On Wednesday we quoted Vlad’s clear illustration of the relationship between support agent and customer,
showing the possibilities of upselling inherent in the service and
support function. On Tuesday we mentioned that customers in general detest automated service systems,
at least as they currently manifest today. Maybe this alienation grows
out of companies reaching too greedily for Vlad’s “extra buck” instead
of investing in true support.
The perception has gained
ground in this decade that the contact center can transition from being
a cost center into a profit center, but focus is still placed on sales
and top line revenue. We have long held at Dovetail Software that focus
should broaden to include customer loyalty and retention (known to the
unsophisticated as repeat business), which impacts the bottom line, but
often in currently unmeasured ways. As you know, we call customer
service and support the Forgotten Space.
Technologically
the shift from cost to profit thinking is already happening, with
increasing integration between the sales front office and all the other
potential customer touchpoints (including fulfillment) across the
enterprise. Additional technology in the form of knowledge management
is also increasing the functional intelligence of the agent in each
open case. Much of this technology change is happening within
enterprise architecture planning for greater agility, better business intelligence, and the unlocking of tacit knowledge through collaboration systems
Culturally,
however, contact center thinking has a long way to go, as with
everything in the realm of authentic customer service. The reason has
often been put forward that companies really don’t care about their
customers, and don’t understand them.
One executive who
ponders this has even said that it may be impossible to reconcile the
focus of the front office with the forgotten space:
“Is it the case that personnel in sales or support,
in this case Help Desk, are motivated by such different incentives that
they cannot work under the same conditions without developing
conflicting goals?
“The most promising system I have been able to decide
upon is a time-based commission, where the commission is paid only
partially at the signing of the contract, and the rest is paid monthly
with the condition that customers are pleased with their service.” – Sales and Support, Two Opposing Goals?
Regardless, this is the age in which companies have to become customer-centric, and the obligation to achieve this falls across the board equally on managers, IT people, CEOs, and software developers.
Our opening theme on Wednesday from Denis Pombriant
made the case that developers can do more to help the contact center
situation, by making software that’s easier to use. We know at Dovetail
Software what happens when agents receive new software that makes their
day easier and also gives them additional power to do their job, and we
mention this at times. We’re quite pleased with our record of creating liberating software.
We like to think that the point made in the movie Tron
is true, that the spirit of its originating authors goes into a
software system. And we’re also proud of our Dovetail engineers who
reveal their development spirit in their own writings.
