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?
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