Leveraging Today's Technology and Data (Part II)

by Chris Domergue, Director of Client Services

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?

 

Leaders Are Made, Not Born

by Seth Sinclair, Member
  

On the AOL Government web site, Sandi Edwards, the director of Corporate and Government Solutions for AMA Enterprise, Inc., recently posted an article that claimed that the new generation of Federal workers were lacking in the skills Government agencies will need to meet their customers’ needs in the 21^st century.  (Read it here.) 

Ms. Edwards’ post was based on a “Critical Skills Survey” conducted by the American Management Association (AMA) in 2010.  The survey looked at the skills both government and private industry needed in their emergency leaders, and concluded that most federal workforces simply don’t have enough young people with those skills “to do the job that an increasingly competitive and innovation-based environment demands”.

The skills AMA believes young leaders need to develop include:

• Critical thinking and problem solving-the ability to make decisions, solve problems, and take actions as appropriate;
• Effective communication-the ability to synthesize and transmit your ideas both in written and oral forms;
• Collaboration and team building-the ability to work effectively with others, including those from diverse groups and with opposing points of view;
• Creativity and innovation-the ability to see what's NOT there and make something happen.

According to Ms. Edwards, these skills are not taught in schools, and most of today’s young people don’t have them intuitively—leading to a crisis that has “severely handicapped government organizations in their efforts to increase productivity and meet budget constraints while still delivering on their mission.”

At SAG, we think the list of skills AMA has developed for new leaders is both useful and comprehensive, but we disagree with the notion that the failure of America’s school system to develop graduates with all of these skills—in and of itself—is a reason for significant concern.  Very few, if any, of today’s senior government leaders had all of these skills when they began their careers.

Instead, they learned on the job; by following the example and advice of mentors; by observing behaviors, both good and bad, of leaders with whom they came into contact; by listening carefully when their performance was evaluated at all stages of their career; and through a process of lifelong learning, including training specifically developed for them at every stage of their careers.

Schools have never been able to replicate the business or government environment very well: there was never a “golden age” in which young leaders emerged, full-blown, from academia, ready to shoulder the responsibilities of leadership.  Some skills are best learned on the job, in a real-world environment: others, like collaboration and team building, can only be taught once people have some understanding of why those skills are so important.

We’ve taught many Federal employees and leaders in our training programs, and we’ve seen the improvements in performance, across the board, leadership training provides.  Our instructor-led classroom training, hands-on exercises, and one-on-one coaching sessions have built cadres of competent and inspired leaders to execute organizational strategies at numerous federal agencies.

By exposing our students to best practices and theories in leadership and management, and by providing them with a structured framework to help them apply what they learn in real-world situations, we help them develop the skills they will need to assume the duties of a Federal government leader.  While some students, naturally, are better than others at developing these skills, all of our students benefit from our training.

We have never seen a leader whose skills are so “natural” that he or she needs no more instruction than they received in high school and college.  Instead, learning the skills AMA describes is a lifelong process, and good agencies make sufficient resources available to train their staffs throughout their careers.

Here, of course, is the problem.  As Federal agencies increasingly face budget constraints in today’s environment, will they reduce the amount of funding they set aside for leadership training?  As Ms. Edwards points out, today’s college graduates don’t have the leadership skills they require on graduation (nor, we maintain, did their predecessors).  If they are not given formal, structured training tailored to their level of development, they will never learn what they need to know to succeed in today’s fast-paced business world—or tomorrow’s. 

Training funds are not a luxury, to be slashed when the funding pipeline begins to dry up: instead, they are a necessity—one of the prime ways to enable any Federal agency or private company to “do more with less” and meet the challenges of budget reductions.  Bold, visionary leadership can go a long way towards overcoming fiscal shortfalls—but such leaders aren’t born, they’re taught.  We hope that as today’s leaders make decisions about their agency’s futures, they will spare training costs from the budget ax to the maximum extent possible.

Leveraging Today's Technology and Data (Part I)

by Chris Domergue

Director of Client Services

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 start 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 that the customer interacts with your organization (today) and the way your organization can optimize its business (more on that next week).

For many years, customers began their experience with a business or a government agency with a face-to-face visit at a store or office and formed their first impressions of that organization through that interaction.  Now, most first experiences with any given company or government department are through electronic means.  Websites, phone calls, web chat, emails, social media, smart phone ‘apps’, and other forms of communication dominate the way the majority of business is conducted in 2011.

In many ways, today’s technology has made enhancing a customer’s experience with your company or organization a much easier task.  Modern technology allows the customer to easily choose how they want to interact with your organization at the time, in the place, and in the manner with which they are most comfortable.

Today’s applications and solutions enable commercial businesses and government agencies to personalize the experience for their customers.  By understanding their previous actions and customizing this interaction to their personal preferences, organizations can now optimize this exchange by providing more valuable and targeted information, in a timely manner and at a lower cost.  This will enhance the customer experience and in turn drive repeat business from a satisfied consumer.

Numerous products are available to help manage your organization’s interactions.  While some may claim to be better than others, in my opinion, after many years at IBM and Accenture working with these tools, they all have strengths and weaknesses. 

Choosing one over another for your organization depends on how their tools map to your customer strategy and enable your business processes.  If you have already defined your experience, strategy, and background processes, then you can focus on choosing and implementing the technology with the features that best fit your needs.  (If you have not done this already, go back and re-read my previous blog posts.)

The biggest benefit today’s technology offers customers is that it increases their options.  Specifically, for government agencies, President Obama’s order pushes the Federal Government to leverage the technology available today to provide multiple interaction options to Americans when they do business with Federal agencies.

One of my favorite clients once made a critical ‘faux-pas’ in a recent implementation… the agency provided limited and non-preferred channels for collecting of critical information from Americans.

In 2010 (hint), the Federal Government surveyed the American population to collect key demographic information from more than 300 million people in the United States (hint hint).  To collect this information, the agency sent out more than 100 million pieces of mail with paper surveys to collect, process, and analyze this data.  There was a phone number recipients could call with questions, but the original design did not allow recipients to provide their data over the phone.  In addition, if you somehow lost or did not respond to this questionnaire, you either had to call in to request a new one, wait until a second mailing arrived, OR wait even longer until someone knocked on your door to collect the data.

Having worked with this agency for years, I understood all their major political and IT security concerns, as well as the agency’s true goals and objectives.  They had rationales on why no additional channels should be offered for this operation.  Although their rationales were reasonable, they never really addressed how to engage their core consumer in the way that today’s Americans prefer to do business. 

Many respondents were completely fine with opening the mail, filling out the survey, and sending the piece of paper in.  This is a perfectly acceptable channel to collect information.  However, there were a SIGNIFICANT number of Americans who would have much preferred to log into a website and provide this information electronically or to dial into a phone number and provide this data to an agent.  They would have felt more secure using these methods, as well.

What most Americans really did not want was for the government to come knocking on their door.  When we reached this phase of the operation, we had to modify the system to suddenly allow people to provide their information by phone, since there had been so many complaints about the face-to-face collection method and the lack of alternative channels to provide information.  As a result, numerous news reports, articles, and other ‘negative’ media reports drew attention away from the incredible efforts this agency made to accomplish their mission.

It was not that this client did anything ‘wrong’ by providing only two channels for data collection.  However, by not offering alternative data collection methods they failed to provide an optimized solution.  This ended up costing the agency hundreds of millions of dollars more, drew negative attention to their work, and ultimately provided a lower overall quality of service. 

Corporations cannot survive without optimized solutions to customer interaction issues, and now, with the Presidential mandate, government agencies face increased pressure as well.  Customers today want the options and personalized service today’s technology can provide.  If you don’t know how, let us know and we can help at SAG.  Feel free to email, call, tweet, mail, visit our website, post a Facebook or blog comment, or just stop by for a chat.

(Part II will be posted next week.)

Timeless Books on Business Management

By Seth Sinclair, Member

A wise man once said: “the books that help you the most are those that make you think the most.”  Recently, Time Magazine’s web site (www.Time.com) published a list of what Time’s editors believe are the “25 Most Influential Business Management Books.”  You can read the list here. 

The books on the list range from Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People,” which was published back in 1936, to Kenneth Blanchard and Spencer Johnson’s short tome “The One Minute Manager,” to one of our own personal favorites, “On Becoming a Leader,” by Warren Bennis.

It’s interesting that the most recent of their top 25 books was published in 2001, meaning that either an entire decade has passed since a great book on business management has been written, or simply that not enough time has gone by to judge any of the current crop of books on the subject to be a classic. 

Here at Sinclair Speaks, we’d like to help the process along.  What recently written books have you read that you think are worthy of being included on Time’s “Most Influential” list, or even on your own personal list of favorites?  If nothing written recently has struck your fancy, what great book on Business Management do you believe Time omitted? 

Send us an email at info@sinclairadvisorygroup.com telling us what you’ve liked and why by October 21st. We’ll publish your responses here on the blog—and give a prize to what we believe is the most thoughtful response. The winner will be announced in our November Newsletter.

Here’s your chance to share your favorite book with the world, and for you and all our readers to fill your home and office bookshelves with books that will make you think—and help you to succeed.