it even makes the list. The reason for this seems to be two fold, politics and money. Imagine that.....
In terms of technology and where things are going, I think there are a number of niche players right now that are trying to define the way forward for mobile customer service. Some are using the idea of voice to make a call to a call center from a mobile device much easier, smoother and more intelligent. Others are looking at using smart mobile devices to use the tap interface to create what are termed "visual IVR's". And still others are using the screen real estate issues on a mobile device to push the concept of Virtual Assistants onto mobile devices or into mobile apps. I think all of these concepts have merit and have a place in the process of providing a high quality service experience for consumers.
The companies that are likely going to define this space over the next few years will be both the small niche companies and also some of the bigger companies that can either buy their way in or use their marketing muscle to help define the path. The smaller companies that I would keep an eye on are companies like Fonolo, Jacada, MyCyberTwin and NextIT. The bigger companies are the classic names in the space, Nice, Verint, Nuance, Genesys, Avaya and Interactive Intelligence. But I would also keep one eye on the larger technology and CRM companies. With the replacement of older CRM systems picking up pace, mobile CRM/Service, Knowledge and the like will be likely a priority investment area for SFDC, Oracle, SAP and others.
As always, I would suggest that before anyone invests in this area, that service leadership defines the optimal customer experience that aligns with optimal processes so that customers actually feel supported effectively long term.
Monday, January 28, 2013
2013 Technology Trends For Customer Service Part 2
In part one of this series, I talked about a trend that I am seeing and hearing about broadly across all sizes of companies and all industry types, Multi Channel Customer Service. As a component of that group, I wanted to call out a technology that I am seeing start to pick up steam and I think will take over from Live Chat as the next hot technology for customer service in 2013 and 2014. That technology is Virtual Assistants.
A brief history for those that are new to the concept. Back about 10 or 12 years ago, a few select companies started playing around with the idea of Natural Language Processing and Artificial Intelligence to create these characters that could assist people in using new technology. One of the first applications of this type of technology that we have all seen at one time or another was from Microsoft and the ubiquitous CLIPPY that also was incredibly annoying to most of us. This was the first crude version of what was going to come with the concept of Virtual Assistants and their application to the customer service space.
Building on that initial idea and concept, a few innovative companies started bringing to market the idea of CLIPPY, but in a Enterprise ready state and form. Of course these companies had their struggles with the technology and the application of it in the first early adopters customers, as any technology company does early on. But over the last 5 years or so, the concept of the Virtual Assistant has really started to pick up steam. There were companies like VirtuOz, NextIT, Creative Virtual and Intelliresponse here in the US that were signing deals with companies like PayPal, eBay, US Army, Continental Airlines, AT&T and many others. Although these big names were jumping into the market, the reality was that it was a very new market still and many companies did not have the risk tolerance to jump into the market head first.
Fast forward to 2011/2012 and the introduction of Siri into the lexicon of Americans and others around the world from our friends at Apple. As they introduced this new concept on a grand scale to the world, people have come to understand that although still limited in their abilities, Siri and Virtual Assistants in general are becoming more useful and applicable to our daily lives. Again, in the Enterprise space, vendors like VirtuOz and NextIT have been selling and deploying Virtual Assistants to websites for 10 years. But, when Apple released Siri, the market really started to build and move up and to the right.
So, we have now landed in 2013 and there are Virtual Assistant projects getting budget and resources in just about every large company now in the US. Many are looking at the mobile applications they have deployed and trying to understand how they can use a Mobile Virtual Assistant to help provide service in that channel more effectively than they do today. Others are looking at the application of a Virtual Assistant in their primary web channels and still others are looking at how they can use a Virtual Assistant in their social channels.
As I said earlier on in this post, I think that 2013 and 2014 are going to be the years that Virtual Assistants take off out of the early adopter companies and rush into the fast follower companies, just as Live Chat has done over the past two years. But as always, we need to keep our expectations in check about what a Virtual Assistant can and should do for a company. The technology is powerful, no doubt. But, the application of technology in the wrong area is always a recipe for disaster, no matter what the technology is. So, make sure that before you deploy any Virtual Assistant in any channel that you first understand the experience of the user and ensure that the deployment is a good match for your customer base demographic, the action they are trying to complete and the device they are trying to complete it on.
Are you planning a Virtual Assistant project this coming year? If not, I would suggest that you have your innovation teams for both web and mobile start looking at how it can serve your prospects and customers.
A brief history for those that are new to the concept. Back about 10 or 12 years ago, a few select companies started playing around with the idea of Natural Language Processing and Artificial Intelligence to create these characters that could assist people in using new technology. One of the first applications of this type of technology that we have all seen at one time or another was from Microsoft and the ubiquitous CLIPPY that also was incredibly annoying to most of us. This was the first crude version of what was going to come with the concept of Virtual Assistants and their application to the customer service space.
Building on that initial idea and concept, a few innovative companies started bringing to market the idea of CLIPPY, but in a Enterprise ready state and form. Of course these companies had their struggles with the technology and the application of it in the first early adopters customers, as any technology company does early on. But over the last 5 years or so, the concept of the Virtual Assistant has really started to pick up steam. There were companies like VirtuOz, NextIT, Creative Virtual and Intelliresponse here in the US that were signing deals with companies like PayPal, eBay, US Army, Continental Airlines, AT&T and many others. Although these big names were jumping into the market, the reality was that it was a very new market still and many companies did not have the risk tolerance to jump into the market head first.
Fast forward to 2011/2012 and the introduction of Siri into the lexicon of Americans and others around the world from our friends at Apple. As they introduced this new concept on a grand scale to the world, people have come to understand that although still limited in their abilities, Siri and Virtual Assistants in general are becoming more useful and applicable to our daily lives. Again, in the Enterprise space, vendors like VirtuOz and NextIT have been selling and deploying Virtual Assistants to websites for 10 years. But, when Apple released Siri, the market really started to build and move up and to the right.
So, we have now landed in 2013 and there are Virtual Assistant projects getting budget and resources in just about every large company now in the US. Many are looking at the mobile applications they have deployed and trying to understand how they can use a Mobile Virtual Assistant to help provide service in that channel more effectively than they do today. Others are looking at the application of a Virtual Assistant in their primary web channels and still others are looking at how they can use a Virtual Assistant in their social channels.
As I said earlier on in this post, I think that 2013 and 2014 are going to be the years that Virtual Assistants take off out of the early adopter companies and rush into the fast follower companies, just as Live Chat has done over the past two years. But as always, we need to keep our expectations in check about what a Virtual Assistant can and should do for a company. The technology is powerful, no doubt. But, the application of technology in the wrong area is always a recipe for disaster, no matter what the technology is. So, make sure that before you deploy any Virtual Assistant in any channel that you first understand the experience of the user and ensure that the deployment is a good match for your customer base demographic, the action they are trying to complete and the device they are trying to complete it on.
Are you planning a Virtual Assistant project this coming year? If not, I would suggest that you have your innovation teams for both web and mobile start looking at how it can serve your prospects and customers.
Wednesday, January 23, 2013
2013 Technology Trends for Customer Service Part 1
As I mentioned in my last post, I have been hearing a number of leaders in the customer service space talk recently about what is on their Wish List. In these conversations, a number of items have been coming up, but I am trying to distil down these Wish Lists to the top five things that seem to be coming up in every conversation.
One of the first sets of technology that consistently comes up in every dialog that I have had in the past 6 months is the idea that companies need to consolidate their very much disparate technologies that they own now that service multiple customer interaction channels.
Over the past 10 years or so, as new companies have come into the customer service technology landscape and new channels have availed themselves to customers and to companies, there has been an ever growing set of "one off" technologies that service execs have purchased to round out their offering to customers. First it was just the phone. Then it grew to the automated phone with IVR's. Then it grew to email and self service knowledge systems for customers to use on their own time. Then it evolved over the past few years to Live Chat and Virtual Assistants and now of course you have the onslaught of social channels and communities that are starting to overwhelm companies. Oh and lets not forget the newest and likely most disruptive channel in recent years, mobile apps and the mobile web.
Interestingly, as a consumer, this expansion of the types of channels I can use to contact or interact with a company is fantastic. I can choose the experience and the channel that suits me best. But for companies, the sad truth is that a large majority of them end up dealing with 5-7 different companies to supply the technology for each of these channels. And of course the sobering reality of this multiple vendor state is that none of these systems talk to each other or track the whole customer journey which creates a poor customer experience, none of them are integrated in a way that makes it easier for the service leader and professionals to manage their business and most certainly the data that comes from these systems is not consolidated to help the business spot opportunities for improvement or growth.
So, this leads us to today and this overwhelming desire on the part of service execs to create a technology infrastructure that can support all of these channels in a way that is not only beneficial to the end using consumer, but also helps them, as a service leader, capture what is happening and make better decisions going forward. They are tired of having one company for phone, one company for email, one company for live chat. Another company for social media listening, another company for communities and another company for providing a mobile experience. Some companies have made the effort to consolidate a few channels together but most are still stuck with at least 5 different companies providing their technology for these channels.
It seems from talking with service leaders that they are going one of three ways to really address this consolidation issues.
1. Some execs are turning to their traditional customer service vendors like Avaya or Genesys or Cisco to help pull together all the pieces to the puzzle. These execs tend to see the world as a phone centric world still and are most comfortable with the solutions from these types of companies.
2. Other execs are looking to their phone vendors to continue to support them in that channel, as they have for many years, but then turning to multi channel digital players like Moxie Software, Live Person, Kana, eGain or 24/7 for the rest of the solution. Not a bad direction to go, as most of these vendors have full suites that will do their best to integrate to the phone channel for escalation or transfer.
3. But what I am hearing the most about lately in many big companies is a trend towards CRM companies becoming the one stop shop for the needs of the service exec around consolidation. So companies like Salesforce.com, RightNow, Microsoft Dynamics etc. The reason why many service execs are looking to these companies to provide the wholistic approach is that they tend to have the underpinnings that helps to bring it all together for companies. So someone like Salesforce has all the channels with KB, Live Chat, Email, Phone, Communities etc, but what they have that is different than the other two options is they have the customer record as well. And this, seems to be the most important part of the puzzle for most service execs. They want to be able to see, track and understand the journey of the customer and make adjustments that will benefit both the customer and the company.
I don't have the right answer today as to what everyone should be doing. That will play out over time. But my sense is that the CRM option will more and more become the default option for most big companies. There are ALOT of horrible SAP, Siebel and Amdocs applications out in the market still and most companies are looking at how they can replace those systems. Combine that with this desire to consolidate multiple channels and you have a situation very ripe for the new SaaS based CRM companies. Especially those CRM companies that are building out ecosystems knowing that they won't own or build all the next great ideas themselves. We are moving into a world of connectors and those that get that will likely win this war for the consolidated multi channel experience.
What do you think?
One of the first sets of technology that consistently comes up in every dialog that I have had in the past 6 months is the idea that companies need to consolidate their very much disparate technologies that they own now that service multiple customer interaction channels.
Over the past 10 years or so, as new companies have come into the customer service technology landscape and new channels have availed themselves to customers and to companies, there has been an ever growing set of "one off" technologies that service execs have purchased to round out their offering to customers. First it was just the phone. Then it grew to the automated phone with IVR's. Then it grew to email and self service knowledge systems for customers to use on their own time. Then it evolved over the past few years to Live Chat and Virtual Assistants and now of course you have the onslaught of social channels and communities that are starting to overwhelm companies. Oh and lets not forget the newest and likely most disruptive channel in recent years, mobile apps and the mobile web.
Interestingly, as a consumer, this expansion of the types of channels I can use to contact or interact with a company is fantastic. I can choose the experience and the channel that suits me best. But for companies, the sad truth is that a large majority of them end up dealing with 5-7 different companies to supply the technology for each of these channels. And of course the sobering reality of this multiple vendor state is that none of these systems talk to each other or track the whole customer journey which creates a poor customer experience, none of them are integrated in a way that makes it easier for the service leader and professionals to manage their business and most certainly the data that comes from these systems is not consolidated to help the business spot opportunities for improvement or growth.
So, this leads us to today and this overwhelming desire on the part of service execs to create a technology infrastructure that can support all of these channels in a way that is not only beneficial to the end using consumer, but also helps them, as a service leader, capture what is happening and make better decisions going forward. They are tired of having one company for phone, one company for email, one company for live chat. Another company for social media listening, another company for communities and another company for providing a mobile experience. Some companies have made the effort to consolidate a few channels together but most are still stuck with at least 5 different companies providing their technology for these channels.
It seems from talking with service leaders that they are going one of three ways to really address this consolidation issues.
1. Some execs are turning to their traditional customer service vendors like Avaya or Genesys or Cisco to help pull together all the pieces to the puzzle. These execs tend to see the world as a phone centric world still and are most comfortable with the solutions from these types of companies.
2. Other execs are looking to their phone vendors to continue to support them in that channel, as they have for many years, but then turning to multi channel digital players like Moxie Software, Live Person, Kana, eGain or 24/7 for the rest of the solution. Not a bad direction to go, as most of these vendors have full suites that will do their best to integrate to the phone channel for escalation or transfer.
3. But what I am hearing the most about lately in many big companies is a trend towards CRM companies becoming the one stop shop for the needs of the service exec around consolidation. So companies like Salesforce.com, RightNow, Microsoft Dynamics etc. The reason why many service execs are looking to these companies to provide the wholistic approach is that they tend to have the underpinnings that helps to bring it all together for companies. So someone like Salesforce has all the channels with KB, Live Chat, Email, Phone, Communities etc, but what they have that is different than the other two options is they have the customer record as well. And this, seems to be the most important part of the puzzle for most service execs. They want to be able to see, track and understand the journey of the customer and make adjustments that will benefit both the customer and the company.
I don't have the right answer today as to what everyone should be doing. That will play out over time. But my sense is that the CRM option will more and more become the default option for most big companies. There are ALOT of horrible SAP, Siebel and Amdocs applications out in the market still and most companies are looking at how they can replace those systems. Combine that with this desire to consolidate multiple channels and you have a situation very ripe for the new SaaS based CRM companies. Especially those CRM companies that are building out ecosystems knowing that they won't own or build all the next great ideas themselves. We are moving into a world of connectors and those that get that will likely win this war for the consolidated multi channel experience.
What do you think?
Tuesday, January 22, 2013
Top 5 Technology Trends In Customer Service For 2013
As 2012 has come to a close, it seems to be that time of year again when it makes sense to throw out on the table what I am seeing in the market for this coming year and what technologies in customer service seem to be on the Wish List of most service leaders. So here is my 2013 list of technologies that consistently are bubbling to the top of the conversations I am having with leaders:
1. Multi-Channel Consolidation
2. Virtual Assistant Technology
3. Mobile Customer Service
4. Communities and Social Listening
5. Analytics Tools
Over the coming week or so, I will break down each of these areas and talk about a few players in that market and what I am hearing from leaders about why that specific area seems to be on the Wish List.
Check back soon.....
1. Multi-Channel Consolidation
2. Virtual Assistant Technology
3. Mobile Customer Service
4. Communities and Social Listening
5. Analytics Tools
Over the coming week or so, I will break down each of these areas and talk about a few players in that market and what I am hearing from leaders about why that specific area seems to be on the Wish List.
Check back soon.....
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