Michael MaozIt would take Panglossian-scale optimism to say that the large enterprise application vendors or the consultancies that deploy their products are providing their clients a service in the CRM space for Customer Service contact centers. For all of the positioning, there is little fire for all of the smoke. With promises of new UIs and fewer clicks to get anything done (what, 100 separate clicks to turn a service request into a sales opportunity is too much for the average person?), to the PDF razzle dazzle of ‘collaborative interfaces’ – they all fall far short of current needs.
To a one, the large vendors with stacks – ERP, SCM, CRM…. are failing to keep pace with demand in the Customer Service area. Instead they are holding the shredded mast of Customer Experience solutions together with business intelligence, brittle procedural code, outdated interfaces, and Loyalty Marketing. Good, but far inadequate in the age of the Social Customer. Can you share that customer record in real time with the customer? Do you know their location? Their influence? Their current posts in Facebook or Twitter? Do you know what happened in the last sales experience or the marketing promise now that you are in a customer service issue?
Now turn from the software solution providers to the system integrators and consultancies. They are stuck with the aging produce that they deployed for you Circa 1999-2006. In their version of The Emperor’s New Clothes they have clients focused on social, social analytics, one-to-one marketing, Big Data, mobile and Cloud. These are all great – and a part of the Gartner Nexus of Forces, but what about the basics of updating the antediluvian Customer Service applications used to interact with the customer and foster loyalty? They are like the Great and Wonderful Oz. There is nothing behind the curtain.
As end consumers of technologies and solutions from the megavendors, how do you respond? Right now it seems to be a waiting game, during which we improve around the edges (or migrate to Salesforce.com, it seems).
Thank you for continuing to email me your experiences. They are better than fiction.
For any of you attending Dreamforce in two weeks, I’m speaking in the ServiceCloud track on Thursday at 3:00 PM: Service Cloud: Service, Sales & Marketing the New BFFs. I see some of you are already registered, so: see you then.
Category: Analytics for Social CRM Applications CIO Cloud Contact Center CRM Innovation and Customer Experience SaaS and Cloud Computing Social CRM Social Software Strategic Planning Tags:
3 responses so far ↓
1 Joshua March September 6, 2012 at 1:00 pm
Michael, completely agree. Whenever I see the ‘social’ solutions being tacked on to already bloated (and often broken) decade old customer service solutions it’s apparent they offer almost nothing of value to agents or end clients – and although they get lots of puff and marketing spin, very few of them have been successfully deployed in real social customer service situations.
From our side this is a big opportunity – it’s given us an opening to provide the complete social customer service solution in major enterprise call centres, because the existing large vendors just haven’t been able to create anything of genuine value. The big challenge now is how we integrate with the aging systems to provide a real single view of the customer, which they seem to be struggling to provide even within their own systems.
2 Jeff Goalder September 6, 2012 at 6:41 pm
I think you have nailed this subject just perfectly Michael. For some reason I can’t ever seem to understand, customer service companies never seem to commit to cornering the social media portions of customer service. Being how that most of the people that purchase products online almost always have some sort of social media page, you would really think that most customer service companies would shift some of their focus to that market.
3 Hanne Refslund September 10, 2012 at 11:03 am
I tend to agree with you, even though not completely. I claim that Salesforce.com’s Service Cloud offers excellent UI and easy tools for the agents AND breath-taking social media tools and integration. My view is that the enterprises and organizations frequently do not make the effort to involve the Customer Experience Management and marketing in the process of selecting a new CRM or replacing an existing system. If you just leave it up to IT to define the requirements and chose a solution, there is a risk that you end up with a CRM/customer service application from “the old ages = 1999-2006″.