Within the field of CRM,
customer service and support (CS&S) often shows itself to be a fair
weather friend: when the storm hits, the system fails. The recent
customer experience delivered by Jet Blue, stranding travelers in storm
conditions, has received significant deconstruction in the industry, in
part because the airline has been noticed in the past for its canny
deployment of CRM.
In Jet Blue’s
situation, their infrastructure proved inadequate to their system – in
the crisis they didn’t have enough phone lines to manage all the
information trying to flow. Business rules couldn’t advance cases, and
management intervention couldn’t rewrite inadequate protocols on the
fly. In the crunch, the company lacked sufficient agility.
”’One bad experience washes away a lot of good ones, and in this case, we are seeing what airline CRM is like,’ Denis Pombriant, managing principal with Stoughton, Mass.-based Beagle Research, wrote in an email. ‘In airline CRM
you get all the buzzwords and none of the follow-through.’ In the
travel business, the limited number of carriers on specific routes
makes airlines compete on price. They are unafraid of losing customers,
according to Pombriant, making customer attrition a revolving door.” Is there a CRM lesson in JetBlue’s snafu?
The company moved to repair customer loyalty
after the event by institutionalizing new service protocols, and making
them public.
“Yet, according to [Paul] Greenberg,
JetBlue’s cache of customer service served it well last week. “It was
quite noticeable that because of the past history of great customer
service from JetBlue and their generally excellent relationships with
their customers, that their customers were willing to cut them a
significantly larger portion of slack than would be likely for any
other airline” [ibid]
All things being equal, customer loyalty comes
not from the sales end of the business but from the service and support
end – anybody can buy once, but to buy again has to come from a measure
of satisfaction that has endured across time. In general, that
satisfaction will be delivered or maintained by personnel downstream
from management decision-making. It will be delivered by
customer-facing agents and departments responsible for follow-through
and fulfillment, support and repair.
It is often noted that
companies place less focus on their service and support systems than
they should, focused as they are on their top-line revenue drivers of
sales. This shows in CRM, where principal development occurs in Sales Force Automation, and Analytics, and less in support systems.
“Unfortunately, today’s accounting systems do not
capture the value of a loyal customer [...] Surveys have shown that it
costs eight to ten times as much to attract new customers through
marketing as it does to retain them.” Beyond risk and compliance: Driving customer value
This situation is changing as companies integrate
their entire computing environments, and begin to see the cross-selling
and upselling initiatives that can arise from the support areas.
Corporate systems and protocols are impossible to change overnight.
Service areas change best by gradual, self-proving evolution. Business
has a long way yet to go to integrate all its processes, and still
deliver state-of-play analysis to decision-makers, but this is the
goal. And because the storm comes unexpectedly from time to time, a
measure of systemic agility is desirable.
At Dovetail
Software, we understand that people by nature want to help. We try to
build software that maximizes the abilities of individual agents to
handle service and support cases. Dovetail Director of Software
Development Gary Sherman shows how one part of the process works in the
task of empowering the individual support agent:
“A support case (issue, trouble ticket, etc.) has one
and only one owner. That strict ownership paradigm is built into the
application. Everything that happens with that case has an activity
log, tracking who did what and when. Cases can be assigned and taken
from an individual, changing ownership. But it still has one owner
[...] Combine that with escalations (business rules, in Clarify
terminology), and nothing can languish” Owning the Support Issue
