Michael MaozI don’t hear much disagreement about the need to communicate more with the customer. But there is far less consensus around the question of WHO within the organization should be in charge of making this happen in a well planned and executed fashion. Instead I am seeing multiple departments each spearheading their own initiatives. Each describes their initiative differently:
- Social networking
- Unified communications
- Unified collaboration and communications
- Context-enriched services
- Collaborative commerce
- Communities, forums, focus groups
- eService
These are just a few, and no two are alike. Some are part of broad and ambitious undertakings to create what Gartner calls a context delivery architecture (CoDA) framework, while others are attempts to enhance the tools that employees have to communicate and collaborate with each other.
The two most serious challenges are to coordinate efforts, and to find the business value. In my own area of the Contact Center for customer service, we have spent the past ten years working with clients to create the ability to interact with customers across whatever communication channel the customer chooses, within reason. We have not, for example, been strong proponents of using string tied between two tin cans, or sending a service agent to the customer’s home to discuss each issue. OK, I joke. But the point is that not every possible approach to assisting a customer makes economic sense. It’s not that we love voice response systems; it’s that they are necessary and can work very well. And many forms of self service are far superior to interacting with humans. Humans have lots of downtime. They are hard to recruit, train, motivate and upgrade. They are very expensive. As we have advocated integration of email, advanced search, real time analytics for agents, knowledge bases, chat, and CRM systems on the desktop, other teams are going around the customer service center and working their own customer processes into their eCommerce initiative or online billing or marketing systems. The result is double or triple spending, and a customer who is having a different quality of experience depending on the communication channel and process they are involved in.
So what do you do? Spend some time inventorying your customer-facing technology and process initiatives. Otherwise there could be too much of a good thing happening in your business – too many cooks spoiling the broth.
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