software
industry can be sure of seeing in 2008 is the continuing demand for
context-sensitive, customer-centric applications and utilities.
These don’t have to be grand or elaborate: APIs, web services,
mashups can make all the difference. In customer service, little
things go a long way, and the large things are on the scale of
paradigm shifts anyway.
The biggest shift in the treatment of customers lies in
letting them into your operation, with degrees of involvement
ranging from soliciting feedback, to partnering with users in
development design.
The process of letting customers “in” needn’t be as
revolutionary as it sounds: at heart it involves exposing internal
processes to the outside in some way, often with self-service
interfaces on the Web or in kiosks.
“The company judiciously decided on all the parts of
the company’s line-of-business applications that it wanted to
expose to its customers.” – The Rewards of Turning Customers Into Call Center
Agents
The organization’s governance rules the initial
configuration of platform and function: but after this comes the
unknown, the interaction of the users. In general companies are
finding that customers are happy with self service if they can
achieve results directly by their own efforts. In back of this lies
integration between systems across the organization.
“Typically, customers see a 15-25% call deflection when
incorporating customer self service tools which ultimately can
result in substantial annual cost savings. This frees up the
customer care staff to handle more complex issues and empowers
customers to access case, solution and other information real-time,
any time.” – Let Customers Declare Their Independence
As for those little things that make a difference, a
helper in closing the divide between self service and full service
is the automated service agent (ASA), which is:
”... a ‘chat-like’ technology popping up on many
self-service portals and has tremendous benefits for call
deflection, transfer to live agents with session history, and even
decision-tree implementation to customers (or even the agents).” –
Customers Become Their Own Service Reps
In the call center, where customer service takes on
tangible and highly measurable proportions, the notion of
empowering customers to do everything themselves that they want to
do is greeted with some relief.
The contact center lives by its results, and the
results companies want today are proof that their customers are
staying closely held, while also spending more of course.
What is being found in the realm of ecommerce and the
contact center – embracing the economics of both sales and support
– is that customers who are empowered to act on their own
initiative tend not to flee away but to hover close to the enabling
platform. More on this next week.
