As I discussed in my May 26 post, President Obama’s April 27, 2011 executive order, titled “Streamlining Service Delivery and Improving Customer Service,” requires Federal agencies to quickly come up with ways to use technology to improve their service to their customers.
In my post, I recommended four principles that, if followed, will result in a successful customer service strategy: defining the customer experience; focusing on consistent information; leveraging today’s technology and data; and making customer experience one of your core functions.
I‘d like to continue to discuss the third principle – leveraging today’s technology and data. Technology, in this day and age, allows for a paradigm shift in both the way the customer interacts with your organization and the way your organization can optimize its business.
In the past, many large companies and federal agencies have treated their contact centers and servicing customers purely as a cost to the organization. As a result, multiple contracts were awarded or different technologies were used to try to minimize the cost of customer service and to optimize the budget. However, over time, this strategy has had the exact opposite impact – those who used the strategy created ‘silos’ across their organizations, and now any holistic customer satisfaction initiatives they might try will cost the enterprise exponentially more to implement and will have a lower chance of success.
Why? First, any ‘simple’ change of adding a new channel (email, web chat, social media, etc) or creating a ‘common view’ of the customer has to touch multiple systems, all speaking different languages. And second, the costs to maintain and update systems with new software and hardware have increased the burden on an organization’s IT department--all in an often failed attempt to just look at data across the systems.
Over my career I have worked with several CIOs and IT leaders to develop plans for them to ‘modernize’ and ‘consolidate’ their customer servicing functions. Many of them have made the same fatal flaw in this effort– they pick the technology and the platforms they will use before they define their requirements and strategies. This course of action has led to many failed implementations and has wasted vast amounts of money.
I have worked first hand to ‘fix the mess’ with clients, and we’ve been able to put band aids on many of these initiatives. However, that’s all they were for the most part… band aids. My clients still needed to address the reason why the dam was breaking, instead of just sticking fingers in the holes to hold the water back.
I would encourage any organization truly looking to modernize today’s technology to define a strategy before spending a penny on implementation. This task should start with asking these simple questions:
Question #1: Do I know what exists in my current environment? – Do you as the IT leader for your organization know what already exists in your current state? Do you know how many technologies exist, how many functions are performed, where your infrastructure is, and the cost of those components? Do you know if you are optimizing the solutions available to you in your current platforms? Do you know where critical business data is stored within your environment and how it is accessed?
During my time with IBM, I worked with clients who were about to undertake a key $100M+ initiative to transform their contact centers. They already had four different CRM desktop applications and countless other technologies in place… and they wanted to procure something ELSE to put on TOP of this infrastructure. Instead, they should have taken exactly the opposite approach – they had the existing hardware and software to do everything they needed. They should have just picked ONE solution out of what they already had, then migrated everything to that platform to simplify the environment.
Question #2: Do I even want to manage this function? – Are contact centers and CRM applications even in your organizations core capabilities? Would this simply be better for you to manage this function as a service instead of procuring, building, and maintaining your own platform?
Today, ‘cloud’ solutions are the hot buzz. Why? Simply put, they finally work to a degree that allows for enhanced security, faster deployment, and a massive reduction in cost with a higher quality of performance. I developed a massive ‘cloud’ based solution with one of my clients over the last several years. This solution cost my clients one-third of what building the function themselves would have, and was deployed in one-fifth of the time.
My team was able to build an all-inclusive enterprise level solution customized for our customer’s requirements. We leveraged a ‘cloud’ platform including Speech Recognition IVR, Automated Outbound Dialer, VoIP Enterprise Routing, Centralized Workforce Management, Virtual Desktop Applications, Audio/Video Quality Monitoring, and true End to End Call Reporting in just over a year. Then, we were able to deploy this solution to 7000 seats in just 14 weeks. This solution held constitutionally-mandated secure data and gave the organization the ability to manage operations at the enterprise level. (By the way… we also got a 100% Award Fee score for this solution).
In a time where key IT leaders have enough to deal with, wouldn’t it be easier to have someone else handle some of the functions they aren’t great at anyway?
Question #3: Will my business adapt to the technology? – Should I procure a Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS) solution or should I build a custom solution? Have I defined the ‘requirements’ for what the technology needs to do or have I dictated how the technology needs to work?
In my experience, most failed customer relationship management initiatives start with a lack of scope control and definition by the business owners. Most of today’s products that claim to be COTS are actually only truly able to deliver their Return on Investment (ROI) when the business adapts the processes to fit the technology. If you are the IT owner, you need to push on the business to define the requirements of what needs to be done and control how it is executed. On one project I worked on, the COTS product had to be so overly configured to meet the business owners needs and processes that it ended up costing the organization three times more than if they would have built a new custom solution themselves.
Question #4: Do I know what is going on across my enterprise? – Can I compare Contact Center A with Contact Center B in an ‘apples to apples’ comparison? Am I optimizing my workforce? Can I pinpoint every segment of my customer’s actual experience? Are my reports accurate?
Enterprise data and their corresponding reports can influence millions of dollars of decisions in an organization. What if that data is inaccurate?
In a technology assessment I did with an Internet Service Provider a few years ago, I identified that the way they were reporting on inbound contacts by supposedly measuring the number customers called in on was actually being aggregated across multiple phone numbers. Every promotional CD this company mailed out to try and get new members for their service had a different 800 number on it, and then they pumped more marketing dollars into those that were the most ‘successful’. In my final analysis, I found out that hundreds of different CDs actually came through on the reports inaccurately and this company was pumping $10 million into the wrong marketing campaign. While many of today’s products promote “end to end” or “cradle to grave” reporting, IT leaders need to invest time and effort in to verifying and validating that data is truly captured, represented, and reported upon accurately throughout the organization so they are best equipped to make the correct strategic decisions for the enterprise.
IT Leaders today are faced with a lot of tough challenges. However, the one that most often is undervalued is how your organization’s technology supports your customers. By optimizing your solutions around the customer experience, you can drive not only vast reductions in costs in your area, but across the enterprise as a whole. In addition, as the customer’s experience improves, you can actually INCREASE your revenue stream by supporting more customers (if your business is corporate) or your ability to support Americans more effectively (if you represent a government agency).
At SAG, we focus on defining a Strategic Plan that supports your customer’s needs and then driving your IT implementations to align to this strategy. With these simple questions, you can begin to outline your organization’s strategy which will allow you to save operational costs and ultimately serve your customers more effectively.
Now, for one final question… Are you ready to make the change?
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