Michael MaozThe calls come in: how can we do more for less money? There are lots of processes that can be approved, sure, but what happens when you want to automate these processes or support them with technology and software applications? What happens is: you spend money. There is a tug of war that goes on in this regard in my area of customer service and consumer support. On the one hand, we all want an application that is more than a transactional system: we’d like one with some built in analytical capabilities and decision support. We also want the system to be flexible, easy to design and maintain, and for it extend to several channels: web chat, email response, browsing, search, and the agent desktop. Simply complex and other oxymorons come to mind.
As IT professionals helping the consumer support or customer service manager deliver better customer experiences, we have to accept that improvements to search, knowledge solutions, customer process, information access, and customer analytics cost money. And we also need to accept that we are going to stand up the best system at the lowest cost. The best system is the one that realistically meets your needs. If you are doing case management in a consumer business, you probably don’t need the case management system built for business-to-business such as aerospace or medical equipment manufacturing. Yet going for the lower end case management system means straying from our core ERP vendor, and we are often afraid of best of breed.
The bottom line is that we need to get over the fear of spending a little money to save a lot of money, and the fear that choosing a best of breed vendor puts us in a position of increased risk.
My upcoming research will be exploring these two issues, and let me know your position and how you deal with these scenarios.
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