Michael MaozComing back today from the Nuance “Conversations” conference that was held in Orlando, I had time to absorb what the attendees had been saying. They talked about improving customer processes over the course of the two days – during Q&A, at Universal Studios, in the karaoke bar, after breakout sessions. They are a committed bunch, drawn from the IT ranks, as well as customer service managers, network managers, business process engineers. And they struggle for clarity from vendors.
CRM to them (and to Gartner as well) is a business strategy, and the pieces of technology to support the strategy are confounding, overlapping, and poorly designed to participate in a business process. The questions they asked showed a sharp understanding of their remit: to improve the customer experience. At the same time, the ‘correct’ way to instantiate this in software is complex. The telephony providers talk about unified communications, and of storing the business rules to drive connections and queuing and balancing of calls. The CRM application vendors largely were absent from the conversation. They are viewed simply as expensive interfaces that deliver little more than a container for information. None of the six companies I spoke with thought their home-grown customer service application would be improved by replacing it with a packaged system from any of the established market-share leaders.
What were they doing to gain value? They were building better segmentation schemes, improving their master data management capabilities, hiring a different type of business-oriented customer service agent, and making their websites more intuitive to customer needs. It was inspiring to see 650 IT and business line professionals sharing their stories.
It would seem that the major CRM vendors selling customer service solutions are falling out of step with the rank and file technologists and business leaders responsible for improved customer experience.
What are you experiencing?
Comments Off
Category: Uncategorized Tags:
