Trends for 2012- IVR's

Number two on the list of projects that people are working on and I am hearing a lot about is IVR Replacement or Re-Design. And all I have to say about that is, THANK GOD!

For years now consumers have been crying foul on anyone that is using an IVR as a typical speed bump to getting to a live agent. Consumers have been incredibly vocal on social sites and even developing their own blogs or websites dedicated to making sure each other is aware of how to beat the IVR. I was watching a show the other day on CNBC callled "Customer Dis-Service", a supposed inside look into the world of customer service. The show itself was crap. But they did have a major segment of the program dedicated to talking to the guy that built the website that puts up IVR trees online so you know how to beat them. Not sure if that says more about CNBC's journalism or the state of our industry.

Anyway, IVR's need the makeover. They have needed it for many years, but there just has not been enough real headway made in the voice interaction space to really drive compelling and useful re-design or replacement. Most companies that I have spoken with just could not justify the investment with the "new" IVR tools that had been coming out.

But, in the last year or two there have been a couple companies in the IVR space that have come up with some truly valuable and unique ways of addressing the challenges that are inherent with voice interactions. This technology jump along with the addition of common sense best practices and a deeper set of analytical tools to actually measure the customer journey have produced some strong re-designs and replacements. So much so that those big companies that could not justify it in the past are finally willing to put their political and financial butts on the line to make a change.

Of course it is again a welcome replacement cycle for technology providers and integration companies, but I think it is an even more welcome change for all of us consumers. Someday in the next ten years, someone will nail down Natural Language Processing and Voice Reco so well that this will all be a punch line to a joke we tell at conferences about when we used to use those old systems back in the day. But till then, we will see a steady stream of refresh happening that will make us all happy!

Trends for 2012- Knowledge Management

As we kick off the trends to watch for 2012, the list would certainly not be complete without the inclusion of Knowledge Bases or Knowledge Management. Seemingly every company I am working with today has some sort of initiative to overhaul how the customer service group or the whole company views knowledge.

There are any number of views on what Knowledge really is and how it should be gathered, stored, accessed and used. Some on one end of the spectrum believe that KM is really nothing more than a storage facility for information and Microsoft Sharepoint will do just fine. Others on the opposite end of the spectrum believe that KM is critical to the way a company needs to run it's business in 2012 and beyond. These folks argue that with the reshaping of the customer experience and the new dynamics of co creation with customers, there is a real opportunity to change the way that knowledge is created, used and stored that will fundamentally shift the KM space.

I am currently unsure of where exactly we are at in the KM cycle and mind set shift, but my sense is that we are somewhere in the middle of those views. From my conversations, there are a number of companies that are just starting to understand the value of having KM as a key part of their customer service strategy. While there seem to be just as many that already have some form of KM and are just trying to figure out what their strategy should be moving forward.

The one thing that I am certain of is that everyone is talking KM in meetings. They are talking about the desire to figure it out once and for all. They are talking consistency with their communication. They are talking about the single source of truth. They are working through models of how social customers impact their strategy. They are asking questions about a single stand along solution versus something that maybe comes as a part of a suite.

There are some very exciting technologies that exist in the market today for meeting the need you have as a company. The one caution that I would lay down for anyone looking to invest in knowledge is to try to think about how you can make knowledge come to life. Knowledge or information by its very nature is boring and static and certainly not sexy. Whether that knowledge lives in a data warehouse, a CRM system, a KM system or in a BI tool. The key will always be to take the time to figure out how to surface that information to the right person, in the right format, at the right time and in a way that will engage them so they will come back for more.

Yep, KM is a big hairy monster that many companies are just trying to grapple with. Take your time and make sure the knowledge lives and breaths......

Trends for 2012 Technology

Being on the front lines of technology for customer service environments, I am afforded the opportunity to meet with many different people inside and outside of enterprise companies. I work with all sorts of different people at different levels in companies and with all kinds of industries. The neat part of that for me is getting to meet so many people, but the technology geek side of me loves it because I am able to see first had what people are doing to leverage technology for the betterment of their business and for the consumer.

Over the course of the next few weeks, I am going to post about the trends/technology that I am seeing organizations take a crack at deploying in the customer service operations and what they are saying about why they are doing it.

As a precursor, here are the items that seem to be jumping out as trends that I will be talking about more in depth:

1. Knowledge Management Overhaul

2. IVR Re-Design or Replacements

3. Web Site Refresh

4. Live Chat Deployments

5. Virtual Agents

6. Feedback Management

7. Social Tools

I will take one at a time and just see where it goes. Please let me know your thoughts....

Steve Jobs- Bringing Information to Life

So, Steve Jobs passed away a few weeks ago and many in the world of technology still are mourning the loss of a person that has been referred to as an icon, genius, pioneer and legend. I have decided to hold off my criticism or admiration for him until now, so as to not let emotions get in the way.

While many will be talking for years and even decades to come about a man that ran Apple with an iron fist or a man that changed 6 different industries in a matter of 15 years or a man that was as much artist as he was business man, I will remember Steve Jobs for doing something much more personal, Bringing Information to Life.

Let me explain. I think the beauty of what Steve Jobs has lead Apple to do over the last 15 years wasn't so much that they created incredible devices to consume information/media on. What I think is the genius behind what they have done is that they have made that information or media come to life in a way that I personally have never seen before. Whether it be the GUI with the Mac or iTunes or iPods or iPhones or the wonderful iPad, each device reimagined how people would consume information and allowed it to come to life.

Where this has really hit home with me is in my personal life. One of my little girls has both Down Syndrome and severe Autism. She can not really communicate with the outside world or should I say has not been able to communicate with the outside world. About a year ago we start working with her on an iPad and trying to get her to understand how to use it and communicate with it to let us know what she needs or wants. It has been a slow process, but we are starting to see hope where we once saw dispair. We are starting to see smiles where we once saw tears. And we are starting to see life where we once saw cold blank stares. The iPad has started to bring the information and words and knowledge that lives in my little girls brain to life in ways that we never imagined possible.

We may never know in our lifetime why the brains of children with severe forms of Autism lock up and trap them in a prison of their own mind. But my wife and I will always remember Steve Jobs as a visionary leader of a company of people that helped bring information to life in very personal and important ways.

Second Class Customer Experience

So I was ready through my twitter stream the other night and found an interesting article. Parenthetically, that is what I love most about twitter, you can find out what other people you share things in common with are reading.

Anyway, I clicked on the link and was dazzled by the Slideshare presentation that I saw from a major multi billion dollar company and their Social Media lead. It showed all of this info about how they use social media, how they respond to people, how it makes the company that much better, how they have integrated social into the fabric of the company. It was pretty compelling and impressive to see from such a large company. A real strategy for how they are using social media to create digital relationships.

Then something came to my head, I thought I would click over from there to their website to see if they are following the same principles and ideas on their website. I would think that a consistent experience would be a no brainer for this company, based on the message in the slides.

Sadly, the experience was much different than what they talked about in their social channels. All of the ideas about customer loyalty and customer experience and wowing the customer in social media didn't extend to the website, specifically the support pages of the website.

It got me thinking, why is this the case? Why do companies put so much effort and time into creating a unique and compelling experience in the social media channel, but neglect the place where people still, more often than not, go to get answers to the questions they have?

Maybe it is because different groups own the different channels internally at the company. Maybe it is because some executive is in love with social and is just demanding a different experience in that channel. Or maybe it is because the perception is that your brand can be damaged much faster on the social channel than on the website.

Regardless of the reason, I think it is only damaging the company with their customers when they choose to focus dollars, time and resources on the channel of the day and relegate the other channels to second class experiences.

What I Learned From My Cab Driver

I travel a couple of times a month for work. A day or two at a time. Nothing too crazy like those technology or management consultants!

When I travel, I take a cab from my home to the airport for three reasons. One, my family only has and only needs one car for our typical daily life. Two, it is much faster for me to get to and from the airport which cuts down on the overall travel time I am away from my family. And three, it is just cheaper usually for me to do it this way, which only benefits my company.

When I was in the cab the other day, I was talking to the driver, a guy that I have been using consistently for about 3 years now. And he shared with me the success that he is having as a small business man. He shared with me how business is going well and this time of the year is usually even more busy because of vacationers and last minute business deals.

But the best part of the ride was when he was sharing with me about how he is being careful to not grow too fast and add the wrong drivers to his team. He told me that he could very easily triple his business tomorrow if he wanted to, but said that he is going to take it slow. He then gave me two reasons that made me smile and nod my head up and down.

First, he said that he liked the pace of life that he had right now and enjoyed having the flexibility in his schedule to see his family quite a bit and not work 16 hour days to make a living. Smart man in my book. He gets the work life balance he needs to be good at what he does.

But the second thing he talked about was what made me want to post about it here. He said that if he were to grow too quickly, he would actually likely lose business. He said that if he grew too fast, he would have to add drivers to his team that were new and didn't know if he could trust them to do the job, be on time and be respectful to his clients. He said, in his own way, that he wanted to put the customer experience before growth at this point. He wanted to put in place a good team of people that valued the relationship with the clients as much as he does, so that he can grow slowly over time. Genius....

I love the unexpected learnings that we can see everyday in front of us if we just keep our eyes open and our ears tuned.

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?